{"id":7011,"date":"2004-07-16T08:27:47","date_gmt":"2004-07-16T08:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/and_then_in_fresno.html"},"modified":"2004-07-16T08:27:47","modified_gmt":"2004-07-16T08:27:47","slug":"and_then_in_fresno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/and_then_in_fresno.html","title":{"rendered":"And then in Fresno…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Priest removed<\/a><\/p>\n

Father Jean-Michael Lastiri, or Father Mike as he is known, has been removed indefinitely from the Merced parish he worked so hard to build \u2014 leaving parishioners there hurt and upset that their spiritual leader and friend is being disciplined by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno.<\/p>\n

St. Patrick’s parishioner Tony Lua says Father Lastiri is a great priest, “Your hear stuff, but I’m nobody to judge. I don’t judge anybody, and like I said, as far as what he taught us and showed us in the church, we never had no complaints. He’s a great man, he’s a great priest.”<\/p>\n

The popular and well-liked priest will be leaving next month for St. Luke’s Institute, where he will receive psychological and spiritual therapy for what his superiors are calling compulsive and addictive behavior.<\/p>\n

For months, the watchdog group “The Roman Catholic Faithful” had complained to Bishop John Steinbock<\/a> that some of Lastiri’s parishioners knew he was using web sites and chat rooms to solicit relationships with men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, then back to poor Scranton and the case of Fr. Liberatore<\/a>, which we first discussed here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Priest removed Father Jean-Michael Lastiri, or Father Mike as he is known, has been removed indefinitely from the Merced parish he worked so hard to build \u2014 leaving parishioners there hurt and upset that their spiritual leader and friend is being disciplined by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno. St. Patrick’s parishioner Tony Lua says…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAnd then in Fresno... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/and_then_in_fresno.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"And then in Fresno... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Priest removed Father Jean-Michael Lastiri, or Father Mike as he is known, has been removed indefinitely from the Merced parish he worked so hard to build \u2014 leaving parishioners there hurt and upset that their spiritual leader and friend is being disciplined by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}