{"id":7329,"date":"2004-05-07T07:41:07","date_gmt":"2004-05-07T07:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/fathers_537000_home.html"},"modified":"2004-05-07T07:41:07","modified_gmt":"2004-05-07T07:41:07","slug":"fathers_537000_home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/fathers_537000_home.html","title":{"rendered":"Father’s $537,000 home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raised the suspicion of some parishioners<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The pastor of St. Anthony’s in downtown Joliet since 1993, LaPore was ordained in 1976 and also had served as associate pastor of St. Pius X in Lombard. He was placed on administrative leave from the Joliet diocese on Thursday, the day after church officials found out about the charges, said John Cullen, spokesman for the Diocese of Joliet.<\/p>\n

LaPore, 56, of Oak Brook, first caught the attention of authorities in 1999 when about 30 parishioners complained to the diocese that they suspected their priest was using spaghetti dinner money to pay for a $537,000 home in Oak Brook, according to Joliet Police Chief David Gerdes. When a diocese investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing, the parishioners, led by David Pretto, a church janitor and manager of the dinners, went to the police, Gerdes said.<\/p>\n

Police investigators unearthed inconsistencies between church records and information from witnesses about how much money should be in the funds. But the case was handed over to the IRS and federal investigators began seizing church records in February 2000, Gerdes said. Police and federal prosecutors would not comment on whether any of the spaghetti dinner funds had been used to purchase LaPore’s home in the 200 block of Bridle Path Circle in Oak Brook.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raised the suspicion of some parishioners The pastor of St. Anthony’s in downtown Joliet since 1993, LaPore was ordained in 1976 and also had served as associate pastor of St. Pius X in Lombard. He was placed on administrative leave from the Joliet diocese on Thursday, the day after church officials found out about the…<\/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-7329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFather's $537,000 home - 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\/05\/fathers_537000_home.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Father's $537,000 home - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Raised the suspicion of some parishioners The pastor of St. Anthony’s in downtown Joliet since 1993, LaPore was ordained in 1976 and also had served as associate pastor of St. Pius X in Lombard. 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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\/7329","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=7329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}