LOS ANGELES (AP) — A man who allegedly posed as a priest and officiated at Masses, funerals, confessions, and at least one marriage has been arrested on suspicion of selling thousands of dollars in phony tickets to see Pope Francis during last year’s U.S. visit.
Erwin Mena, 59, recently declined to comment to the Los Angeles Times as detectives escorted him in handcuffs from police headquarters.
Mena faces about 30 charges, including grand theft, perjury — for filing a marriage license he signed as a priest — and practicing medicine without a license in connection with offering “a system or mode of treating the sick,” according to an arrest warrant.
Last year, Mena allegedly posed as a priest at St. Ignatius of Loyola parish in northeastern Los Angeles and sold tickets to a pilgrimage to visit New York and see the pope during his Philadelphia visit in September, prosecutors said.
The trip supposedly included airfare and lodging at convents.
Michelle Rodriguez, 60, and some of her friends and co-workers paid more than $950 each in cash for the trip.
Mena, who was acting as a substitute priest, made a good impression.
“He smiled, talked about how good things were. There was never anything negative,” Joaquin Oviedo, a retired public high school teacher, told the paper.
“We had always been raised not to question authority figures,” Oviedo said. “He’s a priest - what he said is holy writ. We never imagined he was a phony.”
Mena had been posing as a priest since the mid-1990s, appearing at parishes or prayer groups in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Stockton, Fresno and Orange counties, then vanishing before Roman Catholic authorities could act, court papers indicated.
