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	Church Officials Bar NYC Priest Accused of Affair USA Today October 30, 2008 http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-10-30-priest-affair_N.htm NEW YORK (AP) — A visiting Catholic priest accused in a $25 million lawsuit of luring a distraught divorcee into having a seven-month affair has been barred from serving in the city, church officials said Thursday. The accuser, Judith Rodrigues-Lytwyn, reported the affair in August but refused to out the priest, said the officials, who learned it was the Rev. Elvis Elano when the suit was filed earlier this week. "Despite repeated requests on the part of diocesan officials, she neither would name the priest nor would she identify the parish in which the priest had served," according to a statement from the Diocese of Brooklyn. The church officials declined to comment on the lawsuit. They did not have contact information for Elano or the name of an attorney for him. Elano, who was ordained in the Philippines in 1992, had been visiting from Texas and served in parishes in Brooklyn and Queens. FIND MORE STORIES IN: Texas | God | United States Supreme Court | Catholic Church | Philippines | Long Island | Queens of the Stone Age | Our Lady | Diocese of Brooklyn The suit, filed in Brooklyn state Supreme Court, said the affair began after the 50-year-old plaintiff went to confession at Our Lady of the Snows Church in Queens and told the priest about her divorce from an abusive husband. She says he began "encouraging her to engage in a sexual liaison with him to assist her in overcoming her pain associated with her husband and because it was 'ordained by God,"' according to the lawsuit. As part of the suit, she provided photographs of him — one of him shirtless and kneeling next to her bed, another of the two of them embraced on a Long Island beach and a third showing him clenching a rose in his mouth. The relationship ended earlier this month, she said, after she received an e-mail from the priest telling her he had "developed a rash in his groin and legs and believed it was from his sexual liaisons with others."
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