PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
John P. Martin, Inquirer Staff Writer
POSTED: Friday, August 16, 2013
When her cellphone rang in May 2009, Sister Celeste Ortiz thought God had answered her prayers. On the line was Samuel Alvarado, who said he was a priest in New Jersey with wonderful news.
A parishioner had bequeathed $1 million to Ortiz’s order, the Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima. A fee was needed to process the inheritance, Alvarado said, but it would be reimbursed.
He would personally deliver the papers. Then 67, Ortiz was the superior for her order, which is based in Puerto Rico and has 130 nuns working in impoverished spots worldwide, including, at the time, Philadelphia.
The call came as she was struggling to find funds for a mission in Haiti and to pay for an international gathering the order was holding that summer. God’s handiwork, she thought. Weeks later, she wired $3,792 to New Jersey. Requests for more money followed.
Then pleadings, demands, and, finally, threats. By 2011, the nun, two priests, their friends, relatives, and parishioners had handed more than $1 million to the fake priest, a con man named Adriano Sotomayor who gambled it away in casinos. …
Breaking what he said had been a decades-long silence, Sotomayor told the judge he had targeted the clergy because he was raped by a priest in Puerto Rico when he was 13. He claimed other members of the church community – including Ortiz – knew about the attack but ignored his allegations and conspired to protect the abusive priest.
“Nobody knows what I’ve suffered inside for 40 years,” Sotomayor said in Spanish through an interpreter, his voice rising and choking. “They molded me, they created me. If they would have listened to me, I wouldn’t be here today, I wouldn’t be here.” Ortiz denied the claim.
“He’s lying,” she later said.
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