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Porn or confession? Priest tells all
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-06-11 16:17

A 77-year-old Roman Catholic priest in Argentina has published his memoirs recounting sex with women and a frustrated gay liaison, angering Church officials.

The autobiography "No Beating About The Bush. The Life of a Priest," tells of the life and loves of Father Jose Mariani in a posh parish in Cordoba, Argentina's third biggest city where he has been a priest for 53 years.

"I could hear my heart beat in ecstasy before the beauty of the body offered before me. I smothered the body with the sweat of my skin," Mariani wrote in the book about having sex with a woman.

One secret romance ended when the woman's five brothers and her parents discovered the liaison and took her away from the parish to escape the priest.

Elsewhere in the book he wrote how he tried to have sex with "Antonio" but "our mutual inhibitions conquered our momentary permissiveness and openness."

The book's first edition of 3,000 copies had almost sold out in Cordoba, where it was printed by a local publisher. Radio stations in Cordoba, which has over 1 million inhabitants, were jammed with calls by listeners as controversy over the book surged.

Roman Catholic officials criticized the book for advocating an end to celibacy. "In my personal opinion ... it should not have been published," said Gustavo Loza, an official in the press office of Cordoba's Archbishop Carlos Nanez of Cordoba.

Mariani reflects a radical wing of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America.

 
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