Don Benito, in the western Spanish province of Badajoz, is a quaint, quiet town of 37,000. Whitewashed buildings, an imperial theater, and a museum on the banks of the Guadiana River play host to a community known in the region for growing watermelons and producing brandy and chocolate. Much of the town’s social life revolves around the Parroquia de San Sebastian, an inconspicuous Roman Catholic church.
But just over a month ago, the Parroquia became the center of something bigger—a nationwide scandal—when its clergyman, Alfonso Raúl Masa Soto, known locally as Don Alfonso, was arrested on suspicion of running a drug-trafficking operation out of his parish.
A bald, bearded man in his early 40s, Don Alfonso seemed like the model upstanding citizen, and was loved by Don Benito’s locals, who describe him as “a good man, pleasant and dedicated to his duties,” according to the Spanish news site Libertad Digital.
After graduating with honors from the Pontifical University in Salamanca, in northwestern Spain, he attended a seminary in nearby Plasencia to complete his indoctrination. He then worked in three parishes in the area. By the end of his tenure there, in 2019, he was so popular that all three towns signed a petition advocating for him to stay on, citing his success at getting younger people involved in church life.
“He brought about new times, new concerns, and many projects,” his fans told the Spanish newspaper El Español.
Don Alfonso was loved by locals, who describe him as “a good man, pleasant and dedicated to his duties.”
But for whatever reason, the diocese rejected the community’s petition, and five years ago Don Alfonso moved to Don Benito, where, by day, he organized processions and community meals. When he wasn’t at the Church, he went to the gym and smoked cigarettes. “He wears a backwards cap, tight pants, elastic sweatshirts and is not shocked by anything,” one Don Benito resident told El Español. Despite his unconventional style, the townspeople quickly came to love him.
Yet he refused to stay in the San Sebastian parish’s accommodations, claiming that he did not want to kick out the ailing elderly priest who lived there, and instead rented an apartment on the other side of town, where he was allegedly living with his boyfriend, Alvaró. (His last name has not been made public; the Catholic Church has mandated celibacy from its clergymen since the 11th century, and while the Pope recently said that homosexuality is not a crime, it remains a sin in the eyes of the Church—and many conservative Spaniards.)
According to neighbors, Alvaró sometimes greeted people outside, while other times he sneaked into the house. The pair reportedly shopped together at the local supermarket, but each traveled in his own car.
All the while, Alvaró was allegedly dealing Viagra and mephedrone, an amphetamine stimulant with similar properties to MDMA, to clients, including some whom he’d reportedly met on the gay-dating app Grindr. Badajoz’s organized-crime and anti-drug unit, La Guardia Civil, eventually got wind of the trafficking ring in September of last year, marking the beginning of a police investigation that would last five months.
On February 19, after Don Alfonso had finished officiating a funeral for an elderly Don Benito resident, police raided his apartment and arrested him and Alvaró.
Police found more than four pounds of mephedrone, several packets of Viagra, and 3,300 euros in cash in the apartment. (Viagra is legal in Spain, but by prescription only; mephedrone is illegal, as of 2011.) They also intercepted two parcel shipments headed to Don Alfonso’s address, and suspect that the pair were dealing to clients nationwide.
“There is no evidence that incriminates him,” Don Alfonso’s lawyer, Jesús Carretero, told Spain’s second-biggest newspaper, El Mundo. He claims that the priest knew nothing about the dealings. The two men are now awaiting trial.
All the while, Don Benito’s boyfriend was allegedly dealing Viagra and mephedrone to clients he’d reportedly met on the gay-dating app Grindr.
The arrests shocked the residents of sleepy Don Benito, who told local reporters that Don Alfonso was a “very popular man,” according to the U.K. tabloid Metro; he “achieved the involvement of the town … and the collaboration of the youngest,” reported the local Spanish paper Hoy. The Diocese of Placencia released a statement expressing its “pain and dismay at the suffering and scandal” caused by the events.
The townspeople of Don Benito may have been shocked, but in recent years Roman Catholic priests have been mired in countless sex-related drug scandals.
In September of last year, Father Tomasz Zmarzły, of the Church of Blessed Virgin Mary of the Angels in Dąbrowa Górnicza, in southern Poland, was arrested after a sex party went awry. A male prostitute had overdosed on erectile-dysfunction pills while lying stark naked on the clergyman’s floor, and when the ambulance arrived, Zmarzły allegedly blocked doctors from entering for several minutes, fearing for his job. The man survived, but the priest is now awaiting trial and is reportedly facing a maximum of eight years in prison.
The Vatican itself is hardly immune. In 2017, the police raided a Viagra-fueled sex party at the home of Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio’s 56-year-old aide, Luigi Capozzi. (Housed in Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, the apartment occupies the same building as the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department which monitors religious discipline.) News outlets have since suggested Coccopalmerio himself was behind the parties.
And in 2018, detailed evidence of years of sexual abuse in parishes around Pennsylvania emerged, involving more than 300 priests and 1,000 victims in the state over seven decades, and giving way to further investigations that exposed horrifying tales of pedophilia in Roman Catholic churches across the globe.
As more of these scandals emerge, it raises the question of whether they would not be mitigated by allowing priests to marry, and by de-stigmatizing homosexuality. In 2019, The New York Times reported that fewer than 10 Catholic priests in the U.S. had come out publicly as gay, while dozens of gay priests themselves and researchers estimated that gay men make up 30 to 40 percent of their ranks.
“You couldn’t have a particular friendship with a man, because you might end up being homosexual,” one priest said in the article. “And you couldn’t have a friendship with a woman, because you might end up falling in love, and they were both against celibacy. With whom do you have a relationship that would be a healthy human relationship?”
The Vatican still does not accept openly gay men into their seminaries, even if the men promise to maintain their vows of chastity. And the Church’s long, convoluted history of sexual abuse means that whenever a new scandal emerges, priests are only pushed further back into the closet.
Meanwhile, life in Don Benito is inching toward normality again. As parish members revert back to their uninspired Sunday Masses, those enthusiastic young people Don Alfonso worked so hard to attract will likely go elsewhere, to sip beers at cafés or play soccer a few blocks away.
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL