At today’s service, perjuring priest Bob Malm, now interim rector at St. Gabriel’s Marion, announced that, during the coming week, he will be taking online interim training. The move is a waste of time and money for all involved.
Interim training is the formal education by which clergy learn how to serve as interims. Topics covered include how to help congregations come to terms with the past, how to vision the future, how to align with denominational norms, and more.
The problems with perjuring priest Bob Malm serving as an interim are myriad and touch on all these areas.
First, the timing underscores the lack of seriousness with which the diocese and parish are taking these issues. The average interim period runs for 12-16 months, often longer when a rector has been with a parish for an extended period of time. Now, seven months into this gig (no way I’m going to use the term “calling”), perjuring priest Bob Malm finally gets his training. That right there speaks volumes about the transition process in DioMass.
Second, my belief is that it would be difficult to find clergy less suited to interim ministry than perjuring priest Bob Malm. Between his narcissistic focus on self, to his confident but empty professions of faith, to his utter lack of personal integrity, to his disastrous tenure at Grace Episcopal, Bob has none of the attributes needed to help a parish transition successfully.
Third, Bishop Gates and the diocesan staff are largely responsible for this debacle. They are fully aware of the issues with perjuring priest Bob Malm, but seemingly have accepted the assurances coming from DioVA and perjuring priest Bob Malm himself that there’s nothing troubling about Bob’s conduct. That of course is like asking the fox who destroyed the hen house — one is highly unlikely to get an accurate answer.
That said, one need only look to the tone and tenor of perjuring priest Bob Malm’s correspondence with parish and diocesan officials, in which he refers to me as “sick,” “twisted,” and “dysfunctional,” or his weird claims that he’s threatened by “domestic terrorism,” to realize just how spectacularly ill-suited Bob is to the task. Then we come to the matter of his decision to try to drag a dying woman into court, which is irrefutable; and his perjury, which is readily ascertained simply by asking Bob to provide one scrap of evidence to support his claim that my mother, or someone claiming to be her, repeatedly set up appointments with him, only to cancel.
In ignoring these unambiguous warning signs, Gates’ conduct is akin to saying, “Yes, we knew there were allegations that Father X molested children, but we had assurances that these allegations were not true.”
The reality is that perjury is a serious charge, and the fact that perjuring priest Bob Malm can continue to serve as a priest without any examination of the underlying issues makes clear that both the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and DioVA are utterly corrupt, as are the bishops and staff of both.
Fourth and most importantly, no rector is going to be successful over time, nor the parish that he or she serves, when their entire ministry is a lie. Jesus came to lift up the poor, the oppressed, the outcast. Perjuring priest Bob Malm creates the oppressed, the outcast. In short, perjuring priest Bob Malm is the modern-day version of the very same Scribes and Pharisees against whom Jesus railed.
Bottom line, hypocrisy can never serve as the basis for a healthy faith, nor can it result in a healthy church.