Fake monk fake icon

I'm not a uniformly pro-Dreher person. Some of his decisions and declarations have perturbed me, but this article is worth a read. I actually remember looking over this monastery's website many years ago and wanting to go there and visit in the starry-eyed way kids are wont to do.

On a scrubby hilltop in the middle of nowhere, amid a squalid trailer park masquerading as a monastery, the life of Samuel Greene – known to his followers as Father Benedict – came this month to an abrupt conclusion.

Suicide? Could be, says the sheriff. Sam Greene was a convicted pedophile, a purported pothead, an audacious blasphemer, a morbidly obese slob and a thoroughgoing fraud. He was, quite simply, a wretch.

And yet I owe to his life more than I can say.

In 1981, Mr. Greene, a TV real-estate pitchman, declared himself an Eastern Orthodox monk and founded Christ of the Hills monastery – mostly mobile homes near a wooden chapel – in the countryside outside the Hill Country town of Blanco.

Four years later, Father Benedict, as he now called himself, acquired an icon of the Virgin Mary. He and his followers soon claimed the icon was miraculously "weeping" myrrh. Word spread, and soon the multitudes were making their way to the isolated monastery to venerate the icon and pray for miracles of their own.

Read the rest here.