Charge St. John’s priest with child pornography

A Vincentian priest serving as a campus minister at St. John’s University in Jamaica has been arrested and charged with sending pornographic video over the internet.
Reverend Charles Plock was taken into custody by cops from the 107th Precinct on the school’s Utopia Parkway campus on Friday, October 10. He was arraigned in Queens Criminal Court later that day.
According to Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown, the 64-year-old Plock used the screen name “Chuckster_0573,” to communicate with what he thought was a 13-year-old boy.
Instead, Chuckster was in contact with Deputy Sheriff Matthew Peterson in Adams County, Colorado, who was sitting at his computer with another deputy, conducting a “sting” operation.
Brown alleges that between Tuesday, September 2 and Wednesday, September 3, during “instant message” conversations, Plock contacted Peterson, asked if he was “gay,” masturbated during a live video, and invited him to join in sexual acts.
The disgraced priest was charged with attempting to disseminate indecent material to a minor and endanger the welfare of a child.
If convicted of the top charge, Plock faces four years in prison. Had he actually been communicating with a minor, the penalty would be seven years.
Plock’s bond was set at $150,000. Vincentian priests from his order raised the $15,000 in cash necessary to have him released, and he was ordered into a treatment facility, Saint John Vianney Center in Downingtown, Pennsylvania.
Authorities at the center reportedly refused to confirm or deny Plock’s presence there, citing privacy issues. The facility has been owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia since 1946.
According to the facility’s web site, it “provides a safe, ideal haven” for residents “as they begin that vital journey toward personal and spiritual renewal, all within a comfortable, responsive and pastoral environment.”
St. John’s University President, Donald Harrington and senior staffers were in Rome for the dedication of a new campus facility of the university’s Graduate School of Foreign Affairs when the arrest took place.
Officials at the St. John’s have distanced the school from the scholar.
“Reverend Plock is no longer employed at the university,” said spokesperson Dominic Scianna. “The university was not involved in the bail process whatsoever,” Scianna said.
Police sources reportedly said there “was no indication Plock had behaved inappropriately toward St. John’s students” and news of his arrest was reportedly met with shock and disbelief by students.
In addition to his former position at the college, he is reportedly a board member at Covenant House, a non-profit shelter for runaway teens.
According to a spokesperson for the charity, “We will take any and all steps necessary to ensure the safety and well-being of our kids.”
As a writer, Plock was known as an advocate for immigrants as well as the poor and downtrodden, a tenet of Saint Vincent de Paul from whose name the “Congregation of the mission” or Vincentians, take their name.
Plock was fluent in Spanish and spent 10 years working as a priest in Panama. He spent more than two years translating the homilies of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a government critic and advocate for the poor, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1980, as part of an effort to have him canonized as a Catholic saint.
He is due back in court on Monday, November 10.