HAPPY DAYS: Erik Campano at church with the Rev. Ginger Strickland, who he says mistreated him by having a fling with him while she counseled him as a priest. (
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She nicknamed a rule forbidding sexual contact with parishioners “Don’t do the pew.”
But the Rev. Ginger Strickland, 33, the newly ordained assistant minister at Manhattan’s historic Church of the Incarnation, allegedly used her religious authority to seduce a good-looking male in the flock.
“God brought you to me,” Strickland told Erik Campano, 34, during their secret affair — using a line from a textbook on clergy sexual abuse.
Now, Campano is complaining to the church, saying he was taken advantage of by the reverend and betrayed when she dumped him back in the pews.
Their trysts occurred in a Paris rectory and on Skype video chats.
“On her initiation, we are naked . . . over church computers,’’ Campano wrote in a shocking complaint to church leaders obtained by The Post.
They broke up about a month before her Dec. 11 ordination. It left him so devastated emotionally and spiritually that he considered suicide, Campano said.
“If you believe your relationship is blessed by God, a breakup means a failure to live out God’s will,” Campano told The Post.
Strickland, from a Texas oil baron’s family, and Campano, from Queens, met in late 2010 at the American Church in Paris, where she held a job leading a youth ministry. He was going to medical school, attended services, and — at Strickland’s urging, he said — became a church volunteer.
Over several months, Campano says, Strickland first engaged him in e-mail discussions dripping with pastoral concern and advice for coping with his studies and his mother’s cancer. He says he resisted her invitations to socialize.
Finally, alone in a gym after an outing with a jogging club, she leaned over to kiss him, the start of a four-month affair.
Campano kept romantic e-mails and handwritten notes in which he and Strickland describe their sexual activities in X-rated detail.
But Strickland continued to act as his pastor. “Prayers for vocational success and spiritual clarity became mixed together with sexual behavior,” Campano’s complaint says.
In one e-mail, Strickland mocked a seminary course on sexual harassment.
“Formally [it’s] called ‘Preventing Ministerial Misconduct.’ Informally — ‘Don’t Do the Pew.’ It was super awkward,” she wrote him.
She also jokingly cited a “theological justification” for their unholy hookups, loosely quoting Martin Luther: “God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Sin boldly! Be a sinner and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger.”
Strickland got the job at the Church of the Incarnation, at Madison Aenue and 35th Street and moved to New York last summer, but they kept up their sexual gratification via Skype. On Nov. 2, she e-mailed Campano that she wanted “space,” after telling him that any contact between them could complicate her ministry.
“I felt betrayed by my church, which was supposed to enforce rules against pastors having relationships with parishioners,” Campano told The Post.
A few weeks before Strickland’s ordination, Campano filed a detailed report, accusing her of sexual misconduct, conduct unbecoming a clergy member, and hiding her wrongdoing.
The church has not yet acted. The case was initially dismissed, but Campano won a reversal on appeal. A panel including the US Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, the Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori — the first woman elected to the top post — is weighing possible discipline.
Strickland did not return messages to her cellphone or e-mail address.
Experts agree that clergy-laity romances are disastrous.
“It’s never right — and virtually always harmful –when a spiritual figure abuses his or her power over a believer,” said David Clohessy, director of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “There can never be truly consensual sex between a minister and a congregant because of the tremendous power imbalance. It’s even harder for men to realize they’ve been manipulated and exploited.”
Clohessy said female religious figures generate about 10 percent of complaints to the group, but abuse by women is “vastly under-reported.”
Clarification
Articles in the Post on July 8 and 11, 2012, about Rev. Ginger Strickland, a priest of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in Manhattan, described a brief, personal relationship with Eric Campano in Paris, France. At the time she was a layperson affiliated the non-denominational American Church in Paris, and was not an ordained Episcopal priest. Subsequently she was ordained, but a panel of Episcopal Bishops found at no time during her priesthood and ministry at Church of The Incarnation, or while in Paris, has she had a pastoral relationship with Mr. Campano. She has had no relationship of any kind with Mr. Campano while serving at The Church of The Incarnation.