An Episcopal Church panel — including the nation’s top bishop — gave a randy priest a mere slap on the wrist for having secret trysts with a parishioner.
The Rev. Ginger Strickland, 33, a newly ordained assistant minister at Manhattan’s landmark Church of the Incarnation, will receive training on “appropriate relationships and essential boundaries between clergy and laity,” the panel ruled.
And her medical-student ex-lover, Eric Campano, 34, will get up to six months of “professional pastoral care, including psychological and/or psychiatric care,” at the church’s expense.
The Post on Sunday reported that Campano had filed a formal complaint against Strickland, charging that she had seduced him while she was counseling him at the American Church in Paris.
She was his pastor there, and he was her youth-ministry volunteer, he said.
They slept together in her bed at the rectory, and when she left for the United States they continued the affair via Skype with naked chats — which she conducted via church computers, Campano said in his complaint.
But the panel was not convinced that the relationship “shifted from one in which two persons were dating each other by mutual consent to one between a member of the clergy and a person under her pastoral care.”
That’s because their trysts started several months before Strickland was ordained as a deacon in June 2011, and ended shortly before she was ordained a priest the following December.
That’s when she told Campano that she needed “space” and that further contact would complicate her ministry.
Still, the panel said the church needs to do more to protect its flock.
The church, the panel said, needs to “provide a safe place for all people, and for . . . all clergy to be acutely aware of the importance of boundaries between them and persons clearly or even marginally under their care.”
The three-member panel was led by The Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church — the first woman in the top post.
Campano told The Post he wasn’t surprised that Strickland won’t be publicly disciplined.
“It’s typical in these cases that the church offers psychological treatment to the survivor of sexual exploitation and rehabilitates the clergy member’s reputation,” he said.
“So the survivor appears crazy and the clergy member appears morally pure.”
Strickland did not return calls for comment. Her boss and rector, the Rev. Douglas Ousley, said he had no concerns about her behavior.
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.