Ousted priest continued ministry, teaching

The former priest and public-school counselor who calls himself an archbishop sits in jail in Edwardsville. After years of leaving a sparse trail, he’s suddenly daily fare in the news.

The St. Louis prosecutor calls him “a very predatory, very dangerous individual.” His lawyer says his client “thinks he’s Father Feelgood. He just wants to help people.”

James A. Beine, 60, also known as the Most Rev. Dr. Mar James, faces two felony charges. On March 28, he was accused of having exposed himself to two boys in a St. Louis elementary school, where he worked until he was suspended March 19.

On Friday, federal authorities added the charge of possessing child pornography on computer disks that he recently asked a friend to keep. Beine allegedly tried to get word to his friend to destroy the disks, but the friend turned them over to St. Louis detectives on Tuesday.

Beine’s case is high-profile for two additional reasons – St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce’s declared hope of filing more charges against him, and his prominent place in the five-week-long eruption over accusations of sexual abuse by priests in the St. Louis Archdiocese.

Ten days ago, the archdiocese confirmed that Beine’s dismissal from the priesthood in 1977 concerned allegations of sexual abuse. Archbishop Justin Rigali said Beine was “completely fired” and cannot administer Catholic sacraments, even though Beine continues to call himself a priest and perform marriages and baptisms.

For the past 11 years, he was a counselor at elementary schools in St. Louis, most recently at Patrick Henry School, north of downtown. He resigned on March 21, two days after disclosure that the archdiocese paid $110,000 during the late 1990s to settle two lawsuits alleging that he sexually abused boys 30 years ago. Beine was named during the 1990s in eight lawsuits in St. Louis Circuit Court – more, by far, than against any other current or former priest in the St. Louis area.

The Orthodox archbishop

In 1999, Beine went to St. Charles County Circuit Court and changed his name to Mar James for religious reasons. According to friends and people for whom he performed marriages, he uses both names. They say he says he’s still a Catholic priest but also claims to be a bishop or archbishop for, depending upon the occasion, the Orthodox Catholic Church in America or the Syrian Orthodox Exarchate.

Those two entities apparently don’t exist, at least not as established denominations – and certainly not as part of the Roman Catholic Church. The archdiocese says there is no such thing as the Orthodox Catholic Church in America. The Syrian Orthodox Church archbishopric, in Teaneck, N.J., says it has no priest named Beine nor Mar James. Neither does the other Syrian denomination in the United States.

Beine’s own church organization, currently known as Sancte Joannes Bosco, has been renamed three times since its founding in 1978 as the Community of St. John Bosco, near Foristell. His name isn’t on the state incorporation papers, but the car he drives belongs to the church.

The organization’s official address is the St. Charles County home of Dennis P. Dolan, a friend who said that Beine moves around a lot, preferring post office boxes to street addresses.

“All of this stuff against him is just one big vendetta,” said Dolan, 40.

James M. Martin of St. Louis, Beine’s defense lawyer, said, “He remains committed to his original vocation.”

Martin said Friday that the St. Louis charge of exposing himself “is all made up, a bunch of garbage.” But he said he would have to talk to Beine about the pornography charge.

“It’s certainly a serious issue that has to be addressed,” he said.

Martin said Beine still works with youths and recently began trying to help youngsters in the city’s Bosnian immigrant community.

Martin said Beine did not want to be interviewed. Efforts to reach Beine’s relatives and other friends were unsuccessful.

Auxiliary police officer

Beine was born on June 24, 1941. His parents were a Kroger grocery clerk and a housewife who lived on Etzel Avenue in the city’s West End. He went to the former St. Rose of Lima Grade School on Goodfellow Boulevard and the archdiocesan high school and college seminaries. He was ordained on March 11, 1967.

His first assignment was St. Peter’s Catholic Church in St. Charles, the location cited in most of the lawsuits against him. His first big splash of press was in 1970, when the Post-Dispatch ran a flattering feature about Beine’s activities as an auxiliary officer and chaplain for the St. Charles Police Department.

Beine later served at St. Andrew’s parish in Lemay, St. Francis de Sales in the city and St. Boniface in Edwardsville before he was dismissed. He also taught theology at the former Augustinian Academy.

In between his last two parish assignments, he spent nine months in 1976 at the Paraclete Fathers’ home for troubled priests in Sunset Hills. Among the reasons that bishops send priests there are accusations of sexual abuse.

Beine’s dismissal didn’t make news, but his continuing claims of ministry eventually did. In 1979, the archdiocese publicly warned Catholics that Beine and his St. John Bosco Center had no standing in the church.

Making his own way

He moved to Huntington, W.Va., where he obtained a master’s degree in counseling from Marshall University and taught at the Catholic high school and, later, the local public schools. The county school board fired him in 1985 but botched the procedure. Beine sued and won $63,245.

J.R. Blankenship, a county commissioner in Huntington who was on the school board back then, said the district had “suspicions about him being a little too interested in the kids.” Blankenship said the district fired him after checking his background and learning he no longer was a priest, as he had claimed in his application.

Martin, his lawyer, said, “When he left the archdiocese in 1977, he tried to make his own way. It seems this matter just follows him around.”

Beine returned to Missouri in 1986 and worked for a year at Pattonville Heights Middle School. He worked at schools in Wellsville, El Dorado Springs and Ewing, Mo., and joined the St. Louis Public Schools in January 1991, all the while keeping the Bosco Center going at his home in the Incline Village development west of Foristell.

When the first lawsuits against him were filed in spring 1994, the district moved him to a library job. But he was returned to schools the following fall. How that happened remains unexplained and is a source of controversy with the St. Louis School Board.

Doug Forsyth, the lawyer in St. Louis who filed the lawsuits against Beine, said he had to hire a special process server to trick Beine into accepting formal notice of the lawsuits. Beine never hired a lawyer for his own defense and was not a part of the settlements against the archdiocese.

“The guy knows how to keep a very low profile,” said Forsyth. “He’s a very bright fellow and very calculating.”

The Bosco Center

Beine did defend himself when the Bosco Center was at stake. In 1994, the trustees of Incline Village filed suit in Warren County Circuit Court, accusing him of violating the single-family-home covenant by operating his center.

Beine submitted to a deposition, or sworn interview, with the lawyer for Incline Village. The 126-page transcript offers a revealing look into his notions of ministry.

He said the archdiocese never told him why he was dismissed, saying, “I simply learned that I was retired.” But he was defiant in saying he had the right to celebrate Mass.

“Oh, I have the right to do that, I certainly do,” he said. “And I have that right here in St. Louis, too. I don’t need any rights from the Roman Catholic (church) to celebrate Mass or the sacraments.”

Asked for the location of the Orthodox Catholic Church, he said, “It’s an affiliation of centers of Christianity, and the centers revolve around the clergymen who function from a center. So it’s not a physical building.”

And when Beine mentioned a “Father Gerald” as one of his fellow Orthodox priests, the lawyer asked for Gerald’s name. Beine answered, “Say, I’m not sure.”

Kristin Hagedorn of Marthasville in Warren County, wonders where all of that leaves her marriage and her son’s baptism. Hagedorn said Beine performed both ceremonies as a priest.

At her wedding to Tim Hagedorn in Washington, Mo., in 1998, Beine officiated and wore a bishop’s miter and carried a bishop’s staff. He signed their marriage license as The Most Rev. Dr. Mar James, “Orthodox Catholic Archbishop,” and gave them a paper certifying that it was a Roman Catholic ceremony.

“We thought his hat and staff were a little weird, but we believed in him,” said Kristin Hagedorn, 32. “He had been my religion teacher in grade school, and we kept in touch – birthdays, Easter cards. He had a nice little altar in the basement of his house in Incline Village.

“We never knew any of this other stuff,” she said. “Now we’re mad. He lied to us.”

Terry Edelmann, the spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, said the ceremonies clearly were not Catholic sacraments.

The marriage is on more solid ground with the state of Missouri. Jerri Jordan, the Warren County recorder of deeds, said, “When a couple declares a person to be their minister and bring in a marriage license, we would record it.”

Watching events closely are several men who say they were abused by Beine in the 1960s and 1970s. One of them, a 42-year-old man from west St. Louis County, says he was molested in the rectory at St. Francis de Sales.

Now, he says, his thoughts are a mixture of belated satisfaction and anger at the archdiocese and the city schools for not having acted.

“Why has everybody been afraid of the guy?” the man said. “This is way too long in coming.”

Reporter Tim O’Neil:

E-mail: toneil@post-dispatch.com

Phone: 314-340-8132