Where is the baby now? Fr. Frank Pavone’s words are inconsistent.

r. Frank Pavone can’t seem to keep his sto­ry straight. Below—and I have removed from it the image of the abort­ed baby—is the orig­i­nal post at Priests for Life’s Face­book page. (PFL has since removed said post, but I and oth­ers wise­ly retained a screen­shot of it.)

“Entrust­ed to us by a pathol­o­gist for bur­ial” the post says. So let me under­stand. A pathol­o­gist gave Priests for Life the body of an abort­ed child, in the belief that Fr. Pavone would bury it. But before that could hap­pen, he (Fr. Pavone) decid­ed to place it on an altar, light some can­dles, bring in some video cam­eras, and make a cam­paign com­mer­cial for Don­ald Trump. Such fore­thought this man of God has. And lat­er, his bish­op con­demned the inci­dent and start­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion.

Okay. So far so good. (Well, maybe not “good.”) But what hap­pened to the baby? Was it buried?

That’s where things get a lit­tle con­fus­ing. Stay with me, now. I plead your patience.

As Kei­th Michael Estra­da reports here at Patheos Catholic, Fr. Pavone’s first said, in a video on Novem­ber 8, that the baby had indeed been buried.

PFL has since removed the video from Face­book, and no one seems to know why. Fr. Pavone has no answer for us. Per­haps he said to him­self, “Wait, that baby was­n’t buried after all. Sil­ly me. How could I have thought that it was? I’m get­ting con­fused. But now I remem­ber. I bet­ter remove that video–you know, in order to be an hon­est man”?

Your guess is as good as mine. I only ask.

“I’ve already cel­e­brat­ed that baby’s funer­al,” Fr. Pavone said. The baby, he said, is now “laid to rest.”

Oh. He–Fr. Pavone himself–celebrated a funer­al and buried a baby. Hm. Where? When? What ceme­tery? Would Bish­op Zurek of the Dio­cese of Amar­il­lo look into these mat­ters?

Because, fun­ny thing, but Peter Jesser­er Smith at the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter writes today that Fr. Pavone’s sto­ry has changed. Some­what. Slight­ly. Just a lit­tle.

Fr. Pavone is now say­ing that the pathologist—remember him? the per­son­age who, Fr. insists, gave Priests for Life the body for burial—actually gave the body to a Protes­tant pas­tor for bur­ial, and he decid­ed to con­tact Fr. Pavone so that Priests for Life could turn the corpse into a lit­tle pub­lic­i­ty for Don­ald Trump. Doing due dili­gence, he (Fr. Pavone) returned the body to the Protes­tant pas­tor, and God only knows what he did with it, Fr. Pavone is wash­ing his hands—you know, kind of like Pilate?—he ain’t respon­si­ble for any of this.

I kid you not. Go over to the Reg­is­ter. Fr. Pavone said all this to them. Smith writes:

Father Pavone told the Reg­is­ter that the baby was tem­porar­i­ly entrust­ed to Priests for Life “through a Protes­tant pas­tor who obtained it through a pathol­o­gist who obtained it from an abor­tion facil­i­ty. …

Accord­ing to Father Pavone, he put the pas­tor in touch with a funer­al home for bur­ial. But the baby’s body had not been laid to rest after the ser­vice, as Father Pavone revealed the min­is­ter reached out to him some time lat­er.

As the elec­tion pro­ceed­ed and inten­si­fied, he indi­cat­ed to me that the baby was still under his aus­pices, so to speak; he had access to the body,” Father Pavone con­tin­ued. “We talked again about show­ing peo­ple again the real­i­ty of the abort­ed child, and so we did that.

Father Pavone did not iden­ti­fy the pas­tor, and he declined to pro­vide a gen­er­al time frame that would indi­cate when these con­ser­va­tions took place, which he felt might iden­ti­fy him.

On the videos, Father Pavone said the pathol­o­gist “entrust­ed [the baby’s body] to us for bur­ial.” How­ev­er, Father Pavone told the Reg­is­ter he did not know when the baby would be buried. He said the body was out of his hands and back with the Protes­tant min­is­ter.

Now, wait. A Protes­tant pastor—Fr. Pavone ain’t telling us who he or she is—originally got the baby. (But I thought Fr. Pavone’s first sto­ry, you know, before his bish­op got wind of it and rebuked him and start­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion and Fr. Pavone removed the post from Face­book, was that the pathol­o­gist gave the body to Priests for Life. Now we hear that it was real­ly a Protes­tant pas­tor, name unknown?

And the Protes­tant pas­tor, rather than bury­ing the body, decid­ed to keep it around for a while while he kept a check on how the elec­tion was going. And when it turned out that Don­ald Trump need­ed a corpse trot­ted out the week­end before the first Tues­day in Novem­ber, the Protes­tant pas­tor (name unknown) decid­ed to con­tact Fr. Pavone, because Fr. Pavone knows how to take care of these things, and place a corpse (that’s been lay­ing around for who knows how long?) upon the altar of sac­ri­fice, light some can­dles, bring in the video cam­eras, hit record, and make a lit­tle com­mer­cial.

And Fr. Pavone, who first said that he had the funer­al, the baby’s been buried, now says that he real­ly returned it to the Protes­tant pas­tor in ques­tion (name unknown), and Fr. Pavone has no idea where it is now, it’s out of his hands.

Would Bish­op Zurek look into this, please? 806–383-2243. Or e‑mail him, dear read­er.

I am not let­ting this sto­ry go.