The FBI said Wednesday its interviews of a Hildale, Utah, Catholic priest and a choir director in recent months were part of an investigation of “an individual,” and not of the Catholic Church.
The interviews were part of an ongoing investigation that the FBI did not specify further.
The FBI told The Associated Press on Wednesday that it has interviewed Hildale Priest Salvatore Palazzo and its director of the music ministry, Steven Malinovic, in the last several weeks as part of its investigation, along with unnamed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The FBI said the interviews were related to an individual and not to an investigation into the Catholic Church, which has been trying to establish itself in the predominately Mormon city in an effort to bolster its faith-based outreach efforts.
“The FBI’s investigation was related to an individual and not related to the Catholic Church’s outreach efforts in Hildale,” the agency said in a statement.
The Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City on Wednesday declined to comment on the FBI’s investigation, citing the ongoing nature of the case.
The diocese has been trying to open a parish in Hildale since 2015. It has built a church and school and has established a priest, Palazzo, to serve as its pastor.
The visit by an FBI team to the city was first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. It said about a dozen agents descended on the church in May, loaded boxes of documents and other items from the house of a former lay leader from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who ran a struggling start-up wedding venue.
The visit follows the arrest of the former church official, Samuel Shaffer, last October on charges of child sexual abuse stemming from an investigation by the Utah attorney general’s office. Shaffer, 37, has pleaded not guilty in Washington County to two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child and two counts of forcible sodomy, a first-degree felony.
