Former Priest In Bel Air Faces Porn Charges

BEL AIR, MD - A former priest who lives in Bel Air has been charged with making and possessing child pornography.

Fernando Cristancho, 61, of the 800 block of Hayden Way, was charged with three counts of recording children engaged in a sex act and one count of child pornography possession. The charges are related to an incident on Sept. 19, court records show.

On that date, the Harford County Child Advocacy Center executed a search warrant at Cristancho's home and found pornographic photographs of young boys on his computer, cell phone and memory card, according to charging documents obtained by The Aegis.

Cristancho was a priest at St. Ignatius in Hickory from 1999 to 2002, according to the Archdiocese of Baltimore. The archdiocese revoked his ability to minister in areas under its jurisdiction in 2002 after he refused to relocate to another parish.

"It was subsequent to the revocation of his faculties to function as a priest that the Archdiocese learned that Cristancho had fathered triplets with a woman through in-vitro fertilization, and much later that he was accused and found by a court to have sexually abused two of his children," the Archdiocese of Baltimore said in a statement in 2008.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Cristancho in connection with the four sex charges on Oct. 19 in Harford County District Court in Bel Air. He is being held without bail at the Harford County Detention Center.

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