Rev. Alex Orozco
© FacebookThe Rev. Alex Orozco said it was a mistake to take cash and gifts from parishioners when he served at St. Rose of Lima Church in Short Hills. He is now assigned to the Church of the Nativity in Midland Park. (Facebook photo)
He called them his grandmas.

The Rev. Alex Orozco befriended the elderly women shortly after his assignment to St. Rose of Lima parish in Short Hills.

Orozco was a new priest, charming and kind and afire with enthusiasm.

And always, it seemed, willing to accept money, parishioners said.

For a car. For a big-screen TV. For a house in the Poconos. For another house in his native Colombia. For credit card bills. For a second car. For plane tickets. For furniture. For dental work.

From 2013 through the end of last year, Orozco allegedly took more than $250,000 in cash and goods from women in the wealthy parish after telling them hard-luck stories about the financial woes afflicting him, his family members and his friends.

The case has sparked a criminal investigation by the Essex County Prosecutor's Office and has raised broader questions about the limits on what clergymen should accept from generous parishioners and whether some of those transactions rise to the level of fraud or theft.

A law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said detectives are trying to determine how many people Orozco solicited money and gifts from at St. Rose before his transfer last year to a different post at the Church of the Nativity in Midland Park, Bergen County.

Both churches are in the Archdiocese of Newark, which has not informed either parish of the allegations, according to parishioners and the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak for attribution.

The official called the investigation "open and active," saying Orozco sometimes collected multiple payments from different parishioners for the same expenses — car payments and insurance, for instance — even though both were covered by the archdiocese.

They want to embrace me'

In an interview with NJ Advance Media at the Midland Park rectory, Orozco, 37, acknowledged accepting large sums of money and other items, but he said that in most cases, he did not ask for them.

"People came to me and said, 'Father, do you need something? Father, do you need anything?'" Orozco said. "Always, always always. ... I try to be very open to people. I try to be the best of myself. They want to embrace me, helping me."

He said he did ask one parishioner, Patricia Brady, to help him buy a house in the Poconos so he could have a retreat away from the rectory. Brady, now deceased, gave him $25,000 — a sum NJ Advance Media confirmed with the executor of her estate — but Orozco never did buy the home.

Asked what he did with the money, Orozco said: "I couldn't do it (buy the house), so what I did was try to help other people. So basically I gave it away to people. I did. I helped many people in Colombia. Unfortunately, that happened."

He also acknowledged asking another St. Rose parishioner to buy him a house in Bogotá, Colombia, for his family after she offered her help.

The woman, who was interviewed by detectives in December, told NJ Advance Media that while she freely gave the priest money and gifts on many occasions without solicitation, she did not offer to buy the $150,000 house and, in fact, began to grow suspicious of his motives.

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