"Alberto Rivera had a 'history of legal entanglements' including
fraud, credit card theft, and writing
bad checks. Warrants had been issued for his arrest in
New Jersey and
Florida, and he was wanted by the Spanish police for 'swindles and cheats'. While in the U.S. in 1967, he claimed to be collecting money for a Spanish college, which never received this money. The details of his religious claims changed over time. For example, in 1964 he claimed that he had left the Catholic Church in July 1952. Rivera later put the date at March 20, 1967 - an almost 15 year discrepancy. Despite this second claim of conversion from Catholicism in March 1967, Rivera he was still promoting Catholicism in a newspaper interview of August that same year. Although supposedly placed involuntarily in the sanatorium where he claimed to have nearly been murdered in 1965 and held there for three months, he gave the date of his release as September 1967. This leaves a period of more than a year unaccounted for in this strange narrative.
The document exhibited by Rivera to prove his status as a Catholic priest was fraudulent. The Catholic Church denies his claim of having been a Jesuit priest, or another claim that he was a bishop. He had only one sister in London. She was not a nun, and she did not live in a convent so the claim that his sister the nun nearly died in a convent in London is certainly problematic. In an employment form dated 1963, Rivera stated he was married to Carmen Lydia Torres, and the couple had two children in the U.S. In his narrative, Rivera also claimed that he was a priest living in Spain in 1963.
Cornerstone also questioned Rivera's claim to various degrees, including three doctorates (
Th.D.,
D.D., and
Ph.D.), reporting that his known chronology did not allow enough time to have completed these degrees. Rivera allegedly admitted that he had received these degrees from a non accredited entity sometimes referred to as a
diploma mill located in the state of Colorado."
Alberto Rivera (activist) - Wikipedia
