The first time I saw Father Michael Salerno of St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church in Little Italy, I fell in love with his good heart. He was telling his whole parish about a guy in the neighborhood slipping him some money on the street one day. He turned the story into a grand joke. He made sure everybody understood that the butt of the joke was Father Mike himself. He was always his own best punch line.

“The first time I come down here from New York,” he said, in that thick New Yawk Dead-End Kid accent, “I’m walking through the neighborhood with my cousin. And this guy from the parish comes up to me and slips some money into my hand.

“I thank him, and my cousin and me keep walking. And I whisper to him, ‘Oh, my God, I think it’s $200. Or maybe $100.” As he told the story, he came down from the pulpit and started prancing up and down the center aisle, lighter than air, surrounded by hoots of laughter. “Then I looked down and said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s $50.”

The cousin looked closer. “It’s $5,” he said.

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Father Mike shrugged. “All right, good enough,” he told his parishioners. “He gave what he had.”

He was telling his flock, we do the best we can, and I’m as human about money as you. He used to say, “My mother always told me, ‘You’re not very smart, but you have a good heart.’ ” And he used to laugh that St. Leo’s was a small parish after Brooklyn, “so small that the FBI couldn’t find me here.”

Always the self-mockery, the attempt to tell everybody what a rascal he was despite that collar around his neck. The guy was always sweet and generous and kind and utterly hilarious. He understood how organized religion’s up against it today. Catholicism is having maybe the roughest time. The nuns are vanishing, the priests are vanishing, and the church has had to pay untold millions to those who have accused priests of sexual misconduct, after decades of callously brushing aside hundreds of allegations.

All of this — the buoyant Father Mike personality in the face of so much church trouble, and the way he took a faltering St. Leo’s and turned it over the past decade into a bustling, energetic, overflowing heart of the neighborhood — made the news so stunning last week that he’d been removed as pastor because of an allegation that he sexually abused a teenage boy at a Brooklyn parish 30 years ago.

St. Leo’s got the news from an official church statement read at a parish meeting. Some people wept. Monday night, about 200 of them gathered at the church for a prayer service, and then they all marched, with candles in hand, through the drizzly neighborhood streets. Some carried umbrellas over their heads. One man sat in a wheelchair.

It was quite moving, and quite troubling: No one wants to imagine the worst about this good man.

“It’s only an alleged,” said parishioner Gerard Lioi, “and it’s 30 years ago. Maybe it never happened. Maybe it happened, but he changed from then until now and deserves to be forgiven.”

Three elderly women said they drove in every Sunday to pray at St. Leo’s. They live in Mount Hebron, out in Howard County. As they talked about their devotion to Father Mike, a few young women moved through the crowded church, asking people to write letters to the priest. Another woman snapped photos to send him.

This is a community that’s been deeply wounded. They’ve lost a dear friend, and they’re reacting the way they believe he’d want them to react: by praying. While Father Mike reportedly receives counseling and is cooperating with a church investigation, his parishioners held a lovely service that started with parishioner Maria Serafini listing some of those whose lives have crossed Father Mike’s: “The homeless person that this parish feeds; the immigrant working for a better life; the young adult struggling with an addiction; the battered spouse or abused child looking for a healing; the parent grieving the loss of a child …”

And on and on, including this one: “The alleged victim.”

They aren’t making judgments here. They aren’t taking sides. Nobody’s heard all the facts yet. So they gathered to say prayers. “That he’ll be able to come back here with dignity,” Serafini said.

These folks have put their hearts on the line. Now, in the midst of official silence, comes the time for the church and Father Mike to put the truth on the line.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com