Response to a friend who mention William Donohue of the Catholic League and his defense of the Church against the allegations in Pennsylvania.
Thanks
for responding to my email and for sending ol' Donohue's rebuttal to
the Pennsylvania sex abuse charges. The guy is a one-man Third Army,
Donohue is (why doesn't he use the O'?), when it comes to defending the
Church. And definitely, balance is necessary. Yet things have gone too
far. As one author, Matthew Schmitz, writes (link below)
Yes,
McCarrick’s reported offences occurred years ago. But they were known in 2000,
when a delegation travelled to Rome to warn John Paul II of McCarrick’s crimes.
They were known in 2002, when the American bishops put him forward as their
spokesman on sex abuse. They were known when he retired to the grounds of a
seminary, where he was attended by a string of young men. Whatever one’s view
of the underlying moral matter, we must do away with the compromise that
established this culture of lies.
All that indicates a profound
institutional problem. Even the Vat2 super-pope JP2, wouldn't (or
couldn't) do anything about McCarrick – and nothing speaks more poorly
of the Polish pope – well, that and kissing the Koran – an act of
out-and-out blasphemy.
And sure,
Donohue is always on the defensive, but he's had to be really jumping to
the barricades in recent years because the Church seems in danger of
becoming an open sewer. I actually wrote Donohue a few weeks ago about
an article he wrote defending the indefensible McCarrick. Never
heard back from him. McCarrick is the camel's straw, perhaps, rather
than the PA report. McCarrick is indefensible. He's out-and-out
obscene. He's become the Church's poster boy for corruption. And that's
because the Church kept him, promoted him, and he gloried in his Vat2
Churchiness, in spades, basking in the radiance of the Vat2 Church and
promotion by none other than JP2.
And
it was all a lie. One of the problems with homosexuality in the Church
is – it hides. Like demons do when the exorcist comes calling.
Exorcisms can take months because one has to find out just where the
devils are hiding in the person. It can be a long process. But if you
read that article on St. Peter Damian, he goes into detail about the
effects of homosexuality on the priesthood, and wow, it is uncanny –just like reading the modern news reports on it! I encourage all to read
it.
The
other aspect to this that is revealing is that the bishops have had a
long time now to get their act together and they just don't. Didn't
then. Don't now. And probably won't in the future. That is an
institutional problem, and if "the institutional system" keeps promoting
mountebanks, Yes-men, and duplicitous non-religious money managers, then the system
has to be changed.
Look how they treated
Frank Keating. Keating saw what was going on, talked openly about it,
and got run out of the oversight group. That's reprehensible. I saw an
article the other day where Bishop Robert Barron, the "face of Vat2",
who asked the laity, "Well, what should we do?" Good question.
They should all resign, the lot of 'em, as they seem clueless. Remember
how Dougherty said they were chosen?
For
a number of reasons, the Catholic priesthood has selected for sexual deviancy.
Bishops have been selected for their ability to manage legal and social risk,
rather than their ability to govern and lead a religious organization. As one
smart canon lawyer put it, men don’t rise through the ranks of the Catholic
Church, they are pulled upward by those above them. High-ranking churchmen
select for men who make peace with this sexualized culture in the priesthood.
They prize collegiality rather than exacting holiness, or even competence. Cardinal
Wuerl was selected by the pope to sit on the powerful Congregation of Bishops,
which helps recommend to the pope new candidates for the office of bishop. It’s
time we ask why he was deemed suitable for this task.
That's the Vat2 Church in spades: A
"congregation" of bishops recommending bishops! Bureaucracy! Old-Boy
network. "The fix is in." FWIW, I would insist that the pope should only
chose Archbishops – write this into Canon Law – because there are too
many bishops in the world for the Vatican to try to "vet". (There's
about 5,100 bishops in the Catholic Church, both Latin and orthodox
rites – the latter known as eparchs; I couldn't readily find how many
archbishops exist) and the bishops below them, their "suffragan"
bishops, should subject to the archbishops' oversight, rather than
trekking off to Rome for the occasional group photo opportunity.
Archbishops are closer to the scene and more easily held responsible for foul ups
by local Catholics than distant Rome (as Rome itself can more easily hold the archbishops responsible); and the local bishops under the
archbishops should be elected by the Cathedral canons of each diocese
(most Cathedrals probably don't even have these any more), who in turn
would be priests chosen in part by archbishops and a diocesan senate of
priests and laity. (Currently, archbishops now have no such authority, and
many "archbishops" merely hold the position as an empty, honorary
title.) This would be much more like it was done in Medieval times. It's
also a version of the Catholic principle of Subsidiarity.
"Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be
handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent
authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if
possible, rather than by a central authority." Indeed. Otherwise,
all we get is a distant, unaccountable bureaucracy which means no one
is responsible for anything – which is exactly what we're seeing.)
As
you rightly point out, my friend, there are exceptions and perhaps a strong
majority of priests are "orthodox" both theologically and sexually.
Friends recently sent me the letter to his parish of such a priest in
Columbus, and I link to it here:
An excellent essay and one can readily see that this priest's parish is, indeed, very Catholic.
He raises very important points about public penance, too, and
corporate prayer, fasting, and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And
that's important: Devotion to Mary is a hallmark of all the Orthodoxies,
West (Roman Church) East (the various Orthodoxies, the bigger ones not
being in Communion with Rome), and the true Eastern Churches, called the
Oriental Churches (such as the Copts: Mary has been appearing in Egypt
for some time now.) But the Western Church's powers-that-be are neither very
orthodox nor have the devotion to Our Lady (Pope Francis calls such
Catholics "bead counters", and the Vatican II Council specifically
squashed a plan to write a special Conciliar document on the B.V.M
because, ostensibly, they didn't want to "offend" Protestants).
Indeed,
consider Jorge Bergoglio: he's an out-and-out Lutheran (to the extent
he's anything; certain his doctrine of grace is very Lutheran). All in
all, and trying to consider the exceptions we all know about (good,
solid, if long-suffering priests) I think both Michael Brendan Dougherty
and Michael Walsh are pretty much on target with their accusations about the system.
Anyone
growing up in the Church always has tales to tell. I remember a number
of priests in the last decade or two before I left the area (I used to
go to Mass at odd times, at parishes here and there around Columbus,
when I worked at McGraw-Hill) and quite of few of them were obviously
gay -- and I say this as someone without much of a "Gaydar" radar. I've
been surprised a few times over the years by finding out this or that
person was queer, and I had never had a clue. But some are caricatures
of course of the old-fashioned caricature of male homosexuals. These
priests I refer to now certainly were.
Then
there was my Uncle John, who in his retirement had tried to enter a
branch of the Franciscans he had sort of been in and out of over the
years. This must have been in the 1980s. After some months, he left, and
wouldn't talk about why he did (it was extraordinary for him to
get in to begin with, of course, at his age) and he died soon after. My
mother was amazed and concerned – at his anguished silence as much as
anything else – and when the sex abuse scandal finally broke, she said,
"Ah, that had to be it, now. That's why he left, and died so soon
after." Yep. Things had changed from when he was last in the order back
in the 1960s, apparently.
That had to be a severe shock to him, a man
who would have crawled over broken glass, if ordered to, or into a
volcano, if a bishop asked him. He was the classic Vatican I Catholic,
betrayed by the Vat2 Church. Vatican I Catholics had been trained to
pray. pay, and obey, and the Vatican II Reformers crassly counted on
that to implement their disastrous changes. I remember Uncle John giving
me a lecture in the middle of a Mass once because I wouldn't shake
hands at that absurd gesture – something held in the middle of the
Eucharistic part of the Mass, no less. (Word is that B16 was going to
move it to the front of the Mass, but he was tossed out before he could
effect that.)
And
then there was 'Sister Roberta'. One of my aunts was a Dominican nun, and
in her retirement, she lived at St Mary's of the Springs, which the
Vat2 nun reformers devastated. Trashed out. Tore down the beautiful old
buildings and put up that gawd awful "tower" that a few years ago they
tore down! (Total waste of money.) Such wanton, stupid iconoclasm
strongly indicated those people had no sense of the sacred, and how the
human mind associated the old, hallowed, ancient buildings connected them with their ancestors and the Faith as it was in the past. Everything had
to be New! Improved! The latest! Like dish soap or selling cars.
Anyway,
the old St. Mary of the Springs was buried and forgotten. Yet I
actually had a "recovered memory" at the first Trad Mass I went to at
Holy Family when Fr Lutz was there. (He's an example of a fire-brand
believer who would be a natural for a great Reforming Bishop, and who
has no chance in Hell of becoming one, as Dougherty explained bishops
are chosen with quite different criteria than strong belief.) Anyway, as
I came out of the church after Mass, I suddenly remembered being at St.
Mary's of the Spring as a kid, a little kid, with my mother as she
visited her sister, and I remembered – like it was yesterday – the old
Convent building, and the visiting room, and the wide lawns and nuns
floating about in their full habits. Like a vision, it was nothing else
I've experienced "waking dream"-wise, or even sleeping dream-wise. The
old Mass brought it back to me. One "old Catholic" thing triggered
buried memories of other "old Catholic" things.
I
had totally forgotten it. I mean, I was out to St. Mary's quite often
from the later 1970s on, taking my mother to visit my aunt. But I
had totally forgotten what it was once like. It had been Númenor in its
glory, long lost in the depths of my memory sea. Atlantis, forgotten.
It had been so Catholic. Now it is just a rest home. And an empty one at that.
Anyway.
in my aunt's later years, a certain 'Sr Roberta' used to bring her down
to the farm, and from what I know now, Roberta was all dyke. I could go
into details, but working years in textbook publishing gave me some
insight into recognizing them. And I remember she used to put my mother
down sarcastically when my mother brought up the Vat2 changes.
Eventually, Sr Roberta returned no more with my aunt. My aunt said she
and a couple of other nuns moved across the road into a house – to
establish some sort of aesthetic community. Maybe. Or maybe they wanted a
place where they could do what they wanted to do without supervision.
Then one day my aunt explained the house had been broken into and
Roberta's girls were robbed blind. (As you know, that's not such a good
neighborhood anymore.) I've no clue to whatever became of Sr Roberta
after that. Maybe she got a job in text-book publishing?
In
any event, as you know, I never went to Catholic school, and I luxuriated as the lone (or one of the very few) Catholics
in a Protestant (later Pagan) school, but I still attend Mass today
(albeit the Trad Latin one) whereas most of my city cousins don't attend Mass of any sort. I've 30 or so cousins, and most of
them are no longer Catholic (maybe vaguely "Cultural Catholics" possibly, sorta), and
then again, from what I hear, their kids even less than that.
As I grew up in that "AmChurch", I can say I never experienced the mysteries, the beauties, the profundity of Catholic
worship. It was Protestantism with a few statues. I can appreciate that
because of my strong, encompassing Protestant background – I know
Protestantism inside and out, as it were. And were it not for simple
Irish-American pride, and the fact I stumbled across G. K. Chesterton
(and later Jack Lewis) in high school, and had I not been an avid reader of
Tolkien (one of the very few, if not the only one, at Bloom-Carroll
H.S.) I would be no more Catholic today than my cousins seem to be. I
would have probably drifted into Orthodoxy, or a Catholic-connected
Eastern group, like the Melkites; (in Hungary here there's a whole
Hungarian Catholic Eastern Rite Church, existing in its own canon law
right. Amazing.) That, or stand some standing stone up to Lugh Lámhfhada
and retell the Deeds of Fionn.
So, as for Mr Donohue. What's got the people's goat is McCarrick "hiding in plain
sight" for decades. And now the Establishment Church has lawyered him
up, and does what it always does in these cases -- deny. obfuscate,
misdirect, lie like a rug, and so on. And that pretty much says it all.
For what it is worth, here's a long article from PJ Media by a person who is from that region in Pennsylvania.
J. Christian Adams is the author, and it is a good article, pretty balanced. It should be read in conjunction with my rantings.
Here's the Schmitz article: An excellent article. So good I'll excerpt from it: (highlights my own):
No one cares for the endless Catholic culture wars, but we should be
wary of attempts to shut down frank discussion of how we got here.
Bishop Barron’s list of taboo topics suggests that he – like most
bishops – is keen to preserve the settlement of 1968.
In that year, Pope Paul VI famously reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae,
but then declined to discipline the many bishops and priests who
rejected that teaching. The result was an uneasy truce: the teaching was
formally upheld, but obedience to it was not demanded.
The same dynamic played out in 2005, when the Vatican decided that
men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should be barred from the
priesthood.
Countless bishops ignore this guidance; some even tolerate discreet
romances. They only require that the priests not openly challenge Church
teaching.
Both traditional and liberal Catholics are unhappy with this
settlement. Under it, holiness and truth are sacrificed for a
superficial peace. This arrangement is fair neither to the people who
want to live by Church teaching, nor to those who would rather do
without it.
Maintaining this truce makes sense if one is convinced that the
post-Vatican II settlement is worth preserving. The McCarrick affair
suggests that it is not.
...
But for people in the pews, things don’t look so great. In 1955,
nearly 75 per cent of American Catholics went weekly to Mass. Today,
only 39 percent do. Outside of a few Latin Mass and “reform of the
reform” enclaves, Mass-going Catholics suffer wrecked sanctuaries,
botched liturgies and moral confusion. The springtime is hard to find.
In recent months, I have attended a Mass at which Christ was assigned
gender-neutral pronouns, and one at which the homilist proposed that he
may have had biological brothers and sisters. (So much for Mary’s
perpetual virginity.) At another, I was invited to join a ministry that
openly rejects Christian teaching on sex.
Such is the new era of evangelisation, the wondrous paradigm of
pastoral accompaniment preserved by the fragile truce of 1968. Speaking
as a member of what is called the JPII generation, I no longer think it
is worth preserving. Upholding Catholic teaching on paper but not in
reality has led to widespread corruption and contempt for authority.
Preserving the peace has required a culture of lies. This is the culture
that allowed men like McCarrick to flourish. One way or another, we
must sweep it away.
An Préachán again, definitely a good article and a brilliant idea about "The Compromise of '68". Very insightful.
An Préachán
