“Father, don’t touch the boys.”



THE PROBLEM: Catholic clerical pedophilia and its systemic cover-up are caused by repressed clerical homosexuality, not by the clerical vow of chastity itself. Repressed homosexual pedophilia is not properly identified in seminaries of clerical formation. The vow of chastity merely compounds homosexual pedophilia and its cover-up. The award winning 2016 expose film Spotlight got essential things wrong. Hollywood went to great pains to vaccinate homosexual young-boy-preference from any correlation to clerical pedophilia. The root of the Catholic clergy pedophilia mafia is a fetish culture among priests for young boys. It's not the vow of  priestly celibacy, and it's not the Catholic faith itself. The problem is the large number of homosexuals in the Catholic clergy at all levels. Until recent revelations about Bishops and Cardinals, only priests and deacons were 'spotlighted'.  According to the John Jay report of 2004 and referenced below a staggering 81% of the alleged victims of Catholic deacon and priest abuse were male. “Pedophilia" is defined as an exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, however, 77.4 percent of victims of clergy abuse were eleven years of age or older.” This is reported in:  A RESEARCH STUDY CONDUCTED BY THE JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK • FEBRUARY 2OO4 FOR THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS Washington, D.C. Commissioned in 2002, the report makes no mention of pedophilia numbers among bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes.

“We have known since the John Jay Report published by the US bishops in 2004 that the overwhelming majority of abuse in the Church was carried out against teenage boys. The levels of pedophilia in the Church are shown by this report to be below those of the general population—whereas the levels of homosexual abuse were many multiples of the general situation.” – John Waters: First Things



THE FACTS: For seven years I was a seminarian studying for the Catholic priesthood with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a global Catholic missionary religious order with over 7,000 clerics at the time. Prior to 1967, when Rome released me from my clerical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience few voices sounded any alarm about homosexuality among Catholic clerics and seminarians. In fact, at least in my seminary, any hint of homosexuality or even ‘special friendships’ was dealt with by quick expulsion. But it was happening. If ever a fellow seminarian went missing at refectory breakfast one morning, everyone knew the most probable cause. Not a word was said. Like some others I was approached for sex by a two fellow seminarians (one was a deacon), and furtively by one priest. I was, however, never abused or victimized by them. I wrote this off as fact of life in any all-male organization. I did report the deacon to the seminary rector. Not only was that deacon ordained one year later, but he later faced 'credible evidence' that he molested an 15 year-old alter boy and was subsequently removed from ministry in 2003.

What happened, I thought, between the early 60’s when such things were rare to today’s commonplace homosexual sex abuse in the Catholic clergy? Turns out it wasn’t so rare after all. The spotlight was turned on by the well-intentioned Pope John XXIII (now called ‘saint’ by the Catholics)

Prior to the Second Vatican Council (1963-1965) all concern and debate about the vow of chastity focused exclusively on the burden of heterosexual chastity. A popular expression doled out by our confessors and spiritual advisers to seminarians went; “If you can keep your shoes from under a woman’s bed by the time you’re 50, then you’ll probably be able to keep your vow of chastity.”  Homosexual chastity was treated as a ‘given’ even though we were aware that homosexuality existed in our clerical ranks and challenged many seminarians on their path to ordination. In my seminary at least, if you were even suspected of being homosexual, then by the canon laws of the church at the time, you could never be ordained a deacon or priest. If you were homosexual, then you had to keep it secret and take elaborate means to cover it up. Vatican II changed all of that for two correlated reasons.

1.    Tolerant acceptance of homosexuality in the general global culture was seen as a civil rights issue and no longer a ‘sin’. Prior to Vatican II, Catholic doctrine forbade any non-coital genital activity outside of heterosexual marriage. Homosexual genital activity was especially ‘sinful’ because it was ‘unnatural’ as it could never procreate an offspring. In the middle ages, the Spanish Inquisition conducted by the Catholic Church executed thousands for homosexual acts especially sodomy as penetration of one male by another was odiously unmanly as well as unnatural.

2.    Post Vatican II Catholic Church ‘reforms’ were so drastic that many seminarians not only left the seminary, they deserted the Catholic faith. By 1967 when Rome released me from my religious vows, Latin was no longer the language of Catholic liturgy. At Mass the altar was turned around to face the congregation; guitars, fiddles, even drums replaced the pipe organ. You could now eat meat on Friday. Abortion was winked at in the confessional, and Catholicism was no longer touted officially as the “One-True-Church”. Aggiornamento  "bringing up to date", was one of the key words used during the Second Vatican Council both by bishops and the clergy attending the sessions, and by the media and Vaticanologists covering it. The Catholic Church tried to catch up to the modern protestant, post-Lutheran Reformation.

But it was too little, too late, and the baby was thrown out with the bath water. These links weave a disturbing narrative of the homosexual mafia in the Catholic clergy all the way up to the Vatican:

Top Vatican official: Gay sex in Vatican ‘never been worse’ than under Francis

Gay male prostitute outs dozens of active homosexual priests to Vatican in 1200-page dossier

Christians must go on the offensive against Gay Mafia

Pope Francis’ top ‘reform’ cardinal slams seminarians for exposing homosexuality inside seminary

Homosexuals, recruited by this new post-Vatican II ‘openness’ swarmed by the score into seminaries. Most were later ordained priests, and many consecrated Bishops, Archbishops and even Cardinals. The most infamous case is that of defrocked Cardinal, now retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick facing credible homosexual molestation of an 11-year-old boy among others. He was outed by Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano (top Vatican diplomat to America in the early 2000’s) who informed then Pope Benedict XVI who told him to stay home and pray. Pope Francis, Benedicts’ successor canceled those orders and relied on then Cardinal McCarrick as a ‘close adviser’ allowing McCarrick to move freely around the world and from seminary to seminary where young men became his sexual prey. McCarrick’s successor to the Washington D.C. Archdiocese, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, facilitated the moves from one seminary to another in the archdiocese while claiming agnosticism about his predecessor’s predation on boys.   Here’s a thumbnail of the facts as we know them today published at this source:

Cardinal Donald Wuerl walks between rows of Catholic clergy as he leaves the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on February 20, 2016.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
[From: https://www.weeklystandard.com/jonathan-v-last/vigano-letter-mccarrick-wuerl-and-pope-francis-are-breaking-the-catholic-church]

Pope Francis, Cardinal Wuerl, Theodore McCarrick, and the crisis of a church divided

“Consider what we know, and what has been alleged, about Pope Francis, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
For several decades, Father, Bishop, Archbishop, and eventually Cardinal McCarrick preyed sexually on the priests and seminarians serving under his authority. There are credible allegations he abused boys as young as 11. To the extent that this behavior was a secret within the American church, it was very badly kept. Between 2005 and 2007, three dioceses in New Jersey paid out large cash settlements to keep allegations of abuse by McCarrick quiet. As Bishop Steven Lopes said in a homily first reported by First Things, “I was a seminarian when Theodore McCarrick was named archbishop of Newark. And he would visit the seminary often, and we all knew.”

McCarrick ended his career as cardinal of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese and was succeeded by Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who arrived having just served as bishop of Pittsburgh. Wuerl’s former diocese has been in the news recently after the release of a grand jury report by the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office outlining decades of abuse by priests in the state.

As Wuerl arrived in Washington in 2006, McCarrick retired to the Redemptoris Mater seminary and was later ejected and sent to the Institute of the Incarnate Word seminary, both of which lay within Wuerl’s jurisdiction. In or about 2009, Pope Benedict XVI placed McCarrick under some sort of sanction. (The exact nature of the sanction is still unknown, but it seems to have been something like house arrest. It is also unclear when, exactly, Benedict first learned about McCarrick or how much time passed before he acted.) Yet somehow Wuerl insists that he knew nothing about any of this until June 2018, when the McCarrick firestorm exploded into public view.

It was only after a month of trying to cling to his job that Wuerl said he plans to fly to Rome to discuss his future with Pope Francis. Francis has yet to say or do anything about Wuerl despite the fact that, as do all cardinals over the age of 75, Wuerl had a letter of resignation on file with the Vatican. Francis could have disposed of him in an afternoon without having to do anything more complicated than accept a pre-existing letter.
Those are the facts we know. None of them are in dispute.

Then there are the allegations: On August 25, 2018, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published a letter in which he claimed that he had been party to several attempts to make the Vatican aware of McCarrick’s abuses over the years; that he had personally discussed them with Wuerl; and that Pope Francis—knowing full well all of the above—rescinded the house-arrest order of his predecessor, made McCarrick his “trusted counselor,” and, at McCarrick’s behest, began elevating certain bishops—such as Blase Cupich and Joseph William Tobin—to positions of power in the American church.
And if all of that is true, well, then what? 
The potential answers to this question aren’t very nice.
A family photograph of Father McCarrick and James in the 1970s. (courtesy NY Times)

THE SOLUTION: So, there has always been a double need for homosexual secrecy and cover-up within the Catholic clergy. But until Pope Francis was accused of collusion in covering up the prolific homosexual, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick the Church never even admitted that clerics above the rank of deacon and priest were even capable of practicing and concealing pederasty.

Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals and Popes are never mentioned in that report. For those in the know, there is an isomorphism between the secrecy still required in many societies to be a homosexual and the double secrecy required to cover-up homosexual clerics in the Catholic Church. While this is not an exclusively Catholic phenomenon, since most religious societies now openly court the homosexual community, it is doubly problematic for the Roman Catholic Church. The fact that the RCC still obliges its members to refrain from overt homosexual acts even while embracing the homosexual as a ‘child of God’ does not mitigate the required secrecy. The same church that condemns as sinful all homosexual acts covers up these same acts when committed by its clerics of all ranks.

 The root of this clericalism lies in the ‘cover-up-homosexual- culture’ itself (I do not ever use the term ‘gay’ for there is, in my opinion, very little gay in ‘Gay’).  Until quite recently, being ‘outed’ as a male homosexual meant that you had to cover it up, hide under your bed, masquerade your authentic sexual preference, deceive everyone around you, family, friends, and, in particular, the Catholic Church. This applies to one’s ‘Father Confessor’ who, now it seems, may be a closeted or abusive homosexual himself. It is this very conflictedness at the heart of Catholic doctrine about homosexuality. Notice I did not say Catholic dogma about homosexuality. There is no Catholic dogma about homosexuality, but there is doctrine. What’s the difference? Doctrine entails all Church teaching on matters of faith and morals. Dogma is much more specific and narrowly defines that part of doctrine which has been divinely revealed, and therefore which the Catholic Church obliges the faithful to believe as a necessary condition of being a Catholic. For example, that priests must be celibate is a Catholic doctrine but not a Catholic dogma. The Church could, therefore, easily change its doctrine on priestly celibacy without altering any dogma of the Church’s ‘Magisterium’ (Church teaching). The Catholic Church was a thousand years old before it defined its doctrine of clerical celibacy in the twelfth century at the Second Lateran Council held in 1139 AD, when a canon was approved forbidding priests to marry. In 1563, the Council of Trent reaffirmed this traditional doctrine, not a dogma, of celibacy.

Some Catholic commentators see only four options to save what’s left of the Roman Catholic Church.

1.    Pope Francis must resign. That won’t work. The college of Cardinals will just elect some Public Relations nincompoop who will urge prayer and forgiveness. The sexual abuse of boys by Catholic clergy will continue unchecked, unseen till it’s too late, and unpunished but covered-up by the systemic corporate Vatican run by the abuses themselves.
2.    Capitulate. Admit the corruption, ask for forgiveness and move on. Moving on is postmodern speak for ‘there is no objective morality’. So, judge not, lest ye yourself be judged.
3.    Schism. The break-up of the one, true and apostolic Roman Catholic Church into regional and/or continental ‘The Catholic Church of X’, whoever X is would see the RCC gradually evaporate as invisible as an angel’s breath.
4.    Fight. Driving out the infidels that elevated Pope Francis’s homosexual mafia would be a religious civil war without any winner.

None of these options are practical, although Schism is more probable than the other three. Just look at the many schisms accounting for the vast syllabus of Protestant denominations around the globe since Martin Luther and King Henry VIII.

THE FINAL OPTION: There is a fifth and final option; end the papacy, the cardinalate, the episcopacy and let no Catholic clergy be more exalted than parish priest. Let the parish faithful choose and ordain their priest. Let them hold morally and legally accountable for abusing boys and/or girls. This is exactly why I envisioned in 1967 with my graduate thesis, Contra Romanus Papam et Episcopos (Against the Roman Pope and Bishops). My reasoning in full can be accessed in this my most popular Meddlesome Priest blog:

The moral, practical, but never perfect solution, lies in the abolition of the Papacy, Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops. The power to appoint clerics must return to the early church procedure where clerics (deacons and priests only) are chosen by, and are immediately accountable to, the parish laity that they serve. Should clerics then 'touch the boys' parishioners will extract swift retribution.

 That's what's going to happen, so get ready. Say good-bye to touching the boys, Father.



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