“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)
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
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.
__________________________________
--- Mark
McIntire
SBCC Philosophy Department,
Retired
...the national story @
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--- Mark McIntire