Wolves in Shepherd’s Clothing

Perfidious Priests and What Must be Done About Them

E. L. Core

This essay was first published as a six-part column @ The View from the Core, March 11 to April 15, 2002.

Part One

March 11, 2002

For decades, a crisis has been brewing in the Catholic Church in the USA: a crisis of faith, a crisis of morals, a crisis of courage. Scandalous revelations in the fallout from the prosecution of a predatory pedophile among the priests of the Archdiocese of Boston may, finally, bring the crisis to its turning point. The priest was allowed to continue in ministry with little or no supervision, for at least 15 years and perhaps for much longer, resulting in the abuse of 130 children. These revelations — and others since brought to light, or more into the light — have elicited outcries of outrage, especially among Catholics. How could these horrendous activities have been allowed to happen? Why have perfidious priests — some of whom have committed criminal acts — been allowed to continue in sacred ministry? And what must now be done?

Introduction

In addressing the issue of recent clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the USA, I do not want to make the situation out to be more complicated than it is; nor do I wish to oversimplify. First, I will relate the facts of the situation, as far as I can determine them to be: this will take some time and attention to detail. (Nor will I refrain from comment in the midst.) Later, I will propose my own analysis: how realistic that may be, I do not know.

I rely on recent news reports for the facts of the current situation. Philip Jenkins’ book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1996) is the best source of detailed information, historical trends and wide-ranging analysis. Writers at the National Review Online provide a contemporary viewpoint from well-educated, articulate Catholic laity. And, as always, the redoubtable editor and other writers at the monthly Catholic World Report provide the most insightful extended analysis, outside of books, in the March 2002 issue. (As I write, CWR is available on-line only through January.)

A Review of the Current Situation
(from recent news stories and opinion pieces)

The sorry and sordid story made headlines starting Jan. 6 & 7, when the Boston Globe ran a two-part series recounting the sexual crimes of John J. Geoghan — who had been a priest of the Boston archdiocese before he was finally “defrocked” in 1998 — and the shameful manner in which his superiors had handled his case. The Boston Archdiocese was forced, by court order, to make public its internal documentation of the case. From that information, National Review Online’s Rod Dreher related some facts about how Geoghan had been mollycoddled, in a Jan. 25 column:

• In 1996, as state authorities were preparing to arrest Father John Geoghan, Bernard Cardinal Law wrote to the man whom he knew to be a serial molester of children: “Yours has been an effective life of ministry, sadly impaired by illness.... God bless you, Jack.”
• Brooklyn Bishop Thomas V. Daily, who oversaw Geoghan in his previous role as an auxiliary Boston bishop, explained the kid-gloves treatment archdiocesan officials gave Geoghan as “concern of the public reaction.” Said Daily, excusing his own inaction: “I am not a policeman; I am a shepherd....”
• Newly public Church documents show that Monsignor Francis S. Rossiter, the pastor at Geoghan’s final parish, had been made aware that Geoghan had been removed from several parishes for abusing children. Yet he assigned Geoghan to work with altar boys and youth groups....
• Even as Geoghan was removed from parish after parish following allegations of child molestation, his superiors, including two cardinals, wrote to him with kindness and warmth....

Dreher continued:

Nowhere in any of these documents is there evidence that the churchmen who so agonized about the welfare of Father Geoghan ever showed concern for the children he was raping and fondling, or their families.

As the scandal in Boston “mushroomed”, bishops around the country decided to take action publicly against priests who had been reliably accused of sexual misconduct. As reported in an article in the Los Angeles Times, Mar. 4, Cardinal Mahony had dismissed up to a dozen priests from service:

None of the priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese are believed to be involved in any recent cases of sexually abusing minors. Their cases occurred as long as a decade ago, and all had undergone psychological counseling, according to one of the sources.

Nonetheless, since the scandal over the sexual abuse of minors erupted anew in the Boston archdiocese last month, dioceses across the country, including the Diocese of Orange and Diocese of San Bernardino, have been under increasing pressure to rid themselves of any priests with a history of sexual misconduct.

Not all dioceses have waited until the Boston scandal erupted; according to a New York Times piece, Mar. 3, the Diocese of Belleville, Illinois, has had a firm policy of dealing with priests accused of sexual abuse:

The priests who have been accused of sexual abuse no longer work in churches. One performs karaoke on Wednesday nights at the Lincoln Jug restaurant in Belleville and another pumps gas at his mother's service station in the small town of Columbia.

In the mid-1990’s, the Diocese of Belleville publicly ousted 13 priests accused of inappropriate sexual contact with children, leaving them in an odd limbo — on the church payroll yet without portfolio [sic], called “Father” but barred from administering sacraments or wearing the collar.

Some individuals have questioned whether some dioceses have actually gone too far in removing accused priests, especially if they have already served without blame for a long time since having fallen. And we certainly must not blithely accept every accusation as true, especially because an atmosphere of frenzy-feeding would make it possible for a false accuser to ruin someone out of malice and spite. I nonetheless find it difficult to understand why it is not thought wise to make sure a perfidious priest does not continue to gain respect and support from the church — social, psychological, and financial — after having committed criminal or otherwise immoral acts with those entrusted to his pastoral care. A second chance, so long as it follows true repentance and the opportunity of asking and receiving real forgiveness from the injured parties, should not be out of the question: a third chance, let alone a 130th chance, certainly should be.

A Review of Recent Historical Trends
(from Jenkins’ Pedophiles and Priests)

Philip Jenkin’s book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis, provides considerable background for the current situation. I will quote from the book at what may seem extraordinary length. But the book is 214 pages long, including about 40 pages of footnotes, and I quote but small, fragmented portions of two or three of the book’s ten chapters.

Though not widespread, earlier accusations of clerical misconduct surfaced occasionally through the 1970s. Church officials and mass media alike attempted to deal with them quietly:

Generations of jokes and rumors have helped create a willingness to believe the worst of a celibate clergy, so that the reporting of a few authentic cases of pedophilia quickly leads to acceptance of the most extreme charges about systemic corruption. However, the same religious mythology initially made mainstream media more reluctant to give credence to such allegations, for fear of repeating canards that seemed more suitable for vulgar jokes. (p. 32)

There were certainly cases in the 1960s and 1970s when Catholic clergy were found to be sexually involved with children or adult parishioners. However, the media generally cooperated with the church in avoiding scandal. Clerical offenders were dealt with quietly, usually being transferred from their parishes without obvious publicity, and were required to submit to periods of seclusion and therapy that were neither long nor arduous. (p. 33)

The number of accusations grew dramatically in the 1980s, and unfortunately set something of a pattern to be followed over the next two decades or so:

The major breakthrough in establishing the scale and reality of a “clergy-abuse” problem occurred in the Louisiana diocese of Lafayette in 1984-1985, when Father Gilbert Gauthe was tried on multiple counts of molestation. He was suspected of molesting children of both sexes as early as 1972, and charges involved forcible abuse as well as child pornography. On several occasions, though, church authorities who learned of his misdeeds responded merely by transferring him to new parishes, where the cycle would begin afresh. (pp. 34f)

The Gauthe affair did much to establish the stereotypical characteristics expected of the “clergy-abuse” offender. Apart from illustrating the extensive harm that one individual could do in a position of trust, the case suggested that the church as a whole had acquiesced in the wrongdoing, perhaps even aggravated it, by refusing to take decisive and punitive action at an early stage. The affair set the precedent that failure to intervene should result in serious financial penalties and compensatory damages for the families. (p. 36)

In 1985, a confidential report to the bishops of the USA warned that more vigorous, more rigorous, action was required:

The burgeoning number of scandals evoked deep concern among some Catholic observers, and in 1985 a confidential report entitled “The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy: Meeting the Problem in a Comprehensive and Responsible Matter” was submitted to the Catholic hierarchy. The authors included Gauthe’s attorney, F. Ray Mouton, and two clerics [priests], Thomas P. Doyle and Michael Peterson.... The group warned of the need to take urgent action in the face of scandals, to react swiftly to complaints, and also to avoid charges of secretive proceedings or cover-ups. (p. 37)

Tragically, either this advice was not followed, or not followed often enough, or not followed well enough.

Cases of abuse have not been confined to the USA; in Canada, one instance culminated in an episcopal resignation because of the way cases had been handled:

The Newfoundland [Canada] cases were the first of the new wave of scandals... In the spring of 1989 attention shifted to the long history of both physical and sexual abuse committed by members of the Christian Brothers order against teenage boys in the Mount Cashel boys home in St. John’s.... During the original clandestine inquiry, some Brothers implicated in molestation had been permitted to leave the province to undertake new assignments. There were no sexual allegations against the province’s archbishop, but he resigned in 1990 under attack for church policies during the earlier investigations and cover-up. (p. 39)

After the number of cases skyrocketed in Chicago, the archdiocese initiated radical changes in its policies:

[In the Chicago archdiocese] in the 1960s and 1970s there had on average been two or three cases each year in which priests were accused of sexual misconduct with minors. The rate rose dramatically to seventeen complaints between 1986 an 1988, and to nineteen in the two years 1990-1991. (p. 41)

In September 1992 the Chicago archdiocese instituted the most comprehensive changes, including a pledge to remove forthwith any clergy accused of child abuse in order to prevent any potential harm to future victims.... Where charges were substantiated, priests would in effect pay for the offense for the rest of their lives. There would be years of therapy and counseling, and after this: “We recommend for each priest that has successfully completed the four year aftercare program: restricted ministry, a mandate restricting access to children, supervised residence, participation in a support group, assignment of a monitor or supervisor for life, and if indicated, ongoing therapy.” The Chicago policy was widely imitated, especially the use of a lay-dominated review board. (pp. 49f)

Imitated? Widely?

Contrary to much opinion, this is not a “Catholic” problem:

Clergy of most major denominations were to some extent tainted by such cases from the late 1980s. (p. 50)

The Church Mutual Insurance Company reported that by 1993 “it currently has open claims against four hundred non-Catholic clergy and has closed three hundred others since 1984. About half of them concern child sex abuse....” During 1992 alone, molestation charges were brought against Baptist ministers in rural Michigan, in New Orleans, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In the last case, multiple allegations of rape and molestation were directed against three brothers from one family, all of whom served as ministers in their respective churches. In 1994 there were molestation cases in Baptist churches in Georgia and in Houston, Texas.... Episcopalians encountered a lengthy series of misconduct cases, many involving minors; insurance claims for church liability in sexual matters rose from an annual average of five or so in the late 1980s to thirty-nine in 1992. (p. 51)

These cases, however, do not garner as much media attention as do those involving Catholic ministers. Many Catholic observers, including me, think this is due partly to a widespread hostility towards the Catholic Church among mainstream media.

(How long, for instance, will we have to wait until the Boston Globe, or the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times, or the Washington Post does some intensive investigative reporting into Jenkins’ account of the Church Mutual Insurance Company having receiving seven hundred claims in cases of sexual abuse involving non-Catholic clergy in one ten-year span — half of them involving children? Until hell freezes over, that’s how long.)

Now, almost every case in which a priest is accused of sexually abusing youngsters is called “pedophilia”. This is not always the case. In fact, it is not usually the case:

When considered in detail, the cases often suggest sexual liaisons between priests and boys or young men in their late teens or early twenties. This behavior may be reprehensible in terms of violating ecclesiastical and moral codes of sexual conduct, and breaching vows of celibacy, and the power relationship between priest and young parishioner renders it difficult to speak of the behavior as fully consensual. However, it is not properly pedophilia.... We are therefore left with the obscure word ephebophilia: the sexual preference for boys, epi hebe, upon puberty. (pp. 78f)

The Chicago data indicate that less than 2 percent of all serving American priests are or have been involved with minors, about a thousand “pederasts” in all nationwide, with the great majority of this group being homosexual ephebophiles. True pedophiles would be counted at most in the hundreds, and “predators” like Gauthe [and Geoghan ELC]... constitute a small handful of priests accused of abuse, a few dozen at any given time in the whole of North America. To assert this is in no way to play down the damage that can be done by such individuals or to deflect the culpability of any superior who might have tolerated their activities, but it does provide an essential context for appreciating the dimensions of the “abuse problem.” The number of “pedophile priests” has been magnified by a factor of twenty or more. (pp. 82f)

As we can see, though recent revelations have been shocking, the number of individual priests involved does not (for now, at least) seem to be significantly larger than what should have been expected, according to recent studies. The general Catholic population, however, was not made aware of these statistics.

Jenkins attempts some explanations of how the situation evolved over the past 30 years:

Church attitudes were also conditioned by demographic changes within the priesthood, which suffered an alarming decline in numbers from 1968 onward.... In consequence, clergy and seminarians were a scarce commodity whose careers should not be lightly jeopardized. For that reason, dioceses granted a wider latitude in accepting ordinands of suspected homosexual disposition, and were reluctant to take severe action against priests with a sexual predilection for minors. Clerical authorities were predisposed to place their hopes in the efficacy of treatment and therapy rather than punitive measures. (p. 92)

He also responds to assertions by some observers that the clergy-abuse problem is the greatest crisis the Catholic Church has ever faced:

From a global perspective, the “greatest-crisis” language is fatuous. The contemporary abuse issue directly affects perhaps a few hundred priests on one continent, and it fades into insignificance beside such political conflicts as the spread of Islam and Protestantism in the early modern period, the rise of communism and fascism in the early twentieth century, and such intellectual crises as the Enlightenment and the growing hegemony of science and rationalism in the nineteenth century. (p. 167)

But he also warns that the consequences should not be underestimated:

Though falling short of these other menaces past and present, the abuse problem has already had complex effects on North American Catholicism, and there may be serious long-term consequences. Catholic observers frequently note how easily outsiders are misled by the divisive and even vicious tone of controversies with the church; in reality these have little impact on “real” Catholic life, which revolves around the enduring verities of the parish and the Sacraments. In the abuse issue, however, lies a serious threat to exactly these core phenomena that have survived unscathed the decades of skirmishing over matters like contraception and women’s ordination. (p. 167)

More on the Current Situation
(from recent news stories and opinion pieces)

The American scandals are starting, finally, to get the attention of Rome. As reported in an article in the New York Times, Mar. 2:

Many Vatican officials, conservative and liberal alike, say it will take a sweeping reform of the priesthood to stop the pedophile scandals. The liberals want better psychological screening and revamped training in seminaries. The conservatives shift the focus elsewhere, saying that sexual abuse cases in the church mainly involve teenage boys, not young children, and for that reason they say the priesthood should become less welcoming to gays. Priests who said this made clear they were not suggesting that gays were any more likely to be pedophiles. But they said most of the sex cases being investigated did not fit the classic definition of pedophilia.

As already indicated above, by Jenkins, “pedophilia” is an inaccurate — mistaken, erroneous, just plain wrong — description of most of the activity now being scrutinized. Contrary to the opinion of the priests cited anonymously in that article, some professionals do not hesitate to “suggest” that homosexuals are, indeed, more likely to be sexually attracted to much younger persons than are heterosexuals.

For instance, Catholic psychologist Richard Cross clarifies certain aspects of the situation, in an article in the March 2002 issue of Catholic World Report:

People who molest children fall into two basic types. There are pedophiles who are, strictly speaking, heterosexual (although they might not be exclusively so). These would be men who molest girls, or women who molest boys. Then there is the pederast, who is homosexual.... The most common form of pedophilia involves men molesting girls. The second most common form involves an older girl or a woman molesting a boy. Then you have the third form, which is what we are seeing in the press lately: the pederasts; the adult male molesting the younger male. (This could be either a pre-pubescent male or an early adolescent male.) .... The most recent data that I have seen suggests that there is more abuse of men against girls than men against boys, as I’ve mentioned. That is, abuse by heterosexuals is more common than abuse by homosexuals, or pederasty. However, there is a much smaller percentage of heterosexuals who are molesters than homosexuals who molest. Up to one-third of all homosexuals have pederastic tendencies. (p. 43; emphasis in original)

The Vatican had already gotten immediately involved in another recent case. Though the incident seems to have gone unnoticed, as far as I can tell, in the American press, the archbishop of Cardiff in Wales was ordered by the pope to resign last year, as reported in a Guardian article, Oct. 27, 2001:

The Pope yesterday took the extraordinary step of ordering the retirement of Archbishop John Aloysius Ward, the most senior member of the Roman Catholic Church in Wales, in the wake of a paedophile scandal which has rocked his diocese to its foundations. The 72-year-old archbishop, who had been under severe criticism from clergy and congregations following the convictions of two priests for child sexual abuse offences, was forced to resign despite making clear his determination to stay in office. He had been accused of repeatedly ignoring warnings about the two priests’ conduct.

Indeed, the archbishop had ordained one of those men to the priesthood in 1998, despite the ordinand having already been accused of child sexual abuse, and in the teeth of warnings from a fellow bishop that the man was “unworthy”.

(The precise manner of the archbishop’s exit from office is disputed: he claims that he was not ordered to resign. I interpret the evidence this way: Vatican officials had, shall we say, strongly suggested to the archbishop that he resign or retire early. He repeatedly and publicly refused to do so. After Ward met with the pope, he was told that he must resign or he would be deposed. So he resigned.)

As mentioned above, child sexual abuse isn’t only a “Catholic” problem; it’s not only a “clergy” problem, either. Witness recent news stories:

• An AP story, Jan. 10: “An Orange County Superior Court judge already facing a federal charge of possessing child pornography was arrested Thursday in a child molestation case more than 25 years old. Judge Ronald C. Kline, 61, was booked for investigation of four counts of lewd conduct with a child under the age of 14, said Irvine police Lt. Sam Allevato.”
• A story in Insight in the News, Mar. 2: “Steve Elson, a former Navy SEAL and former member of the FAA’s elite and secret ‘Red Team’ that conducted mock raids to test security at U.S. airports, tells Insight that over the years he has been made aware of sexual exploitation of children by traveling U.S. aviation-security personnel. ‘I heard them talk about having sex with young girls,’ he says. ‘Some of them talked about how [the children] were hairless [in their pubic area]. It was disgusting. My impression is that the behavior was pretty well-known. It was kind of a joke.’”
• A story at NewsMax, Mar. 8: “At a confidential forum, the United States and the international community castigated the U.N. Refugee Agency for the sex scandal surrounding the alleged mass abuse of West African refugee children by aid workers and ‘peacekeepers,’ according to senior diplomats.... The U.S. delegation told a closed-door session of UNHCR’s top executive committee Tuesday, ‘These allegations of abuse by the very people entrusted with care of refugee people are deeply distressing and utterly appalling to all of us.’”

(The New York Times is owned by the same company that owns the Boston Globe. If the NYT has attempted, or does in the future attempt, to investigate charges of child sexual abuse by agents of the UN, which is headquartered in New York, as vigorously as the BG has investigated the Catholic hierarchy in Boston, please let me know. Do not think it necessary to also send contemporary reports of flying pigs.)

Sadly, some clergymen seem to have trouble dealing with the reality that they are sinners, that they have sinned, and that they need to repent and reform their lives. An almost piteously tragicomic aspect of the Boston story comes in the person of Fr. D. George Spagnolia. He had been dismissed from his position by Cardinal Law because of an accusation of having molested a 14-year-old boy in 1971. Spagnolia protested his innocence, refused to leave the rectory as he had been ordered to do, hired a lawyer, and even appeared (with his lawyer) on The Factor, Bill O’Reilly’s program on the Fox News Channel, to state his case.

Beginning in 1973, Spagnolia had left priestly ministry for 20 years, and has since publicly claimed to have been chaste during that time. This turned out to be a lie, as revealed in the Boston Globe, Mar. 2:

Spagnolia also disclosed that in addition to his nearly four-year relationship with Winston F. Reed after leaving the priesthood in 1973, which was reported by the Globe yesterday, he also had a year-long relationship with another man in 1981 or 1982 before resuming a life of celibacy. He had previously said that he had no other sexual relationships after parting with Reed in 1980.

He apologized to his supporters, insisting that he never meant to deceive anyone and lied to protect the privacy of himself and his partners. However it was Spagnolia who brought up the issue of celibacy during an interview with the Globe on Tuesday, insisting that he had lived a celibate life during his 20 years away from the priesthood.

Spagnolia still insists that he is not guilty of the 1971 charge. What moron would believe him now? And what on earth is one to say when a man claims that, by lying, he didn’t mean to deceive anybody?

Hello? Hello?

Sadly, too, some bishops seem to have great difficulty accepting the reality of their own shameful failures in contributing to this sorry situation. Perhaps the most astonishing quotation in this regard, it seems to me, came from Cardinal Law as reported in the Boston Globe, Mar. 10. The Cardinal had met with roughly 3,000 lay leaders from the archdiocese of Boston at a convocation, which I gather is an annual event. He is quoted as follows:

In his response at the end of the convocation, Law said, “In my most horrible nightmares, I would never have imagined that we would have come to the situation in which we find ourselves.”

Say what?

Cardinal Law, you yourself personally were responsible for compounding one Parents’ Nightmare with Another Parents’ Nightmare: a trusted priest abused their children, and a respected bishop allowed the predator to continue his ways. Any other nightmare that has followed was caused by the nightmares for which you were partly responsible, personally.

If that is all the recognition — all the conscience, all the consciousness — we can expect from Cardinal Law and other American bishops, the nightmare has only begun.

Part Two

March 18, 2002

“With a whole population able to read, with cheap newspapers day by day conveying the news of every court, great and small to every home or even cottage, it is plain that we are at the mercy of even one unworthy member or false brother. It is true that the laws of libel are a great protection to us as to others. But the last few years have shown us what harm can be done us by the mere infirmities, not so much as the sins, of one or two weak minds. There is an immense store of curiosity directed upon us in this country, and in great measure an unkind, a malicious curiosity. If there ever was a time when one priest will be a spectacle to men and angels it is in the age now opening upon us....” (J. H. Newman, October 2, 1873)

Cardinals Law, Mahony, and Egan

I concluded last time with Bernard Cardinal Law’s perplexing detachment from the situation he himself had helped to create, as reported in the Boston Globe, Mar. 10:

In his response at the end of the convocation, Law said, “In my most horrible nightmares, I would never have imagined that we would have come to the situation in which we find ourselves.”

Foreboding is added to my perplexity upon re-reading the article, which also contains this revealing notice:

“For more than two months, we have been inundated by the media with details of that awful history,” Law said. “It has left us sad, it has left us angry, and it has robbed us of that trust which a short while ago we took for granted.”

Excuse me, Cardinal Law: neither the media nor the reports of an “awful history” have robbed Boston’s faithful of the trust they had taken for granted: you yourself, personally, have done so by being partly responsible for some of the egregious “details” of that “awful history”.

As reported, Law speaks as if he had been standing in a crowd next to a street when he was suddenly struck by a car veering off the road. Actually, he is more like a passenger who had been telling the driver how well he was handling the car as it barreled down the sidewalk.

It seems to me that the cardinal cannot bring himself to face reality: his own actions, and inactions, have contributed to a situation he can’t stand. Perhaps, like Spagnolia — who didn’t mean to deceive anybody with his lies — perhaps Law has spent so much time trying to convince himself in his heart that his actions were not wrong... not so wrong... not really so wrong... they have become less than real to him. As if he was outside himself, watching somebody else make his mistakes.

Such a man is no man to be leading a clean-up of the mess he helped to make.

If a recent column by Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times is any indicator, the archbishop of Los Angeles may not be such a man either:

Across the land, the Catholic Church is being forced to come clean about the sins of the fathers, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles appears to be falling into line. But the million-dollar word there is “appears.” .... In 1988, [Cardinal Roger] Mahony established a policy designed, in his words, “to do all that is humanly possible to prevent sexual abuse....” In his Sunday [Mar. 10] statement, he invoked that policy and vowed that his church “will not knowingly assign or retain a priest, deacon, religious, or layperson ... when such an individual is determined to have previously engaged in the sexual abuse of a minor.” Well, given that the policy goes back 14 years, how is it that as many as a dozen accused molesters were still on the payroll? Did Mahony just now hear about them?

Now the archbishop of New York is coming under fire, as reported in the Hartford Courant, Mar. 17:

Secret court documents reveal that New York Cardinal Edward M. Egan, while serving as bishop of the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocese.... Egan failed to investigate aggressively some abuse allegations, did not refer complaints to criminal authorities and, during closed testimony in 1999, suggested that a dozen people who made complaints of rape, molestation and beatings against the same priest may have all been lying, the documents show.... However, Egan, who as cardinal in New York is the highest profile Catholic in the United States, has come under growing criticism for not speaking out. On Friday, in a New York Daily News cover story headlined “Speak Up, Egan Told,” Egan’s spokesman said the cardinal planned no public statements on the issue. Egan did not respond to requests for comments about his actions in the Bridgeport cases, including a list of questions e-mailed to his office at the request of his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling. In an e-mail Saturday, Zwilling referred all questions “concerning the Diocese of Bridgeport and/or any actions that may have occured in that diocese” to Bridgeport.

One should not jump to conclusions based on newspaper reports of “secret court documents”. These documents must have been acquired by underhanded — perhaps illegal — means, and it may be unwise to trust the interpretations of what “the documents show” by those who thus acquired them. (The case is different for Boston, where the documents were made public by court order.)

But, surely, we are past the point where official silence, and stonewalling by spokesmen, is acceptable. When was it ever acceptable? And why doesn’t Cardinal Egan know this?

Hear Me Bleat

Before I continue, I would do well, I think, to establish some ground on which to speak. Am I, one of the sheep, anybody to be telling the shepherds what I think has gone wrong with the Catholic Church in the USA, why it has gone wrong, and what must be done to help to set things right?

C. S. Lewis, an Anglican Christian, addressed this very question at the beginning of his paper “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”, delivered May 11, 1959, to a group of Anglican priests at Westcott House, Cambridge:

Though I may have nothing but misunderstanding to lay before you, you ought to know that such misunderstandings exist. That sort of thing is easy to overlook inside one’s own circle. The minds you daily meet have been conditioned by the same studies and prevalent opinions as your own. That may mislead you. For of course as priests it is the outsiders you will have to cope with. You exist in the long run for no other purpose. The proper study of shepherds is sheep, not (save accidentally) other shepherds. And woe to you if you do not evangelize. I am not trying to teach my grandmother. I am a sheep, telling shepherds what only a sheep can tell them. And now I start my bleating. (Christian Reflections, p. 152)

The “Moral Authority” of the Bishops in the USA:
Sliding Further Down the Drain

Philip F. Lawler, editor of Catholic World Report, writes a lengthy article in the March 2002 issue. Called “The Scandal in Boston — and Beyond”, it begins thus:

Even the most imaginative dramatist, with the most malign attitude toward the Church, would have been hard pressed to produce a scenario in which the Catholic Church was humiliated as quickly and thoroughly as the Archdiocese of Boston was in the opening days of 2002. Within a matter of weeks the Catholic Church — which in theory commands the allegiance of roughly one-half the people living in the region — had been reduced to irrelevance as a force in Boston’s public affairs. (p 36)

Indeed. Since the scandal erupted in Boston, more and more bishops are, these very days, publicly dismissing from active service priests who had been accused of sexual immorality — almost always with male youths only — yet they were allowed to continue in sacred ministry; as reported in the New York Times, Mar. 17:

Within weeks, bishops across the country began purging their dioceses of priests who had been serving despite accusations of child abuse. Since January, at least 55 priests in 17 dioceses have been removed, suspended, put on administrative leave or forced to resign or retire. They include at least 6 priests in Philadelphia, 7 in Manchester, N.H., 2 in St. Louis, 2 in Maine, 1 in Fargo, N.D., and as many as 12 in Los Angeles. There are 194 Catholic dioceses in the nation.

And as I write, a controversy erupts in Brooklyn, where a priest had, several years ago, accused an older priest of having abused him and his brother in the 1970s. According to a Newsday article, Mar. 15:

The Brooklyn case stems from allegations made by two brothers, one of them a priest himself, that the Rev. Joseph P. Byrns molested them as children in Douglaston during the early 1970s when he served at St. Anastasia Church. The Rev. Timothy J. Lambert, 44, who is on leave from the diocese of Metuchen in central New Jersey, said that in a 1998 meeting with top diocesan officials, he charged that he and his brother had been molested for several years as adolescents.... “Father Byrns denied unequivocally that anything like this had happened,” said [Brooklyn Bishop Thomas] Daily’s spokesman, Frank DeRosa. “The diocese spoke with him carefully and closely on a number of occasions and was satisfied with his denial.”

If convincing denials were all that is necessary, nobody would be in jail for anything. Is that not obvious? Why was it not obvious to Brooklyn diocesan officials as recently as 1998? Here’s an answer:

Lambert says it came down simply to the priest’s word against his and his brother’s. “I was a priest. He was a priest,” he said. “What made me less credible than him? In my view, the only thing was that if they believed him, they had more to lose if they didn’t.”

The deleterious effect on what is often called the “moral authority” of the bishops, of which Lawler writes about in Boston, will spread, or is already spreading, across the country.

The phrase “moral authority” is vague and ambiguous. What people really mean, I think, when they say that somebody, or some group or organization, has lost the “moral authority” to lead or to guide, or even to stake a meaningful position, is this: the person, the group, the organization have demonstrated that they can no longer be trusted to be honest, upright, straightforward persons of integrity who stand for what they say they stand for — so nobody gives a damn any more what they say.

How is it demonstrated? Breaking promises while feigning their fulfillment; saying one thing while doing another; declining to abide by rules that one expects everybody else to follow; hiding behind lawyers when open honesty is called for. One or another bishop has done this, and more, in cases of immoral priests. For decades. And still today.

How can decent human beings — let alone faithful Catholics and other Christians — ignore these kinds of breaches? In the New York Times article quoted above, it is put this way:

All sides agree that the church is in danger of losing the moral credibility in speaking out on political and social issues, including the death penalty and the status of Jerusalem. “If the church does not respond vigorously to this scandal, then the authority the hierarchy has to teach morally will vanish,” said R. Scott Appleby, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame. “It won’t just be a crisis, it will be all over but the shouting. There will be no moral credibility for the bishops to speak about justice, truth, racial equality, war or immigration if they can’t get their own house in order.”

Similarly, in an editorial in the New York Post, Mar. 17:

Last week, the cardinal [Edward Egan of New York] invoked church-state separation as he again requested a “conscience clause” — an exemption on moral grounds for religion-linked organizations — in any state legislation to make contraception coverage mandatory in employer health plans have. Fair enough. But there won’t be much political support for a conscience clause if the church seems to have lost its conscience — that is, if it appears willing to tolerate serial pedophiles in its midst.

The “Moral Authority” of the Bishops in the USA:
They Themselves Had Opened the Drain

But those who are already looking — whether with glee or with dismay — to January 2002 as the beginning of the end of the “moral authority” of the episcopacy in the USA will need to readjust the focus of their lenses: the real collapse of the “moral authority” of the American bishops began in 1968. Events of early 2002 merely demonstrate the seedier, sorrier aspects of the effect that the bishops’ actions, and inactions, have had on the faith, morality and daily life of Catholics in America, priests and laity alike.

What happened in 1968? Certain Catholic theologians in the USA brazenly distorted the Catholic faith in the most public way they could manage; the American bishops let them get away with it; worse, they eventually lent a false legitimacy by which further brazen distortion of the Catholic faith — disguised by the euphemism “dissent” — could continue unabated.

To set the stage, we must review the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the authority of the pope and bishops to authentically establish Catholic doctrine. (Yes, we must.)

Vatican II reaffirmed the common understanding of the Catholic faith: that when the pope, or the body of bishops together with him, have definitively or repeatedly taught a given doctrine as part of the Catholic faith, then the doctrine is no longer legitimately subject to debate or dispute among Catholics, even by bishops and theologians. I suppose this may seem shocking, especially to Protestants, who are accustomed to fashioning a faith according to their liking from their own interpretation of the Bible, and to Americans, who are rightly accustomed to the idea that laws and politics are continually open to debate and change by voters, legislators, governors and presidents, and judges. The Catholic faith, however, has always been understood by Catholics to have been handed on in the Church from Jesus Christ through His apostles. And the authority to determine true doctrine, definitively and especially in cases of dispute, has always been understood to belong to the pope and the bishops in communion with him.

Yes, Vatican II changed nothing in this traditional understanding. In fact, the Council explicitly and specifically embraced it in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 25:

In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium [teaching authority] of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra [definitively with the fullness of his office as universal pastor]; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.

On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, his famous encyclical on the regulation of birth. Little did he suspect the ambush being brewed by “Catholic” “theologians” in the United States, whose ringleader was Fr. Charles Curran.

Word of the encyclical reached America by publication on July 29. The story of its reception is told by Catholic historian Kenneth Whitehead, in an article in the March/April 1998 issue of Catholic Dossier:

In spite of the fact that the encyclical contained solid traditional Church teaching, the reaction to Humanae Vitae was nevertheless a veritable explosion of dissent from both inside and outside the Church. The incredulity mixed with disillusionment concerning both the person of Paul VI and his re-affirmation of the Church’s teaching was simply massive; and it included probably a majority, at least in North America and Europe, of the Church’s own working theologians, many of whom had already gone out on a limb and openly called for a change in the Church’s teaching. The judgment of these people was that the papal Magisterium [the teaching office of the pope] was simply wrong.

The day after Pope Paul VI’s encyclical was issued, a group of theologians at the Catholic University of America, for example, issued a statement eventually subscribed to by more than 600 theologians and other professional specialists in canon law and related disciplines in North America, in which they asserted that dissent from the encyclical was entirely licit — mostly because, they claimed, the encyclical was “not an infallible teaching,” thus consciously setting aside Lumen Gentium #25 which, of course, required their assent to the encyclical whether or not it was infallible.

Whitehead is diplomatic. He says the signers of the statement — many (if not most) of them among “the Church’s own working theologians” — issued their declaration by “consciously setting aside” the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.

I am not so diplomatic. I say they lied. They were liars and, in some cases, they are still liars.

And what happened to these lying Catholic theologians? Many of whom were in official positions in dioceses or religious orders or Catholic colleges. And, thus, on the Church’s payroll. Did their bishops demand that they be honest and either rescind their signature or find another way to make a living?

No. So far as I know, nothing was done to any of the liars. In fact, most of them were eventually rewarded by promotions or by fame or by influence — more influence among Catholics, indisputably, than the bishops themselves have had.

Thus began the collapse of the “moral authority” of the Catholic bishops in the USA.

The Bishops’ Munich Pact

Unsatisfied, apparently, with merely failing in one of their chief responsibilities — to uphold the Catholic faith — by ridding the Church of public liars, the American bishops soon issued “norms” by which liars could proceed to further undermine the Catholic faith, yet continue as “Catholic” “theologians”. These “norms” were part of a statement the bishops issued November 15, 1968:

Norms of Licit Theological Dissent

49. There exist in the Church a lawful freedom of inquiry and of thought and also general norms of licit dissent. This is particularly true in the area of legitimate theological speculation and research. When conclusions reached by such professional theological work prompt a scholar to dissent from noninfallible received teaching, the norms of licit dissent come into play. They require of him careful respect for the consciences of those who lack his special competence or opportunity for judicious investigation. These norms also require setting forth his dissent with propriety and with regard for the gravity of the matter and the deference due the authority which has pronounced on it.

50. The reverence due all sacred matters, particularly questions which touch on salvation, will not necessarily require the responsible scholar to relinquish his opinion but certainly to propose it with prudence born of intellectual grace and a Christian confidence that the truth is great and will prevail.

51. When there is question of theological dissent from noninfallible doctrine, we must recall that there is always a presumption in favor of the magisterium. Even noninfallible authentic doctrine, though it may admit of development or call for clarification or revision, remains binding and carries with it a moral certitude, especially when it is addressed to the Universal Church, without ambiguity, in response to urgent questions bound up with faith and crucial to morals. The expression of theological dissent from the magisterium is in order only if the reasons are serious and well-founded, if the manner of the dissent does not question or impugn the teaching authority of the Church and is such as not to give scandal.

52. Since our age is characterized by popular interest in theological debate, and given the realities of modern mass media, the ways in which theological dissent may be effectively expressed, in a manner consistent with pastoral solicitude, should become the object of fruitful dialogue between bishops and theologians. These have their diverse ministries in the Church, their distinct responsibilities to the faith, and their respective charisma.

53. Even responsible dissent does not excuse one from faithful presentation of the authentic doctrine of the Church when one is performing a pastoral ministry in her name.

54. We count on priests, the counselors of persons and families, to heed the appeal of Pope Paul that they “expound the Church’s teaching on marriage without ambiguity”; that they “diminish in no way the saving teaching of Christ,” but “teach married couples the indispensable way of prayer... without ever allowing them to be discouraged by their weakness” (Humanae Vitae, 29). We commend to confessors, as does Pope Paul, the example of the Lord Himself, Who was indeed intransigent with evil, but merciful towards individuals.

There you have it: the American bishops’ Munich Pact. How’s that? David Gelernter wrote about the Munich Pact the other day in The Weekly Standard:

Everyone knows about Munich, September 1938: Britain and France generously donate a big slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in exchange for “peace with honor,” “peace in our time,” and the Brooklyn Bridge. Many people know about the Kristallnacht pogrom, November 1938: Germany’s approach to the Jews turns from mere oppression to bloodthirsty violence. Kristallnacht was “triggered” by the murder of a German diplomat by a deranged Jew. But some (not all) historians point out the obvious: A leading cause of Kristallnacht was Munich itself. Hitler read the Munich agreements as a proclamation by England and France stating: “We are weak; you have nothing to fear; do what you like.”

Following Gelernter’s lead, allow me to translate: “Norms of Licit Theological Dissent” is bishop-speak for “We are weak; you have nothing to fear; do what you like.”

Indeed, we may see a foreshadowing in the bishops’ capitulation, 1968, of their spooky reluctance to face the reality of the situation they must deal with in 2002: the stupidity (at the least) of having kept immoral priests in sacred ministry. As Whitehead put it:

This whole elaborate effort of the U.S. bishops [issuing “Norms of Licit Theological Dissent”] was an exercise in unreality, since not one of the conditions they specified was ever observed by the actual dissenters; quite the contrary, for the most part. (emphasis added)

Results of the American Bishops’ Capitulation

Church authorities that have spent the past three decades hiding criminals from justice — criminals like very rare pedophiles (some of them heterosexual) and less rare ephebophiles (all of them homosexual) — began by allowing liars to continue working among them.

Germany, after Chamberlain’s attempt to appease Hitler, had soon invaded and conquered a great deal of Europe; “Catholic” “theologians”, after the bishops’ attempt at appeasement, soon effectively declared Catholic life in its entirety — faith and morals, doctrine and discipline, history and tradition, parcel and part, bit and piece, jot and tittle — open to serious debate, doubt, and even denial.

It has been a power struggle, plain and simple: the bishops and the Catholic faith have, so far, lost.

An essay by Msgr. George A. Kelly in the March 2002 issue of Catholic World Report puts it thus:

The most important and enduring scandal in the Catholic Church of the United States is the established and continued existence of what Pope John Paul II has called a “counter-magisterium” — a rival teaching office that confutes, confounds, and contradicts what the Pope and the bishops in union with him set forth as the Gospel of Jesus Christ regarding human beings, their destiny in this life and the next. The #2 scandal is the downgrading of orthodoxy as an essential standard norm of Catholic belief, and the consequent downsizing of “right belief” as normative for teachers and pastors.... The scandal consists in the harm done to faith in Christ’s Church by the continued and unopposed power exercised by these anti-magisterial forces, which use Catholic colleges and schools, religious societies, and so-called pastoral entities in opposition to the settled mind and law of the Church. (p. 48)

A recent expostulation by Andrew Sullivan illustrates how the distortion of Vatican II has become entrenched to the point that an intelligent writer can take as fact what has no foundation whatever in the teachings of the Council. Sullivan, who is (for lack of a better word) a practicing homosexual but nonetheless claims to be a faithful Catholic, wrote thus, Mar. 14, concerning some “difficult issues” in a section entitled “Sparing Rod”:

The first is whether the Church has a single unchanging doctrine on every matter of morals which every Catholic is obliged to assent to and practice at all times. This is a common view among pre-Vatican II Catholics, ex-Catholics and non-Catholics. It’s wrong. The Church is not a democracy, but neither is it a Vatican dictatorship. The Second Vatican Council specifically carved out a larger area for the laity to discuss, reflect upon and debate matters of morals, of the application of broad principles to particular issues, and so on. We – not just the Pope – are also the Church. For example, most Catholics find the complete bar on any birth control to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bizarre. When the Church imposes something by diktat that the faithful cannot square with their own moral sense, experience and prayerful reflection, two things happen. The laity ignores it; and the hierarchy loses credibility. To a lesser extent, the Church’s teachings on re-marriage, the role of women, celibacy, and homosexuality are also so theologically muddled and troubling upon inspection that they have generated considerable debate. Bottom line: I don’t think such debate is faithless or un-Catholic.

Sullivan posted a letter from a reader, who asked the following: “Where specifically did Vatican II carve out a broader area for the laity to debate the Pope on matters of morals?” The question will go unanswered, of course, because Vatican II did no such thing: “Catholic” “theologians” who wanted to carve out a larger area for their own influence have convinced many Catholics of it, though.

He also posted part of a letter from Catholic philosopher Alexander R. Pruss, who has provided me with the entirety of his letter:

I see several misconceptions in your piece “Sparing Rod” that I thought I should respond to both as a Catholic born after Vatican II and as someone who teaches ethics.

To the extent that the Church is a democracy, it is a democracy that enfranchises all the generations of Catholics before us. Seen in this way, the Church’s official teachings on sexual matters are, as far as we know, the beliefs of the majority of Catholics. While there is a sense of the faith among Catholics, any one Catholic’s sense, or even the sense of the majority of Catholics at a given time, can be clouded. After all, according to a 1992 Gallup poll, only 30% of Catholics accept the correct view of the Eucharist. If someone’s eyesight of clearly visible objects is defective, we disregard his testimony about more murky objects. Likewise, if a Catholic gets wrong things on which the Church is completely clear like abortion or the Eucharist, then his sense of the faith is not functioning properly, and so his views on things like contraception that are somewhat more controversial are irrelevant.

Some Catholics may indeed find the Church’s teachings on matters like contraception “bizarre”. But this is only because they are unaware of the work of philosophers like John Finnis, Germain Grisez, Janet Smith and Karol Wojtyla. Once one understood this work, even if one were not persuaded (as I think one should be: see my own articles at www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85), one would no longer be able sincerely to call the teachings “bizarre.” On the contrary, one would see the Church as espousing a coherent, plausible and all-encompassing ethic of sexual love based on the notion of ontological self-giving.

Your references to Vatican II are puzzling, largely due to a lack of specific references. According to Vatican II, whenever the bishops at any one time unanimously teach that a position is to be definitively held, then that position is thereby infallibly taught (Lumen Gentium, 25). No doubt, the bishops in, say, the 13th or 18th century were in unanimous agreement that it was to be definitively held that, say, homosexual acts and contraception are wrong. Hence this is infallibly taught.

Sexuality is central to human life, and is closely tied to that which is at the center of the Gospels: love. If the Church is wrong on contraception, re-marriage, celibacy and homosexuality, then the Church over the past twenty centuries has got a central area of human life almost completely wrong. Thinking that the Church is so massively wrong about love is indeed un-Catholic.

Some might call Pruss’s explanation pathetically old-fashioned; others might call it remarkably brave. It is neither: an informed, intelligent, articulate Protestant or Muslim or atheist could say as much as Pruss wrote to Sullivan — so long as he honestly intended to accurately express the Catholic faith.

But wolves in shepherd’s clothing have managed to undermine, diminish, and distort the Catholic faith while claiming the aegis of the Second Vatican Council, though a careful — no, even a casual reading — of the Council’s documents will reveal, as already indicated here, that this has been done in spite of the Council, not because of it.

The American bishops will regain their “moral authority” when they start acting like Catholic bishops, acknowledging by word and deed their momentous responsibility to safeguard and hand on the faith they have received from the Apostles. And not before then.

Am I saying that “dissent” from Catholic faith and life caused the outbreak of immoral priests in our midst? No. But there is, indeed, a very good argument to be made that confusion about Church teaching, caused by deliberate and public deception by prominent “Catholic” “theologians”, contributed to the outbreak and “justification” of immoral behavior among Catholics of all stripes.

Here’s a bit of evidence from an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar. 17; the story is about retired priest Joseph P. Lessard, now 76, who admits to having molested boys back in the 1960s and 1970s:

His first victim was a boy of about 12, the son of a couple from a neighboring parish whom he knew well. Lessard, an avid outdoorsman, arranged a fishing trip. After fishing, he took the boy back to the rectory and “started fooling around,” which he said involved touching each other’s genitals and masturbating. “I emotionally and physically wanted to have sex with him,” Lessard said. “There was a mutual interest in having sexual gratification.” The abuse went on for a couple years.... Lessard said he was guilt-free, believing he was educating the boys in sex. He didn’t consider this breaking his vow of celibacy. It didn’t seem as if he was hurting anyone.

If anybody has any evidence that It’s OK As Long As Nobody Gets Hurt was an attitude one could find among parish priests of even one generation earlier, please let me know.

The connection between this particular priest and the distortion of Vatican II, however, is quite direct, and does not need to be surmised; the article later quotes a man who says that he had been one of Lessard’s victims:

“My parents loved him. They would rather me be out with him than roaming the streets,” said the man, to whom the archdiocese paid $60,000 in 1997. “He had a camper. A big mobile home, and lots of great places to go camping and hunting and fishing. He knew several people who had farms and great fishing ponds around Chesterfield.” Lessard talked openly about masturbation, the man said. It wasn’t a sin anymore after the Second Vatican Council, Lessard would say. He wouldn’t let up on the subject. (emphasis added)

If the bishops are to restore their “moral authority”, they must go further back, and deeper down, than merely dealing with immoral priests in their ranks: they must root out Catholic professionals in official positions who effectively confute, confound, and contradict the settled mind and law of the Catholic Church.

Is this such an unthinkable request?

• If the Democratic candidate for the governorship of a state actively did his best to promote the candidacy for state legislature of every Republican on the ballet throughout the state, how many votes would he get from Democrats?
• If the new Republican governor appointed only Democrats to his cabinet, wouldn’t there be calls for impeachment?
• If the president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod announced that he believes the pope is Christ’s Vicar on earth, would he remain long in office?
• If the president of Bob Jones University started filling positions with conservative Catholic educators, would he not be suspected of trying to change the thinking of the university?
• If a CBS reporter wrote an article criticizing the left-leaning bias of his organization, would he remain in good standing there for very long?

That last example takes us from hypotheses to a real situation. And here is another: if professional Catholic theologians and pastors and religious — on the Church’s payroll, at all levels — effectively compromise Catholic faith and life to the point where they are becoming indistinguishable from the prevailing secular milieu, why are these men and women not called subversive traitors and expelled?

Okay, we could call them something else. C. S. Lewis knew what to call subversion of the faith by clergy, in an interview in 1963, when he was asked what he thought of contemporary Christian writing:

A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible. I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution. (God in the Dock, p. 260)

Call it prostitution; call it traitorous subversion; call it dissent: it must be rooted out of the Catholic Church in the USA to effectively restore the bishops’ “moral authority” among Catholics, and the Church’s “moral authority” in public life.

Part Three

March 25, 2002

“In fact, the diseases of consciences, their indifference to good and evil, their errors, are a great danger to man. They are indirectly a menace to society as well, because the level of society’s morals depends in the ultimate analysis on the human conscience. A man who has a hardened heart and a degenerate conscience is spiritually a sick man, even though he may enjoy the fullness of his powers and physical capacities. Everything must be done to bring him back to having a healthy soul.” (Pope John Paul II, March 15, 1981)

Subversive Traitors?

I concluded last time with the idea that men and women, on the Church’s payroll, whose writings and speeches and work tend to effectively render the Catholic faith and life indistinguishable from the secular milieu ought to be recognized for what they are: subversive traitors. And the “moral authority” of the bishops, in particular, and of the Catholic Church more generally, cannot be restored until — unless — subversive traitors are expunged from official positions.

Oh... listen.... I can almost hear the hysterical charges being aimed at me now: You are an Inquistionist, a pogromist; you would really like to be able to set the fires ablaze beneath anybody who disagrees with your own version of Catholicism. And hysterical charges they would be, in more ways than one, especially in the United States of America. Catholics whose alleged conscience supposedly cannot allow them to believe the Catholic faith are entirely free to leave the Catholic Church. And, were they honest men and women, that is what they would do. They can become Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, or Baptist. Or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu. Or atheist or agnostic. They can start their own denomination, or a brand new religion to their self-satisfied heart’s content.

Now, part of the on-going problem with “pedophile priests” — and with the far more numerous, though still rare, “ephebophile priests” (homosexuals who abuse male adolescents) — part of the problem is that almost nobody in authority has been willing to name names, thus allowing the immoral priests to continue their predations. I think that the problem of pedophiliac and ephebophiliac priests could not have taken root and grown to bear poisonous fruit except in the prevailing climate of moral confusion, abetted by the initial collapse of the bishops’ “moral authority” in 1968; this climate of moral confusion in the Catholic Church has been, I believe, caused largely by the widespread influence of subversive traitors in the bosom of the Church; and, getting rid of their predations, of quite another kind, is necessary to restore the health of the Church: so, I myself must be willing to name names.

Rev. Richard McBrien

Fr. Richard McBrien is most famous, perhaps, as the author of a book called Catholicism. Before taking a look at what some folks have had to say about his book, I would like to note that he has been quoted recently, and probably far more often than I have discovered; for instance, in an Associated Press article at Yahoo! News, Mar. 13:

A handful of bishops already have made changes, ousting dozens of priests accused of molestation and working more closely with prosecutors. However, some Catholics — particularly liberals — say reform is needed beyond how the church addresses misconduct in its ranks. “The old system is dead,” said the Rev. Richard McBrien, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. “It’s just a matter of how long it takes before it completely implodes.” The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a conservative and editor of the religious magazine First Things, disagreed. He predicted the church will emerge from this trial with a renewed commitment to its most basic values. “The problem is not with celibacy. The problem is with priests who aren’t celibate,” Neuhaus said. “The problem is not with the teaching of the church. The problem is with the people who don’t live the church.”

(Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor, stated quite succinctly what I am trying to make the case for: “The problem is with the people who don’t live the church.” Viewed from another angle, though, as I’m trying to get across, the problem is with the people who don’t leave the Church but remain in its bosom, trying to “purge” it of everything that is actually, really, distinctively Catholic.)

McBrien was also quoted in an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar. 16:

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, chief spokesman for Pope John Paul II, asked about the Boston scandal earlier this month, told the New York Times that the solution was for the church to ban gays from becoming priests. The comment outraged experts who noted an absence of data linking homosexuality to pedophilia. Most studies show that heterosexual and married men are as likely as gays to abuse children. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at Notre Dame, said Navarro-Valls’ statement also ignored the reality that gays make up an increasing percentage of the priesthood. “It’s one of the most bizarre, absurd and irresponsible statements I’ve ever heard from the Vatican,” McBrien said. “If that became policy, we’d have to evacuate the seminaries.” McBrien went on to say, however, that “cultural, social and even religious changes in attitude toward sexuality and marriage” had dramatically reduced the pool of potential priests. “We are drawing from an ever thinner slice of the population in recruitment of priests,” he said.

(Note how casually, yet deliberately, the Post-Dispatch writer distracts the reader from the reality: most of the sexual immorality committed by priests, for which the Church is now under fire, has not been pedophilia, the sexual abuse of children; it has been ephebophilia, the sexual abuse of adolescents — almost invariably boys. Remarkably, a recent Boston Globe article has noted this: “It has become the shorthand label for a sex abuse scandal that now haunts dioceses around the nation: the pedophile priest crisis. But the vast majority of priests who sexually abuse minors choose adolescent boys — not young children — as their targets....”)

Catholic theologian Robert Fastiggi has analyzed McBrien’s book Catholicism and shown how McBrien so cleverly, so subtly, distorts the Catholic faith in fundamental matters — thus betraying the Church, whose doctrine he is paid to preach, by engaging in what C. S. Lewis has likened to prostitution.

Fastiggi’s article in Pastoral and Homiletic Review, June 1996, begins thus:

If one were to judge a book by its (back) cover, the newly revised edition of Richard McBrien’s Catholicism would have all the appearances of a clear, competent and complete guide to the teachings of the Catholic Church. With praises from diverse authorities, ranging from the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to theologians from Fordham, Boston College and the Gregorianum, this impressive-looking volume seems to possess all the academic credentials needed to be considered the book on “Catholicism.”

As is well-known, though, we cannot judge a book by its cover, and the question that must be asked is whether Fr. McBrien has presented Catholicism as it really is or Catholicism as he would want it to be. Of course, credit should be given where credit is due. Any book of over 1200 pages surely deserves some recognition for the work that went into it, and if one is looking for a quick summary of the thought of theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng and Johannes Metz, McBrien’s book is certainly useful. However, if one is looking for a clear and faithful exposition of authentic Catholic teaching, one would be well-advised to steer clear of McBrien’s opus and concentrate instead on the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In reading McBrien’s text, it is clear that the author has mastered Catholic vocabulary and knows how to give the reader the impression of being rooted in the Catholic tradition. It is here, though, that a disturbing tendency emerges. What one often finds is a discussion of a traditional Catholic dogma cast in ambiguous terms by a skillful turn of phrase or a clever sleight of hand. Thus, the uncritical reader is given the false impression that McBrien’s discussion of the dogma is safely rooted within the parameters of Catholic orthodoxy without realizing that the author has frequently undercut the full meaning and authority of the dogma itself.... (emphasis added)

He concludes as follows:

McBrien’s Catholicism is a dangerous book — dangerous because it cloaks dissent in the vocabulary of the language of Catholicism itself. Its methodology is one of deliberate ambiguity in which many teachings of the Church are either obscured or so qualified that they lose their full significance and authority. The potential impact of this text on the faithful is frightening.

Fastiggi closely examines McBrien’s discussion of the theology of the Church, salvation, infallibility, Marian dogmas, and conscience. His opinion of McBrien’s view of the role conscience plays in making moral decisions is worthy of special note:

McBrien ultimately undercuts the Church’s authority as a moral teacher by asserting that “the Church has never claimed to speak infallibly on a moral question, so there is probably no instance as yet of a conflict between an individual’s fallible decision in conscience and a teaching of the Church which is immune from error” (p. 973). The net effect of this view is an atmosphere of moral ambiguity in which a Catholic can clearly “differ with an official moral teaching of the Church” as long as there is “antecedent attention and respect to such teachings” (p. 980). [emphasis added]

Even the Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has published a general review of the book, from which I quote the conclusion:

Catholicism poses pastoral problems particularly as a textbook in undergraduate college courses and in parish education programs. The principal difficulties with the book lie not only in the particular positions adopted, but perhaps even more in the cumulative effect of the book as a whole. The method is to offer a broad range of opinions on every topic with the apparent intention of allowing or stimulating the reader to make a choice. This places a heavy burden on the reader, especially since some of the opinions described do not stand within the central Catholic tradition. The reader who is a theological beginner could easily assume that all the authors cited are equally a part of the mainstream Catholic conversation, whereas some of the authors are closer to the margins. While the book could be a helpful resource to theologians looking for a survey of opinions on some question, it might well be bewildering and unsettling for Catholics taking undergraduate courses in theology. For some readers it will give encouragement to dissent.

The problem is further aggravated because Catholicism gives very little weight to the teaching of the magisterium, at least where there has been no explicit dogmatic definition. At many points the book treats magisterial statements on the same level as free theological opinions. On a number of important issues, most notably in the field of moral theology, the reader will see without difficulty that the book regards the “official church position” as simply in error.

This review has focused exclusively on the problematic aspects of Catholicism. Certainly, as the 1985 statement of the Committee on Doctrine affirmed, there are many positive features to be found in the book. Nevertheless, this review concludes that, particularly as a book for people who are not specialists in theological reasoning and argumentation, Catholicism poses serious difficulties and in several important respects does not live up to its ambitious title. (emphasis added)

(McBrien’s book must be wonderfully self-serving. Indiscriminately citing the opinions of theologians as authoritative fosters the perception of theologians as having authority: that is, it fosters the perception of McBrien himself as having authority.)

Alas, this “general review” by the bishops’ committee may actually be counter-productive. What was called for, in defense of the Catholic faith? Clear, ringing denunciations of McBrien’s deceptions. What did Catholics get? Criticisms that are too often circuitous and mealy-mouthed; helpful reminders that there are “many positive features to be found in the book”; and complaints that some readers may be overburdened.

Moreover, the newspaper articles quoted above, in which McBrien had been quoted, were not in error: he is, indeed, a priest in good standing and a professor of theology at Notre Dame University.

There, he continues to misrepresent the faith he is paid to uphold.

There, at Notre Dame, reporters can find McBrien and can refer to him, correctly and accurately, as being a priest and a professor of theology at a Catholic institution.

And the American bishops publish “general reviews” that nobody reads.

Most Rev. Thomas Gumbleton

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, as far as I know, has written no tome the likes of McBrienism... er... I mean, the likes of McBrien’s Catholicism. Perhaps he thinks McBrien has said all that needs to be said.

The auxiliary bishop of Detroit is quite happy, though, to use his mitre and crosier to lend a gaudy but quite false sense of authority to any gathering of Catholic malcontents. Especially when the promotion of homosexuality is involved.

For instance, as reported in a recent article at World Net Daily, Gumbleton spoke at the New Ways Ministry Fifth National Symposium, in Louisville, Mar. 8:

Pro-gay Catholic speakers and workshop leaders, including two U.S. bishops, offered ideas for creating a more homosexual-inclusive Church at the New Ways Ministry Fifth National Symposium, titled “Out of Silence God Has Called Us,” March 8-10 at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Ky.... Detroit Bishop Thomas Gumbleton told parents, “The first thing that I think needs to be said that’s very, very important if we’re going to love our children is simply to recognize that homosexual people are not disordered people. They are psychologically healthy people. ... Homosexuals are as healthy as anyone else.”

Gumbleton added, “Homosexuals are able to function and grow at least as well as heterosexuals. They are able to be creative, put in a hard day’s work, act as citizens, help their neighbor. Somewhat surprisingly, they make love more humanely, largely because they are better able empathetically to feel what their partner is feeling.” .... On Saturday evening, retired Bishop Leroy Matthiesen of Amarillo, Texas, celebrated Mass wearing a rainbow stole on a ballroom stage decorated with rainbow banners. The rainbow has become a universal symbol of the homosexual advocacy movement.

(Ah, yes. Life, somewhat surprisingly, would have always been so much better for the human race — if only all our parents had been homosexuals in same-sex relationships.)

Remarkably, the WND writer provides the reader with all that is needed to show that Gumbleton and Matthiesen misrepresent the Catholic faith, which their vows and their position in the Church require them to uphold:

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity.”

However, the Catechism also states: “Homosexual acts [are] acts of grave depravity,” and “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” [The quotations are from ## 2358 and 2357.]

It needs hardly to be said, among honest men, that the Catechism does little more than restate the ancient, unchanging teaching of the Catholic Church: homosexual acts are always — invariably and without exception — sinful.

Now we can see why there is no need for a Gumbletonism book: we can be confident that it could be said of a book, if written by Gumbleton and called Catholicism, that “On a number of important issues, most notably in the field of moral theology, the reader will see without difficulty that the book regards the ‘official church position’ as simply in error.”

The Corrupt American Episcopacy

As the example of Gumbleton and Matthiesen shows, there is much more to the collapse of the bishops’ “moral authority” than failure to remove predators from the midst of Catholics, be the predators sexually immoral priests or otherwise subversive traitors.

The American episcopacy has become corrupt. Not the individual bishops. Well, not all of them. But the episcopacy itself has become corrupt: the group, the organization, the body. It no longer has the will — it has not had the will for a generation or more — to remove subversive traitors from positions of trust, nor to appropriately discipline sexually immoral priests, nor to cause perfidious bishops to be removed from their very midst: all this, I believe, a long-time-coming result of the bishop’s Munich Pact, “Norms of Licit Theological Dissent”, November 15, 1968.

Fr. Paul Shaughnessy wrote about this, with keen insight, in the Essay in the November 2002 issue of Catholic World Report:

I define as corrupt, in a sociological sense, any institution that has lost the capacity to mend itself on its own initiative and by its own resources, an institution that is unable to uncover and expel its own miscreants. It is in this sense that the principal reason why the action necessary to solve the gay problem [in the Catholic priesthood in America] won’t be taken is that the episcopacy in the United States is corrupt, and the same is true of the majority of religious orders. It is important to stress that this is a sociological claim, not a moral one.

If we examine any trust-invested agency at any given point in its history, whether that agency be a police force, a military unit, or a religious community, we might find that, say, out of every hundred men, five are scoundrels, five are heroes, and the rest are neither one nor the other: ordinarily upright men who live with a mixture of moral timidity and moral courage. When the institution is healthy, the gutsier few set the overall tone, and the less courageous but tractable majority works along with these men to minimize misbehavior; more importantly, the healthy institution is able to identify its own rotten apples and remove them before the institution itself is enfeebled. However, when an institution becomes corrupt, its guiding spirit mysteriously shifts away from the morally intrepid few, and with that shift the institution becomes more interested in protecting itself against outside critics than in tackling the problem members who subvert its mission. For example, when we say a certain police force is corrupt, we don’t usually mean that every policeman is on the take — perhaps only five out of a hundred actually accept bribes. Rather we mean that this police force can no longer diagnose and cure its own problems, and consequently if reform is to take place, an outside agency has to be brought in to make the changes.

By the same token, in claiming the US episcopacy is corrupt, I am not claiming that the number of scoundrel bishops is necessarily any higher than it was when the episcopacy was healthy. I am simply pointing to the fact that, as an agency, the episcopacy has lost the capacity to do its own housecleaning, especially, but not exclusively, in the arena of sexual turpitude. Should someone object to this characterization, I would reply in these terms: Excellency, let’s look at the American bishops who have been deposed in recent years as a consequence of sexual scandal: Eugene Marino of Atlanta, Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, Keith Symons of Palm Beach, Daniel Ryan of Springfield, Illinois, Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa. Can you name a single instance in which the district attorney or the media did not get there first — a single case, that is, in which you yourselves identified the scoundrel in your ranks and replaced him before the scandal aired on CBS or before the police came knocking on the door?

At least one more bishop can be added to Shaughnessy’s list, as reported in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Mar. 9:

Three years ago, the pope tapped him to heal a Palm Beach Catholic Diocese reeling from a sex scandal that forced its trusted bishop from the pulpit. On Friday, Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell, 63, stepped into the spotlight with his own secret. Describing what he called a misguided attempt to counsel a troubled seminary student, O’Connell acknowledged he had inappropriately touched the boy about 25 years ago while a rector in Missouri — and had a similar relationship with another teen. At a news conference at the Palm Beach Gardens church that has served as his main parish since 1999, the well-regarded O’Connell said he has offered his resignation to the pope and will go to a quiet place to pray and await his fate.

The pope accepted O’Connell’s resignation within a few days. (A remarkably quick turnaround time, I understand.)

Moreover, as the Boston Globe reports, Mar. 22, it looks as if several other American bishops are about to be engulfed by an old transgression erupting as a new scandal:

Two Roman Catholic archbishops confirmed yesterday that in the mid-1990s they were involved in a legal settlement of a claim that San Diego Bishop Robert H. Brom coerced a seminarian into having sex when Brom was bishop of Duluth, Minn. However, the former seminarian who leveled the charges retracted them after reaching the settlement that provided him with a sum that was less than $100,000, Archbishop Roger L. Schwietz of Anchorage said in an interview. At the time of the agreement, Schwietz was bishop of Duluth. Brom, in a statement last night, denied the allegations, which stemmed from the 1980s. Brom said the charges against him — and three other bishops and several priests — had been disproved by an investigation and retracted by the former seminarian....

However, according to an affidavit filed last week in an unrelated case in San Diego Superior Court, the former seminarian told a friend that he only recanted the charges so he could receive his settlement money. The friend, Mark Brooks of San Diego, another former seminarian, said in his affidavit that the former seminarian told him his retraction letter was “false.” Archbishop John G. Vlazny of Portland, Ore., said in an interview that the retraction by the seminarian was a condition insisted on by the Duluth diocese in return for the settlement. At the time the case was settled, Vlazny was the bishop of the Winona diocese in southern Minnesota, where the seminary is.

More and more evidence comes to us that more and more American bishops are more and more compromised. If a lawsuit being filed as I write is any indicator, much more evidence may be coming to light in the future; as reported in the Miami Herald, Mar. 22:

An ex-seminarian will make sweeping sex abuse and racketeering claims today in Missouri against the former bishop of the Palm Beach diocese and two other dioceses, employing a far-reaching federal statute [RICO] most commonly known for its use in organized crime prosecutions. The man, the third to come forward with sex abuse allegations against the ex-bishop, is charging Anthony J. O’Connell and the dioceses of Palm Beach, Knoxville, Tenn., and Jefferson City, Mo., of falling under racketeering laws in their coverup of sexual abuse cases, according to Pat Noaker, one of the team of Minnesota attorneys representing the alleged victim. The lawsuit also names other American bishops as co-conspirators, according to a news release issued by the lawyers.

(O’Connell is not an “ex-bishop”: he is a retired bishop.)

Now Elden Curtiss, the archbishop of Omaha, has put his foot in it. Though Curtiss has provided an analysis of the vocations “crisis” that I believe is revealing and accurate, his response to the current sex scandals reveals how a bishop can cause harm by acting on incidental matters without understanding the nature and magnitude of the problem.

As reported in the Omaha World-Herald, Mar. 19, Curtiss wrote to two members of his diocese, scolding them for having written to the secular press to criticize and question Curtiss’ recent handling of two cases of priestly immorality:

Two Roman Catholics have received written rebukes from Omaha Archbishop Elden Curtiss after publicly criticizing his decision to reassign a priest who had viewed Internet child pornography.... The archbishop sent copies of the letters to the writers’ pastors. And he instructed both people to say one “Hail Mary” prayer for him as penance. Typically in the Roman Catholic Church, priests assign such prayers as penance to church members who have confessed sins. Curtiss could not be reached for comment. The Rev. Michael Gutgsell, archdiocese chancellor, declined to comment on the letters individually or generally. “The archbishop considers any letters he’s written as between himself and whoever received them,” Gutgsell said....

Bast and Ayers wrote letters to The World-Herald’s Public Pulse regarding Curtiss’ decision to assign a priest who had viewed Internet child pornography to St. Gerald parish in Ralston. Both questioned Curtiss’ assertion that children of the parish were in no danger. Ayers wrote that the archdiocese needed to be more forthcoming with what information it has about deviant behavior of some priests. He noted that the archdiocese didn’t inform parishioners about either the Rev. Robert Allgaier’s viewing of child pornography or Daniel Herek’s sexual abuse of children while he was a priest until after the news media broke the stories. Bast wrote that Curtiss owed the people of the archdiocese “a public apology for not being truthful and forthright about this problem from the very beginning.” ...

The letter to Bast read, in part, “I am surprised that a woman your age and with your background would write such a negative letter in the secular press against me without any previous dialogue. You should be ashamed of yourself!” Curtiss went on to say, “The Church has enough trouble defending herself against non-Catholic attacks without having to contend with disloyal Catholics.”

At first, one is tempted to agree with the archbishop: I do think it would have been more prudent for the letter writers to have sent letters to the chancery rather than to the local secular newspaper. On second thought, however, we must realize — the archbishop must realize, all the bishops must realize — that “internal” complaints from victims and their families, over decades, went unheeded by those in authority in the Church. So one tends to feel that, had Bast and Ayers written merely to the archdiocese, their letters would have probably been fruitless.

Moreover, this story reveals yet another instance of the lack of forthrightness, and of the unreality, of church officials in handling the current situation. How could the spokesman say the letters were considered between the archbishop and their recipients only — when copies had been sent to other people by the archbishop himself? And how dare Curtiss call a Catholic “disloyal” and complain about “non-Catholic attacks” against the Church, when it is the very misbehavior of priests, mollycoddled by irresponsible bishops, that have invited the current wave of anti-Catholic fervor?

Another story breaks. A married man had filed a sexual harassment complaint, last September, against Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg. As reported in the Tampa Tribune, Mar. 22:

Bishop Robert Lynch Friday denied any wrongdoing in a case involving a sexual harassment complaint filed against him by the former spokesman of the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg. The diocese paid its former spokesman more than $100,000 after the married man filed the complaint against the bishop in September, The Tampa Tribune learned earlier this week.... Joseph DiVito, a lawyer for the diocese, said that when Urbanski decided to leave his job he was paid a severance package that amounted to about a year’s salary and benefits costs. Urbanski was not prohibited from discussing the matter, he said. “The diocese does not buy silence in St. Petersburg,” DiVito said....

Urbanski said in the complaint that Lynch made numerous unwanted advances toward him, including booking one motel room for the two on trips and touching him suggestively. Lynch, 60, has not been accused of sexual abuse by anyone. Lynch characterized Urbanski’s allegations as merely a perception, and implied the more than $100,000 was severance pay.... Lynch said the diocese conducted a full investigation into the harassment claim. He said the diocese was satisfied with the results, but he would not say what they were. He said he has never had similar complaints filed against him.

The diocese conducted a full investigation into the harassment claim? A claim against the bishop of the diocese? And he tells us “the diocese was satisfied with the results”? But he doesn’t tell us what the results were?

I am, for once, speechless.

And maybe I don’t get out enough, but I have never heard of a “severance” package for somebody who quits his job.

Yet another story breaks. A former all-star professional athlete, and his brothers, went public with accusations that a lay teacher, who became a seminarian and eventually a priest, had sexually abused them in the early 1960s. As reported in the Detroit Free Press, Mar. 23:

The brothers said in a series of interviews that the Rev. Gerald Shirilla molested them in the 1960s when Shirilla was a lay teacher at Hamtramck St. Ladislaus [sic] and later while he studied for the priesthood at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. Tom Paciorek, in particular, said Shirilla abused him at least one hundred times from ages 15 to 19. Shirilla, 63, was removed this week from St. Mary Church in Alpena, where he was hired as pastor in August. He surfaced there nine years after the Archdiocese of Detroit barred him from active ministry, saying there was credible evidence in 1993 that he had molested boys decades earlier. Church officials have not commented on where Shirilla has been since he was released in 1994 from a sexual-disorder treatment facility in Maryland.

On Friday, the Detroit Archdiocese reiterated that his ban continues. Shirilla has refused repeated requests for comment, and his attorney maintains the priest has done nothing wrong and is contemplating legal action against the church. Bishop Patrick Cooney of the Diocese of Gaylord hired Shirilla in Alpena, saying four evaluators had proclaimed him safe to return to ministry. But Cardinal Adam Maida ordered Shirilla removed Wednesday after reports in the Free Press about his reassignment.

(How Maida has any authority to order Cooney, another diocesan bishop, to remove any priest from a given assignment is beyond me.)

It is no exaggeration (indeed, it is an understatement) to say that day by day we are provided with more and more evidence that the American bishops — whether by continuing perfidy, by resignation, by stonewalling, or by plain and simple what-else-could-it-be-called-but-stupidity — the American bishops are simply incapable of salvaging the “moral authority”, and restoring the integrity, of the Catholic Church in the USA.

Shaughnessy continued his Catholic World Report Essay, already quoted from, thus:

The question will naturally arise, how can Catholics show respect and obedience to their bishops if they believe the episcopacy is corrupt? The answer is that a Catholic does not respect his bishop or attend to his teaching on the grounds that the bishop is holy, but because the bishop, to the extent that he teaches in union with St. Peter, is supernaturally protected against teaching error — and this holds true whether or not the bishop is a villain and whether or not his compatriots are institutionally corrupt. Our duties toward our bishops are the same now as they ever were and ever will be. Moreover, I have frequently counseled wholesome young men of my acquaintance to enter religious orders that are corrupt in the sense explained above. No shame attaches to membership per se in a corrupt institution (all the ancient religious orders and national episcopacies have undergone cycles of corruption and reform), and the question of one’s vocation to take up a certain burden is entirely distinct from the contingent circumstances in which that vocation is lived out. I stress this point in order to make clear that I am not counseling disobedience or disrespect to bishops, and I am not denying that religious orders, even corrupt ones, are capable of working for the good of souls. But let’s face facts. When more of your priests die by sodomy than by martyrdom, you know you’ve got a problem; when the man you bring in for the fix comes down with AIDS, you know you’ve got a crisis; and when the Pope first gets the facts thanks to 60 Minutes, you know you’re corrupt.

The Catholic Church, being Christ’s bride without spot or wrinkle, is indefectible. She is holy because Christ is holy; she is perfect because Christ is perfect. She can not teach error. Her ministers, however, have sinned in the past, sin now, and will sin in the future until the second coming of Christ. She has lost some of her sons to heresy and some to schism, and those who remained have, in various periods, sunk into corruption. Renewal comes about, of course. God raises up a St. Francis or a St. Dominic, a St. Catherine or a St. Ignatius, who not only reject the endemic moral cowardice of their times, but through their own heroic holiness and passion for truth, bring about a transformation in the lives of their fellow Catholics, teaching them by their own example to love sanctity. The current corruption is nothing new, and reforming saints will certainly appear in our midst. Yet even those of us who are not reformers need not sit down under our present woes. Each of us, according to his station in life, can make a modest contribution to the renewal.

The Pope Speaks

The way the media covered the story, you could have almost thought that Moses had come down again from the mountain: in his annual Holy Thursday letter to priests, Pope John Paul II addressed the scandal of sexually immoral priests.

Dear Priests! Know that I am especially close to you as you gather with your Bishops on this Holy Thursday of the year 2002. We have all experienced a new momentum in the Church at the dawn of the new millennium, in the sense of “starting afresh from Christ” (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 29 ff.). We had all hoped that this momentum might coincide with a new era of brotherhood and peace for all humanity. Instead we have seen more bloodshed. Once again we have been witnesses of wars. We are distressed by the tragedy of the divisions and hatreds which are devastating relations between peoples.

At this time too, as priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of Ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the world. Grave scandal is caused, with the result that a dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice. As the Church shows her concern for the victims and strives to respond in truth and justice to each of these painful situations, all of us — conscious of human weakness, but trusting in the healing power of divine grace — are called to embrace the “mysterium Crucis” and to commit ourselves more fully to the search for holiness. We must beg God in his Providence to prompt a whole-hearted reawakening of those ideals of total self-giving to Christ which are the very foundation of the priestly ministry.

It is precisely our faith in Christ which gives us the strength to look trustingly to the future. We know that the human heart has always been attracted to evil, and that man will be able to radiate peace and love to those around him only if he meets Christ and allows himself to be “overtaken” by him. As ministers of the Eucharist and of sacramental Reconciliation, we in particular have the task of communicating hope, goodness and peace to the world.

Some had hoped for more from the pope, much more. But given the venue of his approach — an annual letter that had probably been in the works for many months — I think the remarks were appropriate. And we need not conclude in haste that nothing further will be said. Or that nothing will be done.

Some suspect that John Paul II, nearly 82 years old, having worn himself out in the service of the Lord and His Church, and living with physical ailments now, may be too old to deal with this morass. But he has been counted down and out before, many times, so nobody should be surprised if he rises to the occasion once again.

Significantly, the pope did not adopt the language of American church bureaucrats, psychological “experts”, or mainstream media: he didn’t call immoral priests “sick”, and he didn’t excuse bishops for having made “mistakes”. Noticing this, Peggy Noonan has voiced the heartfelt hopes of many, Mar. 22:

This week an old giant returned to speak of what roils us. His words were welcome, heartening and necessary. But they were not, I think, sufficient. In Rome John Paul II, our warrior-saint of a pope, addressed, finally, the sex scandals that continue to rock the American Catholic Church.... So, the pontiff said that the priests who have abused and seduced teenage boys and adolescents had given in to the most grievous forms of “the mystery of evil.” He did not call the guilty priests only disturbed or in need of therapy; he said they had done evil and betrayed God’s gift to them, the gift of the priesthood.... And yet, one must hope the pope’s letter was only a beginning, only a prologue to action more grave and definitive.... It was heartening that the pontiff broke his silence, heartening that he did not say that priests who prey are only sick, which is how the American cardinals have treated them in the past....

For the first time in my lifetime ardent Catholics, or perhaps I should say orthodox Catholics, no longer trust their cardinals and bishops to do what’s right. They have pinned their hopes on the Vatican, and on the old warrior saint, JPII. They want him to hold up his silver crosier with the crucified Christ on the top and demand that priests who seduce teenage boys — or who sexually abuse, molest or seduce anyone — be thrown from the church, and that their protectors, excusers and enablers be thrown from it too.... The church does so much good! So much of what it is should be protected. But not, of course, at the price of betraying what the church stands for. The Catholics I know, and I know all kinds, left, right and center, would rather see the cathedrals sold for condominiums than see the decay continue.

Which is where the old pope — the mover of mountains, defeater of tyrannies, killer of communism, holder to the faith whose most special gift has been his power to show the powerless of the world, the peasants, the workers with grim hands, that he was their protector, that he loved them in the name of the church — comes in. The powerless need his protection now. They need that old crosier held up again, to tell the dirty wave to recede. Which is why so many of us are hoping that what we heard this week will not be remembered by history as “the pope’s statement” but as “the pope’s first statement — the one that led to a great shaking of the rafters in 2002.”

Amen to that.

Part Four

April 1, 2002

“T