Ding, dong!—the witch is dead. . . . Maybe sometimes an un-Christian sentiment is kinda sorta okay, as long as it is in the form of a direct quotation from a classic film. There could be a rule about that.
St. Peter Damian, in his denunciatory tract *Gomorrah*, quotes an ecclesiastical law that requires any cleric caught in an act of sexual abuse of a boy or adolescent to be publicly humiliated, bound in iron chains, required to fast on barley bread for months while imprisoned in a monastic cell, and then placed permanently in the custody of two other monks to prevent any further harm to children.
This is literally, as in “Do it step by step and I mean ONLY barley bread and water,” what should happen to these men. If I’m being Christian about it. If I were following my normal impulses, there wouldn’t be months to fast on anything. There’d be, say, a very long week.
The Vatican is not a modern democracy. They’ve enough space for cells to hold such offenders until the Lord takes them. But of course the problem is …
The celibate priesthood is a really bad idea; it necessarily selects for perverts. Orthodoxy doesn’t appear to have this particular problem, at least not at institutional scale. (And Eastern Catholicism has married priests—it’s not a matter of actual doctrine.)
I think there's reason to admit that the celibate priesthood *especially with the rise of modernity* selects for perverts. The dynamics were quite different in previous centuries.
Other thing is, as I suppose you know, abuse of children is no more common in Catholic institutions than in other institutions. Public, Protestant--all have abuse of children. In public institutions in the US, during the last decades of the last century, abuse was somewhat higher than in Catholic. Which is not saying much.
The Catholic difference, starting in the last century, is the abuse particularly of *boys*. The numbers were really telling. Abusers all male, abused nearly all male.
How do you know that all religious institutions - or all institutions - are equally likely to abuse children? How is evidence for such an assertion gathered? Are there studies interviewing people of different religions about whether they were abused by religious leaders?
How do we know the relative safety of one city compared to another? There is crime data. That’s of course the main thing that allows us to compare.
One of the biggest problems in many of these instances was the fact that victims would remain quiet. That wall started to break toward the end of the 20th c.
All the evidence suggests that the 1970s were particularly bad. Surprise surprise. Just as Vatican II began to be interpreted in terms of “the spirit of Vatican II.” And of course parallel with spread of the sexual revolution post-1960s.
Many of those “spirit-filled” young blades then proceeded to move up the ladder. Which is easier when you have Kompromat on others in the institution.
There have certainly been scandals involving Protestant clergy, from the most exuberant Pentecostals with their emphasis on obedience, to the most grave mainline denominations, as well as some Jewish rabbis. Whether the numbers and percentages are equivalent is not clear. (I do wonder when Pentecostals and sometimes Baptists prattle about obedience to the pastor, why they don't just return to Rome.)
I remember that ca. 1989 there was some sort of clerical sex scandal in the Archdiocese of New York that attracted a lot of public attention, and, along with it, the usual pointing of the finger at clerical celibacy. William Lazareth, then the ELCA Lutheran "synod bishop" of the New York metropolitan area, pointed out that his own Lutheran jurisdiction, while far smaller in numbers, both clerical and lay, than the Catholic archdiocese, had a higher proportion of convicted sexually abusing clergy than did the Catholic archdiocese, the point being that celibacy was not a requirement for Lutheran clergy.
It’s not that. The problem is that the celibacy requirement takes men who wanna get married out of the pool: which is to say, most healthy men—men who might have otherwise made fine priests. So you’re left selecting from the relative dregs, including the homosexuals, for whom marriage was never a viable option. It’s an *economic* problem.
I don’t glorify celibacy. But the underlying notion is the priests commitment to the church must be total. So someone whose commitment is total is no dreg. You want an easy domestic life maybe you should become an accountant.
The person who abuses children made available to his care is a rapist, of course, but a particular kind of rapist. The point is that some who became priests were doing so to escape their dilemma. Given their lusts, they weren't suited to marry, but given their cultural milieu, Catholic, they couldn't come out. They ended up gravitating toward the all-male society on offer. And then they had access to children.
It's a terrible formula. I think the argument that many tried to make later, that these are "pedophiles," a particular kind of sexual disorder, is wrong. The record proves it's wrong, because the age profile of victims was not typically young children, but young teens. And many of these men were doubtless also engaged in sexual relations with each other.
So, you have men attracted to men and boys, who know about each other, and who know each other's secrets. Add it up and you get: Lavender Mafia.
I have heard it said among Orthodox seminarians that the fact that Orthodoxy allows for married priests discourages homosexuals from entering seminary. It creates a culture of heterosexuality within seminaries. I would love to read a study about how the normalization of homosexuality within Western society has affected the Catholic priesthood re: those ordained in this century, once homosexuality lost its social stigma, and there was no real reason to go "hide" in the priesthood.
I have no stake in this but I don’t understand comments like- . It creates a culture of heterosexuality within seminaries- I’m going try to avoid obscenity and frivolity- but the possibility of marriage to women creates a heterosexual environment in seminaries which are all male? (That reminds of the joke- two men meet in a gay bar who casually know each other but don’t know they are both closet cases - one says to the other - what are you doing here- I’m here to pick up women- Me too)But in Catholic seminaries, since you can’t get married and stay a priest, naturally homosexuals go for it? Look obviously over the centuries homosexuals gravitated to the church because they could say , oh can’t get married because I’m married to the church. Got it , point accepted. Couldn’t a homosexual simply say, you know I’ve always wanted to be a bishop? Further does that mean Orthodox monasteries are homosexual hot beds?
The normalization of homosexuality probably does discourage men from entering the priesthood to cover up homosexual inclinations and if you’re religious and Gay , you know the Anglican Communion is there for you and you can be quite open about it.
Of course, the Orthodox episcopate is celibate, and according to Fr. Gleb Yakunin it is not immune to this problem.
I've often thought that the way to introduce married priests into the Catholic Church is not to change Roman Catholicism but rather to encourage widespread migration to the Eastern Catholic Churches in those areas where there is an historical justification, such as most of Africa (Ethiopian), India (2 Churches there), and even China (Chaldean), and their emigres in the West.
I've attending Liturgy at Maronite, Melkite, and Byzantine Catholic Churches, plus one of the Indian churches that was in a Latin Rite church. I happen to live in a place where there are many of these.
Yeah, I've heard that active homosexuality is not really a problem among parish clergy, who are mostly married, but it is a thing among the episcopate, who are required to be monastics, and in some monasteries.
Among Orthodox bishops, as I commented just above, it is not uncommon to find men who were married but whose wives are deceased.
A famous example: St. Innocent of Alaska in the 19th century was a married missionary priest who had quite a few children. After his wife died (and the children were grown) he retired to a monastery but was eventually chosen to be archbishop of Moscow. Going back farther there's also the example of Patriarch Filaret, father of the first Romanov tsar. A layman and boyar originally, he was forcibly divorced from his wife and the two of them were sent to monasteries by Boris Gudonov.
Specifically homosexual, though? As Eric has said somewhere around here, that is a unique factor in this scenario, compared to stats from other areas. The problem in the clergy could more accurately be called pederasty then pedophilia—older gay men grooming post-pubescent boys and young men.
That obituary doesn't pull any punches. I shed no tears for McCarrick but his guilt or innocence is not for me to decide. He's facing the ultimate judgement now.
McCarrick was an important member of the Lavendar Lobby which in itself is a vital cog in the left-wing, morally rotten Bergoglioite church that dominates the Roman Catholic Church institutionally. The current situation is very sad and frustrating and it seems like it will be the state of affairs for at least the next three decades. But the young of the left eschew religion and the Bergoglio ranks will dwindle just out of attrition. Young Catholics of today are strongly conservative, traditional and at odds with the Bergoglio church. It seems likely that the Roman Catholic Church may be a far different church than the current church by 2075. For we who are older than fifty, let us consider the current situation our Penance.
"...and the Bergoglio ranks will dwindle just out of attrition."
Indeed, those ranks do not appear to be legion. Francis keeps appointing Farrell and Tobin and Cupich and McElroy and Fernandez over and over to temporary positions where he wants things his way. We have to conclude that they definitely are a network and the network is not large.
True, but I'm not 'concluding' anything. I'm merely reporting an appearance that might turn out to be conclusive, or not. I do think it likely will be important.
I don’t mean to be rude. Perhaps because I’ve read of these networks for many years, and seen substantiation from many sources including my own son, I’m stunned that anyone still believes ‘the network’ could be minor.
I could offer substantiation too: I fought off a perv in high school. I guess I'm referring to this particular Francis network. I don't doubt it is one of many. I do doubt there is just one big network, again Francis' reuse of these guys over and over argues against it. Do they have links to other networks? Of course, but it is possible to prune them off from each other with time and determination. Too bad I won't live to see it happen.
I knew you meant that particular group. Even it is larger than you seem to be aware of, and there are endless, international opportunities for them to know one another even personally. Of course they too live in the internet age. Hydra has more heads than a bunch of Dicastery hangers-on and academic “theologians,” sure. This makes no impact on my point.
I no longer can subscribe to the idea that I must do penance for what the Pope or other Catholics, or for that matter, what non-Catholics do. I feel that it is a form of religious gaslighting: I'm told it's my fault for their grave sins. No it isn't. It most definitely isn't. I can still pray for the souls of the perpetrators & for the healing of the victims, however.
Derek, the thin about the changing church - we have those saying the church is gay. But they instructed seminaries to stop admitting homosexuals in 2005. I think there is every evidence it happened. Vigilance must never stop but abuse reports are significantly down, and most reports are of things that happened decades ago. One report is too many of course.
Quote: "During the 20-year survey period, 2004-2023, said the report, “a majority of dioceses, eparchies, and religious communities of men did not have a credible allegation, with an average of three in five (60 percent) having no allegations in a particular survey year.”
The summary report said that “more than nine in ten of all credible allegations occurred or began in 1989 or earlier (92 percent), 5 percent occurred or began in the 1990s, and 3 percent occurred or began since the year 2000.” (That last figure, numerically, is 488 in 24 years - of course not all ever come to light and some are yet to come to light.)
Most of the alleged perpetrators — 86 percent — “were identified as ‘deceased, already removed from ministry, already laicized, or missing,'” said the report."
I am not minimizing suffering, but I think there are signs of change.
Linda, I think things are changing. But the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church is very leftist, has a strong amount of homosexuals, and is sympathetic to homosexuality. But the leadership, men who were ordained in the 60s and 70s, are dying out. But a transformation will take some time. Hopefully, priests from places like Nigeria and the Philippines will bubble up to the leadership.
If you take a look at Gene Thomas Gomulka’s substack, you might not be so optimistic. He is both a priest and a lawyer who helps those who are victims of these things.
As painful as I'm sure it was for you to go back down this road, Rod, I am grateful for all the reminders in this post. The stuff about Groeschel is especially depressing.
And Bill Donohue is a buffoon who comes from the Trump school of aimless counter-punching.
Yeah, Donohue seemed to be born with a permanent snarl on his face. I once saw him on the Long Island Railroad and thought it was nice to see a fellow LIer as such a prominent person. The closer I got to greeting him, the more I reconsidered.
Rod and others who have endeavored to tell the truth about these sordid matters do us and the world a great service and we should be extremely grateful for their work as am I. And in doing that vital work of exposing the corruption it must be at a great personal cost to peer down into the sewer and expose one’s mind and soul to the stench. I have to keep reminding myself as a Catholic that I should, and indeed do, hate what the abusers and their enablers did 100% but that it’s Jesus Christ who will judge those individuals not me.
"Cardinals Cupich (Chicago), Tobin (Newark), McElroy (DC), Gregory (recently retired from DC) and Farrell (Rome) were all McCarrick allies and proteges."
I had not realized that. I knew they were questionable at best on obvious grounds, and alarming just because of what they preach, but this fact makes it way worse.
I can't remember whether I've ever said this publicly or not: in the early '00s then-Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile threw a big celebration for some anniversary of his--ordination or installation as bishop, I'm not sure.*
Bishops from all over the country attended. I was at the celebratory Mass at the cathedral. I was sitting near the aisle and at the end of the Mass more or less idly watching the bishops process out. One face caught my eye and made me think "That man looks corrupt." I had no idea at the time who it was but the image stuck with me, and I realized much later when his face was in the news that it was McCarrick.
*I think Lipscomb was a good bishop but I really disliked the fact that he was spending so much money to celebrate his career. Bishops should live in poverty or close to it.
Have you read that when he preached McCarrick would say things like, "The Holy Spirit just told me there are two vocations in this church today." Disgusting.
Yes, yes. And yet, happy for Rod Dreher in the Orthodox, doing his bit to bring us back together where we should be. We realise we have far more in common now, more than ever.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5)
But we must know of these deeds in the dark. Thank you, Rod, for decades of reporting. Your willingness to bear witness when others looked away. You have been a watchman on the wall. Today's column carries such pain. The loss of trust in authority, the wound of someone looking directly at evil and continuing strong, refusing to turn away, however costly.
And from Patrick’s breastplate, which I know you pray, and we pray with you and with all, “Christ shield me today. Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me."
"Look not on the sins of the Church but on the faith of her people" - a paraphrase of a quote from the various Catholic churches I've attended.
I admit, as I've grown older this line has increasingly grown more hollow for me. A pope who actually seriously tackles this corruption will be reviled in his generation, but praised as a saint in the next.
Defrocked, handed over to local authorities, and tried by a group of their peers in a criminal trial. One of the few times I would want trials to be televised, for all to see.
Rather, from the embolism after the Lord's Prayer:
During the Mass, just after the Our Father and the doxological conclusion but before
the kiss of peace, the celebrant offers the following prayer for peace:
“Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your Apostles: Peace I leave you, my peace I give you,
look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and graciously grant her peace
and unity in accordance with your will...”
In the old order of Mass, this prayer was said sub secreto (silently) by the celebrant,
wherein the priest asked that the Lord not look upon his own sins (ne respicias peccata mea), but the faith of the church faithful gathered. However, with the advent of the new Order of Mass, this petition to God became a prayer petition of all the faithful gathered at the Mass. The celebrant now asks Christ to look away not just from his own sins, but from the sins of all those gathered around the altar, for the sake of the Church’s faith.
You are right. I should have said the Liturgy of the Eucharist. I just meant to clarify that the phrase is more than a "quote from various Catholic churches".
This sorry tale is precisely why the Bible commends plural leadership (elders) rather than one-man rule. See 1 Samuel 8, 10 and 12 where God three times tells the Israelites that they were sinning by asking for a king. People point to Moses and Paul as examples of one-man leadership, but they were both in charge of a task - leading the Israelites from point A to point B and planting new churches. After them, the elders (plural) were to lead. Even though popes are elected, once they are in office, they lead like kings, with no real accountability. It is a very rare man who will not succumb to the temptation to "lord it over" the flock (Mark 10:42) if he is not checked by others.
They were asking for the wrong king. It wasn't a sin asking for a king, it was asking for a king "like the other nations". One that would enable them to pillage and do as other nations when going to war. One that could be manipulated and bribed. As God tells Samuel, "they are not rejecting you, they are rejecting me." They didn't want a king that prevented them from doing as they liked, who could not be bribed into doing their bidding. That was the sin.
1 Samuel 8:7: "And the Lord said to Samuel, 'Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.'" 1 Samuel 10:19: "Today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said to him 'Set a king over us.'" It seems to me that the asking for ANY king to be over them other than God was the sin. The Israelites wanted to be like the other nations, who had A king over them. Then, in the New Testament, Paul appointed elders (plural) over each church that he had started (Acts 14:23), rather than just one leader. When he wanted to speak to the leadership of the church at Ephesus, he called the elders (Acts 20:17).
Scripture is very skeptical about kingship. From the Pharaoh of Exodus down to Herod there are far more bad kings in its pages than good kings. Even David and Solomon are very conflicted figures.
Yes, "protecting their own," is the most plausible explanation of this deafening silence of church leaders. I don't mean to be anti-Catholic, but could it also be that that generation learned unbending loyalty to bishops (and priests, for that matter), granting them divine status? I think it was you Rod who reported some years ago that when you had shared some of your findings (I
don't recall which case) with Neuhaus, he counseled deference to a bishop. When you questioned why, if the bishop is doing wrong, he shouted back, "Because he is a bishop!"
Yeah, it was Neuhaus, castigating me for not believing Bishop Timlin of Scranton, when Timlin told me there was no scandal at the Catholic school on which I was reporting. To be precise, it wasn't that I disbelieved Timlin, it was that Timlin told me that there was no scandal, so I shouldn't report it. I quoted Timlin in my story, and quoted other Catholics (laity) who said yes, there absolutely was. Neuhaus was angry that I had written the story at all. He said the bishop's word should have been enough to shut the story down. To his credit, Neuhaus learned otherwise later.
But, seriously. I thought it was unseemly for a priest to go jingo on a war that was at its best dubious, and on its face unjust, as the Pope himself said. Considering who was paying Neuhaus's bills it was also evident he was speaking pro domo and that made it especially offensive.
I remember how First Things turned into a cheering section for Bush's wars. They published a "debate" once between pro and anti war writers-- but the latter was a full on pacifist who rejected all wars. The message was "The only way to reject the Iraq War is if you reject every war". And when JPII spoke against the war, they pooh-poohed his words, in much the same vein by reminding people that he was not speaking ex cathedra-- just as the libertine faction does when disputing pronouncements on sexual morality.
Fr. Neuhaus--to his later embarrassment--defended Fr. Maciel and praised the wonderful Legionaries. Having worked for the LCs, I assure we had discovered that they were not a wonderful group, even before their founder's story broke.
In the early days of the abuse, the wrath of the laity was sometimes deflected with an anecdote about St. Francis of Assisi kissing the hands of a corrupt priest who kept a concubine rather than reprove him as his angry flock had demanded. That's how we were supposed to respond to priests' crimes. Also remember the victims being punished by their parents for daring to say something bad about a priest.
Ros, I am so sorry about what happened to you personally and professionally at the hands of Catholic Church members. I feel about bishops the way my ancestors felt about the Tsar: "Lord bless and keep him--far away from me." I don't expect much of the institutional Church because as a cradle Catholic I've seen too much. As Scripture says, "Put not thy trust in princes." Our Faith is in Christ, not those who claim to serve him.
That said, I will repeat here what I said to you in a private email. Carl Olson and I are working on a review of a dreadful new book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America by Mark Massa, SJ. Not only does the author go out of his way to attack you and misrepresent the Benedict Option, he covers up for McCarrick and his proteges. The uninformed reader would come away thinking that McCarrick was innocent--except in the minds of those eeevil Catholic Fundamentalists--and that he didn't really influences the careers of his pet prelates. The book, released last month, doesn't even mention that McCarrick was defrocked.
It's one thing for a book to be biased (and this one most assuredly is) but the sheer sloppiness of the work was an extra annoyance. For instance, he lists Rod as a "celebrity convert" who joined the Catholic Church to further his political goals, without mentioned that our host has been Orthodox longer than he was Catholic. Other "celebrity converts" to whom this motive is ascribed include Russell Kirk and Mortimer Adler. (Recognizing why this is an odd charge is left to alert readers here.)
Adler's matrimonial tangles may account for his first becoming an Episcopalian in 1984. He married in 1927, divorced in 1960, and remarried in 1963. Perhaps his first wife was still alive in 1984. Or perhaps he was unwilling to seek an annulment of his first marriage.
Wicked man, that Massa. When I converted to Catholicism, I was nowhere near a "celebrity". I was a 26 year old junior journalist. Such celebrity as I have came after I left the Catholic Church.
'I feel about bishops the way my ancestors felt about the Tsar: "Lord bless and keep him--far away from me."'
Oh man. I have found myself thinking of that often in the past few years, since I reached the point of really, truly, giving up on Pope Francis--just accepting as established fact that he is a bad pope in the fundamental sense of not being good at the job of being pope, and not giving him much thought anymore. No more wondering, no more arguing (with myself or others). That was a relief in an immediate sense, but is basically an act of despair about the present and near-future of the Church. That's when I started thinking of that prayer about the Tsar.
Did that Rabbi prayer about the Tsar predate the musical Fiddler on the Roof? Tsar Nicholas II can be venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church as a saint due primarily to his martyrdom effected by the godless revolutionaries. His role in the pogroms is more complex than popular belief would lead one to believe.
That's the whole point of Massa's book, to smear conservative (and some heretical conservative Catholics) as kin to those horrid Protestant Fundamentalists. Why according to Massa, Catholics have never been interested in End Times/ apocalyptic speculations. I can hear your guffaws from here, gentle readers.
Ding, dong!—the witch is dead. . . . Maybe sometimes an un-Christian sentiment is kinda sorta okay, as long as it is in the form of a direct quotation from a classic film. There could be a rule about that.
The spells he cast are still quite active and wearing red hats.
It sure is gracious of them to wear scarlet garb as a warning to the rest of us.
Supreme.
So why did the church make scarlet the distinctive color of its highest collegial leadership?
St. Peter Damian, in his denunciatory tract *Gomorrah*, quotes an ecclesiastical law that requires any cleric caught in an act of sexual abuse of a boy or adolescent to be publicly humiliated, bound in iron chains, required to fast on barley bread for months while imprisoned in a monastic cell, and then placed permanently in the custody of two other monks to prevent any further harm to children.
This is literally, as in “Do it step by step and I mean ONLY barley bread and water,” what should happen to these men. If I’m being Christian about it. If I were following my normal impulses, there wouldn’t be months to fast on anything. There’d be, say, a very long week.
The Vatican is not a modern democracy. They’ve enough space for cells to hold such offenders until the Lord takes them. But of course the problem is …
So they had to enact such as ecclesiastical law? That's very telling: I think this problem will continue to the Second Coming.
The celibate priesthood is a really bad idea; it necessarily selects for perverts. Orthodoxy doesn’t appear to have this particular problem, at least not at institutional scale. (And Eastern Catholicism has married priests—it’s not a matter of actual doctrine.)
I think there's reason to admit that the celibate priesthood *especially with the rise of modernity* selects for perverts. The dynamics were quite different in previous centuries.
Other thing is, as I suppose you know, abuse of children is no more common in Catholic institutions than in other institutions. Public, Protestant--all have abuse of children. In public institutions in the US, during the last decades of the last century, abuse was somewhat higher than in Catholic. Which is not saying much.
The Catholic difference, starting in the last century, is the abuse particularly of *boys*. The numbers were really telling. Abusers all male, abused nearly all male.
Gee I wonder why there isn't a word for that?
How do you know that all religious institutions - or all institutions - are equally likely to abuse children? How is evidence for such an assertion gathered? Are there studies interviewing people of different religions about whether they were abused by religious leaders?
How do we know the relative safety of one city compared to another? There is crime data. That’s of course the main thing that allows us to compare.
One of the biggest problems in many of these instances was the fact that victims would remain quiet. That wall started to break toward the end of the 20th c.
All the evidence suggests that the 1970s were particularly bad. Surprise surprise. Just as Vatican II began to be interpreted in terms of “the spirit of Vatican II.” And of course parallel with spread of the sexual revolution post-1960s.
Many of those “spirit-filled” young blades then proceeded to move up the ladder. Which is easier when you have Kompromat on others in the institution.
There have certainly been scandals involving Protestant clergy, from the most exuberant Pentecostals with their emphasis on obedience, to the most grave mainline denominations, as well as some Jewish rabbis. Whether the numbers and percentages are equivalent is not clear. (I do wonder when Pentecostals and sometimes Baptists prattle about obedience to the pastor, why they don't just return to Rome.)
I remember that ca. 1989 there was some sort of clerical sex scandal in the Archdiocese of New York that attracted a lot of public attention, and, along with it, the usual pointing of the finger at clerical celibacy. William Lazareth, then the ELCA Lutheran "synod bishop" of the New York metropolitan area, pointed out that his own Lutheran jurisdiction, while far smaller in numbers, both clerical and lay, than the Catholic archdiocese, had a higher proportion of convicted sexually abusing clergy than did the Catholic archdiocese, the point being that celibacy was not a requirement for Lutheran clergy.
Previous centuries also had their problems with sexual sinning among the clergy. It was quite rife in the Renaissance Church.
Yes, all ages had their problems with sexual sinning. But ours had a particular problem with sexual sinning involving children + cover up.
Per se, that makes no sense.Why celibacy would turn you into a rapist isn’t clear.
It’s not that. The problem is that the celibacy requirement takes men who wanna get married out of the pool: which is to say, most healthy men—men who might have otherwise made fine priests. So you’re left selecting from the relative dregs, including the homosexuals, for whom marriage was never a viable option. It’s an *economic* problem.
I don’t glorify celibacy. But the underlying notion is the priests commitment to the church must be total. So someone whose commitment is total is no dreg. You want an easy domestic life maybe you should become an accountant.
Martin Luther speculated only 1 in 1,000 men were cut out to be celibate. “It is not good for man to be alone…”
The person who abuses children made available to his care is a rapist, of course, but a particular kind of rapist. The point is that some who became priests were doing so to escape their dilemma. Given their lusts, they weren't suited to marry, but given their cultural milieu, Catholic, they couldn't come out. They ended up gravitating toward the all-male society on offer. And then they had access to children.
It's a terrible formula. I think the argument that many tried to make later, that these are "pedophiles," a particular kind of sexual disorder, is wrong. The record proves it's wrong, because the age profile of victims was not typically young children, but young teens. And many of these men were doubtless also engaged in sexual relations with each other.
So, you have men attracted to men and boys, who know about each other, and who know each other's secrets. Add it up and you get: Lavender Mafia.
I have heard it said among Orthodox seminarians that the fact that Orthodoxy allows for married priests discourages homosexuals from entering seminary. It creates a culture of heterosexuality within seminaries. I would love to read a study about how the normalization of homosexuality within Western society has affected the Catholic priesthood re: those ordained in this century, once homosexuality lost its social stigma, and there was no real reason to go "hide" in the priesthood.
I have no stake in this but I don’t understand comments like- . It creates a culture of heterosexuality within seminaries- I’m going try to avoid obscenity and frivolity- but the possibility of marriage to women creates a heterosexual environment in seminaries which are all male? (That reminds of the joke- two men meet in a gay bar who casually know each other but don’t know they are both closet cases - one says to the other - what are you doing here- I’m here to pick up women- Me too)But in Catholic seminaries, since you can’t get married and stay a priest, naturally homosexuals go for it? Look obviously over the centuries homosexuals gravitated to the church because they could say , oh can’t get married because I’m married to the church. Got it , point accepted. Couldn’t a homosexual simply say, you know I’ve always wanted to be a bishop? Further does that mean Orthodox monasteries are homosexual hot beds?
The normalization of homosexuality probably does discourage men from entering the priesthood to cover up homosexual inclinations and if you’re religious and Gay , you know the Anglican Communion is there for you and you can be quite open about it.
That Sipe fellow has explanations.
Of course, the Orthodox episcopate is celibate, and according to Fr. Gleb Yakunin it is not immune to this problem.
I've often thought that the way to introduce married priests into the Catholic Church is not to change Roman Catholicism but rather to encourage widespread migration to the Eastern Catholic Churches in those areas where there is an historical justification, such as most of Africa (Ethiopian), India (2 Churches there), and even China (Chaldean), and their emigres in the West.
I’m a Maronite.
I know, and I'm happy for you.
I've attending Liturgy at Maronite, Melkite, and Byzantine Catholic Churches, plus one of the Indian churches that was in a Latin Rite church. I happen to live in a place where there are many of these.
Yeah, I've heard that active homosexuality is not really a problem among parish clergy, who are mostly married, but it is a thing among the episcopate, who are required to be monastics, and in some monasteries.
Among Orthodox bishops, as I commented just above, it is not uncommon to find men who were married but whose wives are deceased.
A famous example: St. Innocent of Alaska in the 19th century was a married missionary priest who had quite a few children. After his wife died (and the children were grown) he retired to a monastery but was eventually chosen to be archbishop of Moscow. Going back farther there's also the example of Patriarch Filaret, father of the first Romanov tsar. A layman and boyar originally, he was forcibly divorced from his wife and the two of them were sent to monasteries by Boris Gudonov.
Yes. I'm aware that a few of the bishops martyred by the Bolsheviks were widowers.
The sheer number of pedo teachers in public schools casts doubt on this assertion. Sadly, there’s no shortage of married perverts.
Specifically homosexual, though? As Eric has said somewhere around here, that is a unique factor in this scenario, compared to stats from other areas. The problem in the clergy could more accurately be called pederasty then pedophilia—older gay men grooming post-pubescent boys and young men.
Of course sexual abuse of children has always existed. St. Peter Damian lived in the 11th c., but there was no century in which it didn't exist.
It was only Christian culture that began condemning it.
Libertine and perverted priests are an old, old problem. Such things were burlesqued in the old medieval Feast of Fools.
God's remedy was to stone the offender. I think God understood something about the cancerous nature of evil.
No doubt a warm welcome awaits. A very warm welcome.
His welcome probably resembles a Cheeto flavor.
Is that a barbecue flavour?
I was thinking Flamin' Hot.
Much like Cardinal Spelman got
That obituary doesn't pull any punches. I shed no tears for McCarrick but his guilt or innocence is not for me to decide. He's facing the ultimate judgement now.
For those who are interested, these are worth attending to:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/how-abuse-scandals-shattered-the-church-of-england-but-were-hidden-by-the-vatican/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/how-abuse-scandals-shattered-the-church-of-england-but-were-hidden-by-the-vatican/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/the-tin-ear-of-justin-welby/
I include the last of these three b/c it ends with an extended comparison of Welby and Pope Francis, rather to the detriment of the latter.
My heart is broken all over again for you, Mr. Dreher. And for me. And for the church. This is the most important column you've ever written, I think.
Evil has made tremendous inroads within the hierarchy. Sickening. Thank you for clarifying this horrific landscape.
McCarrick was an important member of the Lavendar Lobby which in itself is a vital cog in the left-wing, morally rotten Bergoglioite church that dominates the Roman Catholic Church institutionally. The current situation is very sad and frustrating and it seems like it will be the state of affairs for at least the next three decades. But the young of the left eschew religion and the Bergoglio ranks will dwindle just out of attrition. Young Catholics of today are strongly conservative, traditional and at odds with the Bergoglio church. It seems likely that the Roman Catholic Church may be a far different church than the current church by 2075. For we who are older than fifty, let us consider the current situation our Penance.
"...and the Bergoglio ranks will dwindle just out of attrition."
Indeed, those ranks do not appear to be legion. Francis keeps appointing Farrell and Tobin and Cupich and McElroy and Fernandez over and over to temporary positions where he wants things his way. We have to conclude that they definitely are a network and the network is not large.
We do NOT have to conclude the network is “not large.”
True, but I'm not 'concluding' anything. I'm merely reporting an appearance that might turn out to be conclusive, or not. I do think it likely will be important.
I don’t mean to be rude. Perhaps because I’ve read of these networks for many years, and seen substantiation from many sources including my own son, I’m stunned that anyone still believes ‘the network’ could be minor.
I could offer substantiation too: I fought off a perv in high school. I guess I'm referring to this particular Francis network. I don't doubt it is one of many. I do doubt there is just one big network, again Francis' reuse of these guys over and over argues against it. Do they have links to other networks? Of course, but it is possible to prune them off from each other with time and determination. Too bad I won't live to see it happen.
I knew you meant that particular group. Even it is larger than you seem to be aware of, and there are endless, international opportunities for them to know one another even personally. Of course they too live in the internet age. Hydra has more heads than a bunch of Dicastery hangers-on and academic “theologians,” sure. This makes no impact on my point.
I no longer can subscribe to the idea that I must do penance for what the Pope or other Catholics, or for that matter, what non-Catholics do. I feel that it is a form of religious gaslighting: I'm told it's my fault for their grave sins. No it isn't. It most definitely isn't. I can still pray for the souls of the perpetrators & for the healing of the victims, however.
Only Christ Jesus did the penance.
It's also a big part of the DC cesspool.
Derek, the thin about the changing church - we have those saying the church is gay. But they instructed seminaries to stop admitting homosexuals in 2005. I think there is every evidence it happened. Vigilance must never stop but abuse reports are significantly down, and most reports are of things that happened decades ago. One report is too many of course.
https://catholicreview.org/report-20-years-of-data-shows-clerical-abuse-allegations-down-in-u-s/
Quote: "During the 20-year survey period, 2004-2023, said the report, “a majority of dioceses, eparchies, and religious communities of men did not have a credible allegation, with an average of three in five (60 percent) having no allegations in a particular survey year.”
The summary report said that “more than nine in ten of all credible allegations occurred or began in 1989 or earlier (92 percent), 5 percent occurred or began in the 1990s, and 3 percent occurred or began since the year 2000.” (That last figure, numerically, is 488 in 24 years - of course not all ever come to light and some are yet to come to light.)
Most of the alleged perpetrators — 86 percent — “were identified as ‘deceased, already removed from ministry, already laicized, or missing,'” said the report."
I am not minimizing suffering, but I think there are signs of change.
Linda, I think things are changing. But the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church is very leftist, has a strong amount of homosexuals, and is sympathetic to homosexuality. But the leadership, men who were ordained in the 60s and 70s, are dying out. But a transformation will take some time. Hopefully, priests from places like Nigeria and the Philippines will bubble up to the leadership.
If you take a look at Gene Thomas Gomulka’s substack, you might not be so optimistic. He is both a priest and a lawyer who helps those who are victims of these things.
One down, 194 to go.
That’s a reasonable number—we can take ‘em.
As painful as I'm sure it was for you to go back down this road, Rod, I am grateful for all the reminders in this post. The stuff about Groeschel is especially depressing.
And Bill Donohue is a buffoon who comes from the Trump school of aimless counter-punching.
Yeah, Donohue seemed to be born with a permanent snarl on his face. I once saw him on the Long Island Railroad and thought it was nice to see a fellow LIer as such a prominent person. The closer I got to greeting him, the more I reconsidered.
Rod and others who have endeavored to tell the truth about these sordid matters do us and the world a great service and we should be extremely grateful for their work as am I. And in doing that vital work of exposing the corruption it must be at a great personal cost to peer down into the sewer and expose one’s mind and soul to the stench. I have to keep reminding myself as a Catholic that I should, and indeed do, hate what the abusers and their enablers did 100% but that it’s Jesus Christ who will judge those individuals not me.
"Cardinals Cupich (Chicago), Tobin (Newark), McElroy (DC), Gregory (recently retired from DC) and Farrell (Rome) were all McCarrick allies and proteges."
I had not realized that. I knew they were questionable at best on obvious grounds, and alarming just because of what they preach, but this fact makes it way worse.
I can't remember whether I've ever said this publicly or not: in the early '00s then-Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile threw a big celebration for some anniversary of his--ordination or installation as bishop, I'm not sure.*
Bishops from all over the country attended. I was at the celebratory Mass at the cathedral. I was sitting near the aisle and at the end of the Mass more or less idly watching the bishops process out. One face caught my eye and made me think "That man looks corrupt." I had no idea at the time who it was but the image stuck with me, and I realized much later when his face was in the news that it was McCarrick.
*I think Lipscomb was a good bishop but I really disliked the fact that he was spending so much money to celebrate his career. Bishops should live in poverty or close to it.
Have you read that when he preached McCarrick would say things like, "The Holy Spirit just told me there are two vocations in this church today." Disgusting.
No, I had not heard that. Disgusting is an understatement.
https://media.ascensionpress.com/video/the-pennsylvania-sex-abuse-scandal/. Don’t know if this is any comfort to you but for what it’s worth. We Catholics love you and cherish your courage and understand why you left us, but we still miss you. Bless you, Rod.
Thank you, that is so kind. I appreciate it greatly.
Yes, yes. And yet, happy for Rod Dreher in the Orthodox, doing his bit to bring us back together where we should be. We realise we have far more in common now, more than ever.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5)
But we must know of these deeds in the dark. Thank you, Rod, for decades of reporting. Your willingness to bear witness when others looked away. You have been a watchman on the wall. Today's column carries such pain. The loss of trust in authority, the wound of someone looking directly at evil and continuing strong, refusing to turn away, however costly.
And from Patrick’s breastplate, which I know you pray, and we pray with you and with all, “Christ shield me today. Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me."
"Look not on the sins of the Church but on the faith of her people" - a paraphrase of a quote from the various Catholic churches I've attended.
I admit, as I've grown older this line has increasingly grown more hollow for me. A pope who actually seriously tackles this corruption will be reviled in his generation, but praised as a saint in the next.
Maybe someone like Lenny, in *The Young Pope*. He banishes bad priests to a remote corner of Alaska.
I was thinking more drastic than even that.
Defrocked, handed over to local authorities, and tried by a group of their peers in a criminal trial. One of the few times I would want trials to be televised, for all to see.
I support castration if guilt is proven. Perhaps there would have to be films to take such a drastic step. But if there are: snip, snip.
Kind of unfair to the Alaskans
True; they weren't really coming at it from the pastoral angle. I think it was supposed to come off as kind of a Siberian exilie.
The quote is from the Eucharistic prayer.
Rather, from the embolism after the Lord's Prayer:
During the Mass, just after the Our Father and the doxological conclusion but before
the kiss of peace, the celebrant offers the following prayer for peace:
“Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your Apostles: Peace I leave you, my peace I give you,
look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and graciously grant her peace
and unity in accordance with your will...”
In the old order of Mass, this prayer was said sub secreto (silently) by the celebrant,
wherein the priest asked that the Lord not look upon his own sins (ne respicias peccata mea), but the faith of the church faithful gathered. However, with the advent of the new Order of Mass, this petition to God became a prayer petition of all the faithful gathered at the Mass. The celebrant now asks Christ to look away not just from his own sins, but from the sins of all those gathered around the altar, for the sake of the Church’s faith.
You are right. I should have said the Liturgy of the Eucharist. I just meant to clarify that the phrase is more than a "quote from various Catholic churches".
This sorry tale is precisely why the Bible commends plural leadership (elders) rather than one-man rule. See 1 Samuel 8, 10 and 12 where God three times tells the Israelites that they were sinning by asking for a king. People point to Moses and Paul as examples of one-man leadership, but they were both in charge of a task - leading the Israelites from point A to point B and planting new churches. After them, the elders (plural) were to lead. Even though popes are elected, once they are in office, they lead like kings, with no real accountability. It is a very rare man who will not succumb to the temptation to "lord it over" the flock (Mark 10:42) if he is not checked by others.
They were asking for the wrong king. It wasn't a sin asking for a king, it was asking for a king "like the other nations". One that would enable them to pillage and do as other nations when going to war. One that could be manipulated and bribed. As God tells Samuel, "they are not rejecting you, they are rejecting me." They didn't want a king that prevented them from doing as they liked, who could not be bribed into doing their bidding. That was the sin.
1 Samuel 8:7: "And the Lord said to Samuel, 'Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.'" 1 Samuel 10:19: "Today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said to him 'Set a king over us.'" It seems to me that the asking for ANY king to be over them other than God was the sin. The Israelites wanted to be like the other nations, who had A king over them. Then, in the New Testament, Paul appointed elders (plural) over each church that he had started (Acts 14:23), rather than just one leader. When he wanted to speak to the leadership of the church at Ephesus, he called the elders (Acts 20:17).
Recall also that Jeremiah later recites the abuses a king will commit against his own people. Certainly true for kings who wear mitres.
I concur, and thank you for making this point.
This is my understanding as well, that the sin was in asking for a human king, like the other nations, when they had the King of Creation.
Scripture is very skeptical about kingship. From the Pharaoh of Exodus down to Herod there are far more bad kings in its pages than good kings. Even David and Solomon are very conflicted figures.
Thank you for this excellent point! I hadn't understood this.
Moreover Paul was hardly in charge of the entire Church.
Yes, "protecting their own," is the most plausible explanation of this deafening silence of church leaders. I don't mean to be anti-Catholic, but could it also be that that generation learned unbending loyalty to bishops (and priests, for that matter), granting them divine status? I think it was you Rod who reported some years ago that when you had shared some of your findings (I
don't recall which case) with Neuhaus, he counseled deference to a bishop. When you questioned why, if the bishop is doing wrong, he shouted back, "Because he is a bishop!"
Yeah, it was Neuhaus, castigating me for not believing Bishop Timlin of Scranton, when Timlin told me there was no scandal at the Catholic school on which I was reporting. To be precise, it wasn't that I disbelieved Timlin, it was that Timlin told me that there was no scandal, so I shouldn't report it. I quoted Timlin in my story, and quoted other Catholics (laity) who said yes, there absolutely was. Neuhaus was angry that I had written the story at all. He said the bishop's word should have been enough to shut the story down. To his credit, Neuhaus learned otherwise later.
That and Neuhaus's chest-thumping in the run-up to the second Gulf War strike him off the list.
Strike him off the list of what? Your personal imprimatur?
Sure. Don't you have one, Your Excellency?
The patriarch has spoken! Strike Neuhaus from the prayer lists.
But, seriously. I thought it was unseemly for a priest to go jingo on a war that was at its best dubious, and on its face unjust, as the Pope himself said. Considering who was paying Neuhaus's bills it was also evident he was speaking pro domo and that made it especially offensive.
I remember how First Things turned into a cheering section for Bush's wars. They published a "debate" once between pro and anti war writers-- but the latter was a full on pacifist who rejected all wars. The message was "The only way to reject the Iraq War is if you reject every war". And when JPII spoke against the war, they pooh-poohed his words, in much the same vein by reminding people that he was not speaking ex cathedra-- just as the libertine faction does when disputing pronouncements on sexual morality.
Fr. Neuhaus--to his later embarrassment--defended Fr. Maciel and praised the wonderful Legionaries. Having worked for the LCs, I assure we had discovered that they were not a wonderful group, even before their founder's story broke.
In the early days of the abuse, the wrath of the laity was sometimes deflected with an anecdote about St. Francis of Assisi kissing the hands of a corrupt priest who kept a concubine rather than reprove him as his angry flock had demanded. That's how we were supposed to respond to priests' crimes. Also remember the victims being punished by their parents for daring to say something bad about a priest.
Ros, I am so sorry about what happened to you personally and professionally at the hands of Catholic Church members. I feel about bishops the way my ancestors felt about the Tsar: "Lord bless and keep him--far away from me." I don't expect much of the institutional Church because as a cradle Catholic I've seen too much. As Scripture says, "Put not thy trust in princes." Our Faith is in Christ, not those who claim to serve him.
That said, I will repeat here what I said to you in a private email. Carl Olson and I are working on a review of a dreadful new book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America by Mark Massa, SJ. Not only does the author go out of his way to attack you and misrepresent the Benedict Option, he covers up for McCarrick and his proteges. The uninformed reader would come away thinking that McCarrick was innocent--except in the minds of those eeevil Catholic Fundamentalists--and that he didn't really influences the careers of his pet prelates. The book, released last month, doesn't even mention that McCarrick was defrocked.
Sounds as if Massa might have been one of the persecutors of Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ.
I know not, but it would fit.
It's one thing for a book to be biased (and this one most assuredly is) but the sheer sloppiness of the work was an extra annoyance. For instance, he lists Rod as a "celebrity convert" who joined the Catholic Church to further his political goals, without mentioned that our host has been Orthodox longer than he was Catholic. Other "celebrity converts" to whom this motive is ascribed include Russell Kirk and Mortimer Adler. (Recognizing why this is an odd charge is left to alert readers here.)
That's evil stuff.
Got it. Adler converted to the Episcopal Church. That's more than 'odd'.
But two years before the end of his very long life, Adler switched from Episcopalian to Catholic. Not much time to influence things, eh what?
Adler's matrimonial tangles may account for his first becoming an Episcopalian in 1984. He married in 1927, divorced in 1960, and remarried in 1963. Perhaps his first wife was still alive in 1984. Or perhaps he was unwilling to seek an annulment of his first marriage.
Yeah. Adler switched to further his political goals at age 97!
Wicked man, that Massa. When I converted to Catholicism, I was nowhere near a "celebrity". I was a 26 year old junior journalist. Such celebrity as I have came after I left the Catholic Church.
I hadn't heard of that book. I'd love to see your review.
It'll be in Catholic World Report. I'll link it here when it runs.
I just recently came across this book:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Infallibility_Integrity_and_Obedience/YObLEAAAQBAJ?hl=en
which I have almost finished reading. It contains a few historical errors, not really relevant to the the book's thrust and thesis - but WOW!:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Infallibility_Integrity_and_Obedience/YObLEAAAQBAJ?hl=en
'I feel about bishops the way my ancestors felt about the Tsar: "Lord bless and keep him--far away from me."'
Oh man. I have found myself thinking of that often in the past few years, since I reached the point of really, truly, giving up on Pope Francis--just accepting as established fact that he is a bad pope in the fundamental sense of not being good at the job of being pope, and not giving him much thought anymore. No more wondering, no more arguing (with myself or others). That was a relief in an immediate sense, but is basically an act of despair about the present and near-future of the Church. That's when I started thinking of that prayer about the Tsar.
Did that Rabbi prayer about the Tsar predate the musical Fiddler on the Roof? Tsar Nicholas II can be venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church as a saint due primarily to his martyrdom effected by the godless revolutionaries. His role in the pogroms is more complex than popular belief would lead one to believe.
I don't have any idea.
Anyone who uses the word "Fundamentalism" in a Catholic context can immediately be taken, and justly, for an ignoramus or a polemical fraud.
I was just about to say just that.
That's the whole point of Massa's book, to smear conservative (and some heretical conservative Catholics) as kin to those horrid Protestant Fundamentalists. Why according to Massa, Catholics have never been interested in End Times/ apocalyptic speculations. I can hear your guffaws from here, gentle readers.