Is anyone surprised at this morsel? Something told me not to immediately report on the reigning pope's appointment of a new deputy Secretary of State yesterday - especially as the new man, Edgar Pena Parra, was simply described as a Venezuelan archbishop who had served as Apostolic Nuncio to many countries. So, it turns out he is supposed to be a Maradiaga protege! Maybe wannabe-pope Secretary of State Pietro Parolin also got to know him while the latter was Nuncio to Venezuela. Anyway, it's all in the [Bergoglio] family, a new addition to the apostate hierarchy lording it at the Vatican.
The Catholic Church’s Rotherham
By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY
August 15, 2018 12:26 PM
[Before anything else, an explanation of 'Rotherham' in the title of this piece: From Wikipedia -
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consisted of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the northern English town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history". Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16.
It must be noted that the Rotherham abusers were civilians who turned out to be largely British Pakistanis, so the scandal in the Pennsylvania dioceses named in the Grand Jury report released Tuesday is so much worse, because the offenders are Catholic priests and bishops who are obliged by their vocation to be holy.]
‘We are deeply saddened.” So begin the many perfunctory statements of many Catholic bishops today in response to the Pennsylvania grand-jury report detailing how priests in that state abused children and how bishops shuffled these priests around.
What deeply saddens these men? The rape of children, the systematic cover-up, or the little schemes to run out the clock on the statute of limitations? Are they saddened by the people who were so psychologically wounded by their abuse at the hands of priests that they killed themselves? What exactly are they sorry about?
Soon the bishops are telling us about a chance for “renewal” after the promised implementation of new policies. They tell us about “overcoming challenges” in the Church. Or they use the phrase “a few bad apples.”
I find it impossible not to notice that
these expressions of sorrow never arrive before the courts, the state attorneys general, or the local press arrive on the scene. That fact gives you another idea about what causes the bishops’ sorrow.
Fifteen years ago Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, resigned from a panel called the National Review Board, set up by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to monitor compliance with the Church’s new anti-abuse politics.
He was under intense pressure to resign because he had offended bishops when he said some of them were acting like “La Cosa Nostra,” a reference to the Sicilian Mafia.
Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles and other prelates made a great show of detesting Keating’s remarks. Keating refused to apologize.
“My remarks, which some bishops found offensive, were deadly accurate. I make no apology,” he said. “To resist grand-jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church,” Keating said in his resignation statement.
Keating was dismissed as a crank. Hadn’t every consultant and auditor given the the Church’s anti-abuse policies hearty endorsements? Wasn’t it routinely described as a model of safety?
Of course, Keating was right. Mahoney was later exposed as having engaged in an energetic attempt to cover up the truth about his own diocese. He shielded predators from law enforcement and even argued that the personnel files of the archdiocese were protected by the seal of the confessional.
This season is a new round of exposure for Catholic bishops, particularly those who have sold themselves as part of the solution to the Church’s abuse crisis.
- Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who is supposed to have cleaned up in Boston and heads the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, is now trying to explain how it was that he fobbed off a credible report substantiating the well-known reputation of D.C. cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
- Cardinal Donald Wuerl, McCarrick’s successor and a former bishop of Pittsburgh, has always bragged about his record of being a no-nonsense administrator, someone who even fought with the Vatican to have abusive priests removed from ministry. The latest news paints a slightly different picture.
The Pennsylvania grand-jury report names hundreds of predator priests across seven decades of life in six Catholic diocese in the state. Some of the details in the report are so vile and lurid they would have been rejected from the writer’s room of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
They include priests “marking” their preferred boy-victims with special crosses, priests trading and compiling their own homemade child pornography. At one point in the report, a large redaction is made over what appears to be, in context, a ritualized and satanic gang-rape of a young boy by four priests.
The report implicates bishops of every persuasion. A fastidious conservative such as Bishop James Timlin of Scranton would not allow himself to be seated near the pro-choice Catholic MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews at a commencement ceremony, but in this report he is found writing a consoling letter to one of his priests, a priest who had just raped an underaged girl and arranged for the abortion of his own child. The tone of the letter would be no different if he were writing a priest grieving a deceased grandparent."There there, son, I know it hurts".
We don’t need your sadness, we don’t need new policies. We need better men.
The liberal bishop Donald Wuerl, then of Pittsburgh, does seem to take a hard line in some cases of clerical abuse. But in ones that preceded him, he takes a different approach.
When an abusive priest who had been shuffled out of his diocese reports back to Wuerl’s office that he has information on other abusive priests operating in the Pittsburgh diocese and will inform on them if his stipend is increased, Wuerl advises the priest to write a letter in which he disavows any knowledge of the aforementioned illegal sexual activity. In exchange his stipend is increased.
Wuerl did not implement a zero-tolerance policy against clerical sexual misbehavior; what he instituted was a zero-liability policy for the diocese and a zero-responsibility policy for himself. Wuerl outlined exactly what he did not want to know, and rewarded the man who kept him in ignorance.
Wuerl, who in a recent interview suggested that there was no real crisis in the Church, greeted the release of the grand-jury report with the launch of a website designed by a crisis-public-relations firm, touting his good reputation.
If the events outlined in the Pennsylvania grand-jury report had happened among Pakistani immigrants, rather than the Catholic clergy, the perpetrators would be called a grooming gang. If we treated the Catholic Church the same way as the British public treated the grooming gangs of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, we would be asking tough questions about the culture that produces abuse on this scale. We would ask questions about what twisted form of political correctness dissuaded law enforcement from identifying and confronting the criminal network until now. We might be debating our immigration policy, and possibly shutting down our embassies in the countries from which this gang receives support and reinforcements.
In fact, much of that would be the correct response. The Vatican has previously tried investigating and reporting on America’s Catholic seminaries, offering recommendations on how to fix them. The recommendations were not only weak, but mostly ignored.
- Not a single American bishop has emerged from reviewing the records in his chancery offices and apologized before the cops, the courts, and the news media arrived to ask about the revelations.
- Not a single bishop has publicly demanded that one of his brother bishops resign after being exposed for playing games with the statute of limitations.
- They knew about the powerful cardinal who preyed upon seminarians, they know about the decadent culture of the seminaries where priests are trained. And they tell themselves there is nothing they could really have done about it.
The problem of sexual abuse and blackmail in the Church isn’t reducible to “policy,” and the promises made by bishops to make policy changes should be greeted with extreme cynicism.
The problem is personnel. For a number of reasons, the Catholic priesthood has selected for sexual deviancy. Bishops have been selected for their ability to manage legal and social risk, rather than their ability to govern and lead a religious organization.
As one smart canon lawyer put it,
men don’t rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church, they are pulled upward by those above them. High-ranking churchmen select for men who make peace with this sexualized culture in the priesthood. They prize collegiality rather than exacting holiness, or even competence.
Cardinal Wuerl was selected by the pope to sit on the powerful Congregation of Bishops, which helps recommend to the pope new candidates for the office of bishop. It’s time we ask why he was deemed suitable for this task.
Other state attorneys general should do investigations like Pennsylvania’s. As a Catholic, I’m tired of waiting for the next red slipper to drop. If the Church cannot govern itself from within, then it will be governed from without. That’s not a policy, but the iron law of history.
“We are deeply saddened,” they say. Spare us this fake public-relations drivel. We don’t need your sadness, we don’t need new policies. We need better men.
John Zmirak: Faithful Catholics
must withhold donations to the Church
And corrupt bishops involved in sex abuse cover-ups must be imprisoned
August 15, 2018
John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream and author of
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, advocated use of financial pressure against the Catholic Church to address the sexual abuse scandal following Tuesday’s grand jury report regarding a systematic cover-up of sexual abuse in Pennsylvania dioceses.
Zmirak also called for the imprisonment of priests found guilty of sexual abuse crimes and the bishops who covered it up, during a Wednesday interview with Breitbart News Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News
Zmirak noted that the current revelations emerged because “[t]he attorney general of Pennsylvania did what I wish the attorneys general of 49 other states would do. He went into the decades-old criminal conspiracy of Catholic bishops to cover up sexual abuse of minors, mostly boys in their teen years, by priests.
Eighty percent of the crimes were against boys, and most of them were between 14 and 17, so it really is mostly a homosexual scandal of post-pubescent boys. It’s not a pedophile scandal.”
Zmirak added, “Unfortunately, for some segments of the gay community, it’s par for the course to cruise for teenagers, and those kinds of men seem to be the ones who are filling the seminaries. The statistics on priests that I’ve read, according to the John Jay report that the Catholic bishops paid for themselves — they weren’t thrilled with the results — [are that]
between 18 and 58 percent of Catholic priests are homosexual. That’s compared to two percent of the population at large, so there’s seriously a problem.”
Zmirak examined the relationship between the Catholic priesthood’s celibacy requirement and sexual abuse of children and teenagers by priests.
“I think a large part of the problem is that not that many young men who are straight are willing to be celibate and be priests,” assessed Zmirak. “In past decades, men were willing to do it because it was better than working in the coal mines [or] being a subsistence farmer. They were willing to make the sacrifice. Not that many men are willing to be celibate, but you have a fair number of men who are willing to pretend to be celibate.”
“We have seminaries full of gay men who are practising with each other, who are being seduced by their gay seminary teachers or the rector of their seminary,” remarked Zmirak.
“The former cardinal archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, would get seminarians to go in bed with him and call him ‘Uncle Ted,'” recalled Zmirak. “If they were willing to cuddle with him and do more than that, he would promote them up the chain to become priests and bishops themselves.”
Zmirak continued, “One of McCarrick’s proteges is Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl, the current archbishop of Washington, DC. … The report that came out yesterday is just staggering, and for which I have to thank the attorney general of Pennsylvania. He did a service to the country, and also unwittingly to the church. Cardinal Wuerl, who presented himself as a big fighter of sex abuse, it turns out that he paid hush money to a priest who was removed from service because of his addiction to child pornography. He paid that man an income for like 20 years, and when that man wanted more money, one of the conditions Cardinal Wuerl put on him was basically that it be hush money; that he not reveal details.”
Zmirak went on, “In case after case after after case, the [attorney general] found that the church purposely ran out the clock on the cases so that they would miss the statute of limitation, and therefore the predators would never be prosecuted. Most of these predators continue to be on the church’s dime.”
Zmirak highlighted an instance of a sex-related cover-up involving a teenaged girl impregnated by a priest.
“Now, many of the worst bishops were the liberal bishops, but there were some conservative bishops who were terrible, too,” said Zmirak. “Archbishop Timlin of Scranton, who was the guy who brought back the Latin Mass to Pennsylvania and claimed to be loudly pro-life, well, one priest statutorily raped a 17-year-old girl, got her pregnant, and pressured her for an abortion which he paid for. What did Timlin do? He left the man in the priesthood, moved him to another parish, and wrote him a very sympathetic note about what a difficult time he must be going through.”
Zmirak added, “There are cases in there of priests engaged in sadomasochistic rituals that involve the desecration of Eucharist and involve getting naked boys to pose like Christ on the cross; diabolical stuff.”
“If you were a sex pervert, and you’re in a religious environment all the time, your perversions are going to take on a religious flavor,” surmised Zmirak. “It’s not that surprising. … I think it’s perfectly plausible that somebody who never had any place in the priesthood in the first place and joined for cynical reasons is going to be cynical and perverse in the way he treats these things. You see anti-Catholic sacrilegious things in the gay community regularly; you see men dressed up in leather outfits as nuns [and] men dressed in leather clothes with a priest collar.”
“[These are not] repressed and recovered memories,” noted Zmirak. “All the attorney general did was get the church’s own internal documents. All they did was open their files.”
Zmirak stated, “All they care about is money and reputation. Any organization can operate like a cult [and] fall into cult-like behavior. This was cult-like behavior. This was mafia-like behavior. I do think that the homosexual takeover of the Catholic priesthood has been a serious problem, where 80 percent of the sex abuse is of teenage boys.”
Mansour noted, “We’re talking about 301 abuser priests, and we’re talking about over 1000 victims. This is over a period of 70 years. The majority of the abusers that we’re talking about are currently dead. Over 90 percent of them are dead. Full disclosure here, most of these things are in the past. Some of the bishops, especially Archbishop Wuerl — now Cardinal Wuerl — are alive, and he needs to answer very clearly. He needs to have his red hat gone, and he needs to go to jail. He needs to be in a yellow jumpsuit. … This is a problem of secrecy and cover-up, and worrying about the institution instead of the victims.”
Zmirak recommended using financial pressure against the Catholic Church to compel its improvement. He also asserted that any panel assembled to investigate the abuse and provide solutions must be run by Catholic laity, not the bishops or priests.
“I want Catholic millionaires who donate to the church on [a] panel [to investigate the abuse], and I want that panel to be wielding the sword of money. … Grab these people by the purse strings and squeeze,” Zmirak said. “Remember, 40 percent of the bishops’ money comes from government contracts serving immigrants through Catholic nonprofits, charities, and relief services. We need to press the Congress to redirect the money away from Catholic nonprofits, because
they are keeping the church alive like morphine [or] methadone. They’re keeping the church stoned, but barely alive.”
Zmirak added, “We also need to put some of these bishops in prison. I would like to see federal RICO charges filed against the bishops who were involved in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the abuse of children [and] the distribution of child pornography. There were real crimes here, and I don’t think a damn thing is going to change until at least one — but preferably two or three — bishops are rotting in federal in state prison.”
Mansour noted that Pope Benedict XVI did “a lot to clean up the situation” with the sexual abuse scandal in the Church “for the brief time that he had” as pope, “and he got railroaded, by the way, by the Vatican cabal.”
Zmirak said Pope Francis is unwilling to appropriately address sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.
“[This won’t] happen under Pope Francis, because the Lavender Mafia are the ones who elected him,” appraised Zmirak.
“Cardinal Wuerl and Cardinal McCarrick were big boosters of Pope Francis. The guy he appoints vice pope, Cardinal Maradiaga — this Marxist from Honduras — he is heavily involved in covering up sex abuse. This is the Pope of the sex abuse lobby, so while he’s in there, nothing’s going to get fixed.”
“We’re just going to have to wait for God to call him home, and then maybe the next pope will fix things, but I’m not going to wait for the church to fix it,” added Zmirak. “I want Caesar to fix it. We’ve got to put these guys in jail, take away their federal funding, laymen need to cut off their donations.”
Zmirak considered the ordaining of married men: “Start letting married men of good character take training in theology and ordain them to serve, unpaid, as sort of emergency priests, to say Mass. … More normal men would be willing to be priests if they didn’t have to pretend to be celibate.”
“The only people I knew that considered the priesthood, the only seminarians that I knew, all turned out to be gay,” added Zmirak. “They were all conservatives, Latin Mass guys. Thankfully, only one of them got ordained.”
“[Homosexual men] should not be ordained,” advised Zmirak. “Not in our pansexual society.
You don’t put gay men in an all-male environment any more than you send men out with 16-year-old girl scouts into the woods. You don’t put people where they’re likely to be tempted. The all-male environment of the priesthood, this is not hypothetical, it has become a gay bath house atmosphere in one seminary after another; even the conservative seminaries.”
“Celibacy is not the only issue, but it seems to be a decisive issue right now,” determined Zmirak. “It seems to be that the Catholic priesthood has become a gay refuge. Compare the statistics: two percent of the general population versus a minimum of 15 to 18 percent and a maximum of 58 percent. Those are all statistics from the church’s own study. Fifty-eight percent was the highest estimate that Catholic researchers came up with based on their surveys.”
Zmirak said cleansing the Catholic church of sexually abusive priests will garner political support from faithful members of the Catholic laity. He noted the reluctance of government officials to hold Cardinal Roger Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, accountable for his role in covering up sexual abuse.
“The prosecutors thought they would be seen as anti-Catholic and that it would lose them votes. What they need to see now is that it is pro-Catholic. They’re doing the church a favor, and ordinary Catholics will be grateful to see these bishops in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits if this is the stuff they’ve been doing. I guarantee you it will turn out, if this is the last thing that’s going to protect the church, that Caesar has to step in to save the church from its own corrupt bishops, and frankly, its own corrupt pope. Frankly, I really think there’s no political downside. They need to put on their big boy pants and start locking these people up.”
Zmirak concluded,
“Unfortunately, now, the pope is not on our side. The pope is not on the side of cleaning this up.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/08/2018 04:28]