Archdiocesan shake-up continues
in wake of NY attorney general's criminal probe
by Christine Niles
NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2018 (ChurchMilitant.com) - New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan is reportedly trying to leave his post to become new head of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.
Well-placed sources inform Church Militant he possibly wants out of New York before the NY State Attorney General Barbara Underwood gets too deep into her sex abuse investigation of the archdiocese. Underwood announced Sept. 6 she had subpoenaed personnel files and records related to clerical abuse from all eight Catholic dioceses in New York.
The information of Dolan's possible departure comes amid news that longtime vicar general Mustaciuolo is leaving his position to take over as CEO of the Cabrini Health Foundation, with assets of $3.2 billion.
Although Dolan is painting Mustaciuolo's new role, which begins in the new year, as a continuation of work he had already been doing behind the scenes, sources confirm that Mustaciuolo's move is a direct response to the New York attorney general's criminal probe into the Catholic Church, a move long feared by the archdiocese.
Also in response to the criminal probe, Dolan announced Thursday he had appointed former judge Barbara Jones to be special prosecutor to review archdiocesan policies on sex abuse. He is vowing to give her "complete access" to personnel records, including his own.
A former prosecutor, Jones oversaw the review of documents in the case of Michael Cohen, former attorney for President Trump. Jones is a pro-gay Catholic Democrat, who as district judge struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2012.
With pro-LGBT sympathies, Catholics are wondering how vigorously she'll pursue homosexual misconduct in the New York archdiocese.
Dolan's announcement of Jones's appointment comes a day after he was blasted by his own priests and seminarians during a listening session, where they criticized him for failing to speak up or act strongly enough in the wake of the clerical abuse cover-up crisis wracking the Church in America.
Aside from his June 20 announcement that Abp. Theodore McCarrick had been suspended for an abuse allegation, Dolan had remained uncharacteristically quiet for weeks. Even as fellow bishops were issuing statements responding to the explosive allegations of Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò, Dolan maintained his public silence — broken only after news that Attorney General Underwood was launching an investigation into his archdiocese and others.
If Dolan were to become new head of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, he would be replacing Cardinal Edwin O'Brien, Grand Master of the order since 2011, who has deep ties to New York. O'Brien once served as rector at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, where he was close to then-seminarians Peter Miqueli, Greg Mustaciuolo and others who went on to be priests in the archdiocese, Mustaciuolo rising in the ranks to become chancellor, moderator of the curia and vicar general.
It remains unclear where Cardinal O'Brien will go. [???? I am not aware that anyone else in the media, outside of Church Militant, is on O'Brien's case, much less that any official notice has been made by the Vatican (in his position, he is directly responsible to the pope) about the cardinal's seemingly questionable record.]
O'Brien is named in Viganò's testimony as a member of the "homosexual current" in the Church, implicated in the cover-up of Fr. Peter Miqueli, a priest accused of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars to use on drug-fueled parties with gay-for-pay prostitute Keith Crist.
Multiple sources confirmed with Church Militant that, in addition to Mustaciuolo, O'Brien had special relationships with Miqueli and Crist, who would chauffeur him from the airport when O'Brien flew in from Rome (when he was rector of the Pontifical North American College) to offer Confirmation Masses at Miqueli's small, isolated parish in Roosevelt Island — an unusual act for a cardinal of such high rank — as well as at St. Frances Cabrini in the Bronx.
Crist, who is forbidden to be on archdiocesan property, reportedly picked up O'Brien from the airport during most visits, and was present at "special dinners" with O'Brien's small coterie of friends, who invariably included Miqueli, Bp. Gerald Walsh (Vicar for Clergy) and others from the chancery.
Parishioners confirmed with Church Militant that Miqueli and Crist were open about the fact that they stayed with Cdl. O'Brien when they were in Rome.
O’Brien was reportedly Crist’s protector. Multiple parishioners once witnessed Crist screaming at a Catholic in Miqueli's parish, shouting, "I will tell O'Brien — and O'Brien will destroy you."
Retired Navy Chaplain Gene Gomulka, a former monsignor who worked under O'Brien when he was archbishop for the military services, confirmed with Church Militant that O'Brien deliberately underreported the incidents of priest sex abuse.
O’Brien also covered up homosexual misconduct committed by Chaplain Fr. Matt Lee, whom Gomulka reported to O’Brien as engaging in inappropriate homosexual relations with a live-in boyfriend. In spite of Gomulka's report, O'Brien did nothing, allowing Lee to be transferred to a more prestigious position at Quantico, where he went on to commit sexual assault and served prison time. After his release, he was arrested for male child porn and is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence in Delaware.
O'Brien's alleged misdeeds seem just as bad as McCarrick's, but why is no one outraged? Better yet, why don't other news agencies investigate if Church Militant's leads about O'Brien are valid? If any of it is true, he cannot go unpunished - and I would feel even worse because he was made a cardinal by Benedict XVI, at which time, his CV read as pure as driven snow.
Dolan's alleged maneuverings above really pale compared to the new charge that has now come up against the reigning pope for having quashed a CDF investigation of one of his Grand Electors, the late Englich Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who was a member of the 'Sankt-Gallen mafia'.
Vatican source says pope blocked
investigation of abuse allegations
against a cardinal who helped elect him
by Maike Hickson
September 24, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis told Cardinal Gerhard Müller in 2013 to stop investigating an abuse allegation against British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, according to a highly-placed Vatican source who spoke to Marco Tosatti.
Murphy-O'Connor was a member of the 'Sankt Gallen mafia'
[as Cardinal Daneels called the cardinals' group, of which he was a member, that met regularly in Sank Galle, Switzerland, since 2003 to block the possibility that Joseh Ratzinger would succeed John Paul II and came up with Bergoglio as their candidate in the 2005 Conclave] played a pivotal role in getting the latter elected Pope in 2013.
A source from England with inside knowledge of the case told LifeSiteNews that a woman alleges the cardinal was present when she was abused by a priest as age 13 or 14, and that her case was that investigated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).
Tosatti and LifeSiteNews have worked together on this joint story for some weeks now. We have shared our findings with each other.
Tosatti had previously revealed what he learned in September 2013 from a high-ranking Vatican source – “an extremely good source, who was then in the government of the Curia,” and he adds that his source has “learned [it] from those directly concerned.” – that Cardinal Müller, then Prefect of the CDF, was interrupted by the Pope while saying Mass at the Church of Santa Monica (next to the CDF building) for a small group of German students. But now Tosatti reveals that the reason for the interruption was to demand that an investigation into Cardinal O’Connor be halted.
As Tosatti put it in an article for First Things last year:
His secretary joined him at the altar: “The pope wants to speak to you.” “Did you tell him I am celebrating Mass?” asked Müller. “Yes,” said the secretary, “but he says he does not mind—he wants to talk to you all the same.” The cardinal went to the sacristy. The pope, in a very bad mood, gave him some orders about a dossier concerning one of his friends, a cardinal.
This event took place in June of 2013, not long after Pope Francis had been elected Pope.
According to Tosatti’s newly released report, that cardinal and friend of the pope was Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, former Archbishop of Westminster, England and President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. “He was accused of abuse by a woman,” and that woman had insisted for years on her claims and “had finally filed a complaint with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
Tosatti describes his source as a “high-ranking official in the Curia.” He reports that the source “was very amazed” at this event involving the Pope, both about the way in which the communication took place, and also about the message itself.
“He [the Pope] should have said: let me see the dossier, bring me the results. Do not order the investigator to act in a specific way
a priori. These are things that leave us very perplexed,” said Tosatti’s source.
Tosatti then “asked for confirmation from the competent offices, without receiving an answer.” LifeSiteNews reached out to the office of Cardinal Müller, asking for a denial or a confirmation of the story, but the answer was only that there would be no comment made. That is to say, we received a non-denial. LifeSiteNews also reached out to the Vatican Press Office, asking for a confirmation or denial of the story. Should they respond, we will update the report.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor died on September 1, 2017, a year ago, without ever seeing a proper investigation of these charges.
After hearing this story as related by Marco Tosatti, LifeSiteNews reached out to a reliable source from England who is very well informed about the lady who was accusing the English cardinal. According to this English source, the lady has never gone public with her charges.
But she has been in contact with Church authorities for about 15 years now, without ever having received a thorough investigation of her claims, although she received a settlement from the Archdiocese of Brighton-Arundel when it was under Murphy-O'Connor.
The lady says she was abused, when she was 13 or 14 years of age, by Father Michael Hill. She claims that when Hill abused her in the late 1960s, there were several other priests present and involved. - one of them being Murphy-O'Connor. In the early 2000S, she accepted a settlement of £40,000 from the Archdiocese.
Murphy-O'Connor, as bishop of the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton, had appointed Hill in 1985 chaplain at Gatwick Airport. Hill then was charged with abusing a retarded who had missed a flight and was visiting the airport's chapel.
The pedophile Father Hill was imprisonedwice for abusing children - first in 1997, then again in 2002 (a five-year-term for abusing 3 children aged 10-14). He is thought to have abused about 30 boys between his ordination in 1960 and the late 1980s. As
The Guardian reported in 2002:“His case is particularly notorious because the church's leader, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, gave him a post despite warnings that he had abused young boys.” Hill had been moved to different parishes, in spite of the ongoing complaints of parents. Finally he underwent therapy in the 1980s.
Later reports showed that Murphy-O'Connor had been warned by therapists that Hill would be abusive again. Murphy-O'Connor agreed that the diocese should pay compensation to those victims of Hill, but requested their silence on the matter of their abuse.
Murphy-O'Connor had also been accused of trying to pay hush money to Father Hill – some £50,000 to buy his silence when he was released from prison. It was said that a junior bishop made the offer on his behalf during a visit to Hill's Belmarsh prison in London. Murphy-O'Connor “utterly” denied that claim.
Another sign of the cardinal's indulgent leniency toward child abusers is the case of Father Tim Garrett. Fr. Garrett, then a priest in the Portsmouth diocese, was convicted, according to media reports, of taking indecent photographs of boys in the 1980s. Following the advice of a risk assessment team showing that Garrett would not be dangerous, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor allowed him to transfer to his own Diocese of Arundel and Brighton. He later regretted that permission, just as he apologized for his mishandling of the Hill case.
Murphy-O'Connor was Bishop of Arundel and Brighton from 1977 to 2000, when he was appointed Archbishop of Westminster.
The story of the female victim of abuse is a story of delayed justice and denial of due process. Since she now lives in the Diocese of Portsmouth, she started to express her accusations to Church officials there. But sometime between 2009 and 2010, she also contacted the Archdiocese of Westminster with her allegations. Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who has been Archbishop of Westminster since 2009 – and thus the successor of Murphy-O'Connor – refused to investigate the matter.
When Murphy-O'Connor was asked, in 2010, by Pope Benedict XVI to be the head of the Apostolic Visitation to Ireland in order to examine the abuse crisis there, people in the Diocese of Portsmouth were concerned that the abuse allegations against Murphy-O’Connor would then come to light and destroy the credibility of the Apostolic Visitation.
In 2011, according to our English source, the Diocese of Portsmouth, together with the Diocese of Northampton, contacted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then under Cardinal William Levada, in order to request an investigation of the claims of that female victim by Rome and to protest Westminster’s refusal to follow the national safeguarding protocols.
The CDF's chief prosecutor at the time, Mons. Charles Scicluna, now Archbishop of Malta, who requested that all the files from England be sent to him in person. A person from the Diocese of Portsmouth flew to Rome and delivered the files to Scicluna. It is understood that he began an investigation. However, in 2012, Scicluna became the Auxiliary Bishop of Malta and was thus removed from the Murphy-O'Connor case at the CDF. It was then Monsignor Robert W. Oliver who, after the departure of Monsignor Scicluna, met in 2013 with one of the English bishops in Rome in order to discuss the matter.
During that time, the Archdiocese of Westminster finally agreed, for the first time, to meet with the female victim. One of the auxiliary bishops – now a diocesan bishop elsewhere in England – met with her together with the diocesan safeguarding head, but still did not agree to start an investigation, according to the source.
Those within the Catholic Church in England who support this victim's cause argue that, independently of whether this lady speaks the truth or not, the Church must follow her own rules as they are now set up.
That means that the accused clergyman should first be withdrawn from the exercise of his office, and then an investigation should be started. Depending on the result of the investigation, when it is completed, the accused clergyman is to be either reinstated or punitively removed. The protocols make no distinction between the treatment for a priest or deacon and that for a bishop or a cardinal. [But what office other than that of cardinal could have been withdrawn from Murphy-O'Connor in 2013, when he retired in 2009?]
As our source in England relates, there have been repeated attempts, on the side of good bishops, to request a Church investigation into the case of this female victim. They insisted that the Church has to follow the standing rules. Yet, as our source says, Murphy-O'Connor has been treated “as if he were above the law.”
Our source points out that,
in his own career, Murphy-O'Connor always “stood very lightly with regard to the Church's moral and doctrinal teaching.” [Typical of all the progressivists in the Church.]
In one interview,
Murphy-O'Connor made it clear that he is not opposed to non-practicing homosexuals being in the priesthood. He then said: “I think the Church must judge the people who are ordained on what kind of person they are, not on their sexuality. And I think that there will be men, probably a very small minority, who might have a homosexual orientation. Obviously, if they are practicing, this would exclude them [from ordination]. But I would not say that a person who has a homosexual tendency is necessarily debarred.”
He also rejected the claim of a connection between homosexuality and child abuse:
“All I would say is that it does seem to be established that the question of child abuse has nothing directly at all to do with homosexuality.”
The Englishman John Smeaton, chief executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, the world’s oldest pro-life group, and co-founder of Voice of the Family, told LifeSiteNews the following about Cardinal Murphy O'Connor: “However deeply disturbing it is, it is very much for the good of the Church that evils which have been deliberately hidden by Church leaders are coming to light.”
He gave as an example that the “late Cardinal Murphy O’Connor is on record for seeking to cover up evil.
In 2008 it was revealed that the Cardinal had approved an ethics code for St. John and St. Elizabeth’s hospital which effectively accommodated referrals for abortion and other unethical procedures.”
Professor Luke Gormally, a former member of the hospital’s ethics committee commented at the time: “How can the Church in this country effectively defend the sanctity of life when its Chief Shepherd is prepared to approve a code which effectively accommodates referrals for abortion?”
John Smeaton concluded: “Church officials at the very highest level, including the Holy Father, must learn the lesson of recent revelations which have so scandalized the faithful: The cover-up of evil has got to stop.”
Perhaps most importantly, Murphy-O'Connor is said to have helped Pope Francis to get elected. Austen Ivereigh, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor’s former assistant, said that days prior to the March 12 conclave in Rome, Murphy-O’Connor was tasked by the St. Gallen “mafia” to inform Jorge Bergoglio of a plan to get him elected.
As Ivereigh described in his 2014 book on Pope Francis, Murphy-O’Connor was also tasked with lobbying for Bergoglio among his North American counterparts as well as acting as a link to those from Commonwealth countries. So, when Bergoglio met the English cardinal after his election, he jestingly said, “You're to blame!”
As
The Guardian reported: “A few months after his election, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was apparently lightheartedly to credit Murphy-O’Connor, when the two met at a papal audience. The pope pointed to his old friend and said, 'You’re to blame!'”
As The Guardian's obituary for the cardinal stated, Murphy-O'Connor called Pope Francis “my man”: “And, of course, his [Murphy-O'Connor's] presence in Rome in 2013 [was in order] to witness the election of his friend as Pope Francis. He looked on in pleasure at the impact made by the Argentinian whom he liked, jokingly, to refer to as 'my man.'”
So, based on the revelation from Marco Tossati’s source in the Vatican, it would seem that Bergoglio, after his election, especially thanked Murphy-O'Connor by telling Cardinal Müller to halt the investigation against him.
[Which makes Mueller complicit if he agreed to halt it, as it seems to have halted. His office's refusal to answer the questions asked by Lifesite and Tosatti lately would seem to bear this out.]
As of this date, the abused lady's complaints have never been thoroughly investigated, neither in England, nor in Rome. And with the help of Tosatti's own report, we now know some of the reasons why.
Similar to McCarrick, Murphy-O'Connor is known to have later speciously shown himself to the public as being a hardliner with regard to abuse cases. “Roman Catholic bishops found to be flouting the new guidelines on child protection will be held to account, or expected to resign,” is the headline of a 2003 article quoting Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. However, as with the McCarrick case in the U.S., the truth is now gaining upon the Church's hierarchy that has been evasively looking the other way.
In England, there is currently a government-commissioned independent investigation into all sex abuse cases in society, to include those in the Catholic Church. This investigation has the legal power to compel the production of evidence. For this investigation, a so-called “Truth Project” has been set up, whereby victims of sexual abuse of minors may now come and relate their story.
Our source tells us this female victim may have contacted that same Truth Project, since several weeks ago, the investigators requested the Archdiocese of Westminster the release of all the files pertaining to allegations against Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor.
It would be important now that four dioceses release their files to the Truth Project concerning this woman's case: Arundel and Brighton; Westminster; Portsmouth, and Northampton (which submitted the case to the CDF, together with Portsmouth). Bishop John Arnold (now of Salford), who was at the time involved in refusing to investigate the case in Westminster, should also release his files.
Thus, as it seems, the Catholic Church is now sitting upon a ticking time bomb. And on top of that time bomb sits Pope Francis.
This report was consciously published on September 24, the Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham – Patroness of the Catholic Church in England – and on the day of the beginning of the English bishops' Ad Limina visit to Rome.
The episcopal crisis comes to England
September 25, 2018
We all knew about Fr Hill, the priest-abuser of Gatwick Airport, long ago; we learnt about Bishop Kieran Conry more recently. One of the links between the cases is the involvement of the late Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, who moved Fr Hill to fresh pastures after earlier victims came forward, and promoted Bishop Conry's career.
In both cases he was only doing what most bishops seemed to be doing: giving abusers new opportunities for abuse and seeing priests clouded by questions about their chastity as ideal candidates for promotion: that was just what happened in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, isn't it?
Remember that Bishop Kieran was chosen by the Bishops' Conference to be head of their catechetical initiatives and 'Bishop for Youth'. (The official website summary of his career somehow neglects to mention his extra-curricular activities.) He must have had the support of a lot of other bishops as well.
But now further allegations have surfaced. They are focused around Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor and the Hill case but the implications draw in a number of other people in England and in Rome, including Pope Francis. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's reputation is of less importance than that of these others, who are still in office.
The central contention is that abuse accusations against the Cardinal himself were not investigated, despite the Bishops' Conference's adoption of the policy of investigating every allegation.
The problem now becomes not so much whether a dead Cardinal engaged in abuse in the 1970s, but whether various living individuals failed to follow their own protocols for investigating allegations. This question is in principle much easier to answer, and it is an important one: it is ultimately the question of credibility and moral integrity of the bishops, the question which is now overwhelming the Catholic Church in America.
It is perhaps too much to hope that the Rome side of the story be cleared up, but
there is a paper trail in filing-cabinets all around England which could tell us if the claims about the behaviour of the English actors in this drama are true. If the Bishops of England and Wales have any sense, they will settle the matter publicly, taking any necessary bad-publicity hit right away, and not allow the issue to fester.
It may not have been picked up by the mainstream press here yet, but I don't think it is simply going to go away.
So far, the Vatican has not commented on the DER SPIEGEL critique of the pope which, of course, faults him for other things besides his silence on the Vigano testimony. However, it ought to have prompted, at the very least, the release of the reported 'response' to Vigano reportedly approved by the pope on Sept. 18 (unless Luigi Accatoli's Vatican source was wrong about this).
In the following commentary, the writer calls THE PRESENT CRISIS in the Church as a crisis of leadership, as well, and rightly so, because it involves cardinals and bishops who are supposed to be the successors of the Apostles, and the Successor of Peter himself. It seems quite clear from the article that Altieri has had a change of heart about this pope, and not for the better.
Pope Francis and the current crisis of leadership
We need to know the extent of the rot, which may go
all the way up, and all the way through
by Christopher R. Altieri
September 24, 2018
The crisis of leadership in the Catholic Church is protracted, persistent, and global. It is already almost unbearably awful in its details, and has barely begun to be reported. What follows is neither reportage — except incidentally — nor analysis, strictly speaking — but commentary, and it is personal.
In January, I predicted that 2018 would be a make-or-break year for Pope Francis — a year in which he would have to decide whether to use his gifts to set his project of curial reform and Church renewal on track, or whether to continue his efforts to remake Rome into “Buenos Aires-on-Tiber”.
[Not in the sense of a cultural makeover, as it were, but as the personal fiefdom that he appears to have made of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires when he was there. For all his talk of humility, he has really behaved as Pope the same way he behaved as Archbishop - by sovereign fiat: "Let it be done according to my word"!]
In March, on the fifth anniversary of Francis’s election, I considered that the year had got off to a rough start, but noted that we were still in the first quarter.
Now the third quarter is rapidly approaching its end, and things have not improved for Francis, who, whatever the external pressures on him, just can’t seem to get out of his own way.
The election of Francis thrilled me, as it did many others, despite my concerns at having a Jesuit pope — concerns perhaps paradoxically rooted in my love for the Ignatian charism and my many personal spiritual debts to great Jesuits, living and dead — and I must say
his early forays into pot-stirring and mess-making did not dissuade me from my hope that he was most, at any rate, of what he was cracked up to be.
His remark about gay priests — “Who am I to judge?” — read in context, was unexceptionable, and had enough of the wily Jesuit in it to make me think that his play was inspired. He brought faithful Catholics of every age and state of life in the Church out of the woodwork and into the public conversation to say what the Church really teaches — and people who otherwise wouldn’t have, perked up and listened.
It was more gambit than gamble — there was a downside — but I was game for it, even after I had read reports regarding the case of the specific figure, which gave rise to the question that elicited the now famous answer — Msgr. Battista Ricca — whom Francis apparently trusted, based on limited personal acquaintance and the absence of any official condemnation in Ricca’s jacket, even though the Apostolic Nuncio under whom Ricca had worked in Uruguay did not (trust Ricca), owing to serial ambiguities in Ricca’s personal moral conduct.
[I think there was an even more direct reason for the Nuncio's 'mistrust' - Ricca brought his Swiss lover to Uruguay not just as a live-in, but according to Sandro Magister's reports from Uruguay, even had him hired by the Nunciature.]
It is worth revisiting Pope Francis’s full response to the question from Brazilian journalist Ilze Scamparini:
About Monsignor Ricca: I did what canon law calls for, that is a preliminary investigation. And from this investigation, there was nothing of what had been alleged. We did not find anything of that. This is the response. [For the simple reason that 1) Ricca's dossier at the Secretariat of State had been whitewashed, perhaps by him personally, after he was recalled to State from his Uruguay assignment and before he was made manager of the Vatican hotels for priests visiting Rome including Casa Santa Marta; and 2) who knows how perfunctory that 'preliminary investigation' was? Was the Nuncio under whom Ricca served even questioned? Let alone, were the Uruguay police records involving Ricca ever looked at?]
But I wish to add something else: I see that many times in the Church, over and above this case, but including this case, people search for “sins from youth”, for example, and then publish them. They are not crimes, right? Crimes are something different: the abuse of minors is a crime. No, sin.
But if a person, whether it be a lay person, a priest or a religious sister, commits a sin and then converts, the Lord forgives, and when the Lord forgives, the Lord forgets and this is very important for our lives. When we confess our sins and we truly say, “I have sinned in this”, the Lord forgets, and so we have no right not to forget, because otherwise we would run the risk of the Lord not forgetting our sins. That is a danger. This is important: a theology of sin.
Many times I think of Saint Peter. He committed one of the worst sins, that is, he denied Christ, and even with this sin they made him Pope. [What 'they'? Jesus alone 'made him pope'! At the time, after the Resurrection, Peter had more than repented for his denial - and of course, went on to die for the Lord and for the faith. Why does the pope of 'infinite mercy' appear to imply that the Lord did not forgive Peter for his sin but 'made him pope' despite it???]] We have to think a great deal about that. But, returning to your question more concretely. In this case, I conducted the preliminary investigation and we didn’t find anything. This is the first question.
Then, you spoke about the gay lobby. So much is written about the gay lobby. I still haven’t found anyone with an identity card in the Vatican with “gay” on it. They say there are some there. [This, from someone who had received from Benedict XVI the report he commissioned about a gay lobby in the Curia! Which, apart from a couple of bloggers, no one in the media - after the Vigano Testimony and its specifications of the extent of the gaysubculture in the Roman Curia and the American episcopacy - has bothered to ask about. Whatever happened to it?... When I first Bergoglio's words quoted above in July 2013, my immediate conclusion was that he did not think the report from Benedict XVI was any big deal at all - "They say there are some there!] I believe that when you are dealing with such a person, you must distinguish between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of someone forming a lobby, because not all lobbies are good. This one is not good.
If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him? The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this in a beautiful way, saying … wait a moment, how does it say it … it says: “no one should marginalize these people for this, they must be integrated into society”.
The problem is not having this tendency, no, we must be brothers and sisters to one another, and there is this one and there is that one. The problem is in making a lobby of this tendency: a lobby of misers, a lobby of politicians, a lobby of masons, so many lobbies. For me, this is the greater problem. [Not that he has done anything at all about these lobbies, which includes the like of George Soros and his ilk, and all those anti-Catholic pro-abortion leaders invited to the Vatican every few weeks for some big interenational conference where they can freely pitch their agenda.]
That was then. This is now. The pope’s basic instinct may well be sound — he’s not wrong to say, “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?” There are many men in priestly ministry who experience same-sex attraction and struggle to live chastely. Sometimes they fail. They are not to be lumped in automatically with the evil men who sought Holy Orders for the target-rich environment and protection a collar affords, while never intending even to attempt a life of chastity.
The real lavender mafiosi groom boys for membership in their ranks, but that is not all they do — they work their work across the board, and may exploit a straight priest’s dalliance just as easily as they might a gay one’s. Exploiting the confusion and naiveté of an adolescent struggling to understand his identity is worse, on the whole, but exploiting the foibles of a grown man is still very bad. The more disorderly men there are in the clergy, the more powerful the lavender mafia will be, regardless of their status as members or affiliates of the syndicate.
We need to know the extent of the rot, which may — as I have noted elsewhere — go all the way up, and all the way through.
A month has passed now, since the former papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, published his 11-page “testimony”, and while pundits and professional Catholics continue debate whether the Francis pontificate will survive the scandal, the pope himself keeps silence. Sort of.
Two weeks ago, Pope Francis devoted his morning reflections — billed as homilies, though
they aren’t really homilies [????], but brief moral exhortations based loosely on the Readings of the Day — or fervorini to use the Italian word for the genre
[They are still homilies because the exhortations are delivered at Mass - and Bergoglio takes advantage of whatever Reading of the day he can twist for his purposes - which makes them part of the liturgy, as the GIRM reminds all priests, and about which Bergoglio seems oblivious since he has chosen to use these homilettes to get back at his critics] to the Great Accuser, saying he attacks bishops especially, trying to expose their sins and scandalize the faithful, whose default disposition is to love their bishops.
Last week, he returned to the theme and enlarged upon it, saying that it was the people who cried out for Jesus’s crucifixion, and it was Jesus, who kept compassionate silence because “the people were deceived by the powerful.” Francis went on to say the true shepherd chooses silence when the Great Accuser attacks him “through so many people.” On Thursday, Pope Francis offered:
The Church, when she journeys through history, is persecuted by hypocrites: hypocrites, within and without. ['Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the biggest hypocrite of all?']
The devil has nothing to do with repentant sinners, because they look upon God and say, “Lord, I am a sinner, help me!” and the Devil is impotent; but he is strong with hypocrites. He is strong, and he uses them to destroy, to destroy the people, to destroy society, to destroy the Church. Hypocrisy is the Devil’s workhorse, for he is a liar. He makes himself out to be a prince, powerful and beautiful, though from behind he is an assassin. [Oh, yes indeed! That's why old Screwtape has been on a permanent champagne binge since Bergoglio became pope and cannot praise Wormwood enough for his work. Bt I suspect Wormwood really had little to do except work on his target's narcissism.]
On a good day, comparison of the bishop — who stands among his flock in Christ’s stead, as their pastor — to Our Lord, ought to be aspirational. In the midst of worldwide outcry for accountability from bishops, who have sinfully miscarried in their duty of care and used their power to coverup terrible wrongdoing — their own, and that of others in their charge — and coupled with juxtaposition of the faithful thus alarmed with the people who sought Christ’s blood, such comparison is so far beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse, that one is embarrassed for all those who saw the remarks published on their watch.
If when he uttered those words,Pope Francis did not have the current crisis of leadership in mind [a crisis of which he is very much a part, however, so how can he even think there is a crisis of leadership???] then it is fair to say he ought to have been more careful in his choice of them. That he did not, frankly beggars credulity. In any case, he cannot have it both ways: silence is silence, and talk is talk.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/10/2018 18:32]