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As the world demands answers on sex abuse,
Vatican demurs, deflects, ducks, and dodges
by Doug Mainwaring
ROME, February 18, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — A Vatican press conference this morning displayed the pent up frustration of journalists — and millions of Catholics worldwide — over the Holy See’s insistence on addressing only the sexual abuse of minors while ignoring the elephant in the room: the preponderance of homosexual clergy in the Church.
A two-hour-long press conference consisting of a panel of Church luminaries took an abrupt turn once journalists were free to ask questions, revealing a stark divergence between the preferred narrative of the hierarchy and the universal concern of multitudes of Catholics in the pews.
Stunningly, the panelists ducked, dodged and deflected every question raised about homosexuality in the priesthood.
As it turns out, the questions asked were more significant and more informative than the answers proffered.
The National Catholic Register’s Edward Pentin noted that during the Synod on Youth, it was said that the abuse of seminarians and vulnerable adults would be addressed at the Vatican Summit.
“When this meeting was initially announced, it was to be about the protection of minors and vulnerable adults but now it seems to be only about the protection of minors,” said Pentin. “Will this meeting include the abuse of vulnerable adults and seminarians in particular?”
In responding, Cardinal Cupich, nervously fiddling with a pen, couldn’t bring himself to utter the word “seminarians,” and suggested only that bishops around the world could take what is learned during the summit and apply it to ‘other situations.’
Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews addressed the panel: “Recently, Cardinal Muller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — which gives him a unique perspective on these problems — said, as others have … that more than 80% of the victims of these sexual offenders are teenagers of the male sex.”
“Will the problem of homosexuality among the clergy be addressed as part of this problem? It’s obvious from the data that many of these acts committed against minors are homosexual acts. In fact, the majority [are]. So will this be part of the Church’s ‘transparency’ over the course of the coming days?”
Cupich acknowledged the high percentage of “male on male” sex abuse but then quickly deflected, saying that “homosexuality itself is not a cause.” Instead, “It is a matter of opportunity, and also a matter of poor training on the part of people.”
The Cardinal made reference to two famous studies about clergy sexual abuse, but the scope of both were limited to pedophilia, and didn’t take into consideration sexual misconduct with seminarians, other young men subject to exploitative sex abuse by clergy, and consensual romantic and sexualized relationships between clergy and other adult males.
Montagna’s question opened the floodgates. Other journalists picked up where she left off after the panel ducked her question.
“In some circles, for some time now, there’s been the hypothesis that, not with regards to the abuse itself, but with regards to cover up, part of the problem is that priests, bishops, and cardinals are themselves engaged in illicit sexual behavior and therefore are unwilling to denounce each other,” noted CNN’s Delia Gallagher.
“That is a hypothesis both in conservative circles and now being raised in a book coming out by a French gay author who claims that there are these gay relationships in the hierarchy which enable coverup,” continued Gallagher. “In your investigation … is that true?” she asked.
Cupich offered a wry response, dismissing the question. “You are right in saying that it’s a hypothesis,” said Cupich. “Hypotheses have to be proven, and this is something that has to remain at the level of hypothesis.”
When it was the turn of the Catholic Herald’s Christopher Altieri, his questions — and body language — displayed the embarrassment and awkwardness that Catholics experience when challenging high-ranking prelates — men thought to be holy — with simple, honest, obvious questions shared by millions of faithful Catholics:
I don’t know how to do this without just saying it so let me not even try to put a fine point on it.
On the systemic, the structural, and the cultural level of this issue, how do men who don’t understand how bad the abuse of minors is, ever make it past a preliminary screening in a vocational discernment program, let alone rise through the ranks to become bishops?
When Cardinal Cupich responded by speaking only about the screening process for seminary candidates, avoiding the heart of the reporter’s question, Altieri respectfully tried again.
Your Eminence, I’m not sure you’ve answered the question. … I’m not talking about how to screen out abusers …
- How does someone who doesn’t understand, when he gets to the point of becoming a bishop, that this is bad?
- Going back to the beginning of that process, how does someone who doesn’t understand how bad this is ever get into orders at all in the first place?
Archbishop Scicluna [bails out Cupich] offered an unsatisfying, bureaucratic response, while agreeing that pedophilia is a terrible thing. [Even Scicluna, who should know better having investigated Maciel and his abuse of seminarians, along with having mistresses and children, appears to think the sex abuse problem is limited to pedophilia. One ought to curse the journalist who first applied that word to the sex abuse crisis, because it has since been misused by the Church hierarchy and the media as the blanket term to describe clerical sex abuses.]
As journalists in Rome challenge the Holy See’s spokespersons, faithful Catholics in the United States are asking the same questions, rightfully concerned after months of
- revelations about clergy homosexual abuse of seminarians, young men and boys and the associated cover ups by bishops;
- the promotion of the normalization of homosexuality by high profile priests such as Fr. James Martin, SJ; and
- the increasing numbers of priests who have felt compelled to ‘come out of the closet.’
Catholics fear that after this week’s two very grand [very grandstanding, you mean], very public gestures by the Vatican — the defrocking of disgraced former Cardinal McCarrick and the much publicized global Summit on the Sexual Abuse of Minors — that the Holy See will claim the matter is closed and no further investigation or action is necessary.
At a weekend rally in front of the Papal Ambassador’s residence in Washington DC, folks were afraid that after this week, folks at the Vatican will “wash their hands” of the homosexual issue.
“We can’t allow them to just stop there,” Louis Carvallo told LifeSiteNews.
“McCarrick is the tip of the iceberg,” added Bob Foss. “There are so many problems with homosexuality in the Church and the lack of leadership on the part of our bishops.”
Jeffrey Bedia, also at the rally, said that he sees the laicization of McCarrick only as a first step: “I hope this will not be just an example. There’s a lot of people both in the hierarchy and the laity that sheltered this man.”
[Is anyone betting that the Vatican will ever do anything about McCarrick's enablers?
- Why don't they at least release documents, if any such exist, that will refute Mons. Vigano's document citations regarding the McCarrick affair?
- Because if they can't produce documents saying otherwise, why not just release the documents Vigano has cited? Obviously, because they do not have contrary documents, and the existing documents would prove Vigano's claims.
No, the GREAT COVER-UP continues, and transparency is just a fancy word that Vatican spinmeisters bandy about without meaning any of it at all.
In their first and only statements so far about the McCarrick files last October, the Vatican promised disclosure ASAP. It's been four months and counting since then, and noe appears forthcoming. That statement implied that disclosure could lead to implicating the two pontificates before this one. Who believes that there is any interest at all in the Bergoglio Vatican of shielding John Paul II and Benedict XVI from the McCarrick fallout?
Let's say documentation will show that John Paul II named McCarrick Archbishop of Washington and then cardinal despite protests sent to the Vatican citing his sexual misconduct.
- So John Paul II made a terrible' if not horrid, mistake. Surely not his first and only mistake in naming bishops. Every pope has his share of such mistakes (a 100 percent error record, perhaps, for Bergoglio's appointments).
Let's say there is documentation to show that McCarrick's appointment was facilitated by those around the pope for financial considerations. Recent reports have mentioned that McCarrick made or facilitated substantial contributions to the Solidarity movement in Poland and could have funnelled these through now Cardinal Dsiwisz, then the pope's personal secretary.
- So let Cardinal Dsiwisz or whoever else answer the charge.
And why did Benedict XVI not move earlier against McCarrick, assuming he was aware of McCarrick's record?
- Benedict became pope in April 2005.
- McCarrick retired as Archbishop of Washington in July 2006 at the statutory age of 75 - which was not extended by Benedict as is customary for high-profile bishops against whom there appear to be no serious accusations. Might this prompt acceptance of McCarrick's retirement not have reflected Benedict's awareness of the problem and his way of dealing with it? Not the best way, obviously, because in effect, he was letting him off lightly.
- It is claimed that accusatory letters about McCarrick were sent to Benedict through various channels in 2006-2008.
- Benedict apparently reacted eventually - perhaps he should have done so earlier- by ordering McCarrick, some time in 2008, to restrict his public appearances and live a life of prayer and penance some time in 2008, as confirmed by Cardinal Marc Ouellet in his capacity as Prefect of Bishops, and as relayed by two nuncios to McCarrick himself and to his successor as Archbishop of Washington.
- Again, Benedict can be faulted for doing all this in private, off the public and media radar. Probably for the same reason he spared Maciel, who was 86 at the time, a canonical trial but simply ordered the sanctions he did. But does'charitable' treatment of older people trump the bigger issue of flagrant sexual misconduct by ranking prelates held in high esteem by previous pontificates?
So, Benedict has a number of shortcomings to explain and atone for in how he dealt with the McCarrick affair. But they are minor compared to his successor's apparent total disregard of McCarrick's record - about which he must have known something even before Vigano spelled it out for him in their one-on-one conversation in June 2013.
A total disregard for and dismissal of McCarrick's misconduct that not only made Bergoglio lift whatever restrictions Benedict XVI had ordered but led him to restore McCarrick to his previous 'prestige' by making him his chief adviser on affairs involving the US Church and his personal envoy to the Obama White House, to China, Cuba, Iran and Armenia on matters in which Bergoglio placed urgent priority.
Obviously, it is not John Paul II or Benedict XVI that Bergoglio wishes to 'protect' in all this, but himself as the biggest McCarrick enabler of all. Being pope, and having heaped favors and privileges on McCarrick for five years despite knowledge of his double life, is he not guiltier than everybody else who had anything to do with enabling, protecting and covering up for McCarrick? - because, in effect, Bergoglio did all that and more.
Yet McCarrick is only one (though certainly the most egregious by virtue of who he was until a year ago, the man who by virtue of the poep's trust in him was the most influential man about the direction of the Church in the USA) of not a few cases of enabling, protecting, covering up and rewarding pervert priests an bishops in Bergoglio's church career.
Bergoglio's sordid record of dealing with clerical sex abuse and sins against chastity - which are quite well-documented but deliberately downplayed if not ignored in the media - is the second monstrous elephant rampaging through this coming 'summit' - which everyone will feign not to see, as those most concerned have managed not to see so far - the first elephant being the pink elephant of homosexuality in the clergy and episcopacy, the word that no one dares to say and the reality that no one dares to acknowledge in this Pontificate.
Would it be an act of disrespect for one of the 'summit' participants to rise and ask this pope directly if he should be exempted from the reckoning everyone is demanding of complicit bishops when he had his own McCarricks in Argentina and even now, one in a 'spiritual son' whom he rescued from local disgrace over financial and sexual misdeeds to install in a specially created and sensitive post at the Vatican?
Not that this summit is expected to move against any bishop at all, but it simply is not fair and most definitely wrong for everyone to make a big deal out of crying for the resignation and punishment of 'all those in the Curia and the US episcopate who chose to do nothing about McCarrick since 2001', while ignoring the man who chose to lionize McCarrick for five years and use him for his purposes because he didn't think his dalliances with non-minors was important at all! If other guilty parties are to be punished, what about the guiltiest of them all?
In short, if anyone naively expects the Vatican to take further action on cleaning up the McCarrick mess, forget it! Can't be done without necessarily highlighting the fact that the biggest mess in that shithouse was made by no less than the pooper pope. Which was, I think, the main point of Mons. Viganò's testimonies.
In case you have not seen them before,do not fail to bookmark two priceless McCarrick videos that Steve Skojec re-presents (presents again) to his readers in 1Peter5:
https://onepeterfive.com/two-critical-lessons-from-mister-mccarrick/
For months I have noticed the ad for 'The Mike Church Show' at the top of the canon212.com homepage without taking the initiative to check out what the show is all about. I figured the host must be an orthodox Catholic, for which I am thankful. But that was it.
Today, however, a canon212.com headline - which for once is not far out - did lead me to check out Mr. Church on the following:
MIKE CHURCH ON MARTEL’S VATICAN-BACKED ‘EXPOSE’: THE SHOCKINGLY CLEAR MESSAGE IS THIS:
FRANCIS IS GOING TO NORMALIZE HOMOSEXUALITY AND GAY CULTURE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, FIND ANOTHER “RELIGION”
And this is what it led me to:
Francis via Martel:
Hey Catholic Faithful, Go Homo Or Go Home!
February 19, 2019
The much anticipated book on the homosexual invasion and occupation of The Vatican by Frederic Martel is out and the National Catholic Register has a lengthy preview that consists of excerpts from the book. and boy howdy! is this thing a rainbow firecracker but NOT like most think.
Martel’s preview basically tells the story of the heroic Pope Francis, trying to call out the morally “rigid” conservatives that he personally knows to be homosexuals! That’s right, when the Holy Father rails against “rigidity”, he, according to Martel, is not railing against home-schooling Latin Mass attendees, oh no sir, he is railing against the “conservatives” who outwardly appear to be defenders of dogmatic Catholic Church teaching on morals, but are closeted homosexuals and therefore hypocrites.
In this brief excerpt Martel uses the terms “homophobia, homophobic” 6 times yet he clearly doesn’t know what a homophobe is. The shockingly clear message in reading this excerpt is this: Pope Francis is going to normalize homosexuality and gay culture in The Catholic Church and if you don’t like it, find another “religion”. Don’t believe me? Sample this:
Have the pope and his liberal theologians realized that priestly celibacy was a failure?
Did they guess that the battle launched against gays by the Vatican of John Paul II and Benedict XVI was a war that was lost in advance?
One that would be turned against the Church as soon as everyone became aware of its real motivations: a war waged between closeted homosexuals and gays who had come out! War between gays, in short….
They even suggest, when questioned, that by forbidding priests to marry, the Church has become sociologically homosexual; and that by imposing a continence that is against nature, and a secretive culture, it is partly responsible for the tens of thousands of instances of sexual abuse that are undermining it from within.
They also know that sexual desire, and homosexual desire first and foremost, is one of the main engines and wellsprings of Vatican life. Francis knows that he has to move on the Church’s stance, and that he will only be able to do this at the cost of a ruthless battle against all those who use sexual morality and homophobia to conceal their own hypocrisies and double lives.
But there we have it: these secret homosexuals are in the majority, powerful and influential and, in terms of the most ‘rigid’ among them, very noisy in their homophobic utterances. Here is the pope: threatened and attacked on all sides and generally criticized, Francis is said to be ‘among the wolves’. It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens.
Got that? Cardinal’s Burke, and the other 3 that signed the Dubia are basically being called out as sodomites who have duped the brain-dead masses of “rigid-traditionalists” into thinking that, going forward, Catholicism can remain Catholic and stand against the world of sexual, moral sins.
Put another way, now that Cardinals are getting the rainbow hits in secret, its ok for the laity to practice them in public - i.e. go homo or go home.
[Well, it's still quite a way to connect the dots leading to eventual 'normalization' of homosexuality (and all its many variants of sexual deviancy) by the church of Bergoglio. But remember that overnight, he unilaterally changed the Catechism to declare the death penalty unacceptable under any circumstances. How much easier it would be to change what the Catechism says about homosexuality and its practice!]
So, Uncle Ted has been defrocked:
Will the Big Tent abuse summit turn out
to be yet another Bergoglio circus?
by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
February 19, 2019
So Uncle Ted has been defrocked. One wonders how many times he wore the clerical frock as a symbol of his priesthood. Pray for him.
The questions we must ask now:
- Is McCarrick to be the sacrificial lamb of the upcoming meeting in Rome called by the Pope to discuss the crisis in sexual abuse by clergy, including bishops, which meeting will be led by mostly bishops?
- Will burning McCarrick at an imaginary stake be enough to slake the thirst of the liberal press?
- Will it be enough to placate the minority of bishops who take the sexual abuse seriously?
- Will it be enough to stifle discussion about the factual data that the majority of this abuse was with young boys and young men?
- Will it be enough for those who have suffered at the hands of these men for so many years, not in that terrible physical way, but in being suppressed and kept down because of refusing to deny that one of the greatest problems in the Catholic Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council has been not only the terrible predatory behavior of priests and bishops with respect to boys and seminarians and prostitutes, but also the silent complicity of those in the hierarchy who have deliberately turned a blind eye to the egregious destruction of Catholic faith, worship and morality of the past fifty years.
That these people have no shame and are tone-deaf to reality is recently proven by the naming of Cardinal Kevin Farrell as the Camerlengo of the Papal Household, a most important position indeed. - That this man, who lived with McCarrick while the latter was Archbishop of Washington, D.C. and Farrell was an Auxiliary Bishop, and who claims that he did not know anything about the then Cardinal’s history on the Jersey Shore and beyond, would be named by the Pope to this sensitive and central office shows either the total insensitivity of this Pontiff to reality, or a terrible blindness, possibly deliberate, to the cause of the deep corruption in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, beginning with its center in Rome.
The sexual corruption of the Curial clergy is a major cause of the parlous situation of the Church today. But this does not get at the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is the deliberate attack on the doctrinal and liturgical Tradition (the two go hand in hand) of the Catholic Church.
- There is no end to the silly statements of the German bishops who want to out-Zwingli Zwingli but without his moral fiber.
- The fact is that without the church tax in Germany these poseurs would be figuring out how to pay for their next meal.
- One wishes that the Lutherans in Germany would chastise the Catholic bishops for their deep misunderstanding of the Christian faith and their deep silliness in their statements about the faith.
- But classical Protestantism is moribund, and how could it not be, for it is the source of the grey secularism that has destroyed the Christian heart of Europe.
The irony of ironies is that Pope Francis just approved the canonization of John Henry Newman. [Did he have a choice? If the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood declare to him that all the steps and conditions required for canonization have been met, what excuse would he have not to approve it? Make no mistake: He sees the 'protective' camouflage it could give him in repelling the criticisms of orthodox Catholics to whom Newman is a great hero as well as a saint, and no doubt, he is already planning how to make the most - i.e., misrepresent for his purposes - everything Newman wrote about the 'development of doctrine', forone ].
We should take care that Pope Francis does not read any of Newman’s important writings, especially those on the Development of Doctrine. [There you go! I bet his brain trust has already pre-digested for him what he should take from Newman's writings that he could exploit in any way for his purposes.] Newman would not be a support for the footnotes in Amoris Laetitia nor of the Pope’s attempt to change the Church’s clear teaching on the authority of the State to inflict capital punishment.
But one must keep the Pope above all from reading Newman’s Biglietto Speech that he gave upon the receiving of his Cardinal’s biretta in Rome. [But why should he not read the Biglietto Speech???] For it is there, in clear terms, that Newman predicts the terrible debacle of the post-Vatican II Church. I have quoted this before and will continue to do so, because its prescience is clear and relates directly to what has happened in the Catholic Church this past half century. [So Fr Cipolla does not want Bergoglio to know about Newman's prescient words? Why not? Does he fear it will make Bergoglio withdraw his approval for Newman's canonization? On what ground???]
And, I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion.
Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth; and on this great occasion, when it is natural for one who is in my place to look out upon the world, and upon Holy Church as in it, and upon her future, it will not, I hope, be considered out of place, if I renew the protest against it which I have made so often….
Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily.
- It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true.
- It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion.
- Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy...
The deep worm that eats away at the Tradition of the Church and that has brought us to this situation is the destruction of the Liturgy, the way one worships God.
- The quagmire in which we find ourselves is the product of the imposition on the Church of a liturgy that is deeply anti-Traditional and therefore Faith dissolving.
- This has nothing to do with being conservative, nothing to do with where one stands on secular issues.
- It has everything to do with understanding what it means to be in the realm, the being, the essence of Catholic Tradition, a Tradition that has little to do with traditionalism and everything to do with what has been handed down for two thousand years from the Apostles.
Most bishops, who are positivists, cannot admit this, for if they did they would dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West. They are mostly a combination of positivism and super-Ultra-Montanism. They live in the absurd world of Alice in Wonderland and in the world of the Church as the Big Tent, which from the outside can look like a circus.
For at least half a century, astronomers have been sending out into outer space the number pi, for the assumption is that any civilization would recognize this deeply fundamental number/relation, the mutual recognition of shared objective reality.
- Much of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church today does not care about deep objectivity in any sense, and instead wallows in an odoriferous swamp of subjectivity, anti-Traditional worship of God, and morality that has its basis in their adulation of a secularism that allows them to do their own thing while still using the cover of their priesthood, and that allows them to deny the very essence of the Christian faith in the person of Jesus Christ — all the while claiming that they are organs of Catholic orthodoxy.
Enough already! Basta!
[BUT] There seems to be not enough Traditional (which has nothing to do with being conservative in a political sense) Catholics right now who will challenge the ridiculous, illogical and un[anti]-Traditional state of those entrusted by God with leading the Church.
Is it an exaggeration to compare our situation to that of Athanasius in his battle against the lie of Arianism? Perhaps. But who will rise to be the champion, or more likely, the champions, against the shallow and secular distortion of Christianity that is the plague that afflicts us all today?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/02/2019 06:42] |