June/July 2006

Homosexual and Paedophile Clergy

~ Liberal Catholicism's Gift to the Church ~

- PART I -

THE EDITOR

For God's sake, why do you damnable sodomites pursue

the heights of ecclesiastical dignity with such fiery ambition

- St. Peter Damian, 1049

How much filth there is in the Church, even among those who,

by virtue of their priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Christ!

- Cardinal Ratzinger, 2005

I hate to confirm that Monty Python caricature of culturally-challenged Australian males named "Bruce", but I must confess to reading the daily paper always from back to front. I'm such a philistine, in fact, that not even front page photos of a head-cracking traditionalist Pope madly defrocking Curial Masons and hanging their aprons from the papal balcony could alter that practice of a lifetime.

Still, not only are there worse addictions and worse ways to start the day than with the sports pages, it also has its advantages, since they often throw up striking parallels to the Catholic crisis of our day.

A few months back, for instance, a major kerfuffle in the English press about soccer's unfathomable offside rule reflected something of the dissatisfaction voiced by many faithful Catholics over the Vatican's recent Instruction on the criteria for discerning whether to admit those with "homosexual tendencies" to seminaries and Holy Orders.

Liberal fudge

The offside law used to be straightforward and understood by everyone. When the ball was played through and any attacking player was standing offside (i.e. behind the defensive line), he was given offside.

The new law, on the contrary, confuses everyone - managers, players, spectators and the referees themselves. Why? Because a player in an offside position today might not, in fact, be offside at all: if he is "inactive", "not interfering" with play and not "gaining an advantage."

Active or passive? Interfering or not interfering? Offside or onside? "I'm a premiership manager and I don't understand it," fumed the Manchester City manager after mistaken interpretations of the offside law cost his team two perfectly good goals and a crucial win. "Did the linesman explain it to me? Of course he didn't – he didn't know himself."

Even after his own team had benefited from a dubious interpretation of this law, the Liverpool manager agreed: "They need to make it simpler. A player is either offside or he is not. We should not need seven cameras and replays to judge whether someone is offside. The only thing the rule does at the moment is create problems for officials."

It all sounds so familiar. Compare the angelic simplicity and clarity of the Vatican's 1961 ban on the ordination of homosexuals with the can of worms Rome opened up last November.

Directed to religious communities by the Sacred Congregation for Religious as "a matter of public law", the 1961 document was titled Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders. It stated:

"Advancement to religious vows and ordinations should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers..."

So, according to this traditional formula and as per our soccer analogy, a candidate is either 'offside' - i.e. afflicted with the evil tendency to homosexuality or pederasty and therefore barred from advancement to religious vows and ordination - or he is not. In the normal course of events, as the title states, this can be determined by "careful selection and training." Enough said.

On the other hand, with its ominously verbose title - Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with Regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders - the 2005 Instruction is a recipe for endless fudging. A classic Modernist admixture of orthodox affirmations and liberal loopholes, it will allow heterodox clerics the figurative "seven cameras and replays" they need to find suspect candidates 'passive' (rather than 'active') and thus 'onside', when the law of '61 would have ruled them clearly 'offside' and out of the game.

Certainly, the new Instruction bans from the seminary and Holy Orders "those who practice homosexuality, show profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called 'gay culture'." It also reaffirms that "tendencies" to homosexuality are themselves "objectively disordered" and crucially emphasises the inability of homosexuals to develop that true sense of spiritual fatherhood essential to a priest. Bishops, episcopal conferences and major superiors et. al. are also exhorted to carry out a "painstaking discernment" of candidates in "concordance with the teaching of the Church" on the ministerial priesthood.

This is all to the good, albeit the bare minimum one would expect to hear.

It is all of little consequence, however, since the entire document, as flagged in the title itself, accepts that those with "homosexual tendencies" can, in fact, be admitted to the seminary and thus advance to ordination. By implication, those whose tendencies are judged as not "profoundly deep-rooted" will be given the benefit of the doubt. While in the case of a candidate "whose adolescence is not yet complete", he can proceed as long as he overcomes "transitory" tendencies "at least three years before ordination to the diaconate."

This all adds up to a subjective minefield for orthodox adjudicators working to the letter of the Instruction. (Renowned expert Father John Harvey, for example, urges not three but five years of chaste living before even admitting one who has renounced his homosexual tendencies into a seminary, let alone to ordination!)

But more than that, it is a major, fatal compromise and a glorious victory for the sodomites, their disingenuous bleating about the "injustice" of the Instruction notwithstanding. "There is clearly no absolute ban on gay men entering seminaries," one relieved cleric told the ever more homo-friendly Catholic Herald, summing up the wicked compromise that turns two millennia of Catholic wisdom and teaching on its head.

Catholic Tradition

How far Rome has strayed from true compassion: from the straight talk that once protected the faithful from duplicitous directives steeped in false-charity and soothing psychobabble.

One wonders, for instance, what St. Peter Damian would have made of this Instruction? Would he have recommended that Rome seek to accommodate the priestly aspirations of those "inclined" in any way whatsoever to what he called "the befouling cancer of sodomy"? Would he have thought it prudent for such a document to repeatedly accord these people "respect"? Would he have encouraged the Curial desire to assuage rather than admonish souls in mortal danger?

The Saint's resounding "No!" to each of these queries can be gathered from his magnificent Book of Gommorah which he addressed to Pope St. Leo IX in 1049 when homosexuality was also rife among the clergy.

On sodomites operating "under the pretext of religion", he stated that "it would be better for them to perish alone as laymen than, after changing their attire but not their disposition, to drag others with them to destruction." His summary of the physical, spiritual and intellectual devastation wrought by unspeakable homosexual acts (and the homosexual thoughts and inclinations which fuel them!) surely places Rome's fudging document in perilous persepective:

Unquestionably, this vice surpasses the enormity of all others, is impossible to compare with any other vice. Without fail it brings death to the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expells the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust… This disease erodes the foundation of faith, saps the vitality of hope, dissolves the bond of love. It makes way with justice, demolishes fortitude, removes temperance, and blunts the edge of prudence.

Naturally, Damian tempered his strong and blunt exhortation with hopeful calls to prayer and fasting as sure means to subdue the passions, and reminders of God's love and mercy as means to avoid despair: "... beware of drowning in the depths of despondency," he exhorted the sodomites. "Your heart should beat with confidence in God's love and not grow hard and impenitent, in the face of your great crime. It is not sinners, but the wicked who should despair; it is not the magnitude of one's crime, but contempt of God that dashes one's hopes."

But there was no misplaced compassion and his unsparing condemnation of the sin, its habitual perpetrators and co-operators in the crime is in perfect harmony with a litany of Saints, Popes and Councils throughout history, as documented by Atila Sinke Guimarães in his Vatican II, Homosexuality & Pedophilia. The great St. John Chrysostom, for one, explained that "A murderer only separates the soul from the body, whereas these (sodomites) destroy the soul inside the body."

"Improper leniency"

How the homosexually-compromised Western Church of today cried out for an Instruction with a few similar lines of 'tough love' for salvation's sake!

The progeny of Vatican II, however, naturally preferred the humanistic mollycoddling of psychotherapy manuals to the timeless, God-centred, strong meat of Peter Damian and like-minded saints listed by Guimarães, such as John Chrysostom, Bonaventure, Pius V, Albert the Great, Catherine of Sienna, Peter Canisius, Gregory the Great et.al., not to say the teachings of the Councils of Ancyra, Toledo, Nablus and the Third Lateran.

And crucially, of course, the Curia lacked a strong, independent Pope Saint to insist on a "zero tolerance" approach to all sodomitically-inclined seminary candidates, active or in remission, and prepared to enforce his directives with uncompromising language like this by Pope Leo in response to St. Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus:

Lest the wantonness of this foul impurity be allowed to spread unpunished, it must be repelled by proper repressive action of the Apostolic severity. And thus all those defiled in any way by the four types of filth which have been mentioned, are, in consideration of due censure, deposed by our judgment and that of the sacred canons from all ranks of the Church which is Immaculate … Should anyone dare to criticize or attack this decree bearing Apostolic sanction, let him be aware that he does so with the risk of losing his rank.

Lest it be thought that Pope Leo was only talking about sodomy as anal penetration, practitioners of which are clearly excluded by the present Vatican Instruction, it should be noted that the "four types of filth" referred to included the "lesser" degrees of vice along the path of sodomitical corruption. Damian considered that prelates tended to treat these "lesser" degrees, including solitary and mutual masturbation, with an "improper leniency" and milder penances, thereby undermining the sinner's fear of God and entrenching his vice.

The Vatican's refusal to entertain a clear and unequivocal blanket ban on the admission of homosexuals with "lesser" degrees of "homosexual tendencies" is a similar recipe for disaster. Not only does it undermine their own clear teaching on the intrinsic perversion of all such inclinations, it sends out lenient signals both to souls tempted by sodomy and to the many bent or, worse, lukewarm prelates, rectors and superiors who will interpret and apply the Instruction.

In contrast, Pope Saint Siricius (384-399) was of one mind with Pope Leo about the executive action required to save souls and protect Holy Mother Church in this matter. The norms he established for admission into the priestly state specifically prohibited those "who were formerly vessels of vice" as not being able to "receive the instruments to administer the Sacraments." Saint Pius V, Saint Pius X, and Benedict XV echoed Pope Saint Siricius.

Yet the new Vatican policy leaves the door ajar for rehabilitated sodomites and the sodomitically "inclined" to enter seminaries with a view to ordination if they can just keep a 'clean sheet' for several years!

Blurring distinctions

This complete turnaround in the age old attitude of utter revulsion towards sodomy, and subsequent determination to snuff it out at the roots, has emerged since the Council, in keeping with the false-charity, false-optimism, ambiguity and verbosity it encouraged and sustains. In this Liberal environment, even as the sodomites infiltrated and networked their way to power, it wasn't too difficult for the likes of Cardinal Basil Hume to engineer a paradigm shift: in which the ontological dignity of every soul made in the image and likeness of God became synonomous with the hitherto disparate moral dignity, which functions through our being endowed with an intellect and will whereby good can be accepted and evil rejected.

In explaining these diffences between ontological dignity and moral dignity, Guimarães makes the point that while the former clearly exists for the sodomite, the latter surely does not. He argues that seeking to attribute a moral dignity to homosexuals, by erroneously suggesting that there exists an entity called the "homosexual person", is to turn Christian anthropology on its head; making God out to be a liar in creating man with a built-in one way ticket to Hell in complete ignorance of the effect of concupiscence due to Original Sin.

In other words, as Fr. Michael McCarthy OMI wrote in our March 1996 edition, "It would be unthinkable that God would create persons to be homosexual and give them an urge which cannot be morally satisfied. Everything that God creates is good and oriented to life. God is the author of nature and nature is not divided against itself. The perversion and evil are added later from nurture (or lack of it) not nature." He goes on:

"It is difficult to discuss this subject without slipping into saying that someone 'is homosexual.' I believe that even this gives it too much dignity. We should not say that someone 'is homosexual' or say that someone 'is heterosexual' by way of comparison. The natural state is something real that God has created; the unnatural state is not real in the same way. There is such a thing as light but there is no such thing as darkness. Darkness is simply the absence of light. In the same way it is a distortion even to speak of heterosexual and homosexual. There is only the God-given normal sexuality with some individuals trapped in a sexual addiction who pervert and distort their sexual appetite to the point that it is virtually unrecognizable and a mockery of what God has created."

As set out and examined in the February 1997 Christian Order, this classic Modernist stratagem of blurring distinctions, while adopting "gay" propaganda terms like "homophobia" and "sexual orientation", was encapsulated in Basil Hume's infamous 1995 "Note on Church Teaching Concering Homosexual People."

Seeking to undermine the Vatican's unambiguous statement in its 1992 Letter to all American Bishops that the homosexual "inclination" is "an objective disorder," Hume declared: "The particular orientation or inclination of the homosexual person is not a moral failing … Being a homosexual person is, then, neither morally good nor morally bad; it is homosexual genital acts that are morally wrong."

"By reducing moral culpability only to acts," Guimarães points out, "Cardinal Hume (and the entirety of the post-conciliar Church) appeared to legitimize sinful thoughts and words. However, such concessions incur culpability with regard to the vice of homosexuality like any other vice, as Catholic doctrine has ALWAYS taught."

Corrosive middle- way

Renowned for pushing the Modernist agenda through via-media posturing,effectively what the Cardinal sought in his own jaundiced Liberal eyes was a sensible compromise on the question of 'orientation' towards sodomy; a move away from the Vatican's harsh language which he said "caused distress and anger;" a softening of distinctions; a middle-way.

As Guimarães suggests, this desire to meet homosexuals half-way, to reduce moral culpability only to acts, is based on the view that temptation in thought and word is not a sin. It is vital, therefore, to debunk once more this spurious notion, which has now gained real credence through the Vatican Instruction.

In our February 1997 number, refuting this wicked drive to legitimise sinful thoughts, Fr McCarthy recalled that while it is true in principle that only acts are sins, in the moral view thoughts are also actions, and wishing to do something sinful is the equivalent of doing it. Envy, hatred, jealousy and coveting our neighbours' goods are sins that we can commit in our innermost thoughts.

Lust is another of these sins of thought. Our Lord taught that when a man looks at a woman lustfully he has already committed adultery with her in his heart [Matt. 5:28] In the case of a man and a woman the thought he is harbouring is about actions which are natural and hence not, in the words of the Vatican, "deprived of their essential and indispensable finality." Despite the fact that these actions could be morally acceptable (within the marriage covenant) the mere harbouring of thoughts and desires is still a sin according to Our Lord.

How, Father McCarthy asks, can prelates be so insistent that the homosexuals' harbouring of thoughts and desires for actions which are always sinful is such an important distinction from the actions themselves?

He continues: "The moral theology of the Church recognises that there is a stage of thought which is called temptation which if it is not accepted by the person does not become a sin of thought. This is a grey area for anyone. It is difficult to be confident that the temptation was not accepted momentarily to become a sin of thought or desire.

"It is clear in the Church's teaching that temptations are to be fought and eliminated zealously with prayer and recourse to the means of grace. Each time we pray the Lord's Prayer we ask: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. If we give the hypothetical virtuous homosexual the benefit of the doubt and agree that his thoughts are not sins but only temptations, it is still not a basis for approval of the homosexual tendency, inclination or orientation. These temptations should be fought and rooted out before they become sins.

"If [Catholic Bishops] see temptations as a legitimate outlet for homosexual desires they have already accepted the temptation and made of it a sinful thought. This is a dead end useless distinction."

Thus, Father McCarthy notes that his own Canadian bishops, like so many other episcopates, put homosexuality on the same basis as the normal sexuality between a man and a woman and ignore the fact that "while there are many sinful thoughts and actions in the relations between men and women there are some of these thoughts and actions which are not sinful. This is because the fundamental "orientation" is God-given and it can fulfill the plan of God when it is lived out according to His law.

"In the case of homosexuality ALL the related thoughts and actions are sinful. There is no legitimate outlet for these homosexual desires. All homosexual acts, desires, and thoughts are to be rejected. There is no morally acceptable element to be found in homosexuality as in heterosexuality. Why are homosexuals to be commended for (supposedly) restraining themselves to thoughts and desires? The celibate homosexual [usually put forward in episcopal documents] has already committed sodomy or oral intercourse in his heart.

"The CDF statement that 'the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder' is being studiously ignored...," Father concluded a decade ago. "Who needs [erroneous episcopal] explanations when the CDF teaching is so much more forthright and clear?"

That forthrightness and clarity, however, has now been further undone by Rome's 2005 fudge. The latest in a post-conciliar line of needless, corrosive qualifications of the traditional Church stance and teaching on homosexuality, the Instruction is just one more manifestation of sodomitical infiltration, networking and relentless propaganda from fellow-travelling dissidents high and low.

Celibacy red herring

And so, by sidelining sodomitical thoughts and reducing moral evil to acts alone, the hypothetically virtuous homosexual could be presented as the (middle-)way forward. Accordingly, this has become the principal mantra in the propaganda war: ad nauseam appeals to priestly celibacy as the overriding factor in determining fitness for ordination.

By arguing that homosexuals are as capable of remaining chaste as heterosexuals (demonstrably false), the sodomites and their liberal supporters have successfully insinuated into ecclesiastical discourse a 'level playing field' of hetero-homo moral equivalence.

Hence, on release of the Instruction, in which celibacy is not even discussed, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham quickly assured BBC Radio 4's Today listeners that "there is no condemnation in this document of a homosexual person," while pushing the party line: "The demands of the priesthood are on the wholehearted attempt to lead a chaste and celibate life and that's the same demand on me as it is on a homosexual person."

This reflects the Kinseyan mentality of prelates and priests everywhere, not least Edinburgh's Cardinal O'Brien who even spouts Kinsey's notoriously false statistics in declaring that "If ten per cent of men are gay, then it's a reasonable assumption that ten per cent of priests and ten per cent of bishops are gay … If they are living a celibate life then God bless the men."

The arch-dissident Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester, New York, wrote in his diocesan paper that "The fundamental concern of formation for a life of celibate chastity is for sexual maturity, not sexual orientation. … [T]o gay young men who are considering a vocation to priesthood. We try to treat all inquiries fairly. You will be no exception."

In the same vein, Bishop Joseph Adamec of Altoona-Johnstown in Pennsylvania told reporters that although some dioceses screen out candidates for the seminary because of "gay" sexual orientation, his diocese did not, since a seminarian was expected to keep his vow of celibacy after he was ordained.

Never mind that in the struggle to remain chaste in the priesthood someone afflicted with the dangerous, deep-seated psychological disorder of same-sex attraction will inherently encounter more difficulties than a normally adjusted male. And no matter that this is evidenced in Bishop Adamec's own diocese - famously rife with active homosexual clergy - and in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice study commissioned by the U.S. episcopate, which revealed abuse of teenage boys by homosexual clergy as accounting for 80-90% of all American clerical sexual abuse cases between 1950-2002.

No, we can forget all these inconvient realities because the 'chaste homosexual' line immediately circumvents pointed discussion of Natural Law and the unspeakable toll of human misery and lost and ruined souls precipitated by a certain sexual, but unmentionable, disorientation.

Instead, we're assured in not so many words, with a nod and wink, that as long as the heteros keep their hands off the girls and the homos leave the boys alone, then everything's hunky dory. I'm OK. You're OK. We're all fine.

Well, to paraphrase the late Sister Lucy of Fatima, this is denial cum disorientation of diabolic proportions! For as the definitive John Jay report confirms, placing homosexuals in seminaries and the priesthood is like putting diabetics in charge of chocolate shops and alcoholics behind bars. It is to facilitate the occasions of sin which set in train the years of homosexual depravity witnessed in the John Jay statistics.

While this is obvious to anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty, there are none so blind and intellectually dishonest as so-called Liberal Catholics who, denying the binding character of Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium, naturally tailor the Faith to the surrounding degenerate culture and their own disorders. A blindness compounded by sodomy which, according to St. Peter Damian, "extinguishes the light of the mind... [and] totally removes truth from the human mind."

Consequently, on 14 December 2005, devoid of self-knowledge, oozing self-pity and against all the available evidence, an anonymous group of 39 Italian homosexual clerics duly posted an open letter to the Vatican on the website of the Italian news agency Adista, claiming: "We don't have more problems living chastely than heterosexuals do because homosexuality is not a synonym of incontinence, nor of uncontrollable urges. We are not sick with sex and our homosexual tendency has not damaged our psychic health. … We are Catholic priests … with homosexual tendencies, and that fact has not stopped us from being good priests."

Despite their plaint of feeling like the Church's "unloved and unwanted children," however, their Liberal spirit of special pleading has in fact been woven into the Vatican Instruction - in the needless concessions and dangerous loopholes already mentioned; in the therapeutic and humanistic language sprinkled throughout; in the fact that pederasty is not even mentioned but, rather, alluded to in criminally feeble and attenuated fashion ("The negative consequences that may derive from the Ordination of persons with profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies are by no means to be ignored."); in the false-charity that avoids blunt talk of expulsion (not to say damnation) in favour of attempts to "dissuade [a homosexual seminarian], in conscience, from proceeding towards ordination."

Moreover, immediately following the passage that actually prohibits active sodomites from seminaries and Holy Orders, we find the Modernist rider: "while profoundly respecting them as persons"! This sop to the likes of the protesters above is offensive to the ears of pious Catholics who, like the Vatican of old, eschew such despicable false-compassion and false-respect for public apostates and sinners, and pray and work, rather, for their conversion.

U-turn

All these not-so-delicate footprints embedded in the Instruction lead back to the homosexual network but are also testimony to the onward march of Liberal tenets into hearts and minds everywhere. That numerous neo-conservative commentators welcomed the document - having readily bought the bogus 'chaste homosexual' mantra - only confirms this pervasive 'creeping Modernism' at every level of the Church.

In that light and bearing in mind its lengthy gestation, the Instruction never stood a chance. Instead of a quick and decisive papal fiat, we had a typically laborious postconciliar 'dialogue' that involved the usual horse-trading between neo-con and Liberal Curial officials. On its release, the Secretary of the Congregation on Catholic Education stated that it was "the result of a long process of preparation" - starting in 1996! - which involved the evaluation of various draft versions by a laundry list of Vatican dicasteries down the years.

For that very reason - sheer weight of time and consultation - ongoing predictions of a tough document reasserting the clear and uncompromising 1961 line were always utterly fanciful, despite hopeful noises emanating from Rome.

In a letter of 16 May 2002 [Prot. n. 886/02/0] to an unidentified bishop who had sought a definitive answer regarding Vatican policy on the ordination of men with homosexual tendencies, Cardinal Estevez, then Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, wrote:

This Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, conscious of the experience resulting from many instructed causes for the purpose of obtaining dispensation from the obligations that derive from Holy Ordination, and after due consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, expresses its judgment as follows:

Ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore, fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders.[Emphases added]

Addressing a group of Brazilian bishops on 5 September 2002, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed this robust line - that sexually disordered men are singularly ill-suited to the priesthood. In the speech delivered at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, John Paul naturally spoke of the need for greater care in selecting candidates who have the capacity to live celibate lives, but rather than hypothesise about 'chaste homosexuality' he called instead for the exclusion of anyone with observably deviant affections:

It would be deplorable that, by a mistaken act of tolerance, [a bishop] would ordain young men who are immature or exhibit clear signs of affective disorders, who, as is sadly known, could cause serious confusion in the consciousness of the faithful with obvious harm for the whole Church. [L'Osservatore Romano 11/9/02]

These clear signals sent effete dissidents into a tizz as they sweated on the impending Vatican directive. According to one Associated Press report, "the Rev. James Martin of the Jesuit magazine America says four Vatican sources had told him that, under John Paul, the Vatican was about to issue a decree placing severe restrictions or an outright ban on seminarians who acknowledge they are gay - even if they are celibate. The fate of that document and its exact contents are unknown."

Several years ago, Bishop Reg Cawcutt, the notorious South African sodomite, in one of his vicious rants on the St. Sebastian's Angels homosexual website [see CO, Jan. 2002], wrote that the Bishops of Los Angeles had returned from an official visit to Rome claiming that a very strong directive was in preparation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "Apparently Ratz's office was very proud of it," Cawcutt caterwauled, "and was telling all those who were visiting that the next official letter would in fact ban gays from religious orders and the priesthood."

But he added, ominously: "When the LA crew mentioned the letter to the more sympathetic Pio Laghi [the American papal nuncio], he told them not to worry, that the rest of the congregations would never allow such a letter to get through."

And so, on cue, despite persistent reports of a strong Vatican line, by late 2004, in the 17 December edition of the Los Angeles Archdiocesan publication, Tidings, John Thavis could accurately reveal that the effort to keep and enforce the 1961 ban had been rejected, and that a revised Vatican draft document would in effect allow homosexuals to be ordained as Catholic priests.

The consummate Modernist 'insider', Pio Laghi knew that, true to form, Roman neo-cons would flatter only to deceive: that the urgency of their definitive pronouncements would finally give way to a gutless, toothless, equivocal Instruction which could never escape the self-serving clutches of the deviant fifth column that now rules the ecclesiastical roost.

The Lavender Mafia

The rise of the Lavender Mafia has been dutifully recorded in numerous books, starting with The Homosexual Network by Fr. Enrique Rueda back in 1982. Today, omnipresent and omnipotent, as endlessly reported in magazines worlwide and through major exposes like Amchurch Comes Out (2002) and Good Bye Good Men (2002), the homosexuals dictate the Modernist agenda.

In our December 2005 edition, Father Mankowski explained how they have managed it. Quite simply, bishops, religious superiors and others in positions of influence are often fatally compromised by hidden personal scandal in their own lives, whether it be of an active or complicit nature. This fear of exposure is the latent powder keg that explains both the overwhelming influence of the Lavender Mafia and much of the episcopal complicity in dissent and indifference to scandal, sacrilege and perversion that we daily observe.

During the last U.S. presidential election, to take a random example, one "influential bishop" was mentioned in despatches about the pro-abort Democratic candidate John Kerry receiving sacrilegious Communions. "I know that this bishop is deeply compromised in his personal life," commented journalist Rod Dreher, "and more importantly, I know that this fact, while hidden from the public, is fairly widespread knowledge among the media and church elite. I would be shocked if the higher-ups in the Democratic Party didn't know this too. So I don't expect this bishop to offer any criticism of Kerry if asked, and in fact I would expect him to offer warm words of conciliation and 'healing.' He may mean them sincerely, or he may fear what might emerge if he took on Kerry directly on the abortion issue."

And so it goes. Who among our local readership has not wondered about the deafening silence of our homo-friendly British prelates, who never say 'We have to clean out the priesthood; we have to purge the seminaries'? Or about their toleration or tardiness in respect of priests involved in homosexual liaisons, hanging out in homosexual bars and accessing pornography? Who hasn't pondered the link between their rationalising of sex-ed for children, shelving of the Catechism and indifference to sodomy, as in Bishops Crowley and Rawsthorne attending an "anniversary" Mass for a homosexual "couple" and Cardinal O'Brien's declaration that "a gay teacher…living with a partner [is] their personal, private life. I don't see it as a problem"?

What could possibly motivate O'Brien to insist that a priest (Fr. Andy Monaghan) who refers his radio listeners to "gay" hotlines and abortion providers "is doing God's work and the Pope's"? And why did Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff, a candidate for Westminster no less, not respond to a Wales on Sunday report in which one of his priests anonymously accused him of turning a blind eye to "at least eight priests" in his diocese "who are practicing homosexuals … [including] two priests who in the past … have been convicted of importuning for immoral purposes in public toilets [and] priests who are known to frequent gay night clubs in Cardiff on Saturday nights then go and say Mass on Sundays"?

How are we to explain Cardinal Murphy O'Connor's ongoing, inexcusable indulgence of the sacrileges perpetrated by sodomite-sanctioning outfits like London's so-called Roman Catholic Gay and Lesbian Caucus [see ensuing report in this edition]? Especially in light of his tragic trail of negligence in the Michael Hill paedophile saga, as recorded in CO and elsewhere.

And why, in 2000, after so many other sexual abuse cases had rocked and shamed the Church in Scotland, did Bishop Joseph "I-am-not-bothered-by-the-sexual-orientation-of-any-priest" Devine refuse to instigate a police investigation of the depraved Fr. Jim Nicol. Then sitting in judgement on marriage annulment cases at Scotland's National Marriage Tribunal, Nicol had posted on the internet film of himself engaged in perverted sex acts with a man, as well as downloading thousands of hardcore "gay" porn images possibly involving underage participants. Police were only called in, by a frustrated lay employee, twelve months after the porn stash was discovered, by which time the pictures had been wiped from Nicol's computer. Nor did Devine move to defrock Nicol but let him remain a parish curate and informed him in writing, a year later, that if he co-operated with treatment for his "problem" he "could soon become a parish priest."

Before these endless scandals, the bewildered and disgusted British faithful righteously ask themselves: Is there more to such heinous sins of omission and commission than mere false-charity, Liberal ideology or ineptitude? And, if so, how much involves the keeping of diocesan closets, crammed with filth and complicity, firmly shut?

Deeper and darker

James Bendell, attorney for Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc., whose detailed exposés have brought down homosexual priests and bishops in the U.S., voiced his disappointment that prelates have never pursued their occasionally threatened lawsuits against RCF, as he would love to take depositions from bishops and their officials under oath.

Wouldn't we all!

How the dominos would then fall. Even as I penned these words, information conveyed in a phone call from a credible source suggested yet another ticking time bomb in the form of a homosexually active - high profile - English cleric. (Not that one more potential tabloid headline is likely to concern Shepherds so inured to public scandals of their own making.)

Since the diabolical spirit of Sodom corrupts everyone and everything it touches, the pattern is the same always and everywhere: however bad things seem on the surface, the deeper truth is always infinitely murkier still.

In a voluminous study soon to be released titled The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church, Canadian writer Randy Engels details how the highly publicised case of the "paedophile/pederast/homosexual priest Rev. Paul Shanley of the Boston Archdiocese [which later brought down Cardinal Law] clearly illustrates not only the existence of an extensive clerical homosexual underworld and overworld in the American Church today, but affords the reader an unusually penetrating glimpse into its joint-operations. The case also reveals many of the darker and more secretive elements of the homosexual underworld including drugs, prostitution, pornography, criminal conspiracy and blackmail, and how these elements eventually filter upwards to the homosexual overworld of Cardinals and bishops."

It demonstrates, she says, that Boston "like every large diocese in the nation, has a flourishing Catholic pederast/homosexual underworld - Shanley knew Pilecki who knew Ritter who knew.… and so it goes. But, more importantly, the Shanley case has an active clerical and lay overworld consisting of Cardinals, bishops, priests, lay bureaucrats and attorneys and an infinite number of other Catholics who protect the underworld either by their silence or by their overt approval. Shanley went through three Cardinals - Richard Cardinal Cushing (1944-1970); Humberto Cardinal Medeiros (1970-1983); Bernard Cardinal Law (1983- ).

"All three protected Shanley. Why? When all is said and done, the answer probably boils down to blackmail. Shanley knew too much about too many - and like many clerical homosexuals was clever enough to have kept good records as a form of 'insurance' against the day he would run into trouble with either the Church or secular law enforcement agencies. Shanley has accused Cushing of abusing him when he was a seminarian at Boston's St. John Seminary. Medeiros played a major cover-up role in the case of Father James Porter. And, as the record clearly shows, Law has not been out of Shanley's grip since he took over the Boston Archdiocese - for reasons yet to be revealed."

Meanwhile, "the American hierarchy continues to blithely tip-toe over the dead bodies of hundreds of homosexual priests who have died of AIDS or priests who have committed suicide rather than face sex abuse charges."

Lavender prelates

Amidst all that blackmail, complicity and deadly decadence, what odds a 'chaste homosexual' priest? Or, for that matter a 'chaste homosexual' prelate? Indeed, just how many episcopal sodomites remain to be 'outed'? How many smoking guns are out there in any one episcopal conference?

In 2002 the Dallas Morning News reported that at least two-thirds of the US episcopate was either complicit through cover-ups or directly involved themselves in some cases of sexual abuse or misconduct! As explained in past issues, this is largely due to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin. A prelate greatly admired by Basil Hume, Bernardin was the Godfather of the U.S. Lavender Mafia and its network of episcopal perverts, many of whom he sponsored through the ranks [cf. Bernadin's Boys, CO, Jan 2002].

In June 2005, CWNews did "a little stock-taking of those U.S. Bishops who are publicly known to be gay". The listed included retired Bishops Daniel Ryan of Springfield, IL; Tom Dupre of Springfield, MA; Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, CA; Kendrick Williams of Lexington, KY; Keith Symons of Palm Beach, FL; Lawrence Soens of Sioux City, IA; Joseph Hart of Cheyenne, WY; Andrew O'Connell of Palm Beach, FL; Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, WI; and non-retired Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, FL.

Beside almost every name, the "stock-take" adds the same observation: "Did he tell us he was gay? Did his brother bishops tell us he was gay? No. Then how did we find out? Through the offices of the civil justice system." In the case of Bishop Lynch, they found out when "The papers reported his $100,000 sexual harassment pay-off to his communications flack." And with Rembert Weakland "His lover broke the news on Good Morning America."

CWNews finally comments:

This isn't a roster of gay bishops. This isn't even a roster of gay bishops who have misbehaved. This is a list of only those gay bishops whose misbehavior has gotten them in trouble with the law - and that so deeply that their proclivities were objectively undeniable. What percentage of the total of gay bishops do they represent? I don't know and you don't know. And about the only things we do know are:

1) the bishops won't be up front with us about names or numbers;

2) their clandestine gay brethren are voting, caucusing, doing committee work, legislating, cutting deals, and deciding (among other things) whether gays should be admitted to the seminaries;

3) all bishops, gay and not, will maintain in public that there is no reason to believe a gay bishop would use his vote - on this or any issue - in any way other than to advance the good of the universal Church.

Nor is it the most shocking, headline-grabbing cases but, often, the more mundane allusions to the sodomite infiltration that ram home the endemic episcopal complicity. Like the news item concerning a priest of the Newark archdiocese, Father Robert Templeton, who told friends in mid-2005 that he was leaving the priesthood because it conflicts with his homosexual lifestyle. As CWNews pointed out, this announcement would be sad, but not particularly newsworthy, except that Father Templeton:

• Had recently been tapped by Archbishop John Myers to receive the title of Monsignor
• Was once the secretary to then-Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, and
• Was serving as executive director for the archdiocesan office of priestly personnel.