November 2012
CHRONIC CONVERGENCE
On Scandals and Mafias in Church and State
THE EDITOR
- Part III -
"It's important to realize that mafias don't kill you with lead and TNT. |
They manage, sooner or later, to murder your credibility." |
- Roberto Saviano |
Last March, during an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York made the following candid observations about the state of the Church and the hierarchy:
- "We have gotten gun-shy, in speaking with any amount of cogency on chastity and sexual morality."
- "Catholics in general got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best thing the Church can do is become more and more like everybody else."
- "[Humanae Vitae] brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the Church, that I think most of us — and I'm using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself — kind of subconsciously said, 'Whoa. We'd better never talk about that, because it's just too hot to handle'."
Having effectively summarised and confirmed our damning analysis of the ecclesiastical status quo, the Cardinal then evoked the very cowardice and worldly convergence he had just bemoaned. Addressing the episcopate's protest over Obamacare, he insisted: "We've grown hoarse saying this is not about contraception, this is about religious freedom." He might just as well have said: Look, we're gun-shy on this difficult issue because it's simply too hot to handle. And we're uncomfortable being seen as out of step and on the fringe. So we prefer to talk about 'religious freedom' instead.
Handmaids of Liberalism
Only a team of New York psychiatrists could untie that Gordian knot of duplicity and delusion! On the one hand, His Eminence clearly sees and laments the problems besetting the Church, even admitting personal culpability. On the other, he is paralysed: unable to stop the self-contradiction and inversion of Catholic priorities. But let us leave Freudian shrinks to rationalise extreme episcopal disorientation. By the grace of God we know better: that only its "diabolical" essence, so keenly sensed by Sister Lucy of Fatima, can really explain the self-deception both embodied and fostered by the Western hierarchy.
According to papal theologian Cardinal Ciappi, who read the Third Secret, this suicidal tendency driven by "apostasy" began "at the top." Presumably he was referring to Rome where "the top" of the curial apex obviously includes the sovereign pontiff. In which case Pope John unwittingly ushered in the apostasy: preferring to shelve the Secret and call an ill-advised Council instead. While Pope Paul kept the diabolic ball rolling: noting that the "smoke of Satan" had subsequently entered the Church, only to be blinded by it and repeatedly pulled back from the brink by the Holy Spirit.(1)
By that disoriented papal standard, what hope a mere Cardinal Archbishop? The personification of chummy post-conciliarism, oozing false-charity, the affable Dolan never stood a chance. Likewise the vast majority of his brethren. Their apostolic shield of prayer, poverty and mortification either lowered or long abandoned, they stand spiritually exposed as the tendrils of satanic smoke envelop and beguile them.(2)Hence their worldly (dis)orientation and the mass secularisation of Catholic hearts and minds they have induced; a manifest calamity they occasionally acknowledge only to reapply their blinkers, contradict themselves, and pursue the same failed and suicidal policies.
Like his American counterpart, Archbishop Martin of Dublin epitomises this perverse and stubborn status quo. Addressing an Irish summer school last July, His Grace noted that some priestly vocations are now "much more traditional than those who went before them." He first stated that he preferred these kinds of aspirants to trendy types and that he had "no problem with priests or seminarians who come from a solid theologically-based traditional faith background." Then he added this predictable rider: "There is however a danger that superficial attachment to the externals of tradition may well be a sign of fearfulness and flight from changed realities: and that is not exactly what we need."
Really? What if present Catholic "realities" are in fact secular counterfeits? Would not fleeing them be precisely the right course? Who is the fearful, unrealistic, disoriented party here? Ireland's Brandsma Review responded:
Perhaps the majority of today’s orthodox clerical students, far from being fearful of "changed realities" have a clearer vision of where the Church is now headed than some of those in charge of their formation. If their thinking is in line with that of Pope Benedict XVI, who cares if some of them are a bit over-concerned about liturgical niceties and the design of vestments? And who can tell whether such attachment is merely "superficial" in any given case? We have been starved of order and beauty in the liturgy for far too long.
"The most depressing part of the archbishop’s address," sighed Brandsma, was his continued pushing of the National Directory of neo-Modernist catechesis as the evangelical panacea for Ireland. They endorsed the retort of Fr Gabriel Burke, who blogged:
As John McEnroe used to say — you cannot be serious. The [national catechetical] framework actually states that Alive O is a terrific religious education programme. Good grief, any document that holds up such a failed programme cannot be taken seriously. I wonder has His Grace actually read the document; has he gone through the Alive O programme? If he has and he can still make such comments then I am afraid he is running away from reality. His Grace has stated on a number of occasions the lack of catechesis of our youth and adults. In the business world this would lead to a review of the programmes. But the Archbishop's solution is more of the same.
As noted in Part II, this "mainstream" flight from tradition and pursuit of failure owes much to bishops having defined orthodoxy downwards, so to speak. In this case His Grace not only lowered the Catholic bar but obliterated it: lauding as "excellent and stimulating" RE programmes which combine the falsification/omission of essential doctrines with pop-psychology and explicit sex-ed for infants,(3)even finding room for distinctly occult elements in Alive O.(4)And yet, incredibly, only four months earlier, in a talk delivered in March 2012, this same prelate had publicly lamented the ignorance of his flock! "The Catholic Church in Ireland must be concerned about the lack of knowledge of basic elements of the Christian faith and the nature of the Church among Catholics," he said. "This is a situation which should be a cause of concern as it can only increase from one generation to the next.
And who's fault might that be? The real "cause of concern" is being unable to distinguish ecclesiastical self-delusion and hypocrisy from the secular variety. President Obama, for one, claims to be a "committed Christian," when, as George Neumayr recently pointed out, "On multiple occasions [he] has criticized the Bible, referred to Jesus Christ as 'a' son of God (not the Son of God), dismissed St. Paul as 'obscure,' and called Abraham a nut on whom he would have called Child Services." Barack is a poster boy for Alive O.
"A cause of concern"?! His Grace is at least one generation and several heretical catechetical programmes too late. The damage is done. Episcopal hirelings have undermined their own authority. Our enemies know it and exploit the fact. As James G. Bruen Jnr recently noted apropos the American role reversal:
So the Church in America focuses not on morality but on lobbying and coalition building and lawsuits. But the Obama Administration wants to focus on contraception. Why? Because, like Archbishop Dolan, it knows Catholics are poorly catechized? Because it thinks Catholics like Father Jenkins [president of Notre Dame] don't care whether people form their consciences properly or engage in sinful activity? Because like [Larry] Lader and [Bernard] Nathanson [who successfully engineered abortion-on-demand by strategically attacking the U.S. hierarchy], it wants to drive a wedge between the laity and the bishops — even if that wedge is illusory as the bishops themselves have no coherent moral voice?
Cardinal Dolan and Archbishop Martin neatly embody our perpetual disappointment. Flashes of realism raise our hopes; self-contradiction deflates them. Just when we think the scale of the Catholic crisis has registered with neo-conservatives — whenever their words seem to betray liberal misgivings and traditional inclinations and they appear ready to change tack — they instinctively revert to "liberal-conservative" type. Indeed those like Archbishop Martin would take that label as a complimentary nod to their wise determination to avoid a "flight from changed realities"; a contemptuous phrase that once again might have tripped off Obama's forked tongue. After all, how could episcopal neocons view their support for destructive liberal "realities" as problematic when they themselves have adopted the neo-Modernist notion of "change" as the foundation of Catholic faith and life.
An evolutionary concept universally applied by Modernists and condemned by St Pius X in Pascendi, "change" is the warp and woof of modernity; the guarantee of worldly welcome and acceptance. Hence Archbishop Martin's extolling of experiential catechetics which eschews dogma as our sure and objective guide in favour of situation ethics based on subjective feelings. Similarly, it is not a "superficial attachment to the externals of tradition" that bothers him. A quintessential creature/captive of Vatican II, what His Grace fears is the ineradicable attachment to the unchanging Tradition symbolised by those externals. They affront his liberal-conservative instincts and the restless, shifting secular "reality" he has embraced — in catechetical and liturgical practice, if not always in speech.
Even the less egregious neocons are imbued with this corrosive attitude. The new Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, for example, has bravely spoken out against the dangerous absurdity of "gay" marriage and the spiritual, moral and physical dangers of homosexuality per se. Moreover, thus far neither he nor his staff have buckled under fire from the ferocious "gay" lobby and its media lackeys. He deserves praise and thanks for that rare show of apostolic conviction. However, as a hapless child of the Council, formed in its self-satsified shadow on its tradition-rotting equivocations, he undermines his own stance.
His inaugural Glasgow press conference on 24 July 2012 told the story. A Tablet reporter asked for his thoughts on Vatican II. "A wonderful event! Superb!" he replied on cue. Just as predictably, when asked by a Catholic Truth reporter if he planned to lift the restrictions on the Old Rite in Glasgow (which his disobedient predecessor had imposed despite Pope Benedict's express ruling that episcopal permission is not required to offer the Traditional Mass), "The archbishop-elect smiled but said nothing. So, it seems fair to assume," CT concluded, "that he thinks there’s nothing 'wonderful' or 'superb' about Summorum Pontificum."
There is no need to "assume" anything. Archbishop Tartaglia is known to be dismissive of the Traditional Mass. Even so, he is less robotic than most shepherds and might easily have bucked the modernistic party line by at least backing the Benedictine reform set forth in Summorum. Given his admirably low standing in media circles it would have cost him nothing. Yet although unafraid to rebuke the sodomites, when it came to the ancient liturgical bulwark "He smiled, but said nothing."
In fact, his silence speaks scandalous volumes! Above all about his refusal to assimilate the repeatedly stated view of then-Cardinal Ratzinger that "the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy." Indeed the fate of nations, he said, depends on the cultural place afforded to precise and worthy liturgy. To put this in practical terms: only the universal reintroduction of the rubrically ironclad Old Rite can eliminate the scourge of "gay" Masses so effortlessly accommodated in "pastoral practice" by the Novus Ordo; liturgical blasphemies which shore up the very sodomitical agenda Archbishop Tartaglia deplores. He cannot make that liturgical connection, however, because the theology of the Holy Mass for which the Saints and Martyrs suffered and died is passé to the "reordered" episcopal mind that we find so grimly reflected in their "reordered" churches — like the gutted cathedral Archbishop Tartaglia himself has inherited; an edifice that bore Catholic witness for generations but could not withstand the ecumenical obsessions of Thomas Cardinal Winning and Archbishop Mario Conti.
Visibly sacrificial and obstinately dogmatic, the Old Mass is a "rock of scandal" to churchmen in constant search of "common ground" with everyone but their traditional flock. To their compromised view both an anomaly and an anachronism, it rebukes the ecumenical zeitgeist for which Msgr Bugnini tailored their kaleidoscopic New Mass.And that, quite simply, is why a shepherd who actually dares to confront the corrupting secular culture ignored a pivotal query about a solemn papal directive to revive the decidedly counter-cultural worship of our Fathers. Gifted the opportunity to bear affirming witness to lex orandi lex credendi before the assembled CINOs and pagans,the neo-conservative Archbishop Tartaglia offered naught but the feeble, complicit smile of a neo-Modernist handmaid.
Comfortable bedfellows
The Archbishop's fear of breaking collegial lockstep serves to underline the cancerous convergence of hearts and minds across the episcopal spectrum. All joined at the liturgical hip and drinking the same Conciliar Kool Aid, their "conservative"-"liberal" divide has never appeared so obviously contrived. Indeed they no longer try to hide the fact. No sooner had he been elected as president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops than Archbishop Dolan dampened expectations. Taking his "conservative" credentials at face value, naive neocons cheered a changing of the liberal guard and a new orthodox direction for the discredited USCCB. The optimistic smiles soon changed to befuddled frowns:
"My major priority would be to continue with all vigor I can muster what's already in place," Archbishop Dolan said. "It's not like we're in crisis; it's not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well."
In an upbeat news conference, Archbishop Dolan said his differences with Bishop Kicanas are matters of style and not substance. He said the bishops rejected the idea that they were divided left and right, between the "social justice" and "pro-life" camps. [New York Times, 16/11/10].
Like the disgraced Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, who believes "the Church is in rude health" [Daily Telegraph 30/9/12], Cardinal Dolan fails to see the "genuine crisis" of faith decried by John Paul II and every post-conciliar pontiff. He ignores the infinite gap between Modernism (Social Gospel "justice") and Catholicism (pro-life justice) because he has bought into the compromising nostrums that Liberalism has fomented to such devastating effect throughout the Western Church. Not least through the quasi-Marxist agencies of the national Conference he now heads, as documented in last month's edition.
To gauge the extent of this right-left convergence lauded by Dolan, consider the track records of the men he praised: Cardinal George, the former president of the USCCB whom he replaced, and Bishop Kicanas of Tucson, the sitting vice-president who was odds-on favourite to win the election and perpetuate the liberal chokehold.
The courageous and highly informed Stephen Brady, who exposed so many criminally perverse prelates through his "Roman Catholic Faithful" apostolate, wrote about the former:
Francis Cardinal George of Chicago, through his "gay ministry," AGLO, continues to support sodomy and the homosexual lifestyle. I have had first-hand dealings with His Eminence and I can tell you he is a liar and has helped protect a pervert in the bishops’ ranks. [Summer 2008 RCF Newsletter]
About the latter, respected Catholic commentator Phil Lawler, who welcomed Dolan's USCCB election victory, wrote:
Years ago, while serving as a seminary rector in Chicago, [Kicanas] had approved the ordination of Daniel McCormack, who would go on to become the most notorious clerical molester in that archdiocese. [...] Bishop Kicanas defended his handling of the case, arguing that at the time he approved McCormack for ordination, he had no evidence to indicate that the young man would become a molester. But the bishop’s argument was unsatisfactory in two respects.
First, there were multiple reports that McCormack had homosexual encounters before and during his days in the seminary. Personnel files in the Chicago archdiocese have yielded abundant evidence that McCormack had a history of homosexual behavior, and some of his reported actions could easily have been classified as abusive, even if they did not involve children. It strains credulity that the seminary rector would not have recognized, at a bare minimum, that this young man had serious problems.
Second, while he acknowledged evidence of homosexual activity in McCormack’s case, Bishop Kicanas said that he concluded that activity was "experimental and developmental," and therefore not a threat to a future in priestly ministry. His argument downplayed both the moral gravity of homosexual acts and the psychological implications of a serious disorder. As rector the future bishop was worried about McCormack’s alcohol use, and rightly so. But he was apparently not worried about this seminarian’s homosexual flirtations — if, indeed, they were nothing more. Those were easily dismissed as "experimental and developmental." Other observers could not dismiss them so lightly, and so they could not accept the bishop’s argument that he was blameless.
Perhaps more importantly, Bishop Kicanas showed no indication whatsoever that he has sought to learn from what was obviously a serious mistake. To this day he argues that there was no reason to question McCormack’s fitness for the priesthood. ... [16/11/10]
Much more could be said about both these prelates, as about so many others with whom Cardinal Dolan would make common cause. But it is noteworthy that Cardinal George succeeded the homosexual predator Cardinal Bernadin and was welcomed as an allegedly "fresh start" for the dissolute Chicago archdiocese. The episcopal pervert he helped protect "by his inaction as well as actions," says Brady, was Bishop Daniel Ryan of Springfield, "Five years later public exposure and a 3 million dollar lawsuit forced the removal of Ryan who was, among other things, having sex with teenage boys."
On 13 August 2008, the Chicago Tribune also recorded that George revealed in sworn depositions related to other sexual abuses cases how he cooperated in a "a flawed and secretive system where priests and bishops employed by the [Chicago] archdiocese to this day protected their own." This included "steps, missteps and lies" that led to securing the tenure of aforementioned serial molester Fr Daniel McCormack in the years after Bishop Kicanas had ignored "allegations of misconduct" at the seminary. According to court documents "the archdiocese's vicar for priests, Rev. Edward Grace, himself a lawyer, played a role in coaching clergy to deny allegations." The Camorra would be impressed.
Cardinal Dolan might diplomatically have said next to nothing about these men whose warped faith and worldview his election as USCCB president supposedly challenged. He chose instead to thank God "for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George" and dismiss any differences with Bishop Kicanas as trifling. Worse still, he insisted that "things are going well"; a self-satisfied declaration that reflects the track record of Cardinal Dolan himself, who, like the smug Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, has form.
Up to his negligent gills in child abuse scandals during his Arundel and Brighton tenure, thirty years on Murphy O'Connor is still rationalising his catastrophic decision to appoint serial abuser Fr Michael Hill as Gatwick Airport chaplain in 1983. "It's no excuse to say we didn't realise the addictive nature of paedophilia 30 years ago," he proffered by way of excuse during his September Telegraph interview. The degenerate Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee offered the same lame defence when a 1993 lawsuit charged him with "wilfully, intentionally, wantonly and recklessly" returning prolific paedophile cleric William Effinger to parish work in 1978. "[I] followed the advice of psychologists," protested Rembert. It hardly mattered that he refused to name these alleged advisers because a prestigious group of psychologists shot down his claim. "Since the early 1970s," they stated, "all reputable psychologists have been saying that child sex abusers should not be returned to situations in which they could molest again." So much for the Cardinal's attempt to justify the unjustifiable! But like Rembert he continues to exculpate himself, assuring the Telegraph that "No bishop would have handed over a priest [back] then," putting it all down to regrettable "mistakes," and sighing: "I've paid for it." Cold Comfort Cormac might like to repeat that self-indulgent lament to victims who are still paying, in dreadful ways we cannot imagine, for his "mistakes."
As for Timothy Dolan, he did nothing to stop all manner of abuses on his Milwaukee patch. Typically, he authorised/acknowledged the Alinskyite "Common Ground" group affiliated with the subversive Industrial Areas Foundation [see "Why do Catholics Keep Funding the Radical Left," CO, Oct. 2012]. Meanwhile a former priest, Jeffrey Montoya, now an Episcopal "priest," was holding a regular Sunday service with an Episcopalian deaconess at the Order of St. Francis Convent on the southside of Milwaukee without a peep from then-Bishop Dolan. Most telling of all, he allowed his notorious "gay" predecessor Rembert Weakland, to continue presiding over confirmations, not withdrawing permission until one parish objected. And even then he continued to allow the publicly unrepentant Weakland to conduct Masses!
In 2010 Randy Engel put those decisions in dire perspective. Voicing her protest against a bronze relief commissioned by Weakland that pictured himself in the biblical scene of Jesus protecting the little children, she wrote: "Long before his exposure as a sodomite, the Archbishop was a murderer of souls with his abominable classroom 'sex education' programs for Catholic youth and adults including the porno flicks of the SAR (Sexual Attitudinal Restructuring) Program. Weakland helped destroy the innocence of countless Catholic children long before he engaged in the cover-up of clerical pederasts."
Redefining deviancy
Thankfully, Cardinal Murphy O'Connor is reaching the end of his episcopal "journey"; a slow-motion car crash that has destroyed the faith of countless diocesan passengers en route [cf. "Cormac-RENEW-Abuse," CO, Feb. 2003]. He and his protestantised peers are fading away. At the same time, they are making way for a less ideological stage of the hierarchy's "attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789."(5)Neocons badly mistake this seamless transition for a New Springtime. Ever blind to the revolutionary impetus behind episcopal smiles, orthodox soundbites and token nods to the Old Mass, they convince themselves that things are on the up. They fail to see, for example, that it is not owing to Cardinal Bernadin's deviant disciples that the image of Archbishop Weakland remains to give perpetual scandal in that deceitful bronze relief in Milwaukee's cathedral. Rather, it is thanks to the new breed of supposedly "better" bishops who don't have the spine or faith to clean house and start afresh; prelates like liberal-conservative archetype Timothy Dolan, who has learnt precisely nothing from the unspeakably corrupt and dissolute Rembert. Witness his scandalous presiding over the "Rededication Mass" of the church of St. Francis Xavier, New York City, last June.
A dissident parish run by the sort of "gay" CINOs synonymous with Weakland, sacrilegious Communions are staple fare at St Francis Xavier. "Not Archbishop Dolan! I never thought that he'd be involved with something like this," exclaimed one blogger after the ceremony appeared on YouTube. "This is very disturbing. I thought Archbishop Dolan was better than this. Scandals of this type fuel dissent and undermine confidence in the Church," posted another. A third blasted: "This amounts to great public scandal. Dolan cheered them on with full knowledge of their mission. They are not making any secret of their stance or of his knowledge of it."
Their indignant reaction only highlights the Pollyanna Syndrome: wilful neo-conservative ignorance and false-optimism that has blocked any hope of united action to hold wayward shepherds to account (via financial boycotts, for example, the only reproachful 'language' they understand). An informed blogger chimed in to explain to the rest that "St. Francis Xavier has been promoting the LGBT lifestyle openly for decades now. With just that info alone, why would Dolan preside over a Mass there? Beyond that, Dolan sat there watching and encouraging all the abuses that went on in front of him." In other words, it was simply schizoid liberal-conservative business as usual for the Cardinal, who promptly donned his "conservative" hat a few days later to "request" (not demand) that St Francis Xavier parishioners not use the parish banner in the city's pornographic Gay Pride parade, as was their outrageous custom. Naturally they went ahead and did so anyway, without the slightest fear of recrimination.
If neo-Modernists and neocons have found such congenial common ground in aberrant pastoral practice it is because bold and heretical Liberalism has absorbed cowardly and complicit Conservatism. This sinful combination, the toxic fallout from Vatican II, has twisted Christian charity and justice so far out of shape that both sides now expect us to love our homosexual neighbour for himself; not for the love of God and His laws. The ever vacillating Paul VI, on whose watch the homosexualisation of the clergy spiralled out of control, was "alarmed" by this kind of "non-Catholic thinking [prevalent] within Catholicism." Shortly before he died in 1978, he confessed to his friend Jean Guitton that he foresaw it becoming "stronger in the future" [Paul VI Secret, Desclee De Brouwer, 1979]. New Springtimers who nod in orthodox agreement but foolishly think such corrosive thinking is now on the wane might consider that it was not an outgoing über-Modernist like the late Cardinal Martini of Milan, but the world's youngest cardinal who recently suggested that the Church rethink its approach to remarried divorcees and "gay relationships."
In an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, 55, proposed that the Church consider the Orthodox Church model of tolerating divorce and a second marriage. On "gay" men in relationships he shredded the principle of non-contradiction in stating that he tried not to see them as just violating natural law but as people trying to take responsibility for each other in lasting partnerships. "We must find a way of allowing people [i.e. active sodomites] to live without going against Church teaching."
The Director of SPUC, respected pro-life veteran John Smeaton, sees this same duplicity at work in the local hierarchy. "[I]t seems obvious to me," he blogged a few years ago after a scandalous TV interview, "that Archbishop Nichols gives lip-service to the Catholic Church's teaching, while fatally undermining (as distinct from denying) the security and even the legitimacy of that teaching. The way the Archbishop has presented in a popular public forum is more than suggestive that: a) he doesn't really believe that the Church's teaching on homosexuality is true for all time b) that homosexuality is not such a big deal, and c) we should really just accept the fact that people are sexually active in all sorts of ways."(6)
Far more than "suggestive," of course, the deceitful episcopal mindset is manifest in pastoral action that corrupts the innocent. As head of the Catholic Education Service, Archbishop Nichols himself oversaw the secularisation of souls for many years. We have noted before that
His Nihil Obstat even adorns the manual accompanying A Time to Embrace, a disgusting "gay" propaganda video. Produced for Catholic schools on behalf of the Bishops Conference of England and Wales, it clearly implies that homosexual "love" between an older man and a teenage boy is morally equivalent to heterosexual love. Birmingham teens are groomed for this spurious filth through his sex-ed programme All that I Am, which calls for detailed drawings of anatomical parts and discussion of terms like "copulate" and "ejaculate" at 9 years of age! So much for the latency period and the virtues [CO, Aug-Sept, 2009 p. 78].
This is the passive-aggressive phase of the revolutionary "non-Catholic thinking" among the new generation of leaders; shepherds who embody Paul VI's "alarm" and foreboding. Hence the increased tolerance of rank perversion that has redefined the limits of sexual deviancy, now viewed as a "boundary issue" that can be amicably resolved. Even tradition-friendly neo-conservative Bishop Robert Finn of Missouri adopted this approach. A prelate closely associated with Opus Dei, on 6 September 2012 he was convicted of failing to report the heinous crimes of a priest immersed in child pornography and the sexual "grooming" of children. Randy Engel, who was decrying explicit sex-ed "grooming" in the Catholic classroom long before the full extent of homosexual infiltration and abuse surfaced, commented:
It seems that the possession of child porn by a Catholic priest is now considered by members of the Catholic hierarchy to be a “boundary issue” as are “grooming techniques” used by criminal pederasts and pedophiles to sexually seduce and abuse young and vulnerable victims. Homosexuality and lesbianism in the clerical state and religious life are already considered mere “boundary issues” by most members of the American hierarchy, so why not child porn or any pornography found in the possession of a priest or nun or brother? The term “boundary issue” within the context of clerical and religious sexual abuse is but another gross obscenity and insult inflicted upon sex abuse victims, their families and the Catholic faithful by the American bishops with either the tacit or overt approval of the Holy See. It’s time to call a halt to this accursed strategy.
Scandal of Scandals
Whether Dolan replacing Weakland, Egan and George, or George succeeding Bernadin, or Nichols replacing Murphy O'Connor, or Pell succeeding Little and Clancy, or Tartaglio following Conti, or Conti replacing Winning... they always flatter to deceive. Cardinal Dolan said it himself: the left-right episcopal divide is contrived. They're all guzzling the Kool Aid and it's collegial back-slaps and business-as-usual all over. The Great Façade of Vatican II novelty and "non-Catholic thinking" stands firm.
Until the consecration of Russia and consequent Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the belated certainty of which events Our Lord Himself confided to Sister Lucy, we can expect to endure this scandalous status quo — the "same old cabal" as one disgusted former Milwaukean put it to the present writer. It is the 'cabal within the cabal', however, that continues to drive the deconstruction and fuel the scandals.
Like the mainstreaming of criminality by the Italian Camorra, the ecclesiastical cabal known as the Lavender Mafia (LM) continues to poison Catholic truth and life out of all proportion to its numbers. One need only consider the universal application of local policies to understand the corrupting influence. Cardinal Basil Hume's sponsoring of noxious "AIDS education" in Catholic classrooms, for instance.(7)That single strike against morality, virtue and innocence by the late "gay" icon, a man who covered up sexual abuse while Abbot of Ampleforth,(8) was repeated worldwide by his "gay"-friendly episcopal partners in "pastoral" crime (like his good friend Joseph Bernadin). Add to that programme countless others, all aided and abetted by the virtual embargo on Humanae Vitae's condemnation of unnatural/sterile pseudo-sex, and the success of "gay" propaganda orchestrated by the LM and its fellow travellers high and low is hardly surprising.
As regards the current state of priestly formation, improvements have doubtless been made in some diocesan seminaries in response to the largely homosexual abuse crisis. Yet despite assurances from Rome that seminary intakes will now be carefully monitored, its fuzzy 2005 guidelines are woefully insufficient to kill the homosexual infiltration stone dead. Emerging from its lengthy curial gestation radiating a pungent scent of Lavender influence, one relieved cleric rightly informed the English CINO press upon its release, "There is clearly no absolute ban on gay men entering seminaries" [see CO, June/July 2006].
This is the bullet-proof pattern: the LM goes on and on, its ugly face or grubby fingerprints everwhere apparent but rarely challenged by the shepherds. Content to mouth the teachings of the Church while succouring active homosexuals, clerical and lay, "for pastoral reasons," they demonise their righteous critics as self-righteous and judgemental. Consequently, a politically correct readjustment of doctrine and morals to suit the world, the flesh and the devilish LM agenda has followed at the grassroots. The surreal outcome is recorded in polls of Catholic adults and school-leavers which consistently reveal a widespread, often majority acceptance of sexual perversion. We also observe it in the many bishops and clergy who protest against "gay marriage" yet remain silent on the sinful stepping-stone to that abomination: "civil unions." Rooted in human respect, that wicked silence now finds voice in the most unlikely places.
Recently, at the end of a rare Novus Ordo Requiem — i.e. one offered with God-centred reverence before a respectful congregation by a faithful priest of an exemplary parish — the present writer was stunned to discover he had unwittingly attended a celebration of "gayness." The deflating fact that the 50-year-old deceased was an active homosexual only became clear after Mass when his father, clearly a practicing Catholic, and his non-Catholic "partner" both rose to eulogise him. Buoyed by the sight of a full house gathered in a beautiful Catholic church to bury a sodomite with no penitential strings attached, the "partner" even made mention of their penchant for Gay Mardi Gras while smugly alluding (twice) to the progressive moral strides being taken by the Church. The mixed congregation beamed as one in happy agreement with nary a corrective peep (not least about repentance and Judgement) from the thoroughly orthodox celebrant.
Beyond such workaday liturgical encounters with the redefining of natural and divine law, "gay" Masses regularly conducted by radical sodomites in parish churches worldwide remain the most telling indicator. Like pro-lifers forever returning to abortuaries to pray, rescue and bear witness to the truth about life and love, we keep protesting these diabolical parodies of the Holy Sacrifice simply because we must. Mocking Almighty God, they exemplify the "kneeling before the world" that has paralysed the Church. Indeed, over and above "gay" marriage and all the shocking scandals we have documented in this series, inviting sexual deviants into the Holy of Holies is the Scandal of Scandals. The blackest of all the lengthening shadows of anti-Christ, it portends "the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place" [Matt. 24:15; Mk 13:14; Dan. 9:27, 11:31, 12:11], sounding the deathknell of local Churches and civilisation itself. For as the Holy Mass goes, so goes the Church ("the pillar and ground of the truth") — and so the world. In which case, what is the "gay" Mass outrage if not the final convergent nail in the coffin of a homosexualised Church and State; that apocalyptic sign of which Our Blessed Lord said, "He that readeth let him understand" [Mk 24:15]?
Propaganda vehicle
Far more than a nod-and-wink to secular allies, "gay" Masses are like blasphemous jewels in the crown of "gay" propaganda; a public blessing of the entertainment-media's relentless portrayal of a disease-ridden "deathstyle" as a benign lifestyle. A study released in early October by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation [GLAAD] found that there are more homosexual and lesbian characters on US network television this season than ever before. Of 97 scripted shows that are scheduled to premiere, GLAAD counted 31 regularly-appearing characters that identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, up from 19 last season and 23 two seasons ago; numbers out of all proportion to the tiny percentage of such self-identifying sexual deviants in the national population. Lacking all compassion for their benighted and suffering brethren, GLAAD hailed this glossy portrayal of tragic lives and early death as a triumph: "This year’s increase of LGBT characters on television reflects a cultural change in the way gay and lesbian people are seen in our society. More and more Americans have come to accept their LGBT family members, friends, coworkers, and peers, and as audiences tune into their favorite programs, they expect to see the same diversity of people they encounter in their daily lives."
There is no respite; no popular vehicle of innocence, goodness and truth left unreconstructed. Even the comic book superheroes of yore, who affirmed Christian morality and virtues in young hearts and minds for generations, are being re-written to instil moral degeneracy. Green Lantern, the married father of two first introduced in 1940, has just been re-launched by DC Comics as a young man with a boyfriend. "He's still the pinnacle of bravery and idealism; he's also gay," writer James Robinson told the New York Post. X-Men Comics set the trend by depicting a "gay" superhero wedding. Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Axel Alonso said, "Marvel has a long and proud tradition of reflecting the world in all its diversity, and this is just one more example of that." Marjorie Liu, an X-Men writer, told Rolling Stone she wanted to inspire others to follow their footsteps. "Here are two people, trying to live their lives — mutant and gay, black and gay — empowered in their own ways, but also fringe-dwellers," she said. "They're living life on their own terms... The message is: You can do the same thing."
The same message of moral anarchy is telegraphed to the faithful by bishops who allow radical sodomites, lesbians and even drag queens entrée to the Catholic sanctuary [cf. CO, June/July 2012 p.12]. More commonly and indirectly it is flagged by their complicit brethren who stubbornly maintain collegial "omerta" instead of breaking ranks with their errant brothers to condemn the public sacrilege out of hand. Like the ‘decent middle’ in society at large, "gay" aggression seems to have cowed lukewarm prelates into silence. As with their counterparts in the Roman curia they have abandoned their consecrated role to protect the Faith and faithful from ravening wolves, heedless of God's thunderous rebuke: "because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth" [Rev 3:16]. If they are too secularised to comprehend that Divine warning, they should recall Bonhoeffer, who truly said: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." Words far more applicable still where defence of the Holy Sacrifice and Catholic sacraments are concerned.
Perhaps they too are disgusted but think it is none of their business, or that to complain would only create a mountain out of a mole hill? Wrong on both counts. Firstly, it is their business; they are their brother's keeper. Secondly, it is not the number of Masses but the ripple effect that does the damage. It was recently pointed out that "the undermining of marriage comes not from the volume of gay marriages but from the [non-monogamous] values that would spread from them" via the education process, So it is with the Faith, which suffers greatly from the publicity generously afforded these Masses by the media. In our 24/7 information age, one regular homo-Mass-parody in any major city is more than enough to undermine the credibility of the entire Church, local and universal. Zero tolerance is the only answer.
Quite simply and obviously, to allow this absurd and aberrant "pastoral provision" for a tiny deviant clique is to aid their cause; effectively to help the media promote their vice which "surpasses the enormity of all others" [St Peter Damian]. Of course the Masses themselves are mere bait to serve that filthy and sinful end. "Some of my parishioners have been [to the Soho Masses]," recalled Fr Ray Blake of Brighton in a recent blog. "They found a lobby group for dissent against the Church's teaching 'and rather than spiritual help, a gay dating agency,' as one said."
Yet the more we reference this scandal to end all scandals, the less compelling our protests must appear, since the Vatican is not sufficiently bothered to crack the whip. We have remarked many times that Archbishop Vincent Nichols is able to dismiss effete requests from Rome to halt his Soho Masses without fear of being overruled. Now that his predecessor has retired and a red hat is up for grabs, His Grace may well change his self-interested tune to reserve his ticket to the next conclave, especially if the new head of the CDF resurrects the issue. If it takes such monstrous hypocrisy to dismantle the Soho monstrosities, so be it. But we live in hope and expectation that Rome will finally intervene to stop this scourge once and for all, not just in Westminster but worldwide; that self-identifying homosexuals desirous of living chaste Catholic lives will be directed to faithful priests and not sent to blasphemous liturgies run by "gay" radicals and dissident clerics.
Sydney's shame
Until then, the disturbing non-response allows bishops to protest their orthodoxy while allowing the Holy Sacrifice to be used as a political tool for peddling perversion. While this immediately calls to mind Soho and the highly publicised blasphemies perpetrated in San Francisco churches, the blight is far more widespread and dangerously normalised. Sydney's neo-conservative Cardinal George Pell inherited and continues to sanction a weekly "gay" Mass at St Joseph's in Newtown that has been operative for 40 years: "forty long and miserable years; untouched, unchallenged, and permitted," as Michael Voris commented last April on ChurchMilitantTV.com. (Despite regular protests outside the church and constant calls for summary action by the Cardinal, he might have added).
On his video presentation Voris notes that among the clergy who offer the grotesque liturgies in Newtown are members of The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. The present writer possesses a thick and damning dossier on this once great priestly order. Prepared over a dozen years ago by a then MSC priest and sent to the MSC Generalate in Rome, it documents the homosexualisation of the Australian province, still dying a slow death Down Under. In that clerical respect and others, Newtown is a case-study of how "gay" Masses have moved the "gay" agenda forward: acting as "official" conduits for the sexualised gospel long preached "unofficially" by Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines and priests of every stripe.(9)
Delivering his commentary outside St Joseph's church itself during a visit to Australia, Voris neatly summarises the sort of sacramental abuse and general ghastliness behind the "gay" Mass facade, and the corrupting ramifications of failing to halt them:
This blasphemy has been allowed to continue for so long, that an entire culture has grown up here, a "gay" Catholic culture. Newtown "gay" Catholics promote a "gay" Rosary riddled with homosexual "mysteries" Among their "mysteries," a celebration of what they say are the "gay" partnerships of King David and Johnathon, Ruth and Naomi, and most disgusting and offensive of all, Our Lord and Lazarus. There is also a decade dedicated to meditating on the blessings of being homosexual, as shown in the Gospel account of Our Blessed Lord encountering the two disciples on the road to Emaus.
In keeping with the degrading practice of all such groups, Voris explains that each year the Cardinal Pell-approved Newtown community participates in Sydney's pornographic Gay Mardi Gras, entering a "Catholic" float that regularly makes fun of the Pope and the Church. Money to build the float comes from a dinner-dance fund-raiser held in the crypt of St Joseph's.
"If all of this seems unbelievable to you, and it should," says Voris for the benefit of the ill-informed, "you can check it out by going to their quite public and well visited website. As horrible and amazing as this may all seem, Sydney isn't the only diocese around the world where these so-called 'gay' Masses are run, right in full view, while being just under the radar at the same time." He then turns to our local Soho "blasphemy" as another prime example, referencing the online video footage of homosexuals, transvestites and "flags and decorations celebrating homosexual sex, all over the sanctuary." Bemoaning "numerous examples of this all over the United States as well," he agrees that "This acquiescence to the homosexual juggernaut in so many parishes on the actual grounds of the church is a scandal of enormous proportions. That it is happening in various parts of the world, major metropolitan sees and large archdioceses with weekly or greater regularity, makes it even more scandalous."
Summing up the ease with which this shadow of anti-Christ was set up "in the holy place," Voris concludes:
Back in the 1980s the [American] homosexual group Dignity was officially forbidden from gathering on Church property and holding these blasphemous and sacrilegious Masses. So what many of them did was simply walk out the front door, reorganise and rename themselves, something like "The Gay Ministry," and then walk right back in the back door and resumed business as usual. Only this time they've been able to do it under cover and protection from various dioceses who insist publicly that this is a legitimate ministry to people with same-sex attraction. Meanwhile, they continue to mock the Faith in parades and marches, they hold dinner dances and fundraisers, gay-themed parties and persist in their weekly perversions of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And here in Sydney this abomination has been allowed to continue for over 40 years, which, as far as anyone can tell, makes it the oldest of its kind in the world. Forty years and counting, unchecked, of souls being led astray, the Faith being scandalised and very few seeming to care at all.
The Rembert Factor
It is tragically true. "Very few" prelates, priests or laymen care enough about the homosexualisation of the Church to speak out against it. Nor do the vast majority discern or care about its relation to liturgical and sexual abuse.(10)Many years ago, in our October 1998 edition, Margaret Joughin reflected on the apathy. Recounting the paeans of praise heaped on a sex-abuser priest by the Australian bishop who led a Pontifical Concelebrated requiem Mass in his honour (held in Melbourne during then-Archbishop Pell's tenure, I hasten to add), she truly wrote:
We are members of a Church that now lurches from one scandal to another. For we have leaders who now appear to cultivate a diabolical pride in their own folly and falsehood. But then we are a lukewarm lot who never really demanded our right to know, for instance, why the likes of Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee and so many others of his ilk are still "in good standing" in what passes for the Catholic Church today.
As we have already noted, fourteen years later the former Lavender mafioso from Milwaukee remains uncensured. To this day neither the US episcopate nor Rome are bothered about stripping Rembert of his episcopal title: the meal ticket he exploits at Catholic expense. To comprehend the enormity of that studied disregard for truth, justice, episcopal authority and the honour of Holy Mother Church, read Mrs Joughin's summary history of Weakland's contempt and corruption.(11) John Paul II refused to act despite receiving personal requests to remove him and dossiers cataloguing the incessant scandals. This emboldened Weakland to wear his dissent and thinly veiled homosexuality as badges of honour. As recently as May 2011 he boasted in a diocesan paper: "The best compliment I received, then, came from a religious superior in Rome who said: 'Rome does not know what to do with Weakland. He is a free man.' I feel I have been able to maintain my own dignity and identity through it all."
Finally exposed in 2002 as having paid off his homosexual "lover" with diocesan funds, Weakland stepped down but remains to this day "a free man." Far from being shunned, he even touted his shameless autobiography in a newspaper interview conducted in the "Archbishop Weakland Center" in Milwaukee, where surprise, surprise, he called for Church approval of homosexual "physical, genital expression." As Catholic World Report editor George Neumay commented: "An openly 'gay' bishop spouting heresy while sitting in a diocesan office still named in his honor would be amusing if it weren’t so sad and scandalous" — and if it didn't point so flagrantly to the underlying presence and power of the lavender mob.
Speaking of his own gradual awakening to the Rembert-factor and the dissolute status quo, Culture Wars editor Michael Jones recalled his attendance at the 1987 Synod on the Laity in Rome:
Rembert Weakland was the star of the Synod. There was a picture of him being passed around of him being anointed by his female liturgy director, or something like that, and all the bishops were sniggering, looking at the picture and sniggering. Well, suddenly you're thinking: maybe we have an explanation for all this inexplicable stuff. Like why is this guy promoting feminism. Well maybe it's because he's a homosexual. That's one side of the coin. You had clergy who had succumbed to this degenerate behaviour because it had been orchestrated. They were supposed to succumb. Wilhelm Reich had written a book about how you can corrupt the sexual morals of the clergy and destroy the power of the Catholic Church. And Wilhelm Reich ended up on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1970.(12)So these cultural revolutionaries knew this. The Church was totally defenceless. It was like Indians and tuberculosis. They were totally wiped out by it.
That is not to say that the entire hierarchy became howling perverts. Rather, they were and continue to be "Reiched." Morally reconditioned to "snigger" at the doctrinal, moral and liturgical degeneracy of their peers, when not turning a culpable blind eye to it, orthodox praxis has been defined downwards and the supernatural Catholic standard lowered and naturalised.
Divided and dysfunctional hierarchy
As a measure of just how low and secularised, imagine a crusader-bishop leading a pilgrimage of reparation to Rome to demand action from the curia against the "gay" Mass abomination. Would they expect a better reception and outcome than the private delegations that dutifully trooped to Rome to complain about Rembert Weakland and his ilk 20 years ago, or just the same shrugs, wringing of hands and sympathetic raising of curial eyebrows? The question answers itself and indicates the same pernicious influence of the same self-interested cabal whose smirking face Michael Jones observed at the Vatican in 1987. The larger point then as now, however, is that the telling response of the Synod Fathers to Weakland reflected the state of the Curia itself.
At that time the Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal Sodano, the most powerful prelate in Rome after the Pope, was protecting Fr Marcial Maciel, the psychopathic sexual predator and drug addict whose Legionaries of Christ took false obedience and papolatry to new heights (slavishly accepting Maciel's cultish edicts and even stating that if the Pope approved "clown Masses" they would say them!). According to Cardinal Schönborn, Sodano also hindered Cardinal Ratzinger's attempt to investigate allegations of sexual abuse of minors by the late Austrian Cardinal Groer. This gels with Sodano's dismissive statement at the papal Easter Mass in 2010 that increasing reports of sexual abuse by clergy amounted to "petty gossip." In keeping with abuse-and-cover-up bishops all over, instead of resigning and relinquishing all public ministry like Groer, "Don" Angelo continued to oversee the workings of the curia for years before finally being manoeuvred into retirement. However, the 84-year-old still retains his position as Dean of the College of Cardinals and is still covering up, responding to the Wikileaks/Gabriele scandal by stating that reports of division among cardinals in the Curia "astonished me"!
The saintly Fr John Hardon, SJ, would have dismissed Sodano's disingenuous pretence out of hand. "There are those who are in power in the Church, noted Bishops and Cardinals, not all of whom are on the side of [the Pope]," the late scholar once said. "And it's just as well that most Catholics do not know, I don't say the whole story, but even more of what is going on. I repeat, the Catholic Church is divinely instituted and divinely protected but she is, and I mean this, twenty-four years in working for the Vatican, she is a very human, human institution. Once there is conflict in the top echelons of the Church then you have a crisis, indeed. And let me tell you, almost twenty-five years in working for the Holy See; I can tell you this, pray, pray for those same two intentions, for unity and peace in the Catholic Church. There is division and the division is in some high places."
Cardinal Schönborn's righteous spat with Cardinal Sodano highlighted the very disunity Sodano denied. But also the complete madness at the top, since Schönborn himself is utterly discredited. He promotes the acceptance of homosexuals in "stable relationships"; authorised the exhibition in the cathedral museum of a work depicting the Last Supper as a homosexual orgy; overruled the decision of a Viennese parish priest to exclude an active homosexual from his parish council, forcing the priest to resign in protest; calls for Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried; holds sacrilegious discotheque and balloon Masses; authorises the annual Western Masses on the Danube island in Vienna, at which most participants sit on beer benches, eating, drinking and smoking while the rector of his cathedral offers Mass.... and so much more. Yet even as his local Church teeters on the edge of schism, prompting Pope Benedict to publicly rebuke dissident Austrian clergy, Schönborn is calling for the urgent reform of the Roman Curia!
Certainly, he has a hypocritical point. But while Schönborn is concerned about a change of structures and attitudes to suit his own twisted agenda, it is spiritual and moral reform of priestly souls that is most urgently required. This means breaking lavender tentacles that grip and manipulate prelates like himself, including many in Rome. Truly, the leadership have sunk so low that, along with liturgical and catechetical abuse, it feels like the lavender connection is one of the few bonds of ecclesiastical "unity" that remains!
Lavender networks
Only last August, Michael Voris stated that he had spoken to officials in Rome who were "deeply distressed by the far reaching and powerful influence of the homosexual network within the Church, specifically the clergy."
Polish Solidarity veteran Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski concurs, but sees the Curia itself as Homo-Network Central!
In a book-length interview with the editor of Polish journal Fronda released earlier this year, Fr Isakowicz-Zaleski claims that the Church in Poland is compromised by a "gay mafia" which "can destroy anyone who gets in its way." When asked about homosexuality in the clergy he replies: "The higher up you go, the worse it gets... it cannot be so that someone receives an important position solely because of his homosexuality." He has knowledge of one diocese where "from the bishop down to the butler, everyone working there is of such a tendency." He further states that Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul II's former private secretary and now Archbishop of Krakow, specifically requested him to avoid homosexual references in an earlier book he wrote about Communist collaboration.
Isakowicz-Zaleski also claims that during his research into the Communist-era files, he discovered a custom whereby priests were sent to Rome when the diocese "was unable to cope with the homosexuality of a priest." And he adds: "homosexual circles have always had a strong influence at the Vatican."
According to Franco Bellegrandi, ex-correspondent of L'Osservatore Romano and an honour chamberlain of Paul VI, this Vatican colonisation/influence escalated dramatically under Pope Paul. In his 1995 book Nichita Roncalli controvita di un Papa, Bellegrandi recounts the effeminisation of the papal court that he witnessed first-hand. His testimony was supported by the late Cardinal Sylvio Oddi, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, who launched the controverisal book in Milan. Said to have been a matter of common knowledge in private Milanese circles during his tenure as Archbishop, allegations of Paul's homosexuality first surfaced publicly in a 1976 interview with homosexual writer Roger Peyrefitte (Il Tempo, 4/4/76). Father Luigi Villa also attests that Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, his curial instructor/supervisor and former Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, held two binders of documents that demonstrated, unequivocally, Paul's homosexuality, and that Palazzini sent a letter providing details of his vice to the Postulator for the cause of his beatification. Together with the testimony of these credible witnesses, further strong and reinforcing circumstantial evidence accumulated over decades points to Paul's unnatural vice.(13)
Reminiscent of neo-conservative icons like the late Fr John Neuhaus who defended Marcial Maciel to the hilt, dismissing all talk of his heinous crimes, hidden life and dysfunctional priestly Order as implausible nonsense, blinkered papolators wave away the compelling case against Paul VI. As with the defenders of Maciel and other high-profile frauds and deviants, they simply do not want to know. And so they conveniently forget that "Many successful criminal prosecutions rely largely or entirely on circumstantial evidence, and civil charges are frequently based on circumstantial or indirect evidence ... [which] can have an advantage over direct evidence in that it can come from multiple sources that check and reinforce each other" [Wikipedia]. Ergo, the credible witnesses and much damning circumstantial evidence all cry out against recent reports of an impending decision to beatify Pope Paul (quite apart from all the other compelling reasons not to do so as detailed by Fr Villa in our March 2011 number). Should his canonisation be rushed through shortly thereafter, as also reported, the LM would view it as a crowning triumph to rank alongside "gay" Masses, if only because its nefarious network grew like topsy on Paul's watch.
As outlined in Part II, the American network took root in the early 1900s. Constantly grooming, recruiting and conniving, it was embedded in the ecclesiastical structure for over thirty years before it finally exploded into public view in the early 2000s.
In his December 1980 doctrinal dissertation Gay Catholic Priests: A Study of Cognitive Dissonance, American Oblate priest Fr Richard Wagner stated: "There is an informal network of gay priests operative in just about every section of the country." By 1982 it was fully operative and functioning at the highest levels of the American hierarchy, as Fr Enrique Rueda documented in his groundbreaking tome The Homosexual Network. Randy Engels has explained its fundamental workings, purpose and logic within AmChurch (the dissident "American Catholic Church"):
Networks do not come about by spontaneous combustion. They are not woven out of thin air. They are living entities that once created must be managed in order to survive or else they die. Networking is especially crucial where one of the objects is subversion as is the case with the homosexual colonization of the Roman Catholic Church. Once a priest or religious, whatever his rank, enters and attaches himself to a homosexual network it is often difficult, if not impossible, for him to free himself from it completely. As in the secular world, defection is frowned upon.
Although there are many different types of homosexual networks in AmChurch, they all have as their primary function, the provision of sexual partners for homosexual/pederast clergy in an atmosphere of relative safety from the law — both secular and ecclesiastical.
These clerical networks perform other tasks as well.They can be used as a tool for the recruitment of new members. Homosexual networks can assist in damage control when one of their members has been uncovered.
Homosexual networks can provide access to power and open the doors to advancement within AmChurch and the Vatican. Network connections can be used to get a promising homosexual seminarian into the North American College in Rome, an important stepping stone for ecclesiastical advancement. They can also place an ambitious, upward-bound homosexual cleric in a strategic position in one of the many bureaucracies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] in Washington. D.C. It is no coincidence that many homosexual bishops have strong connections to the NCCB/USCC and its successor, the USCCB.(14)
As we have seen, the influence brought to bear throughout the universal Church by these networks is manifested in countless (more or less obvious) ways:
- the compromising/dissident episcopal attitudes and actions of Sodano, Schönborn, Dolan, Nichols and all the others, right and left, that we have referenced;
- the continued protection/promotion of Lavender mafiosi such as Cardinal Wuerl and Archbishop McCarrick;(15)
- the indulgence of public perverts like Weakland even as they spit in the face of the Church that keeps them;
- officially sanctioned "gay" Masses;
- Benedict's choice of "gay"-friendly Archbishop Levada to head the CDF, a prelate known for complacent handling of clerical sexual abusers as Bishop of Portland, and for his friendly approach to sodomites as Archbishop of San Francisco;
- the shrill episcopal denial of the homosexual-sex abuse nexus that bolsters the "gay" cause: preventing public disgust at paedophilia from spilling over to homosexuality;
- Benedict's similar denial;(16)
- the first edition of the Catechism which falsely presented homosexuality as a genetic condition rather than a sinful choice;
- preferring homosexualist terms like “gay” and "sexual orientation" to plain talk of "vice" and "sodomy";
- the fudge-filled, loophole-ridden 2005 Instruction on the admission of those with "homosexual tendencies" to the seminary and to Holy Orders.(17)
Adherence to failure
And then there are the lavender giveaways that all the politically correct obfuscations cannot disguise: namely, the covering of episcopal eyes and ears to clear and present criminality years in advance of the storm, and the studied refusal to learn fundamental lessons after the storm broke.
It is largely forgotten that the bishops were warned and provided with preventative solutions nearly twenty years before the media forced clerical sexual abuse issue into the public spotlight. In 1985, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops received a report titled "The Problem of Sexual Molestations by Roman Catholic Clergy." The prophetic report described the continuing and growing problem of sexual abuse and warned that if the Church failed to take action against its predatory clergy it could face liability in excess of a billion dollars over ten years. In addition, it outlined steps that the Bishops' Conference must take to protect the Church and parishioners from the devastating effects of molesting priests and the cover-ups.
The report also cautioned the bishops to resist the practice of sanitizing or purging the secret files of potentially dangerous material regarding sexually abusive priests. It further warned that their practice of moving files containing potentially dangerous material to the Apostolic Delegate (where the files would be immune from subpoena) could ultimately destroy the immunity enjoyed by the Holy See.
None of these warning were heeded. The bishops duly ignored the report and recommendations. Instead, as one lawsuit phrased it, they "continued providing a fertile environment for molesting priests, as well as continuing a general pattern and practice for the cover-up of these acts as the Church tried to protect its credibility and reputation so as not to lose parishioners and contributions to the Church." As we now know, their thinking was even more influenced by small cliques of sexual deviants who acted like pharisaical leaven within a deeply compromised hierarchy to help facilitate its catastrophic non-response.
The insidious workings and shocking impact of this wicked leaven on the episcopal mindset is well explained in the following passage from Malachi Martin's novel Windswept House (85% of which was based on fact, he said).Conducting a papal investigation on the state of the Church in America, the character Fr Christian Gladstone discovers what a young priest describes to him as "a mutually protective system reaching all the way from O'Cleary's Chancery right up to the College of Cardinals."
Only system wasn't exactly the word for it, Chris decided. No. It was more like a shared understanding. A dirty little secret whispered just loud enough to draw those with similar interests into the circle. Just threatening enough to keep the secret safe. In a way, though, and whatever you called it, the whole setup functioned like a clerical protection racket. And in that sense, O'Reilly's description was accurate. Innocent or not, anybody who spilled the beans was almost certain to end up like Michael O'Reilly, isolated and buried under an avalanche of ruinous counteraccusations.
Those who played the game to the hilt, on the other hand, protected and promoted one another up through the ranks of the hierarchy. Nor did such preferment end with professorships at seminaries and the like. What hit Gladstone like a blow to his belly, in fact, was the credible evidence that built up in his files concerning high-ranking clergy — including auxiliary and residential bishops — who were participants in this ecclesiastical club of homosexual and pedophiliac clergy.
Gladstone was also charged with interviewing the bishops. He phrased careful questions about active clerical homosexuality, statistical and financial in nature, to find that the shepherds had fallen victim to the Social Gospel and shredded the magisterium.
There wasn't a blush or stutter in the answers the bishops gave. But neither was there much by way of traditional Roman Catholic morality. The hot headlines, bitter controversy and radical policy agenda fostered by such militant groups as Dignity and Lambda and Act Up and Queer Nation carried more weight among the American bishops than anything said two thousand years ago by St James or St Paul, much less anything written two minutes ago by the Slavic Pope or by Cardinal Reinvernunft of Rome's Congregation for the Defense of the Faith.
"It isn't really a question of a drain on our diocesan resources," one West Coast prelate lectured Chris patiently. "The problem is delicate. It requires special care. As bishops, after all, we must be pastorally sensitive to the needs of everyone."
In one form or another, that argument — the psychosexual argument, as Christian came to think of it — seemed to carry weight with a number of the bishops he interviewed. "What are we to do," ran the line, "if some of our priests are different by nature? Are we not to recognize the fact? Are we not pastors for all our priests?"
There were a few bishops who made a run at the Gospels in an attempt to excuse homosexual acts among some of the clergy under their pastoral care.
Christ, they argued, talked about visiting prisoners and about caring for the sick and aiding widows and orphans. Homosexual priests did all of that and were a caring group of clergymen. And Christ never mentioned homosexuality. It was the rare bishop who worried any longer that the actively homosexual priests under his pastoral care were in a state of serious sin. That the act of sodomising men and little boys rendered impossible the exercise of priesthood. That daily they added sin after sin of sacrilege to their lives and the lives of others.
When a few bishops did try to take corrective measures, they found themselves cut off from effective dealings with the Regional and National Conferences of Bishops; excluded from important committees; unable to get urgent petitions attended to in Rome.
Feeding the pink elephant
Similarly, in the aftermath of the crisis, what else but the malign secularising influence of an all-powerful clique can explain the stubborn adherence to failed policies? Why, for instance, has Rome acquiesced in the US episcopate's retention of the same corrupting strategies of pop psychology and associated psychobabble that fuelled the crimes in the first place? To repeat and amplify Randy Engel's response to the recent Bishop Finn case:
I suggest the American bishops had better ditch the “boundary issue” strategy which goes back to the 1990s as fast as they can. It just isn’t going to fly and the American hierarchy doesn’t need another multi-million dollar John Jay [Criminal Institute] Study to confirm this. The term “boundary issue” within the context of clerical and religious sexual abuse is but another gross obscenity and insult inflicted upon sex abuse victims, their families and the Catholic Faithful by the American bishops with either the tacit or overt approval of the Holy See. It’s time to call a halt to this accursed strategy.
Ten years ago, when the sex abuse scandals first erupted, Dr. Judith Reisman went even further.
Not content to halt obscene strategies the renowned researcher and author of Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences, called on the American bishops to take massive legal action against their "human sexuality experts" who offered them the disastrous advice that led to the crisis. She hoped that the American bishops would take the providential opportunity to expose the human sexuality fraud once and for all by proving in a court of law that "The 'human sexuality' field is not a field, the experts are not experts, the emperor [Kinsey] had no clothes and he was a bugger to boot."
To encourage them, Reisman and others submitted a paper to a select group of bishops before the 2002 crisis meeting of the episcopate in Dallas, titled, Reliance of the Catholic Church on Sexuality Advisers Whose Moral Foundation Differs Markedly From That of the Church. The Reisman paper explained to the bishops that Kinsey and his peers (whose bogus "research" underpins the "human sexuality" industry that supplies mandated training to psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counsellors, criminologists, teachers et. al.) were engaged in a grand and diabolical scheme to replace traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality with sexual libertinism. Indicative of the Church's suicidal collaboration in that project is the Sexual Attitude Reassessment [SAR] programme that Rembert Weakland and other bishops imposed on their seminarians. SAR is the product of a Kinseyan institute that produced and sold child pornography, and whose academic dean was a periodic sex partner of sexual psychopath Alfred Kinsey [see "Suing the 'Experts'," CO, Oct. 2002].
Faced with the hellish truth, Reisman hoped that the bishops would respond like true and brave shepherds. She insisted that "Catholics have to understand that all the AIDS programs, all the sex education programs, all the tolerance programmes, all the 'safe school' programmes have the same goal: recruit."
She hoped in vain. With a few honourable exceptions the bishops continued to feed the pink elephant — whose subversive presence in the room they simultaneously denied!
"Unless the homosexual tree is cut down," stated Bishop Bruskewitz, "all the draconian measures in the world taken against its fruits will not solve anything in the long run." His brethren opted instead for a politically correct, media-friendly child-protection bureaucracy destined to catch innocent priests in its draconian net and leave undisturbed the entrenched moral and doctrinal corruption that enables the Lavender Mafia to direct proceedings. (Always his own man come what may, the virile Bruskewitz also pointed out that even members of the episcopate’s National Review Board overseeing strategies to deal with sexual abuse included "ardent advocates of partial birth abortion, other abortions, human cloning, and other moral errors.")
Ignoring Bruskewitz and Reisman, the bishops also introduced "safe environment" programmes like Good Touch Bad Touch and Talking About Touching into diocesan primary schools. In other words, their response to the sexual abuse of children was more of the same sexually graphic Kinseyan images and ideas which for two generations have desensitised innocent children and "groomed" them for sexual predators. Accordingly, the programmes were welcomed by the sodomite community and its pederastic subset.
At the same time, the bishops artfully shifted the blame from themselves to everyone else, especially parents. Many dioceses were accused of approaching the issue of "safe environments" from the bias of government child protection agencies which presume that parents abuse their children. "In fact," wrote the President of the Catholic Media Coalition in an Open Letter to the American bishops, "some chancery officials have said those outside the family should teach these programs because 'parents might be abusers.' What an offensive premise!"
A convergent secular premise.
St. Sebastian's Angels
Honeycombed with homosexuals and fellow travellers planted by Cardinal Bernadin, the convergent U.S. hierarchy clearly remains irreformable of itself — too corrupt to purge itself of bad apples, as Fr. Paul Shaunessy wrote in the New Oxford Review eleven years ago. Bernadin's devastating lavender legacy manifests itself in scandal after scandal. Indeed the evasive non-response to the 2002 eruption was prefigured shortly before, by the free ride given to St. Sebastian's Angels. An internet "chatroom" for active homosexual clergy, the hardcore pornographic image on its entry page opened up to hundreds of email posts riddled with gross obscenities, pro-pederast sentiments and nude photographs of the priests and their friends. Among the 55 regular members from various countries were several priests who held positions of responsibility within the Church, including at least two who had been provincials of their religious orders. Others held chancery posts. Some members were newly ordained, others were nearing retirement age and some were responsible for vocations, freely admitting that they sought to recruit active homosexuals for the seminary. One priest who claimed he had been provincial of the Augustinian order for 8 years chatted merrily: "I left vocation work after 12 years straight (if I can use that expression). I wonder what [the Order] would have thought if they knew I was gay and encouraging men to join us?"
When the site was exposed in late 1999 by Stephen Brady of RCF, a handful of American bishops took corrective action against the offending priests in their dioceses. But neither the U.S. nuncio nor any of the five U.S. Cardinals contacted by Brady acted on the sordid information he provided. Only Cardinal George bothered to reply, to say that he wouldn’t access the site as it might be an occasion of sin (a pathetic yet predictable excuse from a man who protected the vicious sexual predator Daniel Ryan).The bishops' news service CNS did not report the site's existence until April 2000, and even then somehow managed to blame Brady! Further, it concealed the truth, offering no hint that most of the Angels endorsed and encouraged sexual relations among priests, or that many emailed pornographic photos of themselves. "The bottom line was that we did not think the story deserved a great deal of detail," rationalised CNS writer Jerry Filteau. Since nearly every diocesan newspaper in the country is reliant on CNS for their news coverage, this left Catholics in the dark about the lavender enemy within. Establishing a now familiar pattern, the secular press offered far more accurate and thorough coverage.
Meanwhile, Reg Cawcutt, Cape Town's openly "gay" auxiliary bishop and quasi-leader of the St. Sebastian's Angels, was lauded by the South African bishops as a "progressive force" in the Church and proudly retained as spokesman for their Conference. This, presumably, in grateful recognition of his unspeakably filthy and blasphemous email postings, his participation in the distribution of the nude photos, and his hateful, X-rated rants against Cardinal Ratzinger and John Paul II [see Cronies, Crooks and Crisis Popes, CO, Jan. 2002]. He was also defended by Gunther Simmermacher, the managing editor of Cape Town's archdiocesan newspaper, The Southern Cross, who found Brady's factual and dutiful reporting of Cawcutt and his depraved pals "a much greater affront to our faith than the private conduct of practicing homosexuals"!
It was Bishop Cawcutt who confirmed what we have always known: the underlying threat of blackmail that hangs over vulnerable prelates with personal "relationship" issues or other unsavoury diocesan affairs to hide. However direct, implicit or faint it may be, this threat largely explains the existence and protection of "gay" Masses despite their corrupting nature and purpose. The public scandal is judged less damaging than the possible revelation of private vice. In his email posts, Cawcutt repeatedly threatened to expose all the homosexuals in the clergy and hierarchy if Cardinal Ratzinger gave him any trouble:
"I will cause lotsa s*** for him and the Vatican. And that is a promise. MY intention would be simply to ask the question what he intends doing with those priests, bishops (possibly "like me") and cardinals (and I might as well put in popes) who are gay. That should cause s*** enough.
Throughout the barrage of worldwide publicity that heaped shame on the Church, Rome barely stirred. "I have noted, however," gloated Simmermacher, "that [Cawcutt] has not yet been transferred to the remote diocese of Sonderbiskopsfontein, as indication that Rome has found no cause for censure." It sure seemed that way. Instead of being stripped of his office and expelled from the Church, the Vatican took no disciplinary action against then 61-year-old Cawcutt. He did step down "voluntarily" but to this day remains Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Cape Town.
The non-response from HQ was typical of the gaping yawn elicited by this monumental scandal. Several priests disclosed on the site that they had not been disciplined despite their superiors' knowledge of their involvement. One young member posted a comment to say he had been called in by the diocesan authorities who "said they had no intention of respecting the RCF and actually seemed a bit embarrassed that they had even responded." The treatment of the earring-clad, sports car-driving homosexual webmaster who refused to shut down the site when ordered to do so by his bishop told the story: he was sent away to discern his future as a Catholic priest, then re-assigned to a plum diocese, finally disappearing on leave of absence after allegations of sexual misconduct with minors.
Society of St John
As a manifestation of Lavender power and the depths of "gay" depravity that both Rome and local hierarchies are prepared to tolerate, the scandal still takes some beating. Yet if the St. Sebastian's Angels was a portent of the firestorm of clerical sex abuse that erupted a few years later, it was just one of many. Stephen Brady and Roman Catholic Faithful had seen the coming storm in the earlier 1998 paedophilia case involving Father Rudy Kos in Dallas. "The Rudy Kos case said it all," Brady reflected after the St. Sebastian's Angels scandal. The Dallas diocese gave clerical faculties to a sexual predator, and then sought to divert attention from reports of his transgressions. "And the victims were treated as enemies of the Church," he recalled. "You would think some bishop somewhere would have stood up and said the cover-ups have to stop. Everyone knows the cover-ups are going on, continually. You've got to laugh or cry."
A few years later all hell broke loose as the festering criminal filth was discharged in a flood; the major cause of which criminality subsequent counter "measures" and "programmes" have failed to address, as a quick scandal-count soon reveals. In just one week last July, a CO reader documented five reports of heinous clerical sexual abuse or related scandals and/or hierarchical cover-ups in America, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and Chile. He didn't search too hard so we can be sure it was a mere sampling of what goes on under the radar, largely unreported and unnoticed. Collusion, complicity and false flags remain the order of the day, each of which factors were and are present, in spades, in case of the faux-traditionalist Society of St John [SSJ].
Since the Traditionalist world is a small one and readers are likely to encounter this wicked crew or their literature at some point, Attorney James Bendell's summary history herein is essential reading. In brief outline: Set up in the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the late 1990s, the SSJ was founded by Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity, a priest who, according to multiple witness/victim statements in several court cases, routinely slept in bed with and had sex with boys in his care, calling it spiritual guidance. Eventually and unsurprisingly, the group settled a sexual molestation case out of court and was suppressed by the Bishop of Scranton [see CO, May 2005]; a decision upheld by Rome. In response, Urritigoity and his crew simply packed their bags and moved to Latin America where they carry on to this day under a new bishop, without a Vatican peep!
Hundreds of pages of documentation related to legal action taken against the SSJ and its predatory leadership (depositions, statements, affidavits etc.) provide sickening detail of the cultish nature of the group and the moral depravity of Carlos Urritigoity and his then sidekick Fr Eric Ensey. Like the present writer, Roman authorities are fully apprised of this incriminating evidence. And yet it has permitted an Opus Dei bishop in Paraguay to welcome the SSJ into his diocese, confer the title Monsignor on its leader, put one of its priests in charge of the local seminary, and place an orphanage under its control.
Officially encouraged to indulge their sick fantasy, the SSJ continues to fool and fleece the uninformed, as epitomised by this 2006 fundraising letter:
With our canonical establishment in the Diocese of Ciudad del Este we have been sent into the vineyard. The Church has given us a command, and we are to respond with diligence. In doing so, we are working among the needy in Paraguay (and internationally) to promote the traditional Mass and sacraments in their solemn form. We are also preaching retreats and workshops which we hope to bring close to you one day.
[...] Indeed, two more men will be sent into the vineyard already as Deacons in December and, hopefully, as priests by July. This is thanks to you. It is by your support that allows us to concentrate on their priestly formation. We hope you will have the opportunity to meet them in one of their travels.
... The Church has given us a mandate. If you help us to fulfil it, there will be a true flowering of the Church and a richer heritage for the days to come.
How insidiously the lavender network develops under the beguiling cloak of tradition. The self-satisfaction oozing from this letter is even more astounding when viewed against Rome's recent defrocking of Fr Ensey. In January 2012, Dominican Father Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer who represented Ensey's victims, wrote to Fr John Horgan of Vancouver (who was supporting the SSJ) and his Archbishop: "The tribunal reached moral certitude that Ensey had indeed committed the offences of which he was accused." With Ensey set to appeal the decision, Fr Doyle added:
I realize that Ensey and his cohorts continue to insist on their innocence. They have masked themselves with a deceitful veil of traditional orthodoxy, which has proven successful in duping a number of people. Unfortunately there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Ensey’s chances of winning an appeal are about as good as that of a rabbi being elected pope.
Perhaps so. But this show of honest scrutiny is a false flag because the SSJ continues in Paraguay unhindered by Rome. Obviously, the Vatican clerics who recently confided to Michael Voris their fears about the "powerful homosexual network within the Church" are themselves stymied by that malicious force. As SSJ nemesis James Bendell confirmed to the present writer, "The lavender hold on the conciliar Church is strong." Not least in Rome, as revealed time and again by the sort of inconsistency and incoherence highlighted by the Society of St John travesty.
Breaking ranks
Although colluding in the SSJ case, most often, like bishops the world over, Rome simply does not want to know — because with knowledge comes pressure to act.(18)And while taking action adverse to the deviant interests and agendas of the Lavender Mafia would be hard enough at the best of times, it is mission impossible for convergent clerics forever seeking a false-peace with the Revolution: "an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789."
And so, ten long years after the dam of sexual abuse burst its banks, the scandalous "fruits" keep dropping off the "homosexual tree" — because our compromised leadership lacks the will, courage and capacity to cut it down. Yet while it stands, as Bishop Bruskewitz warned, no long-term solutions are possible; just ever more crocodile tears, red tape and PC jargon about "transparency" and "best practice." In the Church as in the world, the first step in rooting out the corruption of organised and protected interests is to stand up and speak out. An essential but thankless task.
As close to a collegial whistleblower as we are likely to find, in the decade leading up to his retirement last September, Bruskewitz defied this self-serving group-think subversively fostered and directed by the LM. Not only did he stand apart by adhering to papal commands to make generous provision for the Traditional Mass, he was also the only one of 195 bishops attending the June 2002 meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who dared not to sign the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Unwilling to kowtow to politically correct PR exercises and the social-engineering of his flock, he would neither call in his innocent Nebraska clergy for background checks (refusing to tar them with guilt by association), nor participate in Conference audits of his plans to implement its national guidelines on sex-abuse programmes (refusing to corrupt his innocent children with Kinseyan filth).
For those readers who missed his memorable slap to the face of insufferable bureaucrats pushing this agenda for their episcopal masters — "this hapless bench of bishops" as he called them — here is what he said in 2006 (brace yourself):
Some woman named Patricia O'Donnell Ewers, who is the chair of something called "A National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People", has said that her board "calls for strong fraternal correction of the Diocese of Lincoln." The Diocese of Lincoln has nothing to be corrected for, since the Diocese of Lincoln is and has always been in full compliance with all laws of the Catholic Church and with all civil laws... The Diocese of Lincoln does not see any reason for the existence of Ewers and her organization.
Ouch! On stilts!! Has the sea difference between true and false charity — between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Social Gospel — ever been more clearly and concisely expressed by a post-conciliar prelate? Hurt Feelings obviously rated somewhat lower than Hell on the Bishop's godly list of Things to Avoid. Perhaps that is why he never lacked (heterosexual) vocations? Why the self-fulfilling "priest shortage" never made it to the Diocese of Lincoln? ... Why Bruskewitz never got a red hat?
Shortly before his retirement he restated that neither the U.S. Bishops' Conference nor the draconian directives of its Charter had canonical authority over him or his diocese. The Nebraska exception, however, proves the complicit rule. I use "exception" advisedly, since Bishop Bruskewitz was surely one of just 6 American prelates out of nearly 300 active bishops that Fr John Hardon considered entirely faithful. Around 60 others he described as "mostly" faithful.
In other words, this saintly Jesuit and public supporter of the investigative work undertaken by Roman Catholic Faithful was saying that the vast majority of U.S. bishops are corrupt and destroying the Church. Many years later his assessment still holds, with the likes of Fr. Bob Piersruth of Minnesota free to openly advocate "gay" marriage, as he did recently before a cheering audience of 200 laymen, without fear of episcopal rebuke.
Fr Hardon often said that while the Lord promised the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church, He never promised the Church would survive in a particular country or diocese. His Vatican superiors, no less, warned him that "one diocese after another would be lost unless the laity did something" — underlining their own powerlessness before the Lavender Mafia, its liberal allies and "useful [neocon] idiots" with a stake in the Conciliar comfort zone.
For those honest enough to step out from behind the Great Façade, this is the reality obscured by all smoke-and-mirror "celebrations" of Vatican II; a bleak ecclesiastical landscape of betrayal, dissolution and decay fashioned by forty years of relentless moral and doctrinal pollution of Catholic souls by our own spiritual fathers.
Facing toxic realities
Viewed supernaturally, from God's perspective, this tragedy mirrors the contemporary Italian scene. Our ecclesiastical mafias have orchestrated their own Land of Fires: the apocalytpic wasteland created on the outskirts of Naples by the secular mafia.(19)As outlined in Part I, having trapped Italy in its interlocking criminal web, creating a stakeholder nation that has corroded the moral fibre of the people and sucked them dry of any hope of reform, the insatiable Camorra has literally poisoned its own people, turning southern Italy into a swollen-to-bursting belly of toxic waste.
"The south is flooded with trash and it seems impossible to find a solution," writes Roberto Saviano. The people are "terrorised, nervous, frightened," as much by the impotence of the state authorities and their failure to protect them as by the Camorra itself. Imaging the spiritual murder of recent generations in Catholic classrooms, kids are hired to unload drums filled with toxic waste that drivers won't touch. They have to sit on pillows to reach the brake pedals. "That stuff they make them haul, the more they breathe it in, the sooner they'll drop dead," a bar owner told Saviano. "They send them to die, not to drive."
Once, while daring to cross the Land of Fires on foot, a handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose to keep the carcinogens at bay, Saviano reflected on this deadly and desolate scene, a metaphor for the hopeless predicament he was to expose in Gomorrah [2006]:
I tried to fathom whether human feelings were able to withstand such a vast power machine, if it was possible to act in a way, in any way, that would permit me to live outside of the dynamics of power. I tormented myself trying to grasp if it was possible to try to understand, to discover, to know, without being devoured or destroyed. Or if the choice was between knowing and being compromised, or ignoring — and thus living serenely. Perhaps the only option was to forget, to not see. To listen to the official version of things, to half-listen, distractedly, and respond with nothing more than a sigh. ... or if perhaps I just had to stop dreaming .... [and] convince myself to be part of the connective fabric of my day....
How very many Catholics living among the ruins of the Desolate City of God choose to "not know" in order to live without fuss in compromised "serenity," adopting the "official [revolutionary] version of things" and becoming part of the effete "connective fabric" of post-conciliar life. Contrariwise, how very few, especially clerics, possess the faith and grace that enabled the saints and martyrs to live beyond such worldly parameters.
"They murder your credibility"
Not a religious man, Saviano himself relied on raw courage to escape his enslavement to the material powers. But as Christ taught and the Apostles discovered: the truth which sets you free can also drag you to places you would not choose to go. Thus, speaking out to break the moral paralysis of his region and nation has robbed Saviano of a normal existence. Still only 32, he is is constantly on the move, a twenty-four hour police guard flagging the Camorra death warrant issued against him for having written Gomorrah.
"At times, it has been impossibly hard... impossible," he told the American reporter E. Nina Rothe in a rare interview last January. The controlled, nomadic life to evade a bullet is a constant test. Yet far harder to endure is the systematic defamation: his portrayal by the Camorra and their friends in high places as the guilty party; the real "problem"; a traitor who has shamed the nation. This dreadful inversion of the truth — the isolating fate of all whistleblowers — is his true calvary.
It started during the largest Italian mafia trial of the last 20 years — the "Spartacus Maxi-Trial." The lawyer for two of the accused bosses — Antonio Iovine and Francesco Bidognetti — noted as part of the defense that Saviano, along with a magistrate, should be held "personally responsible for these men's conviction, because they have influenced the trial with their use of the media." Saviano describes that condemnation as a "truly dark moment" of his life. As was the time, around a year and a half ago, when then Prime Minister (and listed P2 affiliate) Silvio Berlusconi declared he had defamed Italy around the world with Gomorrah.
"It's important to realize that mafias don't kill you with lead and TNT," said Saviano. "They manage, sooner or later, to murder your credibility." They did the same to the crusading Don Peppino Diana, a priest gunned down in his parish church when Saviano was just sixteen. His violent death inspired Saviano's mission to uncover a world most prefer to leave buried under the tons of illicit garbage, trafficked drugs and dirty money at the heart of the Camorra.
"When Don Peppino was killed," he said, "within 24 hours the Camorra circulated rumours that he had been killed as a result of his affairs with women, and that he was storing guns." Similarly, until they eliminate Saviano physically, character assassination remains the weapon of choice: fired by way of countless YouTube videos posted by clueless Italian kids, the sort exploited and endangered by the Camorra in all kinds of deadly enterprises, who call him "a sewer, an assassin, a junkie, a liar who has destroyed our town."
"My culpability," counters Saviano, "was this — to have told those stories that were already there, in crime columns, newspapers, in judicial documents and in a thousand other books, but through my own style, which is non-fiction, written like a novel but with real facts. In today's world, it's not information itself that disturbs, because everything is said, everything comes and goes, it's very difficult for anything to remain secret anymore; but the real challenge lies in passing along this information to the public, making it become a subject that people talk about, discuss, repeat and want to understand better."
Quietism vs Courage
Like Roberto Saviano, Fr Isakowicz-Zaleski did not set out to write a best-seller but simply to speak truth to power, not least to lavender power; a pure intention framed in the title of his book: I Am Only Interested in the Truth. We should expect no less from a priest of Jesus Christ. Alas, unlike Fr Isakowicz-Zaleski and Bishop Bruskewitz, most prelates, clergy and religious are able to live a lie through the studious avoidance of all controversy.
A curse of our troubled times, this neo-Quietism is synonymous with the ostrich-like Opus Dei: said to be the whispering serpent behind Cardinal Burke's pathetic last minute withdrawal from Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice's 2011 London conference, lest he be seen to support such righteous episcopal critics. More generally, the mentality was epitomised several months ago by a priest-blogger who withdrew from the vital Soho Mass confrontation, saying it is now time to "leave this problem to the Lord."
Quietism is a safe road, but a low one. As Saviano truly wrote about this desire to vote with one's feet by retreating with serenity into the workaday fabric: "Withdrawal is a statement in the election of the state of things." A statement unworthy of a member of the Church Militant and one that speaks unflattering volumes at many levels of faith, mind and heart.
That is why rare clerics who elect not to hold their tongues before debilitating scandals are so precious and necessary. By giving voice to truth they give us hope and strength; saving souls, and sometimes lives. ("No priests complained so they continue..," wrote Fr Andrew Greeley about the murderous ring of Chicago sexual abusers referenced last month.) They are also courageous because they risk being crushed and defamed by a "mafia" who, as Saviano knows and Fr Isakowicz-Zaleski stated, "can destroy anyone who gets in its way."
"While bishops and priests in union with Rome have been destroying the Faith," Steve Brady once wrote, "good holy priests have been stripped of their faculties for simply defending the Faith. Most of you know of a priest who falls into this category." Indeed we do. If not one who has been stripped of his faculties, perhaps one harassed, ostracised and/or driven from a diocese or order for the "sins" of orthodoxy, defence of tradition and/or love of the Traditional Mass. Last month we referenced the workaday ordeal of Abbé Olivier Horovitz, whose traditional parish ministry saw him hounded out by the diocesan mafia.
Father Nesbella
Crossing the Lavender Mafia, however, takes bravery and consequences to another level. The method and scale of retaliation varies but it is always vicious. Sulphurous. Some clerics continue to pay for their courage into old age. One of our American readers described a typical situation: "The good retired priest here has had to petition the Vatican for funds to pay for his health care! He has Parkinsons and a number of other problems. He was one of the two priests here who gave a deposition against the diocese with regard to the homosexual priests and seminarians, so this is a way of 'punishing' him."
Others, like Fr John Nesbella, are pushed beyond breaking point and leave the priesthood. This secular news report summarises the common victimisation:
Even after a priest sexually abused him when he was in high school, John Nesbella of Lilly came back to the Church. And when Nesbella became a priest, and his strong stance against homosexuality in the priesthood drew venomous mail from his colleagues, he kept the faith. But now, at age 43 and after being banned for the past year from publicly performing any priestly duties, the outspoken and controversial Cambria County priest is taking off his collar.
John Nesbella has resigned from the priesthood.
"This is the end of a sad tale of how wicked so-called Catholic priests and bishops drove me and a few other priests out because we dared to speak up about the corrupt brotherhood of homosexuals in the priesthood," he said.
[...] "The pope has come out and said that homosexual men are not to go to seminaries, but a whole bunch of American priests don’t care what the pope says and keep ordaining them," he said.
"They are part of the Church’s sex-abuse scandal," he said.
"I come forward and say I was abused, and I say that homosexuals should not be ordained as priests, following the pope’s instructions, and I get kicked out."
Perhaps the most hurtful moment for Nesbella since he was ordained in 2002 came the following year, when he was one of three Altoona-Johnstown priests to receive hate mail from a self-described "priests federation" that demanded an end to "harassment of homosexual clergy."
"So after I’m ordained, I get this hate mail saying other priests are pro-gay and they don’t want men like me who are traditional," Nesbella said. “So this is a thread that goes back 20 or 30 years. The underlying problem is that bishops disobeyed the Church, and seminaries became filled with homosexual men. Now these men are in their 60s and are Church leaders," he said.
"They have brought ruin and chaos to the Church."
"When I went into seminary, if someone would have told me what I would find there and later inside the Church itself, I would have said they were nuts," he said. "But eventually the others drove me out of the priesthood. They didn’t want me there because I was too traditional. The way I look at it is that they got what they wanted."
His "gay"-facilitating bishop, the appalling Joseph Adamec, of course denied everything, claiming that the priest was not being punished for anti-homosexual activities. These included distributing a pamphlet that explicitly described the dangers of "gay" sex, deriding "gay" marriage, and publicly stating that the Church is covering up sex abuse including "openly homosexual seminarians, teachers and clergy," leaving "the secular court" as "our only choice."
Importantly, in line with what we have already noted about the inflammatory episcopal response to the crisis, Nesbella also dared to declare that the bishops' national program, Protecting God's Children, is not working. "It focuses on lay people, but remember, it is a priest sex-abuse scandal, not a volunteer scandal. Nothing is being done to address the main problem, which is homosexuality in the priesthood," he explained with admirable candour.
"I've learned," he once said, "that the sacred cow is homosexuality. You do not speak out against it. In this diocese, I've been harassed and threatened for discussing this problem."
Referencing the persecution of Fr Nesbella and his resignation, Mary Anne Kreitzer of Les Femmes appealed for lay action:
What the pro-abortionists and homosexual activists couldn't do, drive this good priest out, the Lavendar Mafia running the chancery accomplished. This is the legacy of evil bishops like Joseph Adamec. Father Nesbella was being persecuted in Altoona because he dared to condemn homosexual behavior. The bishop reprimanded him for distributing literature about the diseased deathstyle of sodomy. Father Nesbella was another priest who could kiss being a pastor good-bye. Maybe you criticize him for giving up. I can't. How steadfast would any of us be in his situation? We need a diocese with a bishop who offers men like Father Nesbella sanctuary.
The persecution of good priests is an on-going scandal to the Church in the United States. If you aren't angry about it why not? If you give one red cent to bishops who persecute good priests, you are part of the problem! The only thing these bishops (and their homosexual priest underlings) love is money. They use it to build or renovate mansions with climate-controlled wine coolers, $5,000 beds, put in marble fireplaces. These men see the priesthood as a career where they are CEOs with bottomless expense accounts. Stop enabling them.
Give your money to the Missionaries of Charity, a contemplative order of sisters like the Poor Clares, crisis pregnancy centers, pro-life politicians, and ministries that directly serve the poor (preferably one you have direct involvement in and know doesn't misuse the funds). If you can't give to your parish without paying the diocesan assessment, then give in-kind donations like flowers, paying the phone or electric bill.
Write to the apostolic nuncio about this shameful situation in the United States. If things don't change we will find ourselves with a higher and higher percentage of homosexual clerics running what's left of our disintegrating Church in the U.S.
Father Hoatson
Fr Robert Hoatson decided appeals to the nuncio were insufficient to tackle the endemic corruption. Like Fr Nesbella he was sexually abused by clerics at a young age. He then spent his entire life surrounded by homosexual clerical sexual abusers in the New York and Newark dioceses and within the Christian Brothers, ending up working with abuse victims. Rather than leave the priesthood, he finally filed a lawsuit against the notorious Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, who, while dealing with sex abuse cases for the episcopal Conference, promoted the ordination of homosexuals and regularly indulged his sick appetite for young male flesh. Fr Hoatson accused him of destroying his career for giving evidence on possible violations of law by clerical sexual abusers to the New York State Senate. He charged Hubbard and others, including Cardinal Edward Egan and Archbishop John Myers with having broken whistleblower and racketeering laws in their maltreatment of him and conspiratorial cover ups. Among much else, he [as plaintiff] claimed that:
79. Due to the fact that the defendants MYERS, EGAN and HUBBARD along with [Cardinal Theodore] McCarrick [of Washington, D.C.] and leaders in the [Christian] Brothers are or have been actively engaged in homosexual lifestyles, these bishops have been compromised in their positions and status as an employer by predators and pedophiles in ministry and motivated to retaliate against the plaintiff for exposing criminal acts, corruption, immorality, hypocrisy and criminal acts by predators and amongst bishops.
80. The defendants have acted to retaliate against the plaintiff’s whistleblowing and/or protected actions in an effort to protect themselves, protect their lifestyles, and protect the culture of secrecy with respect to an overwhelmingly greater proportion of homosexuals in ministry, than celibate or heterosexual priests, and ultimately to protect, enable and aid predators or pedophiles in ministry or religious life, or those who have left the church for these reasons at the expense of children, the vulnerable and/or the plaintiff.
Given the sort of episcopal collusion revealed in the ensuing account by renowned investigative journalist George Archibald, this brave attempt to expose the LM was always destined to fail. And so it did. In 2007 Fr Hoatson's sweeping lawsuit was dismissed as frivolous and his attorney admonished and fined for his trouble.
And yet, as noted in Part II, Hoatson's fundamental charges were politely repeated in the same year in the same city by Charles Molineaux, who reminded The Society of Catholic Social Scientists that "the cover-up aspect [of abuse] involved a majority of the bishops... some behaving criminally," whose "overriding policy ...was the protection of the institutional Church, its physical assets and the careers of its churchmen." That is, all the Social Gospel fruits prized by the LM and its network.
Fathers Minkler and Kunz
Perhaps the likes of Fathers Fr Isakowicz-Zaleski, Nesbella and Hoatson have got off lightly for their defiance. Other priests have paid the ultimate price; driven to suicide, or even murdered by lavender malice.
Fr John Minkler was another arch-critic of Albany's Bishop Hubbard. As a measure of Hubbard's degeneracy, he was once caught in flagrante by a policeman, in a car in a Washington Park with a young boy dressed like a girl. He was not arrested because of his position. At least one young man suicided after an affair with Hubbard, setting himself on fire. Hubbard denied charge after charge as others came forward. After 18 years of accumulating evidence of the disintegration of the Albany diocese under Hubbard, Fr Minkler, a faithful traditional priest, blew the whistle. He provided Paul Likoudis with the material for his 11-part series "Agony in Albany" that ran in The Wanderer in the early 90s.
In 1995 Minkler passed Cardinal John O'Connor, whom he knew well, a seven-page report on the homosexual infestation of Albany and the network led by Hubbard and his sidekick, Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester. He stated that actively homosexual seminarians who had been kicked out of other seminaries were readily accepted by Hubbard and ordained; some homosexual priests were "partnered" with other priests; and that diocesan clergy were regularly seen in the "gay" areas of the city. He reported Hubbard's homosexual relations and noted that, as of 1995, he was involved with two young priests to whom he (Hubbard) had given choice assignments. Minkler also included the names of priests who have contracted AIDS, and mentioned one priest arrested for homosexual activity who bragged that Hubbard wouldn't touch him because he had the goods on the Bishop.
Cardinal O'Connor is reported to have appealed to John Paul II to remove Hubbard, to no avail. Fr Minkler's courageous act of truth-telling stood in stark contradiction to such papal paralysis, which continues to let guilty bishops escape without censure. Concluding her report of the Minkler case, Randy Engels writes:
News of Minkler's report to Cardinal O'Connor did not become public until early February 2004 at which time Hubbard made an attempt to silence the priest. Hubbard had his subordinate, Father Kenneth Doyle, order Father Minkler to come to the Chancery where the priest was forced to sign an affidavit that he was not the author of the 1995 report. Bishop Hubbard was not present at the meeting. Minkler said he signed under duress and with mental reservations.
During the peak of the controversy when Father Minkler was asked to come forward with his charges against Hubbard and other diocesan officials and priests, he said that if he did, he would be a dead man. Two days after meeting with Hubbard's representative — he was.(20)
Another gravely suspicious death involved Fr. Alfred Kunz of Dane, Wisconsin, a canon lawyer recommended to Roman Catholic Faithful by Fr Hardon. He was glad to help but told RCF: "you will find no justice in the Church today." Fr. Kunz was brutally murdered in 1998 while he was helping RCF with the case of predatory homosexual Bishop Daniel Ryan. His killer has never been found.
The violent way in which Chicago's branch of the LM has protected itself puts these and similar deathly outcomes in dark perspective. In one of his non-fiction books, Furthermore! Memories of a parish Priest, released in 1999, Fr Andrew Greeley, a liberal heterosexual, wrote:
But even in Chicago, the ring of predators about whom I wrote in the paperback edition of Confession remains untouched. There is no evidence against them because no one has complained about them and none of their fellow priests have denounced them. Those who have been removed are for the most part lone offenders who lacked the skill to cover their tracks. The ring is much more clever. Perhaps they always will be. But should they slip, should they get caught, the previous scandals will seem trivial. Others like them still flourish all around the country.
... They are a dangerous group. There is reason to believe that they are responsible for at least one murder and may perhaps have been involved in the murder of the murderer. Am I afraid of them? Not particularly. They know that I have in safekeeping information which would implicate them, I am more of a threat to them dead than alive.(21)
Intense suffering
For the most part, however, priests who tackle the Lavender Mafia get the 'Saviano treatment'; they are isolated and personally discredited. In this regard, given the nature of life in community, perhaps whistleblowers in religious and priestly orders colonised by homosexuals have suffered even more intensely than their diocesan counterparts. Again, Windswept House captures something of the horrors they have witnessed and agonies endured. One of the principal characters, Dominican Father Damien Slattery, is charged with investigating the homosexuality endemic in the American Church and within his own order, including satanism among priests and nuns. One evening, upon returning to his Dominican house, he stumbles across two members of his Community with two teenagers:
Damien stared at each man in silence. There were no words to express his shock. Each face etched itself into his mind, intensified the demonic nightmare he was living. With whispers and giggles following in his wake, he backed out of the doorway and half-stumbled down the stairs to the basement. The usual rank odor from the showers made his stomach lurch, but he managed to reach his room and close the door against the world.
Awaiting him was an envelope containing a letter of exclaustration from the Master-General of the Order in Rome, counter-signed by the Father Provincial. It made "a mockery of Dominican life." The accusatory document used to justify the exclaustration, from a complicit local bishop (a composite character modelled on the likes of Bernadin and Hubble), "made a mockery of Canon Law."
[Slattery] dropped the documents onto the table. Every excruciating detail of the future that had been planned for him by his "brothers in Christ" played itself out in his mind's eye. He was not only an alien in America but an alien in the Dominican Order. He was to be left adrift outside any welcoming wall. He could search for a bishop benign enough to accept him as a priest in his diocese. He could try to explain inexplicable letters like the one attached to the exclaustration order; letters, smearing his character, and warning everyone to beware of this disturbing man, this stormy petrel. For the good of the Church, he would be met with bland refusals until, failing any acceptance by a bishop, thee would come the inevitable decree of laicization. He would be defrocked, stripped of the most basic fabric of life and told to live as a layman, to fend for himself.
[...] All at once Damien groaned aloud in his misery and, with the sheerest effort of his will, forced himself to his knees beneath the Crucifix he had hung above his bed. His face covered in his hands, he prayed to the Crucified Lord whose priest he was. Prayed for strength. For light. For help. Prayed that Love had seen his weakness, was ready to give him courage. He emptied the violence of his suffering into the sacred passion God had endured at Calvary, and endured still upon the Altar, for the salvation of all who would call upon Him.
[...] Little by little, as he tore at the demon-shroud of anger that clung to his every sense, as his soul strengthened itself in contrition and trust, Damien's prayers seemed to rise more easily to Heaven. Insensible to the passing hours, impervious to his fatigue, he knew at last what to ask for. "Dear Jesus...." He spoke to his Lord with a different sort of passion now. "Crucify my self-pity and my self-seeking ... Strengthen me for the trials to come ... In the tide of violence and cruelty and Christlessness rising in this land — in this place where there are so many victims, yet where suffering has become so sterile — make a cleansing crucible of my sufferings....."
Father Haley
Untold numbers of priests, religious and seminarians have endured and purified their sufferings in like manner these past decades. Certainly, the injustice endured by Father James Haley of the Diocese of Arlington was enough to crush any man. A case-study of everything we have covered in this series, his shocking experience both before and after his righteous whistleblowing revealed not only the diabolic disorientation of the New Springtime but its sheer inhumanity.
Recapping his reportage of the case in the ensuing account, George Archibald calls it "a soap-operatic story of immense proportions [that] was almost enough to wring all the faith out of me regarding the institutional church [sic]." Yet if the heights of clerical perversion, complicity, collusion, criminality and mendacity he recounts were not enough to destroy his faith completely, the final act of rank injustice meted out to Fr Haley would surely have finished it off.
This year, having left Fr Haley living in a desperate limbo for years, Rome accepted the decision of Bishop Paul Loverde to remove him from the priesthood, upholding an old and hackneyed accusation that he absolved a partner in sin. Used by the thoroughly corrupt and homosexualised diocese to blacken Fr Haley's name and destroy his credibility, this alleged offense was based on hearsay, never tested in a court of any kind, and is utterly rejected by Fr Haley.
Not for the first time, a whistleblowing priest who has committed no crime finds himself convicted and hung out to dry, as the Lavender Mafia sniggers all the way back to its filthy fiefdom. Yet even if Fr Haley was guilty of a grave offence, readers will wonder how he could be stripped of his priesthood while his complicit bishop and the clerical miscreants he exposed remain in good standing. That unspeakable outcome testifies to the sordid reality we have presented and analysed throughout this article. As do the following extracts from the 233 page deposition which Fr Haley was subpoenaed to give in July 2002, during a civil trial brought against the Arlington Diocese, in relation to a parish priest's affair with a married woman which the previous Bishop John Keating failed to investigate.
As explained in the ensuing article, this unavoidable deposition raised the ire of Bishop Loverde, who tried to have it legally sealed and buried. Happily, he failed. So in addition to the information set forth by Mr Archibald, we can shed further light on Fr Haley's credibility, the impossible predicament he faced in Arlington, the disreputable prelate who destroyed him, and the lavenderised Vatican that yet again sided with the bad guys to sanction yet another travesty. In sum, the extracts confirm the doctrinal, moral and spiritual bankruptcy "at the top"; the apostasy foretold in the Third Secret.
Questioned under oath about his concerns over clerical homosexuality which he had become aware of soon after his ordination for the diocese in 1987, Fr Haley spoke of a series of meetings he had with Bishop Keating:
I started to see associations between those who were exhibiting homosexual behaviors and friendships and particular friendships, support of one another and almost a defensive attitude towards anyone who might threaten them. [...]
And we had probably six or seven of those meetings where we talked at length about some of the problems and he indicated the problems from a bishop's perspective that he could not do anything about homosexual priests or their activities. Canon law limited him of this and I said, well as a canon lawyer and the head of The Canon Law Association or Society in the United States, do something about it, change the rules.
And in some of those conversations he had indicated a problem that existed even among the bishops and cardinals, naming some that surprised me, so I was becoming a lot more aware of how significant the problem was and how guarded it was.
Questioning then turned to Fr Haley's nightmare under Bishop Loverde's tenure.
Q. Was there any express or inference of any relationship between Bishop Loverde and Archbishop Cronin [who helped Loverde up the clerical ladder] of a homosexual nature?
No. But certainly there was about Bishop Loverde and his — and a Brother David Eddie who lives with him and has lived with him for more than 15 years, 18 years or something.
[...] I told Bishop Loverde, I said you forced me to live with a gay man and you didn't tell me. He said he didn't know.
Q. That being Father Erbacher?
Yes. He said that he never asks. And I said what do you mean you never ask? How can you assign two men to live together and not know or ask if one of them is gay? He said I have no right to ask. And I said you have a responsibility if you're going to place them in a living situation, which can be an incredible temptation to them. And it became apparent to me that again, more substantial information that was concurring with the stories and the rumors that I have heard from Father Erbacher and other priests in the diocese [that Loverde was a homosexual].
[...] I asked him whether there was anything wrong with homosexual priests and he kept saying that there was nothing wrong and I was floored by that. He says as long as they're not active and I was still floored. And I said will you sign your name to that there was nothing wrong with homosexuals sleeping together as long as they're chaste? I said that's the same, saying we can have priests and nuns live together because they're both chaste and there's not going to be any problems. Of course there's going to be problems. There is going to be incredible temptations, there is going to be flirting and friendships that are sexual in nature, whether they become sexual, in fact is immaterial. They are sexual in nature. They're attracted to each other. And the discipline of the church has always been to separate those who could be sexually attracted. And here he was putting homosexual men together, forcing them to live in a state, an occasion of sin. ....
[...] Again, [I was] just shocked at his apparent indifference or inactivity towards what I found horrible scandals within his diocese. And he seemed at that time to think that the only horrible scandal was that any of this become public. Not that it existed, but that anybody would find out about it.
[...] one week later I had a meeting with him in which I presented factual, self-incriminating information on Father Hamilton's completely outrageous sexual addiction. And at the end of the meeting, which was basically a slide show of the pictures of his incredible collection, the bishop told me that I had better watch out, that he — that I did not know what he was capable of doing.
Q. "He" being whom?
Him, the bishop. And one week after that I was called for a meeting at the chancery, which I had assumed would be to obtain more information about Father Hamilton. Tragically, I thought even after two previous times that the bishop would still want to know about the information that was presented, the circumstances of the people, the relationships that we saw, rather than to attack me on the credibility of evidence. [....] And he told me that on such an important day he needed these [3] witnesses and I said, oh. And we sat down, he pushed a piece of paper across the desk and I remember reading the first words. It said "I, James Haley, hereby resign my offices of parochial vicar of Saint Mary's parish." And I said what's this all about? And he says I want you to resign. And I said why in the world would I want to resign? I love the priesthood.
And he pressed the issue and I said I am not resigning. I certainly haven't done anything wrong. I said, what are you going to do about Father Hamilton? And then he took back that piece of paper, which I said are you not giving that to me? Oh, no, you can't have this, you didn't sign it. And he pushed another piece of paper that said "I hereby instruct you to get out of Saint Mary's parish by 7 o'clock this evening." Pack up your belongings and move into a hotel and basically get out of town. And I said I don't understand why is this about me? What's happening to Father Hamilton?
[...] And I said people need to know that this is going on. To which he threw another document which said if you tell anybody by any means what has happened to Father Hamilton or anybody you will be immediately suspended from the priesthood without any warning. And gave me a further document that if I said anything about any priest past, present or future in any behavior, I suppose it would include criminal behavior or child rape, that I would be suspended.
And I said you mean I'm going to get suspended if I tell the truth to anyone but you, but if I tell you the truth you don't seem to do anything about it. So he took away my faculties, he took away my ability to preach. [...] And repeatedly [I] asked him in that meeting as well in previous meetings what have I done wrong that I am being so punished?
He made a financial offer of $500 a month. And I said there's no way I can live on $500 a month, so I can't go to Denver or anywhere else like you want me to do. I am going to sit in front of the chancery on $500 a month unless you can find me a place to live for that. The meeting was left, I called my lawyer on the 25th.
Two days later he called me back in and said that he was willing to pay me $2,000 after having investigated the cost of living in Denver. And I won't say I agreed, but in obedience to the bishop, accepted what I consider completely unjust, unmerited behavior on his part towards me.
[...] How can he defend the fact that I have no faculties and I cannot preach for having done nothing wrong, but that Father Hamilton still remains a pastor and preaching and, quote, "Leading a parish in the moral life and holiness of Jesus Christ." And he repeated the line often used "You do not have any idea what I've done to Father Hamilton." To which I replied I know he's still the pastor, I know that he was not put in an inpatient facility for evaluation or treatment, I know that his faculties weren't removed or his preaching. I know now what you are capable of doing to a priest because I have the precepts of silence, I have my faculties removed and I haven't done anything wrong. So the unfair treatment of being persecuted when other priests are not continues.
[...]
Q. Where do you understand you stand right now with the bishop as to your position in the diocese?
I am an incardinated priest who has no ministerial assignment and will not have any kind of ministry within the diocese until I will submit to an inpatient evaluation at a facility chosen by him
Q For what period of time?
Indefinitely. Until such point as I would consent to that. He, quote, "In conscience cannot assign me to a parish." I am still under this penal precept of silence, I am living on a stipend that does not allow me to function. I am losing money every single moment.
[...] Again, challenging him on what he was going to do about the homosexual priests in his diocese, the significant problem that he has and voicing my frustration that he does not seem to respond to allegations or evidence or solid proof of bad behaviors of his priests. And I gave him some conjecture, I would be afraid now to come in to you and tell you that I had been raped by a fellow priest because I wouldn't want to go through the scrutiny of having my credibility attacked.
Very similar to the victims who have been abused by priests and who are afraid to come forward because high-priced lawyers hired by the church will prove that they are not the victims but the aggressors. That they have somehow done something wrong. And apparently in response to that, he called me delusional and apparently thought twice about the comment.
[...] Q. Has there been an indication as to what the bishop is looking to do with you or for you to do?
I believe that he's trying to strangle me out of the church.
[...] In one of the later meetings I reacted by saying all of this is just absolutely amazing. And he said no, what's amazing is you. You are amazing, which I found very aggressive and —
Q. Did he say that in a complimentary sense or a challenging, critical sense?
Oh, it was very critical in the sense that none of this is the problem. None of this is a problem. The only problem we have here, the only amazing thing is you, you're the only problem we have.
Father Haley was dragged into this face-off with corrupt authority because he could not live a lie. It was a confrontation he could never win yet one that had to be fought: for the sake of the Church and, ultimately, for his own reputation and sanity. Unlike Fr Minkler he didn't die in the process, at least not physically. But now that Rome has hammered the final nail into his heavy cross of injustice, so powerfully captured in the above extracts, they have truly "murdered" his credibility.
His character likewise assassinated, Roberto Saviano bears the deep scars. "These days I don't trust anyone. No one," he says. Hopefully, Fr Haley still has confidence in the loving God Whose Royal Priesthood he shared for so many years. He Who bore the heaviest burden of all: the weight of our sins, especially those of His beloved bishops and priests sunken in hypocrisy and vice unmentionable.
If Father Haley is a classic whistleblower, Bishop Loverde stands as the archetypal smiling presence behind our woes: smug, malign, alien. It goes without saying that he sanctions Good Touch, Bad Touch in his Arlington schools: an abusive Kinseyan "child protection" programme in which a stranger (facilitator) introduces graphic and upsetting ideas and images to little ones during the latency period, from about age five until puberty. Since the metaphorical punishment for the routine rape of innocence in Catholic classrooms worldwide is drowning-by-millstone [Matt. 18:6], most Western bishops should expect a dreadful fate on the day of reckoning. Starting with this bedrock betrayal of the most vulnerable, Bishop Loverde and his brethren will have to account for every evil actively or tacitly sanctioned; for the sufferings of each victim of their complicity, not just the physically abused.
False prudence
Since they have lost their holy fear of God, however, prelates of every stripe, whether extreme liberals or lukewarm neocons, continue pointing the finger at parents, traditionalists, whistleblowers, society ... and other convenient scapegoats. Together with supportive friends in Rome they will go on suppressing the truth until Judgement, blaming everyone but themselves and the pastoral Council that binds them together — if we let them. As Fr Haley said of Bishop Loverde during his deposition:
His greatest concern is not to address the issues, is not to solve the issues, is not to set up safeguards to avoid future issues, is to not make a change in structures of the diocese, but is simply to make sure that no scandals emerge publicly. He said that any priest who would go to the public, to a newspaper with information about the bad conduct of priests, quote, "Does not love the Church." And I countered with what you're telling me is that a priest who goes to the people of God with the truth about their priests does not love the Church?
Loverde's argument recalls a cryptic conversation Inside the Vatican's well-connectededitor Robert Moynihan once had with a Vatican official, who spun the same creepy line:
Some years ago, a Vatican monsignor said to me: "What is your goal?"
We were sitting in a Vatican office, in rooms where other men had sat and talked in other centuries, and, God willing, will sit and talk in times to come.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"What is the goal of your writing?" he asked.
I sensed that he wanted to know, not just for himself, but for others as well, for the Vatican, let us say...
"The truth," I replied.
"Ah!" he said. "The truth! Well, you had better be careful..."
"What do you mean?" I said.
"First of all, truth is hard to find," he said.
I nodded, thinking, well, he's right...
"You may only catch a glimpse of it, only fragments of truth," he continued. "What will you do then?"
"Well, I'll write the part that I see," I said.
"But what of that which you don't see?"
"I can't write what I don't see," I said.
"Ah!" he said. "And what if the part that you do see could be harmful to the Church?"
I was silent for a moment. "Why is he asking me this?" I wondered.
"Well," I said, trying to choose my words carefully, but also persuaded of my own courage and commitment to the complete truth, "the truth can never hurt the Church. I would still write the truth, knowing that 'the truth shall set you free'... As Jesus himself said..."
"Ah," said the monsignor. "Well, do what you think is right, but remember, there are souls in the balance, the souls of the simple faithful. And remember, the Church is the Bride of Christ — we must protect her from those who would do her harm..."
"How could a truth be used against the Church, if it is true?" I asked, puzzled. "A lie one could fear, as it might cause harm unjustly. But... the truth?"
The monsignor was silent. [...] "Be prudent," he said. ....
Clearly acting "for others, for the Vatican," as Moynihan suspected, the said monsignor, like Loverde, was parroting the deceitful party line: selfish prudence.
Preached by vested interests to confuse the weak and stifle truth-telling, especially by those who do not want to know or act, it is a successful and destructive strategy.
Despite the persistent exposés carried in a handful of orthodox publications independent of local hierarchies, this disorienting false-prudence not only convinced the vast majority of decent clergy and laity to keep the blinkers on and their heads down, but to admonish those who spoke out. It took the lying, hypocritical, anti-Catholic secular press to bring down the wall of silence that protected sexual abusers.
What an indictment.
Full disclosure
If false-prudence is a winning strategy for evil-doers, it is a losing one for the Church. By "prudently" protecting Archbishop Marcinkus from state investigators and Fr Maciel from Vatican investigations, for example, John Paul II did the Church no favours. Full disclosure is our best protection against scandal. It is the policy bequeathed to this magazine by Fr Crane and one we must continue if the grave-diggers of the Church are to be called to account. As the stupefyingly brave Saviano says, "In today's world, it's not information itself that disturbs, ... it's very difficult for anything to remain secret anymore; but the real challenge lies in passing along this information to the public, making it become a subject that people talk about, discuss, repeat and want to understand better."
How emphatically he has achieved that aim, having sold more than 10 million copies of his book, now translated into 54 languages and, in 2008, made into an award-winning film! True, nothing has changed in Italy. But no matter. The power of truth is in the telling. The rest is in God's hands. So although we can never match Saviano's influential reach, hopefully series like this one can at least contribute to the essential process of passing along information and understanding — the raw truth — about the state of the Church and the hierarchy. It is vital because false flags signalling the perpetual false dawn known as the New Springtime continue to bewilder and frustrate the faithful. The July 2012 appointment of Bishop Salvatore Cordileone as Archbishop of San Francisco is emblematic of the ongoing problem.
Describing him as "a prelate already known widely both for his forcefulness and a stringent doctrinal cred almost unequalled among his confreres on the national bench," the media variously labelled the appointment of the anti-"gay marriage" prelate to the notoriously "gay"-friendly archdiocese — "a bombshell," "dramatic," "explosive," "akin to the city’s Great Earthquake of 1906." Neo-conservative bloggers joined in to assure us that "it represents a significant departure from recent appointments in the archdiocese of San Francisco. ... which all seemed to have come from within a circle close to Cardinal William Levada. That is not the case with Bishop Cordileone. The selection indicates a recognition, at the highest levels of the Vatican, of the dangerous drift of the Archdiocese in recent years."
As a highly informed and seasoned Californian activist, a subscriber to this magazine, blogged in realistic response, the truth of the matter is somewhat less exciting:
Unfortunately Bishop Cordileone is a paper tiger. Although he has a reputation as being strong on the "marriage" issue, he is not tough on homosexuality at all. Look at his acceptance of Fr. Jim Schexnayder’s book on how to homosexualize Catholic parishes, and how long it has taken him to take CALGM [Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay Ministry] to task, even in a wimpy way…..The San Francisco sodomites will be in a rage when this news hits the Castro, but it will be just for show. They can pretty much figure that it will be business as usual in the SF Archdiocese "gay" milieu. They know that the "marriage" issue is a false one – the real issue is the indoctrination of and homosexualizing of children. Nothing will stop them.
Brighton parish priest Father Ray Blake has also made a recent stand against false optimism, blogging on 23 October:
[...] There is talk about "Reform of the Reform" but is it real? Bishops are still being appointed who on principle will never celebrate according to the other Form of the Roman Rite. Wander around the Pope's own diocese there are still those lopsided altar arrangements, still the bands of adolescents singing daft songs through mics with ghastly percussive guitars, still no provision for receiving Holy Communion kneeling, still verbose priests who preach four or five sermons during one Mass. The sighting of [the pope wearing traditional vestments] does not tell us summer has come.
Unresolved crisis
If Summer has not come it is because the New Springtime required to usher it in is a con — a neo-con, to be precise. Afraid to face the Crisis of Convergence personified by their smiley shepherds, the faithful find solace in endless springtime themes and programmes, like the "Year of Faith." It helps them avoid the painful reality behind the cant. The self-deception was perfectly captured by James Bruen in this tragi-comic item from his "Bullets" column in Culture Wars:
The New Evangelisation in Action. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia terminated its newspaper, the St. Peter Claver Center for Evangelisation, and the Catholic Institute for Evangelisation. Advocating "everything required by best business standards," Archbishop Chaput also urged people to pray for those losing their jobs. [September, 2012]
Happily, though, not everyone is so easily fooled. There is a traditional remnant maintaining the Faith of Our Fathers against the odds. Although numbering in the millions they are dwarfed by the several hundred million post-conciliar CINOs raised on the warmed over humanism of a social gospel. Hardy souls, the remnant take a lot of abuse because they refuse to let neo-conservative "blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel," lead them "into the pit" of moral incoherence, ignorance and cowardice. In his commentary on Cardinal Dolan's "gun-shy" interview with the Wall Street Journal, referenced at the outset, James Bruen depicted this counterfeit Catholicism truly and well:
We forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day [contraception]. The Church in America seems gun-shy on many issues: the usurious economy, American militarism, gluttony, pornography, etc. Of what worth is a civil law guarantee of free speech or of freedom of religion if Catholics — or their bishops — decide we better not talk about hot issues?
"Doesn't the Church have a problem conveying its moral principles to its own flock?" asked the Wall Street Journal. "Do we ever!" replied Cardinal Dolan "with a hearty laugh." I suspect it was a nervous laugh, given the possibility that the bishops' silence may make the hereafter "too hot to handle" for them.
[....] So the Church in America focuses not on morality but on lobbying and coalition building and lawsuits. But the Obama Administration wants to focus on contraception. Why? Because, like Archbishop Dolan, it knows Catholics are poorly catechized? Because it thinks Catholics like Father Jenkins [president of Notre Dame] don't care whether people form their consciences properly or engage in sinful activity? Because... it wants to drive a wedge between the laity and the bishops — even if that wedge is illusory as the bishops themselves have no coherent moral voice? [Culture Wars, Sept. 2012]
Also discussing Cardinal Dolan's penchant for giving scandal with a jolly face, David Werling summed up our analysis, blogging last August that
It has been bishops collectively that have acted as the primary catalyst of the crisis, giving place to radical leftist intellectuals in our institutions, destroying the clear transmission of the faith, and creating a sub-culture among priests and religious that is a mockery of everything the priesthood and consecrated life has ever stood for. ... It is becoming clear, at least to me, that the same vandals are still in control, and the same spirit of vandalism runs rampant among our churchmen and their "conservative" apologists.
... If anything the events of 2012 demonstrate that the crisis is far from a resolution. The appointment of Archbishop Müller as head of the CDF indicates that even the pope, the author of Summorum Pontificum, still embraces the ambiguity of the Vatican II generation. ... [I]t would appear that Modernism is still thoroughly entrenched, and even in this hour, fighting back with a demonically renewed vigor.
Catholic resilience
Indeed it is. The Lavender Mafia continues to lead the charge while disoriented prelates appointed by disoriented pontiffs keep on disorienting everyone else. And yet, even as classroom sex ed and heretical catechesis secularise a new generation of convergent CINOs, even while local Churches die in their scandalous sins — the gates of Hell cannot prevail against the Universal Church [Matt. 16:18]. A Divine promise, it is also an historical fact, as the editor of Catholic website Mercator recently pointed out:
The resilience of the Catholic Church should not be underestimated. In 1870 the Church had just lost the Papal States and Pius IX was nursing his wounds behind the walls of the Vatican. Intellectually, the Church's prestige seemed to have hit rock-bottom. The yellow press was full of stories about sexual abuse by priests and depravity in convents. Catholicism seemed like a dinosaur thrashing in its death throes. Yet, within a couple of decades, the picture was quite different.
Whether we have hit rock-bottom today is a moot point. Paul VI's looming beatification suggests we have not. In any event, things already seem beyond repair. As ever, our great and only hope lies in this providential cycle of eleventh hour rescues; whereby our loving and merciful God draws greater good from great evils to heal and rejuvenate His Mystical Body, bloodied and broken by sinful men. Secure in the knowledge that the restoration will come, therefore, and ever mindful of His holy injunction — "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil" [Matt. 5:37] — let us resolve to press on with our plain-speaking contribution to that certain and glorious end; suffering joyfully, offering all to Jesus through Mary.
Holy Mother of God, pray for us
Mother of the Church, pray for us
Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, pray for us
FOOTNOTES
(1) To cite just three examples of this Divine protection at play during Paul VI's humanistic, Masonic-friendly pontificate: a) his holding the Magisterial line on contraception in Humanae Vitae, despite the pressure his trademark vacillation had piled upon the Church; b) his hurried correction of the heretical definition of the Mass that he originally signed off in Bugnini's General Introduction to the Novus Ordo Missae; c) his orthodox Credo of the People of God.
(2) Consider Cardinal Dolan's role as a co-president of the World Conference on Religions and Peace [WRCP], the organization that, together with Gorbachev, founded the one-world church of the United Nations, the United Religions Organization (see CO, March 1997). He shares his presidency with the likes of pro-abort Rabbi David Rosen, a witchdoctor, a witchdoctress et. al. The head of the WCRP, Dr. William Vendley, advises Obama on interfaith dialogue and "would be calling the [WRCP] shots over Dolan," advises Cornelia Ferrreira.
(3) cf. "Sensual Catechesis," CO, Feb. 1999.
(4) See "The Monumental Struggle - Part I," CO, March 2010, pp. 22-23.
(5) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 1987, p. 382.
(6) For relevant extracts from this shocking TV interview screened on 2 July 2010, see “Triumph, Tragedy and Stardust,” CO, Nov. 2010, pp. 18-21.
(7) "The subject of sexual development, including teaching about AIDS and HIV, should be included in religious education as well as in science lessons, Cardinal Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, said yesterday. ... Cardinal Hume referred to the document HIV and AIDS: A Guide for the Education Service... [He] was addressing more than 900 Catholics involved in education from the dioceses of England and Wales" [The Times, 14 July 1992].
(8) The Yorkshire Post reported in 2005 that "Pupils at a leading Roman Catholic school suffered decades of abuse from at least six paedophiles following a decision by former Abbot Basil Hume not to call in police at the beginning of the scandal" — i.e. in 1975 when he received a complaint from parents about serial offender Father Piers Grant-Ferris. Cardinal Hume, who did not oppose the lowering of the age of consent for homosexuals, was lauded by the "gay" lobby. "The Cardinal could not have gone further to meet us," gushed lesbian Elizabeth Stuart [The Independent, 21/7/93].
(9) In 1976, for example, the year Basil Hume assumed the Archbishopric of Westminster and open hierarchical support for "homosexual Catholics" commenced in England and Wales, his fellow Benedictine Bishop B.C. Butler formally addressed a gathering of dissident Quest homosexualists on the theme of "Ecstatic Love
(10) After years of pursuing "gay" ecclesiastical criminals and bringing them to to account for their vicious abuse of children, Stephen Brady of Roman Catholic Faithful stated: "Experience has taught us that, more often than not, when we find a priest or bishop whose flock has been subjected to liturgical abuse or heresy you will find a priest or bishop with a sexual weakness or perversion."
(11)"The Weakland File - Parts I & II," Aug/Set & Oct. 1996.
(12) An Austrian-American 'sexologist'/psychoanalyst and one-time Communist, Reich (1897-1957) was the degenerate father of "sexual liberation." His 1936 German opus, Sexuality in the Culture Struggle: for the socialist restructuring of humans," was published in English as The Sexual Revolution. It was popularised by the cultural Marxists of the Jewish Frankfurt School.
(13) For full details see The Rite of Sodomy, Chapter 19.
(14) The Rite of Sodomy, p. 740. Available in paperback or as an eBook at http://www.newengelpublishing.com/
(15) McCarrick, who has consecrated at least 3 homosexual bishops himself, was allowed to answer questions on homosexuality at an April 2002 press conference held in Rome during the height of the abuse scandal, despite the Vatican's full knowledge of his penchant for sleeping with his seminarians [see CO, June/July 2006, pp. 20-23]. See also "Catholic Scandal Series Snuffed," pp. 69-72 this issue.
(16) Claiming en route to America in 2008 that the key to preventing future sexual abuse is keeping paedophiles, not homosexuals, out of the seminaries, Pope Benedict stated: “I will not speak in this moment about homosexuality, but paedophilia, [which] is another thing. We will absolutely exclude paedophiles from the sacred ministry, this is absolutely incompatible.”
(17) “The priesthood will continue to be or become a ‘gay’ profession, thanks to this document,” stated New Oxford Review editor Dale Vree.
(18) The Will to Not Know is the appropriate title of a Mexican work published this year by former Legionary of Christ priests sexually abused by Marcial Maciel when they were seminarians. Based on information from 212 Vatican documents obtained from unnamed officials, it demonstrates that Rome had information against Maciel as early as 1944 and in the mid-1950s, when the Holy See launched its first investigation into the Maciel. It is said to offer "irrefutable evidence and proof that the Vatican has been lying about Maciel." See also "History of the Accusations Against Marcial Maciel," CO, Aug-Sept, 2006.
(19) The Giugliano-Villaricca-Qualiano triangle has 39 landfills, 27 of which contain hazardous waste, and a 30 per cent annual increase in landfills. When a site approaches capacity, the garbage is set on fire. The Camorra clans pay gypsy boys 50 euros by for each mound burned. "They throw foundry remnants, glue, and naptha dregs into the fire," writes Roberto Saviano in Gomorrah. "Dense black smoke and flames contaminate every inch of land with dioxins."
(20) The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 670-71. In mid-April 2004, the Albany County Coroner declared that the cause of Fr Minkler's death was suicide, but at the time of the publication of The Rite of Sodomy, two years later, he had still refused to make details of the autopsy public.
(21) Although urged to do so by those seeking justice for victims, Greeley has never handed over that incriminating information to the police. Now 84, hopefully he will do so before facing Christ.