There are facts and truths that "sexual libertarians" don't want society or public opinion to know, that even they don't want to know. To sum up those facts - accumulated in different human cultures and societies - we don't need sex to live a full life and be content. To define one's identity on the basis of our sexuality alone is to reduce our human value and dignity. I am a lot more than just my genitalia, and so are you. G.S.
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My purpose in these posts is to bring together significant and, where possible, representative echoes of our best human efforts to make sense of our lives - and of our human sexuality in particular - also including the voice of Jesus Christ, the one Saviour of the world, and testimonies from his Church, such as through her teaching voice, the Magisterium. The Church has been accumulating much valuable wisdom granted her by Almighty God since her foundation at Pentecost. In this way, wherever there is darkness in our human understanding, it will serve to highlight the bright and radiant truth, which is Jesus Christ: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also." John's Gospel 14:6-7
Father Gilles Surprenant, priest & poustinik
(1) Remaining a Catholic in the face of tragedy By Margery Eagan
On Spirituality columnist November 3, 2015
(2) Truth Is Needed to Free the Church From Sacrilege of Clergy Scandal - Now is the time to
cooperate — and cooperate fully — with God’s cleansing fire for his Church.
(3) Janet Smith to Bishops: ‘Save the Church — Tell Everything’ - The professor of moral
theology says the scandal surrounding Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s predations on children, seminarians and priests, has exposed a toxic problem in the Church that laity must help bishops to root out.
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Remaining a Catholic in the face of tragedy By Margery Eagan On Spirituality columnist November 3, 2015
How can you spend your workdays chronicling thousands of cases of Catholic priestly sexual abuse — and still remain a Catholic?
Before
the release of “Spotlight,” the movie detailing the massive abuse cover-up in
Boston, I asked that of Anne Barrett Doyle and Terry McKiernan. They’re
co-directors of BishopAccountability.org, which documents that abuse from
an office in Waltham, Massachusetts practically overrun by floor-to-ceiling
files and more than 100,000 pages of Church records, court documents, media
reports, letters from mothers of victims, victims themselves, and even abusers
detailing their crimes. Doyle and McKiernan have done this work full-time for
more than a decade now. Yet both not only remain Catholic, they say their faith
has increased. Here’s how Doyle and McKiernan explained that a few days back in
their Waltham repository.
“Everything good in my life has come from
Catholicism. I’ve never been more Catholic than I am now. It’s never been more
vivid and important to me to pray every day,” said Doyle, a mother of four
married 35 years now. She talked about the shared family rituals — the Masses,
baptisms, weddings, Easters — with her kids, father, siblings (all 9 of them)
and her Jesuit-schooled husband. But mostly she talked about her mother, her
“hero,” who had a passion for trying to change the Church. She wrote letters to
bishops “as a loyal critic,” Doyle said. “That’s exactly how I feel about our
work. We’re loyal critics. I really do feel I’m doing this for justice for survivors,
but also for the Church. It’s absolutely crucial that the Church fully owns up
to this heinous and deliberate enabling.
“My
parents are both 90, about to celebrate 70 years of marriage. My mother says
about my father, ‘Can you believe how handsome this guy is? No wonder I had 10
kids with him. This man gives me heaven on earth.’ When I’m with them, it’s
like I’m in a holy presence. “My mother,” Doyle said, “knows God with this
vivid sense of God’s presence in everyone around her. “I see this joy and grace
all coming from God, from the discipline of Catholicism and the
self-questioning and the sense of reverence. My mother has a great deal of
respect for the priests. But she imbued us with a sense that the laity needs to
have equal power.”
Doyle
took that lesson to heart. Once, at a packed Mass in her hometown parish, the
priest said something the 14-year-old Anne didn’t like. The archdiocese had
refused to baptize the infant of a local couple who’d been publicly pro-choice.
“I heard the priest approving of that and I thought, ‘That baby’s not guilty.
That baby should be baptized.’” So the teenaged Anne raised her hand from the
back pews, stood up before the entire confused congregation, and said, “There
is a second side of the story. That baby was innocent.”
Doyle
took that lesson to heart again in 2002 when she first read about the sexual
abuse crisis in The Boston Globe. “We were just a nice Catholic family minding
our own business. The Sunday I read the stories, I said to my husband, ‘I can’t
go to Mass today. I have to go to the cathedral (Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston
where Cardinal Bernard Law said Mass) and confront Cardinal Law.’ ‘SPEAKING OUT
IS HOLY.’ That was our sign.” Said Doyle, “I didn’t even know any victims until
I met them then in picket lines. That was the beginning of my education about
the corruption of the hierarchy, and it was the most profound spiritual
education of my life.
“Now I
choose every day,” she said, “to ask God to help me do his or her will, that my
work be free from ego and anything petty. I repeat that many times a day. I
don’t know where all this is headed or how this will end up, but my whole life,
ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be in touch with heroes. Now,” she said,
working with survivors, hearing their stories, “I’ve been in touch with heroes.
I’ve been in touch with saints.”
* * * * *
Terry
McKiernan went to parochial school in the Bronx in the 1960s and then Fordham
Prep, where a priest turned out to be an abuser and molested some of his
friends. Yet there’s a St. Jerome medal around McKiernan’s neck and a rosary in
his pocket beside a dog-eared copy of Emily Dickinson, “the greatest religious
poet of all time,” he said. “She accepts the fact that being a religious person
sometimes means being a despairing person and having a hard time. I think
there’s been too much of a tendency after Vatican II to think religion makes
everything nice — not really the road we’re invited to walk.”
He quotes
from the beatitudes in Sunday’s gospel. The last one, he says, is particularly
relevant: “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter
every kind of evil against you falsely because of Me.”
Catholics
themselves have insulted and resented and rejected not just the work McKiernan
and Doyle do, but the stories of victims as well. Some still do. But McKiernan,
like Doyle, said “being raised in the faith taught me that truth is important,
that we’re better than this. Abuse is not a right-wing problem or a left-wing
problem. Conservative priests do it. Liberal priests do it. We should all be
able to get together on this.”
He also
believes there’s something uniquely Catholic about the abuse he’s documented.
How damaging it is for a child to be abused by a priest who’s called “father”
and who has the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of
Christ. How the shadowy confessional has too often turned into a fertile,
secret place for victim recruiting. And again, post-Vatican II, how suddenly
“newfangled and new-age” priests, McKiernan said, would take boys for walks and
face-to-face talks or even face-to-face confessions, then “groom” and
ultimately abuse them. Phil Saviano, a survivor depicted in “Spotlight,”
remembers going to confession to the very priest who molested him. He’d
“confess” that he’d yelled at his brother or lied to his mother. Then he’d add,
“And Father, you know the rest.”
Said
McKiernan, “These priests picked on really spiritual kids, really devout, and
made them vulnerable. Yet you get to know survivors and they are amazing human
beings, still the spiritual people they were when they were abused.” For a long
time after the scandal broke, Terry McKiernan would leave his wife and kids and
Natick home in the dark on Sunday mornings. He’d drive an hour and a half each
way for an 8 a.m. Mass in East Longmeadow because Rev. Jim Scahill was the only
pastor who’d publicly refused to send collection money to the Springfield,
Massachusetts archdiocese when it kept a convicted child molester in its ranks.
“I didn’t
feel I could go to Mass unless I felt really sure about the priest,” McKiernan
said. “Then it just began to seem sort of ridiculous.” Now he goes to Mass at
different churches, “parachuting in,” anonymously, soaking up different styles,
different cultures. He receives the Eucharist. He says his Rosary. And he
travels coast-to-coast collecting records from diocese after diocese — more
than 100 cities so far — where known abuse has continued, hidden, for years. He
said he still has terrible trouble going to baptisms “because we’re supposed to
keep the (babies) safe and raise them in the faith. And then they get older and
you just don’t know … to think of it is really haunting.”
Like Anne
Barrett Doyle, McKiernan said working inside the abuse tragedy has strengthened
his faith, if not his faith in the Church and its bishops. “I’m spending more
time in Catholic churches than many priests do,” he said. “I’m thinking all the
time about the Church and my relationship with it and what it’s all about. It’s
this dilemma and paradox, a kind of attachment to it, as well as an aversion.”
Terry
McKiernan said that during one such aversion moment, he briefly considered
converting to Judaism. He’s thought about other forms of worship as well. But
not anymore. “I am a Catholic,” he said. “I will always be a Catholic.”
VIDEO:
Anne
Barrett Doyle talks about her work margery.eagan@cruxnow.com
Margery Eagan, our spirituality
columnist, is a writer and commentator on current affairs.
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Truth IsNeeded to Free the Church From Sacrilege of Clergy Scandal AUG. 7, 2018
COMMENTARY: Now is the
time to cooperate — and cooperate fully — with God’s cleansing fire for his
Church.
Father Roger J. Landry
The
sad revelations about the sins of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, involving
the sexual abuse of both male minors and seminarians, have brought the Church
in the U.S. and beyond to a second recent phase in the necessary purification
of the clergy of
the Church. The first phase happened in 2002, after the disclosure that more
than 4,000 (out of 110,000) priests had been accused in the U.S. of sexual
abuse of minors in the previous half-century. The U.S. bishops convened in
Dallas and adopted what has overall been a heralded systemic response to root
out those who have abused minors from the priesthood, protect children and care
for survivors.
But there were several major problems with Dallas. First, the phrase “credible accusations” was exceedingly vague and
could encompass even accusations that were immediately demonstrably false. Second, bishops exempted themselves
from the policy. Third, they didn’t
have the courage to address what the data clearly showed was the main part of
the crisis: It wasn’t pedophilia, or the sexual abuse of pre-pubescent girls
and boys; rather, it was ephebophilia, the same-sex molestation of
post-pubescent boys, encompassing more than four out of five accusations.
Fourth, they did not focus
adequately on the corrupt culture that permitted such wide-scale abuse and the
lack of determination to eradicate it: the practical toleration in many
dioceses of priests living double lives, cheating on their vocations with men
and women. As Father Thomas Berg recently wrote, “We can’t prevent the sexual
abuse of minors or vulnerable adults by clergy while habitual and widespread
failures in celibacy are left unchecked.”
The accusations against Archbishop McCarrick have exposed these last three
lacunae in disgusting fashion. Several bishops, most notably Houston Cardinal
Daniel DiNardo, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have
put out firm statements indicating that bishops must no longer be exempt, that
all sexual abuse and harassment by clergy of anyone must be addressed — and all
sexual activity by clergy is abusive, even if consensual, because it is
spiritually incestuous — and that the Church must address the cancerous
prevalence of an unchaste same-sex subculture in the clergy. These are not easy
issues to talk or write about. They sicken and justly scandalize believers.
Light, however, is a great sanitizer. Just as the revelations of the thousands
of cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors in 2002 was not the problem, but
the abuse itself that had remained hidden for decades was, so the disclosures
against Archbishop McCarrick and others in recent weeks, although nauseating
and infuriating, are a necessary part of the healing process. The truth is
needed in order to set the Church free of these sacrileges, which devastate
individual victims and wound the whole Church. Since this second wave of
scandals has hit, I’ve received hundreds of phone calls and emails from friends
and reporters. The internet has exploded with fair questions that deserve
answers. The faith of many in the Church as a holy, rather than corrupt,
institution has been shaken. People don’t know what to think about their
bishops or priests. They legitimately ask how such depraved misconduct could go
on so long. I’d like to attempt a candid response to some of their many
questions. How should we respond to this?
First, by reparation, because God is
the most offended of all. Second, by
demanding to get to the bottom of it, which is part of a firm purpose of
amendment and will help to prevent its recurrence. Third, by focusing on living the faith. Jesus told the Parable of
the Wheat and the Weeds (Matthew 13:24-30) to teach us that our fundamental
focus should never be on rooting out the weeds, but rather on the growth of the
wheat. Every crisis in the Church is a crisis of saints, and God will respond
to infidelity with many graces of fidelity to help bring the Church back to the
holiness in earthen vessels that he wants to characterize it.
How could God permit such abuse? God created us free, free even to betray him
and others. We see this in Judas and in the fleeing of the other apostles on
Holy Thursday. To stop evil, God would have to eliminate our freedom. But God
doesn’t remain on the sidelines as a shocked and impotent bystander. He always
wills to bring good out of the evil we commit or endure, just like he brought
the greatest good (Jesus’ resurrection and the eternal life it made possible)
out of the greatest evil (the murder of Jesus on Calvary).
How could Archbishop McCarrick rise through the ranks while being guilty of
such sins? It shows several clear holes in the process of selecting bishops. Before
one becomes a bishop, there is a lengthy process with multiple confidential
questionnaires sent out to many who have lived and worked with a candidate, but
the process is only as good as the information given in response and the
weighing of that information.
Once one is made a bishop, such thorough investigations are no longer part of the
process. The candidate himself is never interviewed. While no process is
perfect, this process is prone to gross errors, especially if someone has
powerful promoters. In Archbishop McCarrick’s case, the process failed four
times. His notorious case, the similarly infamous ones of Scottish Cardinal
Keith O’Brien and Austrian Cardinal Hermann Groer, as well as recent scandals
leading to episcopal resignations in Honduras, Chile and elsewhere, ought to
precipitate appropriate reform.
How bad is the problem of same-sex unchastity in the clergy? It varies among
different dioceses and religious orders, and no hard numbers exist, but in
various places, it’s big enough to do serious damage.When priests cheat on
their vocations with women, normally either the woman gets pregnant or gives
the priest the ultimatum to choose her or the priesthood, with the result being
that most priests who persist in infidelity leave the priesthood. It’s
relatively rare, therefore, that an active priest has a long-term mistress, although
when he does, it’s terribly corrosive.
Priests who cheat on their vocation with men or fellow priests, on the other
hand, often continue to live the priesthood with a double life. When there’s a
high enough incidence, it can dramatically impact the culture of Church
institutions and presbyterates, because such infidelity in one area of priestly
life often leads to infidelity and corruption in many others.
Seminarians in the 1980s often had to confront openly homosexual subcultures
among faculty and seminarians. I was a seminarian in the ’90s, when the problem
had begun to get cleaned up, but I still personally encountered it without
nuance at the beginning of my seminarian application process and then while
studying languages during summer break in a foreign country, when the priest
tried to make his move 10 minutes after picking me up at the airport. Many
priests, at some time or other, have come face-to-face with this clerical
depravity.
Why didn’t people who suffered or knew of the abuse say anything? For the
reasons that victims often don’t: They don’t think people will believe them,
or, worse, they think those to whom they report the information will be part of
the same corruption. Many have wondered, in particular, why the multiple
seminarians whom Archbishop McCarrick pressured to share his bed didn’t say
anything.
The reason, I believe, is that they didn’t know to whom to go; they didn’t
trust that those authorities wouldn’t protect the predator, since, after all,
they had made him a bishop; and they feared that McCarrick, if he found out,
would be able to blackball them from following their priestly vocation.
Instead, they put down their heads, focused on their training, and tried to
remedy the evil by getting ordained and serving God and his people as God
desires and they deserve.
To eradicate sexual abuse among the clergy, a known, trustworthy, effective,
accountable reporting system is a must, and at present, it doesn’t exist. Is
there hope that the situation will get better? Yes. In many ways, it already
has, because of various reforms in the last few decades. But there are issues
that must be confronted candidly. There is a strain in the Church that
basically has no problem with sexual immorality among the faithful or clergy,
who want to reduce this crisis to one of the “abuse of power.” This strain, in
general, wants to use this second phase of this crisis like they did the first
one, to pretend that “chaste celibacy” is the problem, as if allowing priests
to have wives will eliminate the problem of same-sex molestation of
post-pubescent boys or same-sex sexual infidelity.
Chastity, however, isn’t the problem; unchastity is. Abuse of power isn’t the
main issue, but, rather, the sexual abuse that that power was used to commit
and keep hushed. That’s why we need more than revised “codes of conduct” that
state the obvious; the Ten Commandments, and the Church’s moral theology, are
pretty clear, after all.
Fidelity is the only adequate response to infidelity, and holiness to sin and
corruption. Just as there should be no room in the priesthood or episcopacy for
those who would harm the young, so there should be no room for those who are
determined to live corrupt double lives. God always seeks to draw good out of
evil, and throughout Church history, he has shown this time and again. Where
sin abounds, grace abounds even more. Now is the time to cooperate — and
cooperate fully — with his cleansing fire.
Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the
Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts
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NCR Janet Smith to Bishops: ‘Save the Church —Tell Everything’ AUG. 14, 2018 Peter Jesserer Smith
The professor of moral theology says the
scandal surrounding Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s predations on children,
seminarians and priests, has exposed a toxic problem in the Church that laity
must help bishops to root out.
The
new phase of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church, both in the U.S. and
around the world, reveals how predatory behavior not only robbed children, men,
and women of their innocence but also the joy of their faith, and, in many
cases, their vocations. Janet Smith, noted professor of moral theology at
Sacred Heart Major Seminary, told the Register that bishops must not delay, at
the diocesan and national levels, to empower independent panels of laity to
full investigate the issue and take steps to insure this doesn’t happen again.
What
do you think needs to be done about Archbishop McCarrick?
Just
as everyone else, I am appalled not only at what Archbishop McCarrick did but
at the failure of those who “knew” about his heinous activities to do anything
to prevent him from continuing to abuse boys and seminarians and thus,
consequently, to prevent his advancement in the Church.
I
think we likely already know the answer to some of the questions that everyone
is asking: Who knew, what did they know, and what did they do or not do about
it?
The
answers: It is likely that many bishops have “heard” something, and certainly
those who moved in his circles heard a lot. They heard the beach house stories,
and likely few of them did anything at all about it beside express horror.
Likely a few spoke to those in a position to advance him about what they heard
but, obviously, their reports went unheeded.
They
went unheeded because he was powerful and good at fundraising and the claim
could be made that all that was offered was “rumors” — no real proof was at
hand. Most will say, “I heard rumors but I didn’t have proof.” Or, “I heard
rumors but it was not my responsibility to do something.”
Some
will rightly say they personally were without power or influence. They might
say, “I heard rumors but there is no mechanism for reporting.” Or “I heard from
others who tried to do something and they failed and perhaps were retaliated
against. There is no point to my wasting my energy and ruining my chances for
promotion, too.”
One
thing to remember is that these men have come up together. They were in
seminary together, have done a thousand things together, and they don’t want to
point the finger at their friends. A lot of what goes on here is, “I don’t want
to believe that of my friend.”
They’ve
got to realize that their responsibilities are much, much larger than to not
embarrass or expose a fellow classmate from years ago. They have to love the
Lord and love the Church more than they love their friends.
The
fact is that just about all of them had heard — do you notice how few denials
there have been of “knowledge”? Sadly, some of the few who have denied it can
hardly be believed.
But
there is one group that likely has no excuse. That would be the bishops who
sent their seminarians to the seminaries where McCarrick did his dirty work. Is
it possible that they had not heard anything, that there were no complaints
made to the seminary staff by seminarians about McCarrick? Did the seminary
staff share this information with bishops who sent their candidates
there?
Staff
who did not report, bishops who did nothing, certainly deserve to lose their
positions if not much, much more.
Let
me add something to this picture: As noted, bishops upon hearing about abuse,
nearly always say, “All I have are rumors; I have no proof.” I ask, “Why, if
there is a bishop who is highly placed who has enormous influence, and the
rumors are persistent and credible, why don’t you hire investigators? Instead
of just shrugging your shoulders and saying ‘We have no proof'’’
Proof
can be found. When spouses believe their spouses are cheating, often they hire
an investigator. To just say, “Well, no one offered me any proof,” I find that
lame and incredibly irresponsible. And of course, investigators should be hired
for reports of abuse by any priest of any person.
Sadly,
in this day and age, there should be really deep background checks of men being
proposed to be bishops. What has been done up to now is clearly not
sufficient.
Do
you think that U.S. seminarians in general are adequately protected from
bishops, rectors, or other people in authority that could prey upon them
sexually?
I
strongly doubt that they are adequately warned about what they might face in
the presbyterates into which they are entering. I have heard and read horror
stories of young priests being preyed upon by homosexual priests and who have
reported the abuse to their bishop and other diocesan personnel. Rather than
being protected, the young priests have been told to keep quiet about it
— that the predator could ruin their lives.
What
do you think should be done about the #MeToo sex abuse in seminaries?
I
hope I am not being naïve (sadly, I am constantly learning that I am) but I
don’t think there will be a significant #MeToo abuse movement in respect to
current seminaries (though ANY abuse is outrageously wrong). But there really
should be a #MeToo movement about homosexual abuse in seminaries in the past
and in the priesthood both in the past and currently.
It
won’t be easy for men to come forward — they are likely mortified that they
submitted to the vile approaches made to them. We will need some mechanism for
reporting that does not endanger their privacy and protects them from
retaliation.
How
seriously do you take reports of the presence of “lavender mafias” in the
priesthood?
I
am convinced that they are present in nearly every diocese. And that they
control some dioceses.
Why
haven’t the bishops done anything about these “lavender mafias”?
I
think there are a lot of good bishops who don’t want to tolerate this, but they
have inherited many messes as well as the mess of a homosexual network. I don’t
want to make excuses for bishops but understanding their situation is a
necessary part of any solution. Dealing with sex abuse crises, closing schools
and churches and trying to foster orthodoxy and build vocations consumes
enormous amounts of time and energy. They have also inherited a culture that
holds that if a priest has not done something criminal his private life is his
private life.
Certainly,
rightly and very sadly, they fear that they will lose too many priests if the
active homosexuals leave, perhaps 5%-50%. Parishes will close; services will be
limited; many laity will be furious (though, others, of course, are willing to
pay the price to have things cleaned up). And how could they not fear being
labeled as homophobic? Finally, they also may fear what kind of “outing” of
others the dismissed active homosexuals may engage in.
Eradicating
the presence of the homosexual networks in their dioceses has to be of the
highest priority for bishops. If it hasn’t been before, it has to be now.
I
don’t think we should attempt to force out negligent bishops — few will
not have been negligent. First, who will replace them? Second, if they do what
needs to be done now – and it won’t be without a price (see previous paragraph)
— they will have done a great deal. A sign of their true colors will be their
willingness to do public penance of some serious kind.
Do
you think there is a connection between the sexual abuse of seminarians and
priests, and the widespread child sex abuse crisis that exploded to the
forefront little more than a decade ago?
Yes
and no. Yes, in the sense that the priesthood became for some time a haven for
men whose sexuality was not healthy. The previous crisis dealt largely with
pedophiles and homosexual predators of young men.
Now
we need to deal with the active homosexuals in the priesthood, for they are
engaged in seriously immoral behavior, which has a corrosive effect all efforts
to teach, live and promote the gospel.
Let
it be said that there are certainly priests who experience same-sex attraction
who are leading chaste lives — if we could we would give them awards for
what has to be an heroic effort in such an environment.
How
much do you think this is related to the sexual revolution?
Hugely.
And, as everyone knows by now, I think the pill was the major element that
fueled the sexual revolution. When people became convinced that having sex did
not need to be an act of “making love and making life,” sex became “just sex” —
just a momentary intense physical pleasure that could be engaged in by any
consenting person, no matter what their sex. And so men who had a homosexual
inclination in the priesthood concluded that there was no reason for them not
to enjoy sexual pleasures. They reasoned (even if unconsciously), “Spouses are
using contraception and rendering their acts nonprocreative, so how do our
acts differ from theirs?”
What
happens when seminarians and young priests are coerced or pressured into sex
acts by their superiors?
It’s
horrendous. It’s corrupting a young man who wants to dedicate his life to the
Lord. And then you’ve not only gravely harmed that young man, which is
horrible, but you deny the Church a vocation.
An
abused young man might leave or he might stay and decide that he, too, is a
homosexual, and he becomes part of the network. What kind of an effective
witness can he be to the hard truths that the Church expects us to live? He
can’t be. It is ruination of so many things.
If
the Church hierarchy is going to show they are serious about this issue, what
steps do they need to take immediately?
It
grieves me that we cannot trust the bishops to take care of this internally.
Surely there are trustworthy bishops but unfortunately now all of them live
under the same cloud. It seems very likely that they will set up a lay
commission to look into the McCarrick case. I am afraid, though, that once that
investigation is over, too many bishops will think the crisis is behind them
and they can move on.
We
can’t let that happen. I fear too few bishops realize that a powerful group of
laity is outraged at the control that the lavender mafias have over dioceses
and the damage they have done to the priesthood and the Church. I know many who
are brainstorming about how we can help move the bishops to “clean up” the
priesthood, even though — let me never tire of saying it — it is going to be
terribly costly. Some dioceses will lose so many priests that parishes may have
to close and Masses will need be said in the local stadium, or so many people
will leave the Church, Masses will be able to be said in a closet.
Those
of us who are in a position to do something are not going to “go after” the
bishops. We want to find ways to help the good bishops clean up their diocese
and to expose bad bishops who won’t cooperate. We love the Church, and we
believe that telling the truth serves the Church.
There
needs to be a “place” where priests, seminarians, and lay people can report
instances of abuse without fear of reprisal. Every bishop needs to tell the
priests, the seminarians in his diocese (diocesan and religious), and the lay
people, “Tell everything. Everything.”
A
trusted group of laypeople with the help of law enforcement experts will
determine which accusations seem credible and do what investigations need to be
done to ensure that they are. And then some procedure will be developed for
working with the local bishop to clean up the mess. If a bishop won’t
cooperate, methods need to be devised for dealing with that scandalous reality.
And,
of course, it is not just the lavender mafia that is a scandalous and toxic
problem in the priesthood. There is no place in the priesthood for adulterers,
substance abuses, power-hungry narcissists and the ever-present problem of
clericalism.
In
the long run we hope to help bishops see the need to foster a more Christian,
more ascetic, spiritual life among their priests — modelling all this
themselves. And we need to help the seminaries form men who seek holiness and
retain their backbones.
What
can the laity do right now?
We
should certainly pray and fast and try to keep our faith strong and that of others.
We
also need to help other Catholics see how seriously bad the presence of
homosexual networks in the Church is. We should write letters to our
bishop. We should 1) commend our bishop for the good works he has done 2)
demand a clean-up of whatever homosexual network exists in the diocese.
Carefully give evidence if we have some prefaced by “I have heard; I don’t know
if it is true but I have heard it enough to think queries if not an
investigation should be made.” Demand that if there are credible accusations
against priests and more evidence is needed, that private investigators need to
be hired 3) tell him that if cleaning up the homosexual network means that
there will be such a priest shortage that parishes will close and services will
be curtailed, say that we will stand by him and support his actions 4) that a
lay board be set up to which priests and others can make charges of sexual
harassment by the bishop himself and priests and the particularly priests can
report any mistreatment from the bishop without fear of reprisals; 5) send the
bishop copies of the best articles published expressing lay outrage; 6) promise
to pray and fast for him 7) send copies of your letter to DiNardo and the
nuncio; 8) get signatures of others who may not be inclined to write; 9) ask
for a reply. Be polite but firm. And write again every month until something is
done. If we don’t get a satisfactory reply, we need to consider writing to the
public newspaper.
Peter Jesserer Smith is a Register
staff writer.
© 2006-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2006-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC
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