How The Pederasty Cover-Up Will Make Civil War Within The Catholic
Church, by Paul Rahe, 8/30/18.
Since his election, Pope Francis has done
everything within his power to soften and subvert the church’s teaching
concerning human sexuality. He also packed the College of Cardinals with the
Lavender Mafia.
Sixteen years ago, reporters at The
Boston Globe conducted an extensive investigation of the sexual abuse of
minors by priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Not long
thereafter, reporters elsewhere detailed similar abuse in places like Los
Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the like. The word used in the
press to describe what had been going on was pedophilia, which is a
misnomer deliberately employed to cover up what journalists then considered and
still consider now an inconvenient aspect of the truth.
As a report commissioned by the
National Review Board of the American Catholic bishops and issued in 2004 revealed, something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and
very few were, in the strictest sense, children. They were nearly all what we
euphemistically call young adults. They were male adolescents on the younger
side — at the age when boys as they mature can briefly be downright pretty.
What was involved was what its advocates call man-boy love: a sexual
relationship between a grown man who serves as a mentor and a boy who is under
his care or simply admires or stands in awe of him. The ancient Greeks, who
practiced this systematically in the classical period, called this phenomenon
pederasty, and I wrote extensively about it 26 years ago in the first part of
my hardback book, “Republics Ancient and Modern” (the pertinent chapter can be
found in the first volume of the paperback edition).
In the course of these investigations,
a number of other things came to light. First, a priest
named Gerald Fitzgerald — who in 1947 founded a small
religious order named Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete to
counsel priests who had difficulty with alcoholism, substance abuse, celibacy,
and the like — had for decades been trying to alert the American bishops and
officials in the Vatican (including Pope Paul VI) to the fact that priestly
pederasty (which, he said, was unheard of before World War II) was a growing
problem within the American Catholic Church. He had persistently tried to
persuade the hierarchy to forbid the perpetrators’ supervision of boys and to
laicize them, all to no avail.
It also turned out that in 1984, when a
scandal of this sort broke out in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, a
Dominican priest named Thomas P. O’Doyle — who was a canon lawyer working
for the Papal Nuncio in Washington and had seen numerous reports of a similar
kind cross his desk — joined with a Louisiana lawyer named F. Ray Mouton, Jr.,
and another priest, a psychiatrist named Michael Peterson, who directed a
hospital for troubled priests and knew a great deal, to conduct an extensive
investigation of clerical misconduct along these lines throughout the United
States.
The report these three men produced was sent to every bishop in the
country in May 1985, and then it was ignored. Bishop after bishop continued the
long-standing practice of covering up the scandals that arose, of paying off
the victims, eliciting from them a non-disclosure agreement, and transferring
the perpetrators from one parish to another and even from one diocese to
another.
Not long after the scandal first broke
and the National Review Board issued its 2004 report, I was a guest at a dinner
hosted by a Catholic friend, as was a highly intelligent, young local priest
who, everyone knew, would someday become a bishop. By then it was evident to
anyone who bothered to read the report that pederasty, not pedophilia, was the problem,
and I had long known that there were seminaries in the United States that were
essentially cathouses in which all of the cats were male.
When talk turned to the clerical
scandal, I suggested that the fatal decision the American bishops had made in
1985 to continue covering everything up must have
come from Rome. If, I argued, every diocese followed the same procedures, the
bishops must have received guidance from the center.
Could it then be the case, I asked, that
this was not a peculiarly American problem — that this was going on elsewhere,
all over the world; that Rome was the epicenter; and that the Papal nuncio in
Washington or his superiors at the Vatican were complicit? Could the colleges
in Rome, established for the education of especially promising seminarians from
all over the world, in effect be gay bordellos and promotion into the hierarchy
for many a young priest came at a price?
My host knew what I was talking about.
He had once been a Jesuit novice, and had been expelled from the Jesuits by the
provincial for complaining about the sexual misconduct going on in the
novitiate all around him. What I remember most vividly, however, was the
silence of the young priest at the dinner table. He had been talkative. Now he
said not a word. He was even then a handsome young man, and had studied at the
North American College at a time when he was no doubt even more striking. As we
left, I remember saying to my wife, “He knows more than he is willing to
divulge.”
I do not mean to say that he was
complicit. I doubt that very much. I do mean to suggest that he had received
unwanted attention and knew that, if he talked about it, it would halt his
clerical career.
Later, of course, it became evident that
my suspicions of Rome were justified. In the intervening years, there have been
scandals identical to the American scandal in Canada, Australia, Belgium,
Bavaria, Ireland, Honduras, Chile, and elsewhere.
A few years ago, we also learned that a
host of high-level figures in the Curia were being blackmailed by their male
lovers. I am told that Pope Benedict, who had by that time contracted
Parkinson’s Disease, resigned his office in this connection because he knew there needed to be
a purge and he feared that he did not have the physical stamina to carry it
out. In his memoirs, Pope Benedict touches on the “gay lobby” and
confesses to a lack of resoluteness. As everyone understood at the time, the
task of cleaning house was to be left to his successor.
In the interim between Pope Benedict’s
papacy and that of his successor, we received another indication of the depth
of the problem. In the newspapers of Scotland, we learned that
Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien, a cardinal and archbishop who was the primate of
Scotland, had been buggering seminarians and young priests for years and
nothing had been done in response to the complaints they had submitted to the
Papal Nuncio. It was only when they went public in 2013 that the Vatican acted.
Unfortunately, however, Benedict’s
successor was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, the man who calls himself
Pope Francis. As a Belgian cardinal named Gottfried Daneels — who had been
removed as an archbishop because he had covered up the pederasty of another
Belgian cardinal and had come out in support of contraception, divorce, gay
marriage, euthanasia, and abortion — revealed in his memoirs, Bergoglio’s
candidacy was promoted by the St. Gallen Group, a part of what Catholics call
“the Lavender Mafia.”
This disgraced figure stood on the
balcony with Bergoglio after he was elected pope. He was chosen to say the
prayer at the new pope’s inauguration. And there was joy in the ranks of those
inclined to break the vow of celibacy.
If you want to get a sense of what such
people thought, I suggest that you read “The Vatican’s Secret Life,” an article that appeared in Vanity Fair in December
2013. It is an eye-opener. Its author, Michael Joseph Gross, is not scandalized
by what he found. He celebrates it and, tellingly, never once mentions, even
under the guise of pedophilia, the propensity of prominent priests to indulge
in pederasty. As Gross observes:
At the
Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in
positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of
one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because
homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in
general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion
is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all
Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens
in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay
clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their
priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.
Clerics
inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely
private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves
be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople,
or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way,
perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a
double life. Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the
Italian press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight journalist
pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a ‘honeypot’ and
entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual situations. (The cardinal vicar
of Rome was given the task of investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)
There are at
least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term partner is a well-known
minister in a Protestant denomination. There is the notorious monsignor
nicknamed ‘Jessica,’ who likes to visit a pontifical university and pass out
his business card to 25-year-old novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines:
“Do you want to see the bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight
man who has a secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs
online of the innermost corridors of the Vatican. Whether he received this
privileged access from some friend or family member, or from a client, is
impossible to say; to see a known rent boy in black leather on a private
Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.
I recommend that you read the whole
article. The author interviewed a great many clerics in Rome, and makes it
clear that they were delighted with the choice of Bergoglio and his selection
of advisers.
They had reason to be delighted. Since
his election, Pope Francis has done everything within his power to soften and
subvert the church’s teaching concerning human sexuality. He put the Lavender
Mafia in charge of the two Synods on the Family held in 2014 and 2015. They
tried to push through their agenda; and, when the assembled bishops balked, they got a tongue-lashing from the
pope, and he inserted in the final report without comment two paragraphs that
had not received the requisite two-thirds vote.
All of this — including the machinations
of the St. Gallen Group and the role Daneels played — is laid out in detail by
an English Catholic, who was in Rome during the early year of this papacy, and
who writes under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna. The title is “The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the
Francis Papacy.”
In the last few weeks, we have received
further evidence of the power of the prelate-pederasts. A grand jury convened
in Pennsylvania has revealed that Donald Wuerl, while bishop of Pittsburgh,
covered up a priest-run child-porn ring and a host of other abuse cases
involving something on the order of 100 priests, using the age-old trick of
pay-offs and non-disclosure agreements. This did not stop him from being named
archbishop of Washington DC and of being made a cardinal — which is to say, a
Prince of the Church.
He was not even high on the list of
possible nominees submitted by the Papal Nuncio. Someone powerful in the
Vatican wanted him promoted, and Pope Francis responded to the news of his
guilt not by ordering an investigation into Wuerl’s promotion, but with a dodge
— by attributing collective guilt to us all.
This past weekend, the chickens finally
came home to roost. We had already learned of the predatory conduct of Theodore
McCarrick, Wuerl’s predecessor as cardinal-archbishop of Washington. The
evidence showed that he had buggered altar boys and seminarians while auxiliary
bishop in New York, bishop of Metuchen in New Jersey, and Archbishop of Newark.
Formal complaints had been lodged against him as the 1990s and continued to be
lodged in later years, but they were ignored, and he was nonetheless promoted.
On Saturday night, Archbishop Carlo
Maria Viganò, who was the papal nuncio in Washington from 2011 to 2016,
released an 11-page testament, revealing that Pope Benedict had
learned of McCarrick’s conduct, had acted against the man in 2009 or 2010 by
silencing him, prohibiting him from travel, and forbidding him to say mass in
public; that in 2013 he had himself personally warned Pope Francis against
McCarrick, spelling out in detail the man’s misdeeds; that Francis had reversed
the restrictions imposed on McCarrick by Benedict, taken him as his chief
American advisor, and ignored the advice of the Papal Nuncio and accepted that
of McCarrick in choosing archbishops and bishops for the United States. This
includes Blaise Cupich, the cardinal-archbishop of Chicago, and Joseph Tobin,
the cardinal-archbishop of Newark.
Viganò also did something on Saturday
night that, as far as I know, no high-ranking prelate has done in more than six
hundred years. He called on the pope to resign.
In the meantime, Monsignor Jean-Francois
Lantheaume, former first counsellor at the apostolic nunciature in Washington
D.C. has emerged to confirm that Viganò‘s predecessor had been instructed to
confine McCarrick by Pope Benedict, that he had witnessed the confrontation
with McCarrick, and that everything else that Viganò had said was true. To
this, we must add that Viganò named names in the Vatican, specifying which high
officials had obstructed the investigation into McCarrick’s conduct.
As all of this suggests, we are now at a
turning point. The Lavender Mafia controls the papacy and the Vatican overall,
and Pope Francis is packing the College of Cardinals, who will elect the next
pope, with sympathizers. Pope Francis and his minions have now been exposed,
named, and shamed; and there will be a civil war within the Roman Catholic
Church.
Either Francis leaves and his supporters
and clients are purged, or the church is conceded to those who for decades have
sheltered and promoted the pederasts and those who regard their abuse of minors
as an indifferent matter. It is time that those bishops, archbishops, and
cardinals who are innocent of such conduct stand up and force a house-cleaning.
In the meantime, the laity should speak up loud and clear.
This article originally appeared
on Ricochet.com and
is reprinted with the permission of the author.
Paul A. Rahe holds The
Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale
College, where he is professor of history.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment