The Roots of Abuse



I think it may be possible to very broadly divide the Church up into two camps.

The first camp are learning & growing in Christ. They seek to understand what the Church teaches about God and the Gospel message with humility and seek Christ. They want to change their lives and recognise the power of Jesus Christ to work that change through grace. When they struggle with a topic they work hard to understand it by reading and talking about it with other Catholics to gain a better understanding of the idea in context. They seek forgiveness for the mistakes they make and the grace to conform their lives to Christ in Confession.

The other camp think the Church needs to change to conform to them.

For all of my life, the latter camp have been in the ascendancy. My whole life as a Catholic could be characterised as wondering why no one seemed to take the faith they professed seriously. Why everyone seemed to know better than the Church. No one was interested in humbly seeking to listen and learn the message of the Gospel. Everyone wanted to explain their own exciting new slant on it, and why it had to change. This was a great stumbling block for me as a young man, but later, in my twenties and thirties, I met people who did believe, and my faith eventually blossomed from there.

What better expression of that could there be than priests who abuse young men, boys and girls in the most horrendous and sacrilegious manner, as clearly documented in the Grand Jury Report released last week?

One of the most positive things that may come out of the release of this report is a clear sea-change with respect to the view of homosexuality in the Church. In 2002, the John Jay Report presented shocking data regarding the link between abuse and homosexuality in the Church. This evidence doesn't present that homosexuality causes predatory behaviour. Indeed, such an argument is absurd. While it is true that most homosexual priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been priests who are homosexual.

John Jay reported that 81% of the victims [between 1950 and 2002] were male,” and that 78% were post-pubescent. These statistics have been replicated again and again in the years since - see here.

So if the abusers weren’t paedophiles, and the victims were mostly adolescent males, wouldn’t that make the victimisers homosexuals?

What else could we possibly be talking about if not homosexuality?

Of course, this reality really does not fit well with the progressive narrative, and especially the secular narrative being played out at the present time, which is perhaps why the secular media has been so reticent to comment on the new revelations - they are largely about homosexual encounters, which the secular condones and even encourages. If there is a serious infestation of corrupt men in the priesthood, would we not expect them to dismiss any link between homosexuality and the abuse crisis?

If many of us in the Church had suspicions about a gay subculture before, there can be little doubt in the light of the revelations of the last two weeks or so:
The article linked to by Dreher, author of The Benedict Option provides a catalogue of startling revelations:
So well-known was McCarrick’s reputation, the priest said, that when McCarrick would accompany Cooke to visit the seminary there was a standing joke that they had to "hide the handsome ones" before he arrived.
...
Three Newark priests independently gave CNA nearly identical accounts of being invited to these parties when they were newly ordained.

One recalled that he attended a cocktail party, thinking he had been invited to a simple priests’ dinner. “I was led into the room to a chorus of wolf-whistles,” he said. “It was clear right away I was ‘on display.’”
Another priest told CNA that he was also invited to a party hosted by the priest. “They were all carrying big mixed drinks, pink ones, it was like something out of Sex in City.”
He recalled that after asking for a beer, he was told by his host, “you need to try something more girly tonight.”

All recounted overtly sexual conversation at the cocktail parties. “I was fresh meat and they were trying me out,” one priest said.
All three said they left quickly upon realizing what was going on. “Everyone was getting loaded and getting closer on the couches, I wanted out of there,” a priest told CNA.

“Everyone kept calling me a ‘looker’ and saying they had to ‘keep me around’ from now on,” a third Newark priest told CNA.
The archdiocese declined to answer questions related to those parties.
All three priests told CNA that while the experience was deeply unpleasant, they had seen similar behavior in Newark’s seminary.
This honestly doesn't surprise me one bit, I have personally heard many accounts of the high level of homosexual seminarians and nefarious goings on from seminarians, former seminarians and priests.

Let's take this back to the idea I started this blog with. You can spot these men a mile away because they don't make any effort to cover up their agenda, this is especially true under Pope Francis:
You can be sure that what you will never hear is Church teaching on sexual morality, or in many cases, any morality. In my own Diocese of Brentwood, we have a situation where Stonewall an organisation explicitly and openly seeking to undermine Catholic teaching actually writes the policy on sexuality for our Catholic Schools and they roll it out claiming the authority of the Bishop when questioned. I have written to the Bishop and asked him about this, explaining how one Brentwood School in particular, which facilitates Stonewall "training" in other Catholic Schools in the Diocese, even features Stonewall's logo on their school website. In writing I took the time to provide a link to Portsmouth's Diocese' guidelines which state that using Stonewall in this way amounts to co-operation with a moral evil. However my letter did not appear to merit a response from his Lordship.

We also have a priest in charge of youth and pastoral formation who regularly preaches that people suffering from same-sex attraction (which he always refers to as LGBT) are akin to Saints who were persecuted (see this video for an example in front of the Bishop) so much so, that young people from my own parish have said it is "creepy" and asked me why he is always going on about LGBT. What do I tell them????

We also had a "gay mass" at Brentwood Cathedral courtesy of the Dean. The preacher? Well, you can probably guess by now.

This is all dressed up in the guise of compassion and part of a modernist deceit detailed in Church teaching (Humani generis for example) which seeks to mislead people with a false and unworkable epistemology which is ultimately at odds with what the Church has consistently taught. As I said at the beginning, it is born of a desire to conform Christ to the world - to make Christ "more palatable" somehow, instead of converting the world to Christ.

And of course this is all directly in contradiction to Church teaching which states:
the Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called "gay culture".
Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women. One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep-seated homosexual tendencies.
How can "gay masses" or preaching regularly to children about LGBT issues be consistent with that?

The last authoritative CDF treatment of the issue states:
Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.
Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.
I sincerely hope that, in the light of these new revelations, Catholics might see why the Church has consistently taught these things. It is not a lack of compassion or sensitivity, it is TRUTH and if we start to pick apart the Magisterium on one issue or another for the sake of modern sensibilities or what we consider will appeal to the next generation, we are guilty of the sin of idolatry: putting ourselves or a specific issue above almighty God.

At least one bishop had the courage to speak out:
Kudos to those who bravely seek to explain what the Church teaches in its' proper context, people who are undermined by those who push the LGBT agenda constantly in the Church. If you want to know how damaging pushing the LGBT agenda is TO GAY PEOPLE - ask them:
Other key points on this in my opinion include these EWTN interviews. First with Attorney & child advocate Elizabeth Yore and Brad Miner who writes at The Catholic Thing. As Yore puts it:
"this homosexual network that protects and promotes its' own is what is causing this continual cycle of abuse in the seminaries"


Then there is this interview with Cardinal Raymond Burke who may not be the most sparkling personality (perhaps we've had enough of that sort of cleric?) in the Church today but is a holy man who cares deeply:



This is a wide-ranging interview which covers many topics. Cardinal Burke states that it is the Pope's responsibility to hear complaints against the bishops and to investigate them: the necessary procedures are present in the law of the Church. Cardinal Burke says that Cardinal Daniel DiNardo's presumptions regarding the extraordinary nature of McCarrick's abuse is unbelievable. On the silence of the Vatican ++Burke simply does not understand why it has taken them so long to respond to this news. 

Speaking on Fr Thomas Rosica's comments to Cardinal Wuerl, ++Burke agrees that the victims' plight seems completely absent from the discussion. Burke believes there has been an apostasy from the Church's teaching on human sexuality, it is pervasive in society, but it is also pervasive in the Church. His comments here seem to allude directly to the confusion that surrounds Amoris laetitia.

++Burke is clear that only the Pope can deal with bishops, he is also clear that financial malfeasance usually goes hand in hand with sexual wrong-doing. This could be a good way to track-down the offenders.

Cardinal Burke also rebukes Fr. Thomas Rosica for his crazy comment which I reported here, ++Burke calls Rosica's words "nonsense". ++Burke gives a useful summary of what the office of Pope is about and what it is not about.

There is already a screaming backlash from those who are doing their best to push the LGBTQI agenda in the Church, but it could well be that the statistics will now be confronted and the reality of the homosexuality crisis in the Church can finally be acknowledged.





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