Gay Mafia Bishops — The Net is closing.

GAY MAFIA BISHOPS — once upon a time in the not too distant past I wouldn't have believed such a thing was possible. It sounds like a headline made up by a fantasist.

The following information is corroborated here by four different reputable news sources, so I'd love to hear your excuse if you think this is fantasy!

I would have a lot more confidence in Bishop Robert Barron's defence of Vatican II and the Pope if he spoke out about some of the real problems we are facing in the Church today. Case in point: Michael Bransfield the former bishop of Wheeling-Charleston. 

Over thirteen years, Bransfield is reported to have sexually harassed, assaulted, and coerced seminarians, priests, and other adults. He also spent thousands of dollars on jewellery and other clothing, including spending more than $60,000 of diocesan money at a boutique jeweler in Washington, D.C. during his time in office.

He also spent nearly $1 million on private jets and over $660,000 on airfare and hotels during his tenure as bishop. He often stayed in luxury accommodations on both work trips and personal vacations, and gave large cash gifts to high-ranking Church leaders, using diocesan funds.

Was this all news to the USCCB?

In 2019 Church Militant reported that Bransfield was the perfect example of the corrupt gay mafia who run the Church. Their article very clearly joins the dots from Bransfield to the Papal Foundation, founded by disgraced predator Theodore McCarrick and most recently headed by Donald Wuerl.

The Church Militant piece reports that the Papal Foundation has connections to other accused homosexual predators, including Msgr. Thomas Benestad, who first chaired the foundation in 1988, and was singled out by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro at his August press conference announcing the publication of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

Vatican investigation revealed that Bransfield had sent $350,000 in cash gifts to various cardinals and bishops, including $29,000 to Cdl. Kevin Farrell, who lived with McCarrick for six years in Washington, D.C., and who used the money to renovate his apartment in Rome; and $10,500 to Abp. William Lori — the very man appointed to carry out the investigation. 

Other beneficiaries include Cardinals Wuerl, Timothy Dolan, Raymond Burke and Viganò himself.

Viganò explained to Tosatti that he was told it was the custom of U.S. bishops to send gifts to newly installed papal nuncios, and that he donated the money to charity.

"In truth I don't remember all the names of those who were sending me these gifts, because I didn't pay attention to the name of the donor who was sending me the check," wrote Viganò, "because this was irrelevant to me, as I had no intention of doing anyone any favors."

"As I said before, my staff explained to me that this was customary in the United States, and not accepting the gift would be an affront to donors," he continued. "So, after receiving these gifts, I immediately spent this money in my charity account. I can attach some examples of evidence on how I used my personal money together with the money from these various donations." You can read more about this on Church Militant.

UK Professor Stephen Bullivant has also drawn attention to this an open paper co-authored with Giovanni Radhitio Putra Sadewo entitled: Power, Preferment, and Patronage: Catholic Bishops, Social Networks, and the Affair(s) of Ex-Cardinal McCarrick.

Particularly interesting is the following:

"details from subsequent episcopal scandals have shed further light on the wider culture in which McCarrick thrived for so long. Most intriguing here is the case of Bishop Michael Bransfield, who retired from the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, in late 2018. He too stands accused of sexually harassing and assaulting seminarians and young priests under his authority. Investigators also uncovered hundreds of cash “gifts” made from his personal account before being routinely reimbursed from diocesan funds, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars (Boorstein et al., 2019). Personal payments of four- or five-figure sums were regularly made to other bishops, especially those in influential positions in America and Rome – a practice which, as it transpires, is perfectly common. As one veteran Vaticanista puts it: “the impression one gets from bishops’ public statements is that very few of them thought anything was strange about the money going around. It’s just what high churchmen do, at least in the US” (Altieri, 2019). Other journalists have pointed out that McCarrick, too, was known for his largesse, and indeed he and Bransfield worked closely together on the Board of a major US-based Church fundraising charity, the Papal Foundation (O’Brien, 2018; Flynn, 2019). Several bishops and cardinals who received Bransfield’s checks have since made clear that these gifts came with no strings or conditions attached, and thus were in no sense “bribes”. Maybe so. But as generations of social scientists are all too aware, cultures in which reciprocal gift-giving is an embedded practice invariably tend to produce complex (and networked) relationships of trust, indebtedness, solidarity, obligation, and counter-obligation, even if the actors are not themselves fully conscious of them.[emphasis mine] That said, one presumes that McCarrick himself, having earned a PhD in Sociology from the Catholic University of America in 1963, might not be wholly unacquainted with the classic theories of Malinowski and Mauss."

The Bullivant/ Sadewo paper makes several important recommendations for network informed investigation which, they suggest, has the potential to yield interesting results:

1. The Ordinary—Subordinate tie

2. Co-consecrators at episcopal ordinations

3. Shared college and/ or university backgrounds

4. Shared service on committees/ boards of directors

5. Extending Ordinary-subordinate (or other types of) ties backwards through time. To what extent are “kingmakers” among the previous generations of bishops still significant over current episcopal politics? Is it useful to think in terms of episcopal “family trees”, or even dynasties? Does the influence of different bishops or dioceses wax and wane over time (perhaps with changes in the pope or nuncio)?

6. If episcopal networks currently do exhibit tendencies towards certain “network pathologies”, how might these same methods aid in reforming them? Would a policy of appointing “qualified outsiders” (i.e., suitable bishops not already tied into regional clusters) to major dioceses help in mitigating conflicts of interest, especially in helping to “clean up” scandal hit dioceses? (Based on Ordinary-subordinate dataset, the appointment of Archbishop Wilton Gregory to Washington as Wuerl’s successor looks to be a promising example of precisely this).

7. Moving beyond national episcopal politics, what might be gained from applying SNA methods to studying the Roman curia (itself a major object of scrutiny under the current pontificate). Which are really the powerful dicasteries? Which bishops, from which countries, sit on which especially influential Congregations (especially. the Congregation for Bishops)?

8. What light could SNA shed on certain historically important moments of episcopal politicking (cf. Wilde 2007; Pentin 2015; and O’Connell 2019 respectively)?

The essay is well worth a read if you are interested in positive approaches to investigating the current existential malaise!

And so you have to wonder how bishops like Robert Barron fit into this heady mix of corruption and scandal. 

In the Catholic Herald, Chris Altieri is scathing in his assessment of the faux "justice" served on Bransfield. Please do read it. Here's a quote:

I was about to say that, in a better world, Bishop Bransfield would be publicly stripped of his episcopal dignity and sent to live out his days in penance on a rock. That’s not quite accurate, though. We could have that in this world, if we had better leaders. In a better world, Bishop Bransfield would have traded his episcopal finery for an orange jumpsuit years ago.

Bishop Barron and the USCCB have really got it in for groups like Church Militant and Taylor Marshall at the moment. I think that's one of the main reasons for his recent apologia for Vatican II and the Pope.

I can't help but wonder if this is because they are starting to unpeel the veneer and reveal the filth that is endemic in the hierarchy. For example, watch this video. I think it ties together all my points nicely here. If all the bishops believe the one, true, Catholic and Apostolic faith, why do the facilitate and encourage error? Taylor gets it straight away: it's what Bullivant terms SNA.

 

The sad thing is that all too often a Church Militant report is discounted on social media because it is "hateful" or some such nonsense. The fact of the matter is what they are reporting is hateful and should receive our full fury, not to mention the full measure of the law.

It seems to me the net is closing. Watch how the bad guys wriggle!