The Catholic Church Is Sick With Sex

Outside of condemning adulterous behavior, Christ never said anything about whom you could love.

Pope Alexander VI

By Timothy Egan

One pope was a father of 10 through multiple mistresses, a man who purchased the papacy with mule-loads of silver. It is said that Alexander VI, the most debauched of the Borgia pontiffs, elected in 1492, even had an affair with one of his daughters.

Another pope contracted syphilis during his reign — a “disease very fond of priests, especially rich priests,” as the saying went in Renaissance times. That was Julius II, known as “Il terrible.”

A third pope, Pius IX, added Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and John Stuart Mill’s book on the free market economy to the Vatican’s List of Prohibited Books during his long reign in the 19th century. He also formalized the doctrine of papal infallibility.

What these Holy Fathers had in common was not just that they were badly flawed men putting forth badly flawed ideas: At the root of their moral failings is Catholicism’s centuries-old inability to come to grips with sex.

I say this as a somewhat lapsed, but certainly listening, Catholic educated by fine Jesuit minds and encouraged by the open-mindedness of Pope Francis. The big issue behind the budding civil war in a faith of 1.3 billion people — a rift that could plunge the church back into a medieval mind-set on sexuality — is the same old thing.

And most of the church’s backward teachings, dictated by nominally celibate and hypocritical men, have no connection to the words of Jesus.

If you’re going to strike at a pope, to paraphrase the line about taking down a king, you must kill him. Right-wing Catholics, those who think allowing gay members of the faith to worship with dignity is an affront to God, have just taken their best shot at Francis.

The attempted coup was disguised as an exposé by a conscience-stricken cleric, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. He claims that the pope must resign because he knew about the sexual abuse of young seminarians by a disgraced cardinal and did not defrock the predator.

It’s a fair point, and one that demands a full response from Francis. But if you read Viganò’s full 11-page letter, you see what’s really driving him and his ultraconservative cabal — an abhorrence of gay Catholics and a desire to return to the Dark Ages.

“The homosexual networks present in the church must be eradicated,” Viganò wrote. Those close to Francis, he claimed, “belong to the homosexual current in favor of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality.” For theological authority, he cited the infamous 1986 letter to bishops condemning homosexuality as “a moral disorder.”

That instructive was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, designed to do to heretics what the Inquisition once did, without the stake-burning.

The bishop’s letter cites Old Testament sanctions against “sodomites” and a New Testament interpretation from St. Paul, who admitted he was not speaking with direct authority from the divine. St. Augustine, who loved sex and had plenty of it before he hated it, set the church template in the fifth century, saying, “Marriage is only one degree less sinful than fornication.”

What’s missing from these puritanical pronouncements, from then till now, is the figure at the center of the faith. That’s because, outside of condemning adulterous behavior, Christ never said anything about whom you could love. Nothing about homosexuals. Nothing about priestly celibacy or barring women from clerical ranks, for that matter.

Last year, while walking the thousand-year-old Via Francigena, I came upon many Catholics along that pilgrim’s path to Rome excited about the fresh air blowing through a Vatican that hadn’t opened a window in decades. The only cloud over these spiritual sojourners was the constant news about criminal clergy.

The conservatives would do nothing to fix this, but would make the church a global pariah. The old guard is infuriated by statements like the one Pope Francis made on Sunday. When asked how a parent should treat a gay child, he said, “Don’t condemn, have dialogue, listen.”

The way out of the present crisis is more light, less darkness and a few bold and dramatic moves. For starters, clerics should not be judging other clerics; let lay members, women and men, conduct the investigations.

Priestly celibacy should be optional. It’s an anachronism, certainly not one of the “infallible” truths, and may be one of the main reasons pedophilia is thick in clerical ranks. For the first thousand years of the church, married men could become priests, as they still can in the Greek Orthodox faith.

Women should be priests. Duh. When asked about this, Francis said only men could serve because Jesus chose only men as his apostles. This logic is flawed, as Jesus also chose Jews, and you don’t see a lot of them being invited into the priesthood.

A final alternative might be to look to the United States ambassador to the Vatican for moral guidance. That would be Callista Gingrich, who carried on a six-year affair with a married Newt Gingrich and became his third wife. In Rome, as always, hypocrisy is eternal.

Complete Article HERE!

If Cardinal Was Under Pope’s Sanctions, Why Was He Allowed at Gala Events?

Tensions in the Vatican are high amid accusations that Pope Francis covered up for an American ex-cardinal accused of sexual misconduct.

By Laurie Goodstein and Jason Horowitz

At a gala dinner in the luxury Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in 2012, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Pope Benedict’s top diplomat in the United States, bestowed an award for missionary service on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and praised him as “very much loved from us all.”

But if Archbishop Viganò is to be believed, he was keeping a troubling secret — a claim that is at the heart of a new scandal that has thrown the church into upheaval and led some conservatives to call for Pope Francis to resign.

The archbishop now says he was aware at the time of the gala that Cardinal McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was under orders from Pope Benedict XVI to stop appearing in public on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church because he had sexually abused adult seminary students.

Archbishop Viganò did not explain why he agreed to publicly laud a cardinal under sanctions. But LifeSiteNews — a website run by conservative Catholics — quoted the archbishop on Friday as saying that he could not back out of the event.

Even beyond the gala dinner, however, a review of Cardinal McCarrick’s activities during the years he was supposedly restricted under Benedict showed that he visited seminaries and ordained new priests, officiated at Masses and traveled the world representing the church.

A week ago, Archbishop Viganò released an explosive letter saying that Benedict had ordered Cardinal McCarrick to retire to a life of prayer and penance and had banned him from celebrating Mass in public, traveling for church business, giving lectures and participating in public meetings.

But after Francis became pope, in 2013, he lifted the sanctions and made the cardinal a trusted adviser, the letter claimed. That accusation has stunned the faithful, leaving many clamoring to know whether Pope Francis — who has vowed to rid the church of sexual abuse — had covered up for an abuser or whether Archbishop Viganò, a conservative detractor of Francis’ who was removed from his American post, was lying.

What still remains unclear a week after these accusations surfaced is whether Benedict ever imposed sanctions on the cardinal. And if he was sanctioned but permitted to flout the restrictions so boldly and for so long, it raises questions of how tough the Vatican really is on bishops implicated in sexual abuse.

Francis has reacted to the new revelations by refusing to discuss the matter and has neither confirmed nor denied the allegations in the Viganò letter. Instead, he challenged the news media to ferret out the truth.

The Viganò letter has pitted Francis against Benedict XVI, the emeritus pope, who stepped down in 2013 — confirming the worst fears of Catholics who warned that having two popes living as neighbors in the small, intrigue-laden footprint of Vatican City would be dangerous to the church.

Both popes could clear up the confusion created by the letter. Neither one has.

The silence has left a vacuum into which speculation, gossip and ideological combat have now poured, consuming the Vatican and Francis’ pontificate and drowning out the issue of child sexual abuse, a scourge that is devouring his church from within.

Archbishop Viganò has filled the vacuum with fresh allegations against Pope Francis on sensitive topics such as the pontiff’s 2015 meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

The archbishop argued in another detailed letter published on Friday in conservative Roman Catholic news outlets that he had personally briefed the pope about the meeting beforehand and that the Vatican’s efforts to characterize him as ambushing the pope with the meeting were untrue.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, right, the archbishop of Washington, with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick at the Vatican in 2010, when Cardinal McCarrick was said to be under sanction.

The truth has been difficult to discern so far. If Cardinal McCarrick was, indeed, the target of sanctions by Benedict in 2009 or 2010, as Archbishop Viganò claimed, then he openly disobeyed the orders for years.

There is a long and public record showing that the cardinal at the heart of the scandal did not behave like a man forced to retreat to contemplate any possible sins — and that Archbishop Viganò did not treat him that way.

The cardinal was a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress in 2011. He made multiple trips to the Vatican. He participated in a Mass there when his successor as archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, received the red cardinal’s hat in 2010. He joined American bishops on their five-year check-in with Benedict in January 2012.

Four months later, he was back in Rome to sing happy birthday to Benedict at a celebration sponsored by the Papal Foundation, which Cardinal McCarrick founded to deliver millions in donations to the Vatican each year.

He traveled to Iran in 2011 and helped win the release of American hikers accused of espionage. Friends of the cardinal who did not want to be named said in interviews that they had no indication at all that he was supposedly restricted in those years.

Only in July, after Cardinal McCarrick had been accused of sexually abusing two boys years ago, did he resign from the College of Cardinals, at 88. Demoted to archbishop, he rebutted the allegations and is appealing his case to the Vatican. Through his lawyer, he declined an interview request.

For years, Benedict’s supporters, appalled by the direction Francis was taking the church, have sought to draw Benedict into ideological fights. He has mostly resisted, and his silence so far on the Viganò letter is in keeping with his promise to essentially disappear after his resignation.

Francis, right, greeting Benedict XVI at the Vatican in June.

Benedict, who promised his successor “reverence and obedience” when he retired, is now 91 and frail.

But his personal secretary and trusted lieutenant, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, has issued enigmatic comments. He told the German newspaper Die Tagespost that the reports suggesting that Benedict had confirmed Viganò’s letter were “fake news.”

Asked by The New York Times to clarify whether Benedict had placed sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick, Archbishop Gänswein responded in an email: “I have nothing to add or to subtract from what I have said.”

Pope Francis also evaded a response as he flew from Dublin back to Rome last Sunday, hours after the Viganò letter was published in conservative Catholic news media. In his customary news conference aboard the papal plane, the pope acknowledged that he had read the letter that morning.

But he said: “I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions.” He added: “When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may speak.”

Archbishop Viganò refused an interview request.

Following the pope’s lead, the Vatican has gone on lockdown.

Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, whom Archbishop Viganò also accused in the letter of covering up sexual misconduct by Cardinal McCarrick, rushed a reporter off the phone on Thursday evening.

“Look, I’m not in my office. Good evening. Good evening,” he said. And he was the most talkative.

The Times reached out to every cardinal and bishop said by Archbishop Viganò to have known about the alleged sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict. More than a dozen of them declined or did not answer requests for comment.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington said in a statement that he was never informed about any sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick. Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark said in an interview, “I was never aware of any restrictions.”

A visit to the Vatican Embassy in Washington yielded no information.

In the past, some of the offenders sentenced to “a life of prayer and penance” also resisted the restrictions, so Cardinal McCarrick would not be the first to do so.

But eventually even the most notorious, disobedient abusers sentenced to prayer and penance finally disappeared behind the walls of a convent or private retreat.

In 2005 and 2007, three archdioceses in New Jersey paid settlements to two former seminarians who said they had been molested by Cardinal McCarrick years before

In 2017, the first allegation that Cardinal McCarrick had sexually molested a minor was submitted to the archdiocese of New York. Pope Francis imposed his own sanctions on the cardinal, the Vatican has confirmed.

His friends say that the cardinal slowed down a bit, but even then didn’t stop. He traveled to China and to the Vatican for several church dinners. He attended the ordinations of a priest and deacons. In May of 2018, he celebrated his 60th anniversary as a priest, alongside Cardinal Wuerl, his successor in Washington, with a Mass.

Then in June, , the New York Archdiocese announced the results of its investigation of the allegation they had received last year: As a priest 45 years earlier, Cardinal McCarrick had sexually abused an altar boy. And Pope Francis decreed that he could no longer work or minister as a priest in public.

Complete Article HERE!

A Catholic Civil War?

Traditionalists want strict adherence to church doctrine. Liberals want the doctrine changed.

By Matthew Schmitz

Pope Francis must resign. That conclusion is unavoidable if allegations contained in a letter written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò are true. Archbishop Viganò, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016, says that Pope Francis knew Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had abused seminarians, but nonetheless lifted penalties imposed on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI.

No matter what Francis does now, the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civil war. On one side are the traditionalists, who insist that abuse can be prevented only by tighter adherence to church doctrine. On the other side are the liberals, who demand that the church cease condemning homosexual acts and allow gay priests to step out of the closet.

Despite their opposing views, the two sides have important things in common. Both believe that a culture of lies has enabled predators to flourish. And both trace this culture back to the church’s hypocritical practice of claiming that homosexual acts are wrong while quietly tolerating them among the clergy.

As the liberal Vatican observer Robert Mickens writes, “There is no denying that homosexuality is a key component to the clergy sex abuse (and now sexual harassment) crisis.” James Alison, himself a gay priest, observes, “A far, far greater proportion of the clergy, particularly the senior clergy, is gay than anyone has been allowed to understand,” and many of those gay clergy are sexually active. Father Alison describes the “absurd and pharisaical” rules of the clerical closet, which include “doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t say so in public or challenge the teaching.”

The importance of not challenging church teaching is seen in the contrast of two gay-priest scandals of the Francis pontificate. The first is the case of Msgr. Battista Ricca, a Vatican diplomat who, while stationed in Uruguay, reportedly lived with a man, was beaten at a cruising spot and once got stuck in an elevator with a rent boy. (In Uruguay, the age of consent is 15.) These facts were concealed from Pope Francis, who in 2013 appointed Monsignor Ricca to a position of oversight at the Vatican Bank.

After Monsignor Ricca’s sins were exposed, Francis chose to stand by him, famously saying, “Who am I to judge?” Msgr. Krzysztof Charamsa suffered a less happy fate. The priest, who worked at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, announced in 2015 that he was gay and had a male partner, and asked the church to change its teaching. He was immediately fired. Both Monsignor Ricca and Monsignor Charamsa had sinned, but only one had stepped out of line.

The other rule of the clerical closet is not violating the civil law — or at least not getting caught. Francis defended Monsignor Ricca by distinguishing between sins and crimes: “They are not crimes, right? Crimes are something different.” This distinction provides cover for sex abuse. When countless priests are allowed to live double lives, it is hard to tell who is concealing crimes. Cardinal McCarrick was widely seen as “merely” preying on adult seminarians. Now he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

Corrupt as this situation is, many Catholic leaders prefer it to the coming civil war. That seemed to be the attitude of Bishop Robert Barron when he called for an investigation that avoids “ideological hobby horses” like priestly celibacy and homosexuality. Bishop Barron is right to insist that accountability comes first. This is why anyone implicated in cover-up — up to and including Pope Francis — needs to resign.

But even if all the men at fault are held accountable, the hypocrisy will continue. The real danger the church faces is not ideological challenge from left or right but a muddled modus vivendi that puts peace before truth.

In 2005 the Vatican attempted to address this problem by instructing seminaries to turn away men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies.” But several Catholic leaders immediately indicated that they would not abide by this rule. Because Pope Benedict did nothing to enforce the decree, it became yet another symbol of Catholic hypocrisy.

According to Catholic teaching, every act of unchastity leads to damnation. But many bishops would rather save face than prevent the ruin of bodies and souls. If the church really does believe that homosexual acts are always and everywhere wrong, it should begin to live what it teaches. This would most likely mean enforcing the 2005 decree and removing clergy members caught in unchastity. If the church does not believe what it says — and there are now many reasons to think that it does not — it should officially reverse its teaching and apologize for centuries of pointless cruelty.

Either way, something must change. Marie Collins, a sex abuse survivor, warned that the crisis in the church is bound to get worse: “More and more countries are going to come forward, and as victims find their voices, it’s going to grow bigger.” Everyone who wants to end sex abuse should pray that the Catholic civil war does not end in stalemate.

Complete Article HERE!

Why don’t women have a role in the Catholic Church?

Cardinals attend Mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican on March 12, 2013.

By Margery Eagan

I am part of a dying breed: Catholics who still go to church.

At the rate the Catholic hierarchy is disgracing itself, there’ll soon be none of us left.

How many young people want to join a church that remains oddly obsessed with sex? That says no to gays but yes to bishops who let priests rape little children? That considers birth control a “grave sin,” even among the married?

How many young people want to join a church that still demeans and disrespects women, or half the human race?

The Catholic Church won’t ordain women as priests or even deacons, a sort of priest-lite. Incredibly, the church considers ordaining women one of its worst offenses — but on the exact par with sexually attacking boys and girls.

Women have zero power in church decisions, even those directly affecting them. Instead, hundreds of celibate men get together, by themselves, and decide what women need. Conservative Catholics don’t even want girls to join altar boys serving Mass or have women participate in an annual Easter week feet-washing ritual.

Pope Francis, women’s best hope for reform since the 1960s, nonetheless has a depressingly dated and even juvenile perspective. He has called female theologians “strawberries on the cake,” warned women to become mothers and “not an old maid,” and derided grandmothers as no longer “fertile and vibrant.”

For decades, Catholic women outside the church have trashed these and other absurdities. Earlier this week in Ireland, before Francis’ visit there, former Irish president Mary McAleese again criticized the church she has called the world’s primary “carrier of the virus of misogyny” and “a male bastion of patronizing platitudes.” A church that “regularly criticizes the secular world for its failure to deliver on human rights [but] has almost no culture of critiquing itself.” A church that has “never sought a cure [for this] though a cure is readily available . . . equality.”

McAleese, the mother of a gay son, spoke these words at a conference on women in the church this winter that was originally planned for the Vatican. But the Vatican banned McAleese — a former head of state — from speaking. So the conference was relocated.

I am a fan of Jesuits, an order of smart and typically thoughtful priests. Francis is one. Yet I remember well a Boston College event two years ago marking the selection of the new Jesuit leader. The slide show that night featured picture after picture of men, just men, hundreds and hundreds of men in a massive room — not a woman in sight. Some women in the audience exchanged knowing glances. One raised her hand and asked: What about the women? But not a single Jesuit there, if any noticed at all, remarked on how abnormal, almost ridiculous, this all looked.

I don’t think those Jesuits, or many other bishops and priests, recognize the abnormality, the ridiculousness — perhaps because that’s what the Catholic hierarchy is: men in rooms. All men. Only men. But in light of these endless stories of priests’ sadism, all men and only men seems more than abnormal. It seems diseased.

Catholics get the question all the time: Why stay? Lots of Catholics I know say their faith centers on the radical carpenter who started it all, not on the corrupt institution created and dragged close to ruin — one more time — by men. As one disgusted Catholic put it at Mass last week, she still yearns for a church worthy of Jesus Christ.

Getting there means massive reforms. But a church where men and women share power must be among them. Not that women are perfect, of course. But I have no doubt that Catholic women with power in the church would have saved thousands of children from criminal predators all across Pennsylvania, Boston, America, and much of the world. Here’s what women almost never do: rape children.

Complete Article HERE!

Mexican Cardinal: Pedophile Priests’ Victims Should Think About Their Own Flaws

Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera

By Hemant Mehta

Given the magnitude of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, you’d think Church leaders would be better at responding to the outrage. Say you’re sorry, say you’re working to make the Church more transparent, say that you’ll cooperate with law enforcement whenever there’s an accusation of wrongdoing in the future, etc.

Mexican Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera didn’t get that memo because his reaction was to blame the victims for speaking out.

Even though he acknowledged that some allegations are true, he went after the victims and avoided referring to the Pennsylvania grand jury report in the United States that found some 300 abusive priests in a span of seven decades in six dioceses.

Obeso Rivera’s words came last week, after the report was made public.

“I’m here happy to talk about nice things, not about problematic things, it’s an accusation that is made, and in some cases it’s true. But the evil of many is the consolation of fools, because sometimes those who accuse men of the Church should [be careful] because they have long tails that are easily stepped on.

… Is that supposed to be a threat? You rat on us and we’ll come after you? This isn’t a parable about glass houses. Everyone’s a sinner in some way, but these people were abused by Church leaders, and their abuse was covered up by other Church leaders. When it comes to the people deserving criticism, victims aren’t on the list.

But don’t worry. Obeso Rivera wants you to know he takes the allegations very seriously.

… he did say that the accusations “make us feel bad and we want to improve.”

I’m glad more than 300 priests sexually violating more than 1,000 children over several decades gives him the feels. We wouldn’t want him shedding more than a couple of tears now, would we?

With Church leaders like these, how do Catholics expect anything to change?

Complete Article HERE!