Tag: Take Back The Chruch

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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↩!

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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↩!

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Jake Tapper mocks the Catholic League for defending ‘widespread molestation and rape’ by priests

CNN’s Jake Tapper

By

CNN anchor Jake Tapper mocked the Catholic League on Friday after a 884-page statewide investigative grand jury on “child sex abuse by Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses” was released by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

“It is interesting to note that the most irrational, indeed hysterical, reaction to PA grand jury report is coming from conservative Catholics. They are singularly incapable of making a cogent argument, so all they do is vent like little boys,” the Catholic League argued Friday. “They are a pitiful lot.”

“Yeah, can’t believe Hugh Hewitt Marc Thiessen and others object to credible & detailed allegations of widespread molestation and rape of up to a thousand minors by priests and other clergy, with the subsequent and systematic coverup by the Church,” Tapper replied, citing two conservative Catholics who were alarmed by the report.

Hewitt has pledged that he will not donate “one dime” until Cardinal Donald Wuerl is gone, because such tithing “is exactly like contributing to legal defense fund of accomplice to child rape.”

“If any CEO uncovered 19 child molesters/pornographers in his or her company, didn’t report 18 of them to law enforcement, kept them employed in new jobs where CEO thought ‘Probably won’t rape another child,’ would he/she still be CEO after reveal?” Hewitt asked, in a thought exercise for “the deniers.”

Thiessen has also tweeted calls for Cardinal Wuerl to go and said that, “The bishops not only failed the victims but have also scandalized the church, undermined its teaching authority and driven countless people away from Christ.”

Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, released an 11-page statement (PDF) claiming to “debunk” the grand jury report.

The Catholic League is not part of the Catholic Church.

While Donohue’s organization attempted to defend the sexual assault detailed in the grand jury report, the Vatican on Thursday expressed “shame and sorrow.”

“The Catholic League can’t possible embarrass and injure the Church as much as Wuerl and other prelates have, but every now and then they give it a try,” Hewitt responded.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Is So Hard to Stop

The latest horrific report came from Pennsylvania, but it won’t be the last one, thanks in part to an insane lobby standing in the way.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former D.C. archbishop, waves to fellow bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on September 23, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

by Allie Conti

On Tuesday, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that was nothing less than explosive. Although Americans have been reading similar horrific tales since at least 2002, when Spotlight reporters at the Boston Globe reported on priests there molesting kids and the Church systematically covering it up, the details in the new—nearly 900-page—document were particularly gut-wrenching. What’s more, the report suggested that the already jaw-dropping estimate of the number of victims was probably a conservative one.

“We subpoenaed, and reviewed, half a million pages of internal diocesan documents. They contained credible allegations against over three hundred predator priests,” the report reads. “Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records. We believe that the real number—of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward—is in the thousands.”

To get a sense of what this very lengthy report means in the broader context of Catholic Church sex abuse, how rank-and-file adherents might be responding, and what can be done to punish offenders and prevent abuse in the future, I called up Michael Dolce. He’s a lawyer who represents survivors of clergy abuse and helped get Florida to repeal its statute of limitations on child sex crimes in 2010.

VICE: Like most people, I’m familiar with what happened in Boston, but less so everywhere else. I was hoping we could start off talking about the scope of this scandal so you could get me up to speed on where else there have been explosive reports at this point.
Michael Dolce: We’ve seen similar reports to the most recent one that’s come out of Pennsylvania in Los Angeles, Washington state, Milwaukee, and Minnesota. This is not the first time, but as I see it, the reports are becoming more and more specific and kind of confirming, if you will, the patterns we have seen are very much patterns in terms of the institutional mishandling of child abuse.

Can you elaborate on how the latest grand-jury report fits into the larger picture of what we know about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, though? For instance, have the alleged cover-up tactics been the same nationwide, or have they evolved over time?

I see them as being quite typical of what we’ve seen across the Catholic Church—and not just there, but in other institutions. But certainly the leadership in the Catholic institutions have been particularly purposeful in efforts to cover up reports of abuse and failing in particular to report abuse to law enforcement. What we also see in this report was the acknowledgement by the grand jury of what we’ve known for a long time, which is that when we see 1,000 victims, there’s knowledge that the numbers are much higher. If you look at underreporting rates, this is probably more like 10,000 victims. That was essentially one of the findings of the grand jury—the magnitude and scope of the problem.

One of the unique aspects of this grand-jury report is the recommendations for change. They emphasize more than I’ve seen before the importance of failure-to-report laws [for sex abuse]. They said close the loopholes and don’t give people a pass on this.

Have narrow statutes of limitations been the primary roadblock against criminal charges where there’ve been allegations against priests over the years?
No question about it. We know the average time for reporting is 15 years after the fact and in most states, the statute of limitations is set up that crimes had to be prosecuted in four or six years or something like that. We estimated here in Florida before we repealed the statute of limitations for child sex abuse in 2010 that they were barring 70 percent of all criminal prosecutions.

How does one go about removing the statute of limitations in any given state?
When I started the effort in 2004, I would not have believed you if you had said it would take six years. I knew my way around the legislature, I had worked there for years, I had assisted in passing a number of other laws. I knew what I was doing. I had worked for an influential senator—I knew how to get things done. But when I came back as a citizen it still took six years because I couldn’t find the political willpower to overcome the strength of the Catholic leadership lobby. And they of course were backed by an insurance industry that didn’t want further civil exposure. Then, of course, the criminal defense bar was fighting me tooth and nail.

What reasons do actual lawmakers give for opposing expanding the statute of limitations for civil or criminal action? And is this simply about the Church and other institutions’ lobbying power or is it more complicated?

The tactics that were employed in Florida are the same ones I see elsewhere. They try to kill the legislation quietly and behind the scenes, never letting it go to a vote. Most legislators understand that if you publicly fight against legislation that is specifically designed to protect children and work against the tactics of predators and those who give them safe harbor, you’re going to pay for that in the next election. So what they did in Florida was keep me off the Senate and the House floors for six years. They tied it up in committee and with amendments and excuses. When it got there, we won unanimously. It was the right thing to do—at least publicly.

But the resistance, when it’s spelled out at all, is largely argued on financial grounds?
The main tactic we saw in Florida was they said if the legislation passes, we would see liability insurance for running schools, daycare centers, and recreation leagues become unaffordable. Churches would shutter. Daycare centers would become non-existent.

Well, what have we seen in states where they’ve been repealed? Is that true?
We repealed the limitations in Florida, effective July 1, 2010. And I can tell you as I sit here today, I have not heard of a single daycare center, a single church, a single rec league, being closed as a result of this. And I would be the first person to lodge a complaint to, OK? What we see is the flip-side benefit, which is that insurance carriers are much more careful about the institutions that they insure, and that they come in and audit, and that the best practices are in place.

You mentioned not seeing any church doors close as a result of exposure to liability, but what about due to lack of membership? Why aren’t people leaving the Church despite what is now a decades-long scandal?
I got a note two nights ago from a dear, dear friend of mine, she and her husband are devote Catholics, about their struggle to distinguish the faith from the institution. I simply encouraged them that their faith is their faith and that the people who administer it can do the wrong thing. But I do know people who have been turned off by it.

But when—as in what year—might we have a nationwide accounting? When does this end?
I shudder to think how long it’s going to take. There’s an underlying problem here, and that’s the societal unwillingness to even confront these issues. People don’t wanna believe this will really happen. I can tell you about a case I just tried in Gainesville, Florida. My client’s pastor* said he didn’t believe it was even possible that her father could have behaved this way toward her. He was in disbelief the entire time—including when he testified at trial two years later. And he was willing to look past a lot of very compelling evidence. He said a bizarre theory that somehow my client had been brainwashed by a man who spent ten days around her.

Every time you open a newspaper and see an article about child sexual abuse, you always see quotes from friends, neighbors, family members saying, “I’m in shock.” At what point in time are we going to say, ‘We need to stop acting this way, and this is the reality of the danger we face?’

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Catholic Church has obliterated its ability to inspire trust

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick listens during a news conference in Washington in this May 16, 2006, file photo.

by Elizabeth Bruenig

We live in an era of diminished trust and heightened cynicism. It is hard, now, to imagine someone expressing unqualified faith in government, the media, business — or even, for that matter, religious institutions. And the implication of this development is not simply the erosion of trust. It is the increasing difficulty of learning about the world around us, as we lose belief in those who might teach us.

Learning requires risk-taking. It forces us to face what we don’t know with the hope of advancing toward some grasp of it. The smaller the undertaking, the lower the emotional gamble — learning tomorrow’s weather forecast doesn’t entail an interior journey. But learning about the true and important things in life does require trust and dedication and vulnerability — usually under a teacher’s guidance. It is no surprise so many of us come to love the ones who teach us.

Neither is it a surprise, any longer, that some people charged with these roles of profound responsibility abuse them in the cruelest ways. The latest revelation concerns the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, who resigned Saturday from the College of Cardinals. Over several decades, McCarrick is alleged to have sexually abused at least one child and several adult seminarians or young priests, all of whom looked to the charismatic prelate for guidance — moral, vocational, spiritual. Into his den, he drew them.

McCarrick, who has denied the allegation involving the child, has now become the first prince of the church to resign his role since 1927 and the highest-ranking member of the Catholic hierarchy to step down amid sexual-abuse allegations. But there are others in the church who presumably knew of the charges against him decades ago and failed to act when given the chance. Two New Jersey dioceses where McCarrick served as a bishop paid settlements to young men who alleged abuse as recently as the early 2000s; it isn’t likely that $180,000 went missing from church coffers with only McCarrick’s knowing. In 2011, a priest from Brazil filed a lawsuit against McCarrick for unwanted sexual advances. The suit was withdrawn — but again, it seems unlikely the episode came and went unknown to anyone other than McCarrick.

The question of who in the church hierarchy learned of the allegations against McCarrick — and when — has thus spawned its own predictable controversy. Some Catholics have blamed the hierarchy’s lax attitude toward abuse claims on a modern, Pope Francis-inflected tolerance for gay priests and disregard for traditional church doctrine on sexual morality. Others counter that scapegoating gay priests who remain faithful and celibate is a dangerous and misplaced overreaction. The particular matter of who abetted McCarrick and how has taken on a dimension of doctrinal argument, subtly shifting into a debate about what the church ought to teach.

I am a faithful Catholic, and I worry that this discussion seems not only off-point but also ominously premature. What the church ought to teach makes sense to debate only if it is established that the church can teach at all. And it is precisely that capacity that McCarrick, along with his anonymous enablers and his legions of abusing predecessors, have all but destroyed. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed, “the Catholic bishops are now somewhat protected from media scrutiny by virtue of their increasing unimportance.” The price of that protection is a conspicuous moral muteness: The light has gone under a bushel, and the salt has lost its flavor.

The church has described itself as “mater et magistra,” mother and teacher. Yet, having obliterated its ability to inspire trust, in large part through decades of abuse and abuse-enabling, the church has now been rendered unqualified, in the eyes of many, to serve in that role. As McCarrick allegedly transgressed and abused his position as a spiritual guide, so, too, can it be said that the church has forfeited, at least for now, its own teaching role.

Every effort ought to be made to restore this crucial function, which begins with rebuilding trust. And that requires accountability, which is painful. Francis has already mandated that McCarrick remain in penitent seclusion until the accusations against him can be examined at a canonical trial. This is a positive step, but the Vatican ought also to invite an independent inquiry into who aided McCarrick’s reported abuse, passively or otherwise, how and for how long.

The church should punish those found guilty and cooperate with law enforcement when needed.

The process will likely be ugly, but so much less so than what came before. It is not too much to ask not to be raped or otherwise sexually abused by shepherds of the faith in the course of following Christ. Neither is it too severe to say that if clerics cannot meet that meager demand, they can scarcely teach His people anything at all.

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