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American Catholicism: A Call to Arms
Last Friday, I posted on Ricochet a piece entitled American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil. In it, among other things, I traced the crisis now faced by American Catholicism to the reign within the American Church of Joseph Bernardin, Cardinal-Archbishop of Chicago. In my haste, I got a detail or two wrong, and I was challenged not only with regard to the Cardinal’s cursus honorum but also with regard to the role he played in the scandal concerning the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic clergy. This post is meant to correct the record with regard to minor details, to flesh it out with regard to the profound damage done the American Church by Cardinal Bernardin, and to suggest that we might be witnessing a turning of the tide.
In doing so, I will draw on various sources. But let me say at the outset that the most important of these is the article The End of the Bernardin Era: The Rise, Dominance, and Decline of a Culturally Accommodating Catholicism published by George Weigel in February, 2011 in First Things. Here, in Weigel’s words, is the pre-eminent fact:
In his prime, Joseph Bernardin was arguably the most powerful Catholic prelate in American history; he was certainly the most consequential since the heyday of James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When he was in his early forties, Bernardin was the central figure in defining the culture and modus operandi of the U.S. bishops’ conference. Later, when he became archbishop of Cincinnati and cardinal archbishop of Chicago, Bernardin’s concept and style of episcopal ministry set the pattern for hundreds of U.S. bishops. Bernardin was also the undisputed leader of a potent network of prelates that dominated the affairs of the American hierarchy for more than two decades; observers at the time dubbed it the “Bernardin Machine.”
Here are some of the details. Bernardin was born in 1928 in Columbia, South Carolina. He was ordained a priest for the Charleston diocese in 1952. His talents were recognized immediately, and he rocketed up the clerical ladder. He was a monsignor within seven years. By 1966, he was an auxiliary bishop in Atlanta. Two years later, he was named the general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), the forerunner of today’s United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The NCCB was at that time new; Bernardin was the very first to serve as its general secretary; and he was one of the two men who shaped the institution – which to this day formulates policy for the American bishops.
In 1972, Joseph Bernardin became Archbishop of Cincinnati, and two years later he was named – at the ripe old age of forty-six – the presiding officer of the NCCB. In his years as an official of that body, he hired its staff, and he put his stamp on the organization. Moreover, for decades, the principal posts in the NCCB would be in the hands of Bernardin himself or of one of “Bernardin’s boys,” as they were called. His first five successors as presiding officer of the NCCB — John Quinn, John Roach, James Malone, John May, and Daniel Pilarczyk – were his nominees. Moreover, as George Weigel makes clear, the Bernardin era did not end when the Cardinal died of pancreatic cancer in 1996. In fact, it was not fully over until November 2010, when Archbishop Timothy Dolan of the city of New York was elected the presiding officer of the UCCB in preference to Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, who had started his episcopal career as one of Bernardin’s auxiliaries. As Diogenes at CatholicCulture.Org put it some years ago, “It is almost impossible to over-estimate the importance of Cardinal Bernardin to the U.S. Catholic Church; on that point his critics and admirers are unanimous. Like Bismarck or Stalin or Richard Daley, he created and presided over a bureaucracy whose impersonality became his personal tool, and the way the USCCB does business bears his stamp to this day.”
The church that dissolved in scandal in 2002 – when The Boston Globe began reporting on the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and the protection provided the malefactors by Bernard Francis Cardinal Law of the Boston Archdiocese and his episcopal predecessors – was Bernardin’s church. As a member of the Congregation of Bishops in Rome, he played a decisive role in picking the American bishops and in determining their assignments. Moreover, his influence was dispositive for a long time in determining who would head the bishop’s conference, and it was under the Bernardin machine that the American church decided how it would handle the grave sexual abuse scandal that erupted in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana in the mid-1980s.
In the wake of that event, three individuals joined together – with encouragement from the Papal Nuncio and a number of bishops – to consider the problem of the sexual abuse of minors by clergymen as it applied to the American Church as a whole. The three were Father Michael Peterson, M. D, a psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of wayward priests.; F. Ray Mouton, J.D., the defense attorney hired by the Lafayette, Louisiana diocese to defend a priest who had sexually abused eleven different boys; and Father Thomas P. Doyle, O.P. J.C.D., a canon lawyer attached to the office of the Papal Nuncio in Washington, D. C. The confidential report produced by this committee was a bombshell. It suggested that sexual abuse was quite common. It warned about the prospect of lawsuits and predicted that the American Church would eventually have to pay out more than a billion dollars; it firmly and fiercely denied that there was any possibility of curing those who sexually abused minors; it spoke movingly about the long-term damage done those who were sexually abused as children; it argued for an immediate suspension of clergymen who were accused; and it urged the bishops to weed out from the seminaries those likely to engage in such misconduct.
Peterson, Mouton, and Doyle hoped to have their report discussed in detail by the bishops at their annual conference, but Bernardin’s boys at the NCCB saw to it that the report was tabled. Some months later, Father Peterson, who would die of AIDS in 1987, sent a copy to every bishop in the United States. He received no response. When Father Doyle insisted on pressing the issue, he was dropped by the Papal Nuncio and treated as persona non grata by the American bishops. He ended up in exile as a chaplain on a military base in Greenland, and the problem was hushed up. It was thanks to the Bernardin machine that the bishops continued sending the perpetrators to psychological counseling and then dispatching them to new parishes or to other dioceses where there was no one who knew about their past. Bernardin and his boys did not invent the culture of clerical corruption. In full knowledge of what was going on nationwide, however, they perpetuated it.
In Chicago – where Bernardin became Archbishop in 1982 and Cardinal a year later – things came to a head a full decade before they did in Boston, and, in the face of the scandal, Bernardin was, as always, nimble and effective. When the lawsuits began, and the Cook County State’s Attorney Jack O`Malley turned a baleful eye on the Archdiocese, The Chicago Tribune reported that Cardinal Bernardin “defused a conflict” with the prosecutor by issuing a “20-page guideline” for the Archdiocese, which replaced “a priest-managed investigations system with a non-clergy ‘fitness review administrator,’” tasked with reporting priestly misconduct to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and “a nine-member board . . . consisting of a nun, five laypeople and three parish pastors.”
To this day, Bernardin’s admirers cite this as a sign of his integrity and courage and of his eagerness to confront the culture of corruption. In fact, it was a species of “damage control,” and it constituted a confession that, ten years after Bernardin, a vigorous and effective administrator, had taken over the Chicago Archdiocese, its priests and their archbishop could not be trusted to deal with the sexual abuse of minors by the archdiocesan clergy. In this, as in other matters, Bernardin was the model for the other bishops. It was not until O’Malley began his investigation of the Archdiocese that Bernardin made these changes. He did not introduce them voluntarily. He did so under pressure. Had The Chicago Tribune and the other newspapers in Chicago been as diligent in digging up dirt as The Boston Globe would be a decade later, the scandal that ripped through the church in 2002 might well have begun in Chicago in 1992.
In 1993, Bernardin was himself accused of sexual abuse by a former seminarian named Stephen Cook, who was dying of AIDS. Bernardin fiercely denied the charge; the Vatican and many of the American bishops rallied in his defense; and the seminarian later dropped the suit. The public story at the time was that Cook then apologized to the Cardinal. But, in the keynote address that he delivered to the LINKUP National Conference held by the survivors of clerical abuse in 2003, A. W. Richard Sipe told a different story:
A sad, and as yet unsolved, chapter of the sexual abuse saga in the United States is the story of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. This man probably did die a saint, as his close friends attest. Without doubt, he did many wonderful things for the Church in America.
In the media flurry that surrounded the allegation of sexual abuse, an impertinent reporter asked the Cardinal, “Are you living a sexually active life?” A simple “no” would have been sufficient. But the Cardinal said, “I am sixty-five years old, and I have always lived a chaste and celibate life.”
However defensible in the arena of public assault, I knew that the statement was not unassailably true. Years before, several priests who were associates of Bernardin prior to his move to Chicago revealed that they had “partied” together; they talked about their visits to the Josephinum to socialize with seminarians.
It is a fact that Bernardin’s accuser did not ever retract his allegations of abuse by anyone’s account other than Bernardin’s.
If, as reported, three million dollars were paid in handling the scandal, certainly there are still informed people in Chicago who know at least part of the story. And the story is complex. It holds repercussions far beyond Chicago and one allegation.
There are three reasons why we should not dismiss out of hand as malicious gossip Sipe’s euphemistically-phrased claims. The first is that what he reports with regard to the hush money purportedly paid the seminarian conforms to what was standard operating procedure in American dioceses at the time. The Boston Globe reports that, between 1992 and 2002, the Archdiocese of Boston secretly settled more than seventy cases of child abuse in this fashion. It would not be odd if this were done in Chicago as well. In fact, it is precisely what one would expect.
The second reason for taking Sipe’s claims seriously is the fact that what we know about the clerical sexual abuse of minors is entirely a consequence of the lawsuits brought against the church and the investigations undertaken by the secular authorities. Had it not been for these, the great game of shuttling the predators around would still be going on. There is no reason at all to accord the benefit of the doubt to the bishops. In and soon after 2002 we learned what accomplished liars they had been.
The third reason for suspecting that what Sipe reports might be right is that he is as well-informed an observer as we have. Richard Sipe is a former priest. He was a Benedictine monk for eighteen years, was laicized by the Vatican in 1970, and married. For a long period prior to his departure from the priesthood, he was involved as a psychologist in counseling priests who were having trouble leading celibate lives. He continued doing so after leaving the priesthood, and at various times both before and after he taught in Catholic seminaries. He has testified in case after case involving the sexual abuse of minors by clergymen. He has written a number of books on the subject, and he is a Catholic liberal sympathetic to the political stance of Cardinal Bernardin. I cannot prove that he is telling the truth, but there is no reason to think him a fabricator of lies. When he estimates that about 6% of the priests in the United States in the 1980s were guilty of the sexual abuse of minors and that two-thirds of the bishops had experience in shuttling these men around, his assertions are entirely plausible. The John Jay Report produced in 2004 for the Catholic bishops by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City of New York indicates that, between 1950 and 2002, 4% of the priests in the United States were accused at one time or another of child abuse, and we can be confident that there were perpetrators who were never accused. Two-thirds of these allegations were lodged between 1993 and 2003. Prior to that time, shame on the part of the victims, fear of the fury that they would incur if they went public, and an ill-deserved respect for the hierarchy of the Church generally dictated silence.
As Diogenes observes, one of the major themes of Sipe’s ruminations is that we will never fully understand what happened if we do not attend to “the connection between the sexual misdeeds of churchmen in powerful positions and the cover-ups — personal and institutional — perpetrated by men they recruited, groomed, and promoted.” Here is the way that Sipe put it in his keynote address:
Why is the fight so furious? Why is the struggle to keep FACTS buried so vigorous? Important clues exist in the genealogy of abuse. I have been able to trace victims of clergy and bishop abuse to the third generation.
Often, the history of clergy abusers reveals that the priest himself was abused – sometimes by a priest. The abuse may have occurred when the priest was a child, but not necessarily.
Sexual activity between an older priest and an adult seminarian or young priest sets up a pattern of institutional secrecy. When one of the parties rises to a position of power, his friends are in line also for recommendations and advancement.
The dynamic is not limited to homosexual liaisons. Priests and bishops who know about each other’s sexual affairs with women, too, are bound together by draconian links of sacred silence. A system of blackmail reaches into the highest corridors of the American hierarchy and the Vatican and thrives because of this network of sexual knowledge and relationships.
Secrecy flourishes, like mushrooms on a dank dung pile, even among good men in possession of the facts of the dynamic, but who cannot speak lest they violate the Scarlet Bond.
I have interviewed at length a man who was a sexual partner of Bishop James Rausch. This was particularly painful for me since Rausch and I were young priests together in Minnesota in the early 60s. He went on to get his social work degree and succeeded Bernardin as Secretary of the Bishops’ National Conference in DC. He became Bishop of Phoenix.
It is patently clear that he had an active sexual life. It did involve at least one minor. He was well acquainted with priests who were sexually active with minors (priests who had at least 30 minor victims each). He referred at least one of his own victims to these priests.
What was his sexual genealogy? What are the facts of his celibate/sexual development and practice? Did those who knew him know nothing of his life? Perhaps so! But he was in a spectacular power grid of bright men. He was Bernardin’s successor at the US Conference. Bishop Thomas Kelly at Louisville was his successor. Msgr. Daniel Hoye and Bishop Robert Lynch, among others, took over his job.
Let me be perfectly clear. I am not saying or implying in any way that these men were partners in “crime” with Jim Rausch. But I am saying that anyone who sets out to solve a mystery has to ask people who knew the principal, “What, if anything, did you know or observe about the alleged perpetrator?”
After all, the Church’s hardened resistance to dealing honestly with the problem of sexual abuse on their own has compelled the civil authorities to move in, ask the questions, investigate allegations. The Church in America has been its own worst enemy – creating mysteries and doubts, rather than clear answers that inspire confidence.
Even bishops innocent of sexual violations themselves, by their silence, concealment of facts and resistance to effective solutions, choose to be part of a genealogy of abuse and reinforce a culture of deceit.
In this speech, Sipe does not use the phrase “lavender mafia,” but his focus is the network of powerful clergymen who protected the malefactors and allowed the seminaries to become brothels. As Diogenes puts it,
We don’t need to jump to a Grand Unified Theory of conspiracy in order to recognize corruption; ordinary self-interest can account for particular incidents of ad hoc collusion by which gay bishops who are sexually compromised take care of their own. By the same token, it is absurd to pretend that politically astute gay bishops in key positions of influence could have been unaware of the liabilities of the men they advanced, defended, and perjured themselves for.
To anyone who has paid attention to the major players in the Crisis, Sipe’s roster of Bernardin cronies is striking. For a glimpse of the Southwest Triangle (Rausch, O’Brien, Moreno) go here, here, here, here, and here. For Robert Lynch’s connections, go here and here. Thomas Kelly, whose archdiocese now has problems of its own, winked through Rudy Kos‘s annulment (in spite of his wife’s insistence he was a pedophile), clearing his way into the Dallas seminary headed by Michael Sheehan, who later became Archbishop of Santa Fe. A power grid indeed!
If you follow the links – most of which are still active – you will get the picture, which is in no way pretty. Too many of those who found their way into positions of influence and power thanks to the patronage of Cardinal Bernardin not only failed to honor the vow of celibacy they had themselves taken but were criminally lax in its enforcement. The effect was to foster a culture of corruption throughout the American Church and to dishearten those – whether homoerotically or heterosexually inclined – who were fiercely intent on honoring their own vows. It was in this context that the small minority who preyed on children were protected from the legal consequences of their crimes and allowed to continue. Bernardin and his proteges regarded the sexual abuse of children as a moral lapse comparable to clerical drunkenness.
It is, as I argued in American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil, no accident that the prelates most responsible for the perpetuation of this vile modus operandi were also inclined to downplay the significance of Roe v. Wade, to divert the energy of the institutional Church into a struggle on behalf of the administrative entitlements state, and to discourage the clergy from addressing the challenge posed to Christian morality by the sexual revolution. Joseph Bernardin became the presiding officer of the NCCB shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Roe v. Wade, and it fell to him to articulate the strategy that the Church with regard to that decision has followed ever since. As George Weigel intimates, it is a good thing that the Bernardin era has come to an end.
One can only hope that Archbishop Dolan is up to the task of cleaning the Augean Stables built by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. So far, he and his colleagues have done a better job than I realized when I posted American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil. When I wrote that piece, I relied on the reports in the press concerning the letter that the bishops sent to President in response to his announcement that, in providing health insurance for its employees, the Church would have to provide contraception coverage and abortifacients. In reporting on the response of the Church, the press did not mention that the bishops had in their letter come to the defense of Catholic employers and that they had made the same point with regard to companies owned and operated by the adherents of other faiths. The fact that they did so on this occasion and that in response to the “accommodation” proposed on Friday by President Obama they not only stood their ground but reasserted the rights of everyone in this matter is heartening. I would like to think that this marks a turning point in the history of Roman Catholicism in America and that, under the leadership of Archbishop Dolan, the Church in the United States will relinquish its embrace of the administrative entitlements state, abandon the presumption to an expertise in political affairs that it does not possess, and take up the responsibilities that are its proper task.
In the Bernardin era, Catholic clergymen lost their way. On questions of faith and morals, they spoke in at best a muted fashion. On political questions beyond their ken, they ran their mouths incessantly. To professed Catholics who openly rejected the teaching of the Church on the pre-eminent moral issue of the day, they lent their support. Barack Obama has now shown them the price that they will have to pay if they do not radically reverse course. Maybe, just maybe, they will.
In doing so, I hope that they take to heart an observation made by George Weigel in The End of the Bernardin Era: “The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus used to say that, when the Church is not obliged to speak, the Church is obliged not to speak; that is, when the issue at hand does not touch a fundamental moral truth that the Church is obliged to articulate vigorously in the public-policy debate, the Church’s pastors ought to leave the prudential application of principle to the laity who, according to Vatican II, are the principal evangelizers of culture, politics, and the economy. The USCCB’s habit of trying to articulate a Catholic response to a very broad range of public-policy issues undercuts this responsibility of the laity; it also tends to flatten out the bishops’ witness so that all issues become equal, which they manifestly are not.”
I am struck by one fact. I wrote my earlier post in the hope that it might help educate Catholic laymen and clergymen with regard to their duty. It seemed an opportune time to point to the obvious – that the teaching articulated by Cardinal Bernardin and adopted by the American Church was not just pretentious and false but that, by undermining limited government, it posed a danger to religious liberty. Since writing it – especially since Rush Limbaugh read it out on his show on Monday – I have received innumerable congratulatory e-mails and telephone calls from priests, seminarians, and laymen from every corner of the land. Only one individual mistook my criticism of the hierarchy for an attack on the Church itself.
The proper response to criticism of the sort he articulated is the one which Winston Churchill voiced when he rose in Parliament on 5 October 1938 to criticize a Prime Minister drawn from his own party:
Our loyal, brave people… should know the truth. They should know that there has been a gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road… and do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of the bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.
As one recent correspondent said to me in the course of reminding me of this passage, “The enemy of freedom is not always foreign and external.”
Obamacare delenda est!
ADDENDUM: If you find this of interest, you may wish to consult its sequel: More Than a Touch of Malice.
Published in General
I would like to think that this marks a turning point in the history of Roman Catholicism in America and that, under the leadership of Archbishop Dolan, the Church in the United States will relinquish its embrace of the administrative entitlements state, abandon the presumption to an expertise in political affairs that it does not possess, and take up the responsibilities that are its proper task.
This passage from Archbishop Dolan’s letter to Paul Ryan is encouraging in that respect:
Your letter is correct in observing that the Church makes an essential contribution to society when she raises up moral principles to help guide and inform decisions about public policy in a compelling way. We bishops are very conscious that we are pastors, never politicians. As the Second Vatican Council reminds us, it is the lay faithful who have the specific charism of political leadership and decision (Lumen Gentium, 31; Apostolicam Actuositatem 13).·27 minutes ago
Maybe, just maybe, Dolan understands what needs to be done.
This, I perceive, is par for the course of progressives. Criticize others for not being progressive enough; praise them for adopting progressive ideas. When progressive ideas cause such tragedy, blame it on not being progressive enough, and praise those who push for even more progressive ideas.
I have no doubt that the Church will continue down the Liberal path. Organizations never seem to recover once they become leftist organizations.
The mere fact that this horror went on for so long pretty much demonstrates how bad the rot is. How, exactly, can any organization claim it will recover from something this pervasive and this bad. If 2/3 of the leadership helped in some way to cover up or shuffle people around, to clean up 2/3 of the leadership should be gone.
Did that happen?
The mere fact that this horror went on for so long pretty much demonstrates how bad the rot is. How, exactly, can any organization claim it will recover from something this pervasive and this bad. If 2/3 of the leadership helped in some way to cover up or shuffle people around, to clean up 2/3 of the leadership should be gone.
Did that happen? ·12 minutes ago
“But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible. ” –Matthew 19:26
Restoration turns entirely on who they depend on restoring the Church.
The mere fact that this horror went on for so long pretty much demonstrates how bad the rot is. How, exactly, can any organization claim it will recover from something this pervasive and this bad. If 2/3 of the leadership helped in some way to cover up or shuffle people around, to clean up 2/3 of the leadership should be gone.
Did that happen? ·12 minutes ago
I have hope. This is the western world’s oldest institution. It has been changed by, but managed to survive many things at least as bad as surreptitious leftism.
That judgment seems a bit harsh. Having grown up in Boston at the time of Archbishop Cushing my memory of him was he ran the diocese in the iron-handed manner of an old time machine politician. My recollection – aided by reading Philip Lawler’s book on the collapse of Catholic Culture in the city of Boston – was the things began to crumble under the maladministration of the pathetic bumbler Humberto Medeiros. Conservative inclinations notwithstanding Bernard Law is hardly a fall guy in this drama. He was certainly complicit in covering up the activities of the notorious pedophile priests Paul Shanley and John Geoghan.
That judgment seems a bit harsh. Having grown up in Boston at the time of Archbishop Cushing my memory of him was he ran the diocese in the iron-handed manner of an old time machine politician. My recollection – aided by reading Philip Lawler’s book on the collapse of Catholic Culture in the city of Boston – was the things began to crumble under the maladministration of the pathetic bumbler Humberto Medeiros. Conservative inclinations notwithstanding Bernard Law is hardly a fall guy in this drama. He was certainly complicit in covering up the activities of the notorious pedophile priests Paul Shanley and John Geoghan. ·4 minutes ago
I am not defending Law. He was inept. Shanley and Geoghan he inherited from Medeiros and, yes, from Cushing. Let me add that Cushing was, in effect, the in-house chaplain of the Kennedy family — more than willing to cover for their failures. Rumor has it that they had the goods on him. There is a novel by Dominick Dunne. . .
The mere fact that this horror went on for so long pretty much demonstrates how bad the rot is. How, exactly, can any organization claim it will recover from something this pervasive and this bad. If 2/3 of the leadership helped in some way to cover up or shuffle people around, to clean up 2/3 of the leadership should be gone.
Did that happen? ·12 minutes ago
I have hope. This is the western world’s oldest institution. It has been changed by, but managed to survive many things at least as bad as surreptitious leftism. ·13 minutes ago
It has come back from disasters worse than the one that became visible to all in 2002. What Churchill said about England applies to Rome as well.
Anecdotally, when I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts (home of Tufts University), in the early 1980s, at least two dozen lesbians I met (many long-time partnered) had been nuns who, in the early 1970s, left the vocation (and most the church) as a result of the cultural changes brought about by Vatican II. I suspected that the reforms made the idea of being a nun much less romantic (picture the abbey in Sound of Music) so they decided to be social workers and penniless leftist activists who did not have to repress their emotions (much more important to them than their sexuality). All this to say, I don’t think it should be surprising that single-sexed environments would attract those who are homoerotically inclined.
·3 hours ago
I am guessing but I suspect that what happened in the general culture in the 1960s was very hard on a great many priests. They got hit by something that their formation in the seminaries had not prepared them for.
Does that make any sense to you? ·14 hours ago
Yes, and I also think it’s possible that they thought the grace that celibacy offered would empower them to not act on there homoerotic desires.
I think you have me to thank for no more “letters to the editor” in our weekly Tidings, published by LA Archdiocese. Years ago there was an article about the evils of consumerism in general and $350 sneakers in particular. I responded that as long as someone wasn’t spending the household milk money, the only time a $350 pair of shoes was immoral was if someone stole them.
The responses I got to that published letter were unbelievable in their vitriol. ·11 hours ago
I can imagine. It’s the social justice theme that was adopted and when you look at the time line and the geography of where these particular Priests come from, especially the gay Priests. It’s the 60’s and early 70’s and both coasts.
Professor Rahe, as someone who was very critical of your prior piece, I appreciate what you have said with this one. I especially appreciate your correction of several statements regarding recent public statements by the current leadership of the American Church. I still have objections to some of your arguments, particularly regarding New Deal programs like the Social Security Act or the cooperation with government initiatives by Catholic institutions (Catholic Social Teaching clearly calls for such cooperation when possible, to advance the common good). That being said, I certainly agree with you and many of the other commenters (and, surely, anyone with their eyes open) that the American Church went through a very dark period, in part because bishops and priests did not clearly and consistently articulate the Church’s moral teaching. Many current bishops have said as much.
Though I question the wisdom of having this discussion in the present critical moment, I do think these conversations are healthy and must be had. May God bring much good out of this, as only He can.
Excellent pair of articles. A ‘Cradle Catholic,” I spent 2 years of high school and 2 and a half years of college at the Athenaeum of Ohio seminary in Cincinnati (9/64 – 12/68). Fr. Pilarczyk was my Greek and Latin Teacher. Bishop Dan Conlon was my roomate for 2 and a half years. The rationale for Vatican II was to “throw open the windows and let some frech air in.” Unfortunately, sewer stench also filtered in, and we have been fighting it ever since. I really appreciated the historical perspective in your 1st article. I also like your comment concerning abortion & contraception in particular and moral teaching from the pulpit in general. In fact, these articles, used on Rush’s show, prompted me to join this organization. To close, I offer a challenge: Where in the bible does Jesus tell us to give our money to a government and let the government do our “charity” for us?
I think you have me to thank for no more “letters to the editor” in our weekly Tidings, published by LA Archdiocese. Years ago there was an article about the evils of consumerism in general and $350 sneakers in particular. I responded that as long as someone wasn’t spending the household milk money, the only time a $350 pair of shoes was immoral was if someone stole them.
The responses I got to that published letter were unbelievable in their vitriol.
The mere fact that this horror went on for so long pretty much demonstrates how bad the rot is. How, exactly, can any organization claim it will recover from something this pervasive and this bad. If 2/3 of the leadership helped in some way to cover up or shuffle people around, to clean up 2/3 of the leadership should be gone.
Did that happen? ·12 minutes ago
I have hope. This is the western world’s oldest institution. It has been changed by, but managed to survive many things at least as bad as surreptitious leftism. ·13 minutes ago
It has come back from disasters worse than the one that became visible to all in 2002. What Churchill said about England applies to Rome as well. ·2 hours ago
With God all things are possible.
It seems worth noting that 6% is an unusually high estimate, and that not all of those accused, or even all of those convicted, were guilty (particularly at the height of the scare). .
I suspect, in fact, that 6% is low. Keep in mind that the survey covered 1950-2002. How many people in their sixties were going to make complaints about what happened fifty years ago? I ran the number past a close friend who knows the Church in the United States very, very well, and he thought 6% utterly plausible. ·
If you read the follow up study, you can see that the cases of abuse discovered were overwhelmingly from the 60s-80s; things really are getting better. It might not sound impressive, but the chart (pg. 8) really is.
And yes, there are a ton of angry old people with imagined complaints about their youth, and particularly about the church. I’ve not studied ecclesiastical abuse so much, but it’s certainly true that for post-dated secular abuse claims, there is very often a good chunk of BS involved.
Thank you for your articles. You have articulated what I have felt for a long time. I rarely attend Mass anymore because I leave angry from the socialism vomiting from the pulpit and the intentions that pray for socialist answers to societal ills. I pray for recovery of both my attitude and a turning away of the pact with the devil that the leaders of the Church have made. Your point that where “social justice” prevails, the Church is dead or dying is true.
Pope Leo XIII wrote a prescient encyclical title “Socialism, Communism, Nihilishm” in 1875, and called the church to stand strong until the “accursed brood of Socialism is utterly destroyed”.
Excerpts page27:
For although the Socialists, turning to evil use the Gospel itself so as to deceive more readily the unwary, have been wont to twist it to their meaning, still so striking is the disagreement between their criminal teachings and the pure doctrine of Christ, that no greater can exist:
…
[Socialists] in good sooth cease not from asserting, …, that all men are by nature equal, and hence they contend that neither honor nor respect is owed to public authority, nor any obedience to the laws, saving perhaps to those which have been sanctioned according to their good pleasure.
Contrariwise, from the Gospel records, equality among men consists in this, that one and all, possessing the same nature, are called to the sublime dignity of being sons of God ; and, moreover, that one and the same end being set before all, each and every one has to be judged according to the same laws and to have punishments or rewards meted out according to individual deserts.
Though I question the wisdom of having this discussion in the present critical moment, I do think these conversations are healthy and must be had. May God bring much good out of this, as only He can. ·3 hours ago
Amen.
I’d like to explain that comment a bit more. The Left has promoted a theory of sexual predation that links it to frustrations caused by the effort to live by an impossible conservative ideal of chastity. Under this theory, health and balance are only possible by regular “expression” of one’s urges.
Fredo,
I am forced to admit that I did not read this closely enough. I agree with your analysis completely. The root cause is so often the sub-moral beliefs of the left wing itself. They are often the cause of the problems they claim to be solving. You have got it correct.
Regards,
Jim
For my post, just click the link, the blue text, Free Exercise Clause. ·37 minutes ago
Thanks, that makes things easy.
For my post, just click the link, the blue text, Free Exercise Clause. ·47 minutes ago
I just read it and commented on it. An excellent piece.
I recall the Stephen Cook case, dimly, because I was living out of the Chicago area at the time. The public denouement was as you said, Professor. In fact, there was comment at the time on how forgiving Cardinal Bernardin was towards his “false accuser.”
When the later scandal started to break, I remember thinking “some of these guys are making it up, just like that guy in Chicago.”
Read The peasants of Autun. ·47 minutes ago
I just did. It is all too apt.
Thank the Lord for Rush Limbaugh & Paul A. Rahe.
Come November the people will know if the Constitution will survive.
Give us strength Almighty God
When the later scandal started to break, I remember thinking “some of these guys are making it up, just like that guy in Chicago.” ·14 minutes ago
At the time, my local tv station received Rush Limbaugh’s show late at night, and I happened to be watching when this story broke. Rush covered it as the mainstream media did (no fault of his of course given how little we knew at the time) but did highlight what he took to be an instance of “false recovered memory syndrome”.
That was well before we got used to seeing prominent prelates on the witness stand repeating over and over again: “I don’t recall, I don’t recall, I don’t recall”.
Thank you, Professor. As a Protestant called on to defend the Christian Faith to agnostics and atheists from time to time, I am challenged with the histories of crusades, indulgences, inquisitions, wars, witch-hunts, and the priest pedophile scandals. Your honest and forthright assessment, welcomed as it has been by many in the Catholic church, will be a big help in future discussions.
Obamacare delenda est! Indeed!
Thank you very much, Prof. Rahe, for taking the time to flesh out the points you made regarding Bernardin. I’ll have to go through all the links you provided before rendering any conclusions on it. But I do certainly think you’ve established there is ample evidence to be suspicious of what the sources of corruption behind the scandals the Church has endured could be and how they might have been allowed to creep in and fester.
That said, I would still caution you in your tone and the stridency with which you press the implication that Bernardin was some malevolent power broker behind the scenes, operating a clerical political “machine” within the American Church. One could easily draw the conclusion from your complaints that Bernardin was some type of Svengali, beguiling young priests and building a conniving network of hierarchical henchmen obediently carrying out the twisted orders of a perverted puppet master, who all the while played the humble and innocent, avuncular shepherd on the shores of Lake Michigan.
continued below…
Take the case of Steven Cook, and the skeptical manner in which you describe details of him recanting his charges against Bernardin. Cook was an indigent and sick man whose promiscuous lifestyle had led him to contract AIDS, and who was seeking to win monetary damages from the Church on the basis of “recovered memories” he had “repressed” of sexual liaisons that he allegedly had with Bernardin, dredged up under hypnosis. Perhaps there is more to that story, but the fact that he was ever granted any credence or attention at all based on such flaky and dubious “evidence” is something I think deserved at least some comment from you.
I imagine the Church leadership could be as corrupt, cynical, and perverse as you hint in your writing, but it would be truly surprising in a media and news environment so hostile to religious faith and the teachings of the Catholic Church that such a large network of deceit and licentiousness could remain so well hidden from view.
Prof. Rahe, you began so well by citing the Magna Carta and the limited government posture in Western Civilization. You showed the Church’s historical role in enforcing the boundaries of government — and then your errors in reporting and emphasis completely gutted your credibility in speaking on Catholic leadership. You can’t drop a stun grenade (i.e. erroneously saying the leadership only wants to drop the mandate for its schools and hospitals) and napalm (i.e. supporting your disdain for Bernadin’s leadership with a short quip about his enabling pedophilia) — then say “my bad” and double down with more sordid rumors and details about Bernadin. Did you want to settle old scores about Bernadin or did you want to aid the bishops in confronting an over-reaching federal government in the here and now? With this piece you fully do the former and give lip service to the latter. It is powerful to ask why Bernadin didn’t do more to challenge Roe v. Wade, and beyond pointless to reinforce the point with speculations about Bernadin’s misconduct. You fully stepped on your male appendage by making Bernadin the issue, and thereby diluting the force of resistance.