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I’ll Have What He’s Having
Remember the last time you looked forward to a cocktail party? Neither do I. But, if you were a seminarian in Newark, NJ under Theodore “Uncle Teddy” McCarrick you certainly didn’t go back for seconds unless you like drinking drinks with an umbrella in them. New allegations today at Catholic World Report:
Published in Religion & PhilosophyThree Newark priests independently gave CNA nearly identical accounts of being invited to these parties when they were newly ordained.
One recalled that he attended a cocktail party, thinking he had been invited to a simple priests’ dinner. “I was led into the room to a chorus of wolf-whistles,” he said. “It was clear right away I was ‘on display.’”
Another priest told CNA that he was also invited to a party hosted by the priest. “They were all carrying big mixed drinks, pink ones, it was like something out of ‘Sex in the City.’”
He recalled that after asking for a beer, he was told by his host, “you need to try something more girly tonight.”
All recounted overtly sexual conversation at the cocktail parties. “I was fresh meat and they were trying me out,” one priest said.
All three said they left quickly upon realizing what was going on. “Everyone was getting loaded and getting closer on the couches, I wanted out of there,” a priest told CNA.
“Everyone kept calling me a ‘looker’ and saying they had to ‘keep me around’ from now on,” a third Newark priest told CNA.
I heard it growing up in high school and junior high, and again when I worked at Air France. A lot of my co-workers were from France or Italy. We all grew up in the 50s and 60s. One day in the office, they all started getting these cards out of their wallets, with pictures of Mary etc, and one of them had her heart outside of her clothes with blood dripping from it. They started talking in a matter-of-fact way about how Protestants go to Hell. Both of them were Italian.
In middle scho0l, I knew girls who went to my school and some who went to the Catholic school. The Catholic girls were the “fast” girls who smoked at age 14 and did things with boys etc. One of them, also Italian (but born here), told me they can do anything they want because all they have to do is go to confession and it’s washed away. And she said that I, even though I didn’t smoke or do anything except kissing with boys yet, was going to Hell.
Speaking as someone who attended Catholic school in the 80’s, I was taught that good people go to Heaven, and bad people go to Hell. Period. There is no reason to make it more complicated than that.
Not sure what you mean by that.
Are you familiar with Chick Tracts? Some of them are quite bilious, and they have a notable one that is rabidly anti-Catholic. I could link to it, but I don’t want to give them any extra attention.
Welp, the Church of the 1950s had a harsher view! I like yours better.
I was raised by a Southern Methodist and a Southern Baptist, and was afraid of Catholics as a child. One of my Air France Catholic co-workers, an American, told me she had been raised to view Protestants with a mixture of fear and pity, and I told her how I’d been raised to see Catholics that way, and we just laughed. I know one thing: if one of us had married a Catholic it would have well nigh killed my parents, and we would never in a million years have been able to sign that paper promising to raise children as Catholics.
It’s pretty sad how, even though we are all Christians and read from the same Bible (well except for all that extra stuff you guys added haha! Kidding! I am kidding!) , we can still find ways to separate ourselves from each other and view each other with suspicion. What a shame.
Was that study done after these revelations? I doubt it.
I had to google him. I must say I agree.
Assuming that one has belief in the devil, those options are not mutually exclusive.
At one time he thought he was going to be the first pope from the US.
His list of offenses are long, but this is one that hit close to home.
During the scandal, he said over and over he would not put any Catholic schools in financial jeopardy. Behind the scenes, he and his cohorts took out mortgages on several Catholic schools.
Five years later, he passed the hat looking to “save the schools” with no mention of why there were mortgages on the land or where that money had gone.
My daughter attended an all girls Catholic school in Sierra Madre (you’ve seen the property in many movies) and my sons attended an all boys school in La Canada. Due to prudence and foresight, both those properties are held privately by the schools or orders, so Mahoney couldn’t touch them.
Mahoney is now living in comfort and style in Los Angeles thanks to several benefactors.
Uh, oh.
I’m sorry, Ms. Angles. There was a disconnection between my brain and my keyboard. That happens to me every now and then. I was trying to say that the story is so good that it resembles fiction in its drama and moral import, though I have no doubt that it actually happened.
I valued being clever over being clear. That almost always ends in being neither.
Too nice.
ne of them, also Italian (but born here), told me they can do anything they want because all they have to do is go to confession and it’s washed away.
That’s not how the sacrament works. If you sin and go to confession and don’t have a serious intent to amend your life, the confession is invalid, you retain the mortal sin with which you’re already guilty and add the additional mortal sin of sacrilege. In other words, you pile drive yourself further down into Hell.
To be saved either into purgatory or into heaven, you need to be in a state of grace (free of even one mortal sin) and also have the grace of final perseverance since Satan and the demons are given access to all your unconfessed and unforgiven sins and will use them to drive you into the mortal sin of despair at your death, when your soul separates from you body, something that is hideously painful I might add.
Re: Catholic vs. Protestant beliefs: The church I attended as a child was vaguely Southern Baptist, where we enjoyed a kind and mild pastor. Every so often, though, the higher-ups would send around a collector, a fire and brimstone pulpit-pounder, to try and squeeze more money out of the congregation. One Sunday he told us that “12,000 souls an hour were going to Hell because they weren’t Southern Baptist.” I wondered: was there supposed to be an angel with one of those clicking counters standing at the pearly gates? Many of the congregation truly believed that Catholics were idol-worshipping pagans and that the Pope was the anti-Christ.
As for the cover-ups in the Catholic church, I don’t believe that it’s the power that corrupts per se. It’s the freedom from consequence that is so corrupting. If you know, as a priest, that your church will protect you, hide you, move you away from the scene of your crime and never breathe a word to civil authorities, that’s virtually carte blanche to indulge your lust or the 6 other deadly sins as well.
I’ve argued elsewhere that what this really points to is an organizational and institutional discipline problem, much more than it is (or was) a sex problem.
As we frequently say in Catholic theology, it’s not “either/or,” it’s “and/both.”
As to the original post, “Mother Mary, pray for us, your poor banished Children of Eve…”
Well we were in 8th grade.
@rightangles, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I have a gay friend who has a very similar story to the one you shared about your friend. How said is that?
(That was me being quoted above) Now see, this is one of the parts that I don’t recall from the Bible exactly. Too many kind of man-made additions for me.
My dad’s Baptist church was what they call Northern Baptist or American Baptist (I grew up in the North, not the South, though my parents are from . They can dance, drink, smoke, etc. and are not the kind of Holy Rollers that shout “Amen Brother Ben” from the pews etc., and nobody would ever say that only Baptists go to Heaven. They’re more like Methodists probably, except they have baptism of believers. I did, however, grow up being told that Catholics worship graven images haha. I’m sure God has had some good laughs at us all at one time or another.
It really is sad, due to the psychological damage it can do to the other person.
And the Bible came from where, exactly?
Okay okay. But I still don’t like the Purgatory and Limbo stuff.
Um… do we?
“Every man his own priest.”
Oh no. See what this present revelation has done? Luther’s words now sound like an exhortation to Onanism.
Purgatory is a remarkably consoling doctrine.
I grew up with Chick tracts, @skipsul. It’s why I can’t bear any tract of any kind.
It is not!
I agree, it isn’t. I was never instructed in it, being Prot, but I now understand that you don’t go there unless you are already destined for Heaven. It’s not, like, one last chance.
Well I don’t like it at all, and just because they added it and called it dogma, does that mean I might end up there? Or have I already committed a Mortal Sin whatever that is, wait I’d better google that.