Posted on 02/02/2013 1:48:40 PM PST by NYer
.- Archbishop José Gomez's decision to relieve Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Thomas Curry of their duties in the L.A. archdiocese is being welcomed as “the best possible thing he could have done.”
“The archbishop has in one stroke, opened up the doors and let in the sunlight,” historian and author Charles Coulombe told CNA Feb. 1. “It is an enormously difficult task he has taken on...it would have been the case no matter what he did.”
“However, he handled it brilliantly, wisely, pastorally, truthfully, honestly, openly,” he reflected. “Very, very different than what we're used to here in Los Angeles.”
“I can't overemphasize how grateful I am that the Holy Father gave us this man.”
On Jan. 31, Archbishop Gomez announced that with the release of personnel files of priests accused decades ago of sexual abuse, his predecessor, the retired Cardinal Mahony, and his one-time vicar for clergy, Bishop Curry, would no longer have official duties in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The files showed that in the late 1980s, Cardinal Mahony and Bishop Curry, who was then vicar of clergy, corresponded often about dealing with priests who had sexually abused minors. The Los Angeles Times said the memos show a campaign to hide sex abuse cases from police.
“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading...We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today. We need to pray for everyone who has ever been hurt by members of the Church,” Archbishop Gomez announced.
“Effective immediately, I have informed Cardinal Mahony that he will no longer have any administrative or public duties. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry has also publicly apologized for his decisions while serving as Vicar for Clergy. I have accepted his request to be relieved of his responsibility as the Regional Bishop of Santa Barbara.”
The decision has been roundly welcomed throughout the Church in America. On the archbishop's Facebook page, 278 have liked the statement, and virtually all of the comments have been supportive of Archbishop Gomez.
“I applaud Archbp. Gomez. and plan to have Masses said for him for his courage,” one online commenter wrote. “Living in Santa Barbara for the past decade, I have seen what a barren land for solid Catholicism the LA archdiocese has been for decades.”
Coulombe continued saying, “it signals above everything else that the church in Los Angeles has entered a new, and if I may so, a much better age.”
Cardinal Mahony served as the head of the Los Angeles archdiocese for 26 years, and as such has had a profound effect on the local Church.
“Suffice it to say, it's been a very long, difficult time here. What the archbishop has done, I think, is draw that period to its end.”
Coulombe went on to compare Archbishop Gomez' task to that of the character John O'Hanlon in the 1970 film “The Cheyenne Social Club,” who “inherited a house of ill repute.”
“It's not that far-fetched of an analogy, unfortunately, because he inherited a huge risk.”
Archbishop Gomez has both brought in “very fine people” from out of state to help in the archdiocese, Coulombe said, and retained some of the “best of the people who were here before.”
“For his Grace to succeed, on the one hand at re-Catholicizing the archdiocese, and on the other, of pursuing the archdiocese's rightful work – evangelization in this part of the world – he's going to need the help of everyone. And fortunately, he really seems to know that.”
Coulombe praised the archbishop's pastoral letter “Witness to the New World of Faith,” in which he gave a mission for the diocese focused on evangelization and the salvation of souls.
“In every way seemingly, he's the opposite of his predecessor, and that's what we need,” Coulombe said.
Cardinal Mahony's removal will be largely unchanged, the archdiocese's media relations director said, according to the Los Angeles Times. The biggest effect for Cardinal Mahony is that he will no longer administer confirmation in the archdiocese.
He remains in good standing and a cardinal, Tamberg said. No cardinal has resigned from the College since Father Louis Billot in 1927.
The larger change in the day to day functioning of the diocese comes with Bishop Curry's removal. He has been an auxiliary bishop of the diocese since 1994, and was responsible for Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. As Bishop Curry is now 70, he is stepping down five years before bishops' mandatory retirement age.
Last week, both Cardinal Mahony and Bishop Curry offered apologies for their failures in adequately protecting youth.
On Feb. 1, Cardinal Mahony released a letter he wrote to Archbishop Gomez explaining his history of dealing with clergy sexual abuse.
“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem,” he wrote.
He reproached his archbishop for not expressing displeasure with his policies before now.
“Not once over these past years did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices, or procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct involving minors.”
The Los Angeles archdiocese has been found in compliance with every audit of child protection measures, which have been conducted since 2004.
Coulombe said Archbishop Gomez' removal of the two prelates may “free him up in making appointments.”
“I don't know who Curry's replacement will be, but I'm very confident it will be someone...much better for the job.”
Coulombe concluded his reflections on Archbishop Gomez' statement by quoting Gerald Ford at his presidential inauguration, following Richard Nixon's resignation following Watergate.
“Our long national nightmare is over.”
Mahoney, Law and the Popes who looked the other way are likely to be members of the anti-Church. The Bible tells me to "come out of" that anti-Church. Until the RCC hierarchy very publicly repents and undertakes the actions I've described or at least something approaching it, I can have nothing to do with it.
You're slandering people based on "your experience"??? IOW, it's totally anecdotal.
BTW, my experience is very much contrary to yours. I've met some priests who were queer (in more ways than one), but they were a tiny minority, and usually very easy to pick out because of their utter lack of fidelity to anything resembling real Catholicism, or real reverence, or real Godliness. I've met a whole lot more who are good men trying to lead their flocks to holiness.
The prophets in Revelation shout to the hapless members of that anti-Church "come out of her, my people!" because they know that membership in that spiritual corporate body could well drag their souls to hell.
Very nice, very fundamentalist, very wrong interpretation of Scripture. You didn't get that from any Catholic source, so might as well 'fess up as to where it really came from.
Incidentally, of the 12 apostles, one betrayed Our Lord to the Sanhedrin, one betrayed him by denying three times that he even knew him, nine of them ran like scared bunnies, and only one, St. John, stayed behind with his Master.
According to you, St. John should have started his own church and told the other apostles to get lost. After all, he might take on the "collective spiritual nature of the group" (that being the nature of liars and cowards, after all). Yet he didn't, because that was not Our Lord's will.
Fundamentalists are fond of quoting Ps 14 (somewhat) out of context: "they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, no, not one". They then run around seeking to "separate" themselves from everyone else's sins. If they believed what they said when they quoted Ps 14:3, they wouldn't bother. Looking for someone who is not corrupt is a waste of time if all are "alike corrupt".
No, seek instead to separate yourself from YOUR sins. That's much more difficult, but if you're to be damned, it will be your sins that work the damnation, not anyone else's.
It's easy and fun to point at Law, or Mahony, or any one else and say, "He BAD!". It takes real courage to look in the mirror at yourself and say, "HE bad!", and then man up to do something about it.
”If you want to be a priest, you [should] first have to get married."
This serves no purpose in terms of getting rid of pedophilia. There are as many married pedophiles as there are unmarried. Example Jerry Sandusky; and research shows that more children are sexually abused by fathers/stepfathers than by any other category of person.
"Even men who do not have sex with men but who nevertheless suffer from Same Sex Attraction Disorder are barred from the seminaries. That's the rule."
You are correct. And the rule is quite necessary: you and I and the Church agree on that.
” The Popes since John XXIII unofficially welcomed homosexuals into the ranks of the clergy.”
I have been following this issue for decades (Michael Rose etc.) and I never seen evidence of that. You can say popes were lax in supervision and failed in diligent oversight. That’s quite bad enough to do the damage. But there's no proof that any pope “unofficially welcomed” homosexuals to be priests.
” A friend of mine sent me a picture from her Diocesan webpage showing the new crop of seminarians - the finest collection of assorted fruits you can imagine.”
"Imagine” is the keyword here. You're imagining. Nobody can tell if a seminarian’s homosexual by looking at his picture from a Diocesan webpage. (What was it? Low-rise jeans and a tight charcoal-colored tee-shirt?) For your soul's sake, avoid this sin of rash judgment.
”A healthy Inquisition would root them out, at least mostly. And that's really what we need.”
Agreed, if what you mean is a good psych profiling/survey process, good spiritual counsel, and the exclusion of men who show attachment to any kind of vice. But what more? Subjecting all priests to continuous hostile surveillance within their own residences --- what? deputized housekeepers? --- would be going too far. NO normal, self-respecting man would ever become a priest if he knew he was continuously being spied upon by a network of stealthy informers.
”Your argument seems to be that since requiring a married clergy and excising all of the homosexuals from the clergy wouldn't solve all of our problems, that we shouldn't even try.”
That’s not my argument at all. In addition to psychological testing, a seminarian would need recommendations from people who can be questioned point-blank about the guy’s sexual-romantic history, too. This is already in place. But as I said, requiring men to be married wouldn’t work, and ain’t gonna happen; and it would be unjust to reject a good man as an ordinand just because he was called to be celibate. If celibacy is a call from God, and if celibacy disqualifies a man from the priesthood, we’d have to ditch the patrimony of Catholicism going back to the Fathers of the Church and throw out St. Paul and Jesus as well.
Plus, there’s no reason to think that would improve the security and safety of our children, even remotely.
”There's nothing wrong with that. The Orthodox do a version of that.”
That is also not true. Married men are allowed to become Orthodox priests (and, more to the point, Byzantine Catholic priests), but marriage has never been a requirement for ordination as deacons or priests --- and the married ones are ordinarily excluded from consecration to the level of bishop.
"It also strikes me as sacrilegious to have a man with such a twisted personality disorder performing the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. All homosexuals must leave. The Church should do her best to hunt them down and remove them."
I agree that a man with a “twisted personality disorder” ought not to be allowed to become a priest, especially one with obsessive fantasies or compulsive practices sexually --- whether that might be heterosexual or homosexual. But a chaste celibate man has no reason to be hounded out as a "homosexual" even if he has experienced unwanted, transient feelings of temptation --- and that’s all. Scripture says Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, and yet without sinning.
"How about life in prison for those who abetted them, like Mahoney, Law, et al? Why aren't we prosecuting [them]?”
Regrettable as it may seem to me or to you, no criminal charge has ever been lodged against Cardinal Law. He was fully investigated by the (MA) state attorney general and the district attorneys in the 5 counties of the Archdiocese, and he gave evidence before two grand juries. All of these attorneys general, after years of aggressive media coverage and intense scrutiny, nevertheless concluded that Law had not tried to evade investigation and had not broken any laws.
The most you can prove (in court) about his administration of the Archdiocese, was serious, repeated lapses in pastoral judgment.
Upon turning 80 a little more than a year ago, Law became ineligible to participate in any papal conclave or to hold any Curial memberships, and was replaced as priest of Sta Maria Maggiore, an assignment which involved no pastoral role at all and which kept him under the nose of Roman nsupervision.
The fact that the Vatican removed Bernard Law from leadership of a powerful Archdiocese, and put him in charge of managing a Roman church with no pastoral authority, tells you what they thought of his pastoral competence.
As for Mahony: again, find a prosecutor who has sufficient evidence to charge and convict him for breaking a law, and he’d face prison like Feeney and Buzanowski. That’s how it works: first the charges, then the trial, then the verdict, then the prison.
”As a disciple of Christ, I cannot have my name sullied by association with the RCC, at least not until it publicly repents of this sickening sin and undertakes all actions it can to ensure it won't happen again.”
Nobody’s name is “sullied” by being in the Church, because even on a human level, the Catholic Church is still a huge sign of hope and an effective instrument of goodness in this world. Your heart has been broken and your faith shaken by scandalous sin, and I understand this pain; but it is not generalizable to the whole Church.
In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of priests, and hundreds of millions of Catholics, who are innocent of these sins, brothers and sisters in Christ, and who don't deserve to be slandered by your demeaning comments.
Luke 18:11
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: "God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector."
Jesus says: Don't be like that.
AND Jesus Himself said that the Kingdom of God is like a dragnet which hauls ashore all manner of fish, good and bad (Matthew 13:47-49); and like a field that has growing in it both wheat and tares, which will growing together until the Day of Judgment. Jesus says you can't pull out all the weeds now, because you would pull out the wheat along with it. Let them grow together until the harvest. They will then be "harvested" --- He said --- by the angels, and the evil cast into the fire. I recommend this (Matthew 13:24-29 LINK) for your careful, prayerful reading.
The Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ to be a means of salvation for everyone in the world.
If sinful leadership could ruin the Church, it would have been dead on arrival in 33 AD, when one of the Twelve betrayed Jesus, one denied Him three times, and athe other nine headed for the tall grass where they could hide like cowards.Only one out of the Twelve --- John --- was faithful and stayed with the Blessed Mother at the foot of the Cross. At that moment, they were the Church. But the sinners -- the rest of the APostles --- came back.
The Lord Jesus is the Church’s only High Priest --- which you surely know if you were educated as a Catholic--- and the validity of the Sacraments is not tainted by contact with the hands of sinful men. It is true that contact with this filthy sin repels us. St. Francis de Sales said: “Those who give scandal, as guilty of spiritual murder. But those who take (who leave the Church because of it) are guilty of spiritual suicide."
”I don't want to go to hell with the likes of Mahoney and Law. I'm not in communion with them. “
This is a serious and tragic spiritual mistake on your part. You can’t combat the influence of bad Cathoics in any other way than by being a good Catholic. Does a soldier desert his post because of a corrupt officer? Did John leave the Church because of Judas?
Speaking of John, he wrote of the Seven Churches of Asia in his Book of Revelation. And most of them received severe censure for serious sin. And this didn’t cause John to leave the Church, either.
When King Henry VIII, who was not only an adulterer but also a murderer, took over the Catholic Church in England, every single one of the English bishops went along with it, except for Bishop John Fisher. He was beheaded for not going along with it. But did the weakness and apostasy f every other bishop cause Fisher to leave the Church? It did not.
For the salvation of our own soul, do not leave the Church. You have slandered Her, by taking the sins of some, and attributing them to the whole: to the Church, which is sometimes called Christ’s Body, and sometimes called His Bride. The truth being, that nothing could be closer to Him than that.
The tagline is for you.
Again, it will not solve the problem, but requiring that all new ordinations be limited to men who have proved their ability to form a successful marriage and otherwise check out psychologically would certainly help. In life, we manage problems, we seldom solve them once and for all. This would really help keeping out the queers.
I have been following this issue for decades (Michael Rose etc.) and I never seen evidence of that. You can say popes were lax in supervision and failed in diligent oversight. That’s quite bad enough to do the damage. But there's no proof that any pope “unofficially welcomed” homosexuals to be priests.
You're in denial here. We know that the seminaries were overrun with gays, literally for decades in a row. We heard nary a peep from the Popes until the scandal resulting from the natural inclinations of queers began to take its toll. The Popes, and I blame all of them from John XXII to Benedict XVI, can't on the one hand preside over a worldwide system of vocation training that is overrun with gays for decades on end and then turn around and say "ooops, we didn't know." Nonsense. They knew. They were required to act, and to act decisively. They failed to do that. There's a maxim in the law that states that one intends the natural consequences of one's actions. The Popes are stuck with all of the guilt for the child sex abuse scandal, for the Lavender Clergy and all that it entails.
"Imagine” is the keyword here. You're imagining. Nobody can tell if a seminarian’s homosexual by looking at his picture from a Diocesan webpage.
Again, you're in denial. Look at the picture and you'd see immediately that they were all queer as three dollar bills. Provided of course that you could first turn off your internal the-church-is-always-right doublethink narrative.
If celibacy is a call from God, and if celibacy disqualifies a man from the priesthood, we’d have to ditch the patrimony of Catholicism going back to the Fathers of the Church and throw out St. Paul and Jesus as well.
As I said, we could keep a monastic vocation, provided of course that celibates have zero contact with laity, especially children. But the main issue remains - how to ensure that all homosexuals will be permanently barred from holy orders. Requiring marriage of all future ordinations would be a great start.
That is also not true. Married men are allowed to become Orthodox priests (and, more to the point, Byzantine Catholic priests), but marriage has never been a requirement for ordination as deacons or priests --- and the married ones are ordinarily excluded from consecration to the level of bishop.
You're wrong. The Orthodox have the "black" clergy (celibates) and the "white" clergy (parish priests). White clergy have to be married at ordination. I was acquainted with a Romanian Orthodox priest who told me about having to meet his bride for the first time a week or so before his ordination (chosen by the family).
But a chaste celibate man has no reason to be hounded out as a "homosexual" even if he has experienced unwanted, transient feelings of temptation --- and that’s all.
No, that's just wrong. As you've already agreed, any man who is "hounded" by homosexual feelings may not be ordained. You're not getting the main point, which is that in order to protect the laity all homosexuals - chaste or not - must be removed from the ranks of the clergy.
As to your attempt to justify the inactions of Law, Bernadine, Mahoney et al., you're using a false standard. Conviction of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt is most emphatically not the standard of proof necessary to make prudent managerial decisions. The fact that all the aforementioned men presided over endemic child sexual abuse is sufficient proof to laicize them. I'd be delighted if the District Attorney of LA County could put the swine Mahoney away for life, but that's no reason that the RCC couldn't have disgraced him years ago. Different issues, different consequences, different standards of judgement.
Nobody’s name is “sullied” by being in the Church, because even on a human level, the Catholic Church is still a huge sign of hope and an effective instrument of goodness in this world.
Dream on. The Catholic Church is a "sign of hope and an effective instrument of goodness in this world?" Good heavens, have you read this article? Tell that to the thousands of victims of child sex abuse by priests. Go ahead. Attend one of their meetings and stand up and tell them what a force for good the RCC is. See what they say. I'm thinking they won't agree, to put it mildly.
Your heart has been broken and your faith shaken by scandalous sin, and I understand this pain; but it is not generalizable to the whole Church.
True enough, but I'm not generalizing as to the whole Church, as you say. The RCC is not the "whole Church." So, I'm not generalizing.
For the salvation of our own soul, do not leave the Church. You have slandered Her, by taking the sins of some, and attributing them to the whole: to the Church, which is sometimes called Christ’s Body, and sometimes called His Bride. The truth being, that nothing could be closer to Him than that.
I didn't leave the Church, I left the RCC hierarchy. Those are very different things. My soul seems to be doing okay, but thanks for your concern.
I disagree with you on the "compulsory priestly marriage" thing because there's quite a bit of evidence that the celibacy issue is irrelevant. Pedophilia among priests is extremely rare, affecting only 0.3% of the entire population of clergy. This figure, cited in the book Pedophiles and Priests by non-Catholic scholar, Philip Jenkins, is from the most comprehensive study to date, which found that only one out of 2,252 priests considered over a thirty-year period was afflicted with pedophilia. In the recent Boston scandal, only four of the more than eighty priests labeled by the media as "pedophiles" are actually guilty of molesting pre-pubescent children.
The vast majority of the clerical sex-abuse scandals now coming to light involve ephebophilia — homosexual attraction to adolescent boys. This is still, of course a grave (that is to say, damnable) sin, as well as a crime. But while the total number of sexual abusers in the priesthood is higher than those guilty of, specifically, pedophilia, it still amounts to less than 2 percent — about the same as the rate among married men (Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests).
Since neither being Catholic nor being celibate predisposes a person to develop pedophilia, a married clergy wouldn't solve the problem ("Doctors call for pedophilia research," The Hartford Currant, March 23). One has only to look at similar crises in other denominations and professions to see this.
If you wish to bolster your argument, it will not help to simply repeat it. Reiteration does not count as proof. I will follow your line of thinking with interest it you will reinforce your stance by citing evidence.
On the question of papal responsibility: it seems plain to me that nobody acted decisively on this until Benedict XVI. (You can find evidence for Pope Benedict's decisive action HERE, and please check out the embedded links.
I can and do blame popes for failing to require obedience and discipline, but I think the sharp point of that responsibility falls on bishops and seminary rectors in individual dioceses.
As for John Paul II, his personal experience as a cleric in Poland was that priests were, in the main, heroic figures for two mid-20th-century generations. They were the soul and substance of resistance to the Nazis and the Soviet Communists; and the oppressors always tried to slander them by spurious accusations of homosexuality. So, on the basis of his experience, he gave the benefit of the doubt to priests, and was skeptical of accusers.
In this, he showed the limitation of relying on personal experience, and he fell short of good judgment. It makes me sick to my stomach, for instance, to see how he was deceived by that filthy beast “Fr.” Marcial Maciel. And others as well. And he also trusted that the Bishops were taking care of their charge. An unsafe assumption, but one he made in a tragically naive trust. It had grave consequences, but it was done, I am convinced, without grave moral fault.
But that does not mean Pope John Paul welcomed homosexual priests, to use the verb you employed. His was a failure of experience and temperament, not of moral indifference, malice, or corruption. Even his critics acknowledge this.
To assume the worst --- that it was moral indifference, malice, or corruption --- is rash judgment. To assume the worst is to be cynical as hell, and corrupt judges, ourselves. The temptation is great, but please understand this.
It’s bedtime for me, so I must leave off here.
Peace to you. Let us pray for each other.
Manure. There are many homosexuals who are married, using their wives for “beards,” like the disgraced football coach at Penn State. Obviously you know nothing about the problems of the Protestant clergy, among whom divorce remains a scandal, that and “fooling around,” which so often leads to the division of congregations or the disappearance of pastors for new horizons.
One thing is certain: I am not a Jew. IAC, the situation in common law rather depends on the consent of the woman. But if I were such a husband, I would not want to leave any knives around.
Of course you are generalizing. There are more than a billion Catholics, tens of thousands of congregations and hundreds of thousands of priests, plus a smaller but still huge number of clergy and laity in the other Christian bodies. Your personal knowledge of them is as certain as the knowledge of a house fly of the world beyond the dung heap.
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