Hilary White is back in full cry on the blogsite she has subtitled 'Promethean neopelagian chronicles'...
Things 'good' bishops can do
to re-earn (some) trust
July 21, 2018
Back in Dallas in 2002, the US bishops gave themselves a pass. They put this Dallas Charter on clerical sex abuse up in front of the cameras, a thing that brazenly shifted blame, and said the whole affair was over and-can-everyone-please-go-back-to-respecting-us-now…
Frankly, the only people fooled were themselves. The Dallas Charter specifically excluded their own from the regulations, focusing on the media-generated phantasm of “pedophile priests”. LifeSite and a few others climbed wearily back onto the housetops to start shouting – again – that the whole thing was a whitewash, and that the facts clearly indicated that 1) it was the preponderance of homosexuals in the priesthood and episcopate that was to blame; 2) the victims were almost never children, but adolescent males; and 3) that bishops were guilty of collusion by shifting blame and covering up.
And, now… McCarrick.
Of course, LifeSite were among the majority who had known about McCarrick all along.
[Then why did it not make an issue of it - at all??? White was the Rome correspondent for LifeSite before she 'retired' to Norcia. I'm not blaming her for LifeSite's failure to expose and pursue what knowledge they had about McCarrick's personal evil, but all those in the media who now claim they have known about this for some time - but didn't divulge it, much less make an issue of it - are just as morally irresponsible as the bishops and priests who, in effect, covered up for McCarrick all these decades.] It was the worst kept secret in the Church. In fact, the same could be said for the entire homosexual nightmare in the Catholic institutions.
Rod Dreher is collecting data on how much this was true, and how much everyone knew, and how tightly controlled the bishop-silence was, and remains. And how this includes the “good” bishops, the men most people who hold the simplistic “conservatives vs. liberals” narrative have always held to be the “good guys”.
The level of denial required to imagine that there is a group of “good bishops” out there working against the badness in the Church reaches into the range of the psychotic. But it is out there still. And the men who want to be seen as the good guys, making all the right noises, are capitalising on it.
Today this post from Bishop Thomas Joseph Tobin, dubbed the “good Tobin” (with increasing irony, it should be noted) turned up in my feed today, and it’s hard to believe.
Thomas J. Tobin
@bishoptjt
Despite the egregious offenses of a few, and despite the faults and sins we all have, I’m very proud of my brother bishops and I admire and applaud the great work they do everyday for Christ and His Church.
7:17 AM - Jul 19, 2018 · East Providence, RI
I think the “good” Bishop learned an uncomfortable lesson today from the responses he got. I think we’re up to 94 responses, and I only saw two that were praising him for it.
[That was a crass, ill-considered - and worst, totally unnecessary - tweet from a bishop who has heretofore seemed unequivocally 'good'. Does it serve Christ and the Church to keep silent and do nothing about evil you know about, to even pay for it, in the case of the New Jersey dioceses that made a financial settlement with two victims of McCarrick's lusts? If a man in New York had not, for some reason, decided to pursue his charge against McCarrick four decades later, and the archdiocese had not, miraculously, done its duty to investigate his charge thoroughly, McCarrick who is now 85 may well have gone to his grave unsullied in the public mind and his evil never disclosed, with the usual fulsome eulogies on his death by even those who have known about his evil for decades. How many McCarricks have there been before him who successfully hid their evil behind the veneer of social activism because in the public mind, anyone who speaks and works so actively in behalf of 'the poor' must be a living saint!]
The only apt description of the response: “blinding hot rage.” Most people there, with the possible exception of myself, were pretty polite about it, there weren’t any Bad Swears, but it’s easy to see that
this kind of self-congratulatory PR blither isn’t going to fly ever again.
We want you gone. That’s the long and the short of it. The well is poisoned. The bishop brand is toxic. We’re pretty much here: “They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.” And we’re about ready to run the entire boatload out on a rail.
It shows me that my suspicion is correct: in their polite little bubbleverse they have no idea that the peasants are getting ready with the pitchforks and torches, that plans for DIY gallows are being Googled…
In seriousness, I think they don’t understand that there are laity who are working right now on creating financial endowments to build churches and fund priests completely outside the episcopal structures. That laymen are grouping together to buy convents for nuns because they’re sick of bishops destroying religious orders. It’s been decades since they started grouping together to do homeschooling so they could keep their kids out of (what remains of) Catholic schools, to safeguard them bodily and spiritually.
So, I thought I’d try to be fair. I thought maybe I’d assume that Bishop GoodTobin is actually a decent guy who means well, (I know; stop laughing) and that this little thing was just a bit of bad timing or a misplaced effort to help. A bit of totally tone deaf PR, maybe on the suggestion of a lawyer or chancery official. Completely, utterly, inappropriate – like making a bawdy joke about the deceased to the widow at a funeral. But not completely malicious. (Let’s pretend, anyway…)
To all bishops taken aback by the current seething rage of the laity, here are some things you can do, for realsies and no irony, that would win back a modicum of trust.
1. Publicly denounce – BY NAME – bishops whom you personally know are homosexuals and/or sexual predators. But not the ones we already know about from the press. Let’s hear about the ones who haven’t been outed yet that are known to you personally.
2. Petition the pope, PUBLICLY, for them to be removed, excommunicated and laicised.
3. Say – PUBLICLY AND LOUDLY – that such offenders are not welcome in your diocese.
4. Personally launch and pay for an independent, TRANSPARENT investigation of the gay lobby in the Church.
5. Denounce gay priests and throw them out if they complain.
6. Preach yourself and order all your priests to preach the full Catholic teaching – just the 1993 Catechism will be fine – on homosexuality, not just the New York Times-approved bits.
7. Launch a full, independent audit of diocesan finances; publish the findings in the local papers.
8. Launch and personally supervise an independent investigation of priests and Bishops associated in any way with Cardinal McCarrick and any of the other homosexual bishops you know of.
9. Announce a “Zero Tolerance” policy for the preaching of ANY sexual heresy, including the endorsement of books, movies, magazines or any other public speech, for all your priests. One strike you’re out. Go see if the other Tobin wants you.
10. Ban men like Fr. James Martin from ever speaking or preaching or publicly appearing in your diocese for life.
11. Invite the FSSP, the ICK, AND the SSPX to erect personal parishes in your diocese.
12. Invite them to start liturgical workshops for your priests.
13. Prioritise the traditional Mass/Extraordinary Form in your cathedral.
14. Require Latin and training in the Extraordinary Form in your seminary.
15. Ban Communion in the hand; ban extraordinary ministers of holy Communion.
16. Publicly and loudly denounce the USCCB’s embeddedness with the Democrat party.
BONUS ROUND:
Fly to Italy in a charter plane, pick up Fr. Manelli and any surviving FFIs & FSIs you can find, and fly them back to your diocese and set them up so they can get the apostolate going again.
In general, stop smiling and nodding into the cameras as we all watch your wonderful “Brother bishops” destroy what’s left of the Church.
Understanding that this is just the first stuff that comes to mind, I’d say this is the minimum. This is the VERY LEAST it is going to take.
In the following item, Fr H skewers no less than the present 'Holy Father' himself who did say the words Fr H attributes here to 'a very senior prelate' [can't get more senior than the pope!], speaking to Chilean Juan Carlos Cruz who reported it to the world, without any objection or remonstration whatsoever from the Bergoglio Vatican.
Would the pope tell a sex-offender priest or bishop
'I love you like this and I don't care?'
When, once again, Bergoglio thoughtlessly puts foot in mouth
July 23, 2018
A very senior prelate is reported recently to have said
"X, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like that and loves you like this and I don't care. I love you like this. You have to be happy with who you are."
I find it logically helpful to substitute other things for gay (Paedophile? Psychopath?) and to see how the propositions look then.
Of course, this is a dangerous line to take. Those with an enfeebled grasp of logic are likely to blurt out "So you're saying that all homosexuals are paedophiles!" or "So you think homosexuals are as bad as psychopaths?"
(In fact, I think that Christian homosexuals
[who live chastely] are, almost by definition, likely to be more admirable than heterosexuals. Because, denied the sexual outlets which are available to heterosexuals, they lead a grace-filled and continent life. I condemn those heterosexuals, often fundamentalist Evangelicals, who are very 'strong' against homosexuality, but don't seem to have noticed what the Lord said about remarriage after divorce.)
Questions abound, some of them in the field known as theodicy
[explaining or seeking to explain why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil].
- Does God make people gay, or are there (sometimes?) cultural factors involved?
- If gaydom is to be deemed a matter of divine creation, why is paedophilia (or bipolarity or spina bifida) not to be so considered? - If gaydom is a matter of divine creation, does this imply that those so born should be permitted/encouraged to live along their instincts?
These are difficult questions. But Holy Mother Church has always taken the line that,
whatever one is born with, one is still subject to the same divine laws (although psychological compulsion may well diminish the subjective culpability of particular breaches of the laws in individual cases).
If this is, according to the High Prelate concerned, no longer true, then it is not only 'gays' who are affected.
There are other categories who need to be reassured that they are made the way they are by God, loved like that by him, and expected by him to be happy with the way they are; others who, perhaps, must be allowed to express the sexual inclinations God is said to have put within them.
Here's an expanded reaction to 'Good' Bishop Tobin's rather thoughtless and insensitive tweet about his brother bishops in the context of the McCarrick scandal... Hard to understand why on earth he even felt the need to tweet it.
An open letter to Mons. Tobin
by Chris Altieri
July 22, 2018
To: His Excellency Thomas J. Tobin
Bishop of Providence, RI
Dear Bishop Tobin,
These lines are in response to your tweet of Thursday, July 19th, 2018. I’m afraid I have rather more to say than the 280-character platform will comfortably allow. You will recall that you said:
Despite the egregious offenses of a few, and despite the faults and sins we all have, I’m very proud of my brother bishops and I admire and applaud the great work they do every day for Christ and His Church.
I assume that the “few” to whom you refer are the Catholic bishops who abuse people sexually, and those who enable such clerics’ abusive behavior by winking and connivance if not active coverup.
To be frank, whether those men are a “few” in any defensible sense of the term is at this point doubtful, but that is not what I would like to discuss. Here, I am concerned to address a different elephant in the sanctuary.
You have all failed us.
- You, personally, and all your brother bishops have failed Christ’s faithful.
- You have failed our children.
- You have failed our clergy.
- You have failed the people searching for the Lord, who have a right to the Gospel and therefore a right to the Church as Christ intends her to be, rather than as you have made her; you have failed us all.
I hope you are not one of the “few”, who knew something and yet did nothing – but candor compels me to tell you that, for the present purposes, I do not care. Your duty as a bishop is to know, and to act.
It says so right in the name of the office you hold: episkopos. You episkopoi are the curators, the guardians, the superintendents – in a word, the overseers – of the Church.
Seeing that justice is done by way of transparent and reliable criminal procedure whenever a credible accusation is lodged, while indispensably necessary and imprescindible, is only a small part of the seeing for which Christ instituted your office.
Before that, it is your duty to see that the Christian faithful of every age and state of life in the Church are safe from every possible bodily, psychological, and spiritual harm.
If you bishops cannot do that, you cannot hope to help us grow in the holiness to which Our Lord calls us, and for which he has placed us in your charge. It simply will not do for you to tell us that you did not see, hence that you did not know, what was before you.
If it were not an insult to our intelligence, it would still be gravely unsatisfactory.
It is your duty to see that your brethren in the episcopacy and the clergy in your charge live morally upright and orderly lives.
- Ideally, you would see that yourself and all of them live lives of exemplary virtue. At a bare minimum, you must see to it that
- The children and young people everywhere are safe, and that vulnerable people are protected;
- That no seminary should become or continue to be a farm for perversion, nor any chancery or chapter a hotbed of corruption and disorder – for, so long as they are, parishes and schools and oratories cannot fail to become playgrounds for perverts.
I say again: it is your duty to see, and to act – even to see and to denounce your brother bishops’ failures and misdeeds and miscarriages of duty when and where you do see them.
Just this Sunday, we heard Our Lord tell words of stark warning to the shepherds of His people:
Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the LORD.
Therefore, thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, against the shepherds who shepherd my people: You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but I will take care to punish your evil deeds.
We need leaders who will not mislead us and scatter us. We cry out for shepherds who will shepherd us, so that we need no longer fear and tremble.
There is something else, Bishop Tobin, which I feel I must say to you: I do not doubt for one second that Our Lord will in His own good time send us good shepherds, who shall do what is just and right. The only question I have for you, Your Excellency, is this: what kind of shepherds will you and your lot try to be in the time the Lord has appointed you to watch over His flock?
You will not see the end of the ruin to lives and souls that you have wrought – not if you live to see a hundred years – but if you open your eyes and act now, you may be in time to arrest the destruction. You may even be in time to take such steps, as may begin to repair the damage.
I believe I speak for many of our brothers and sisters in Christ, when I say that we will not fail to support any shepherd who proves his willingness to toil and to suffer in this cause for our sake and Our Lord’s.
Nevertheless, our patience with those of you, who do not see, is at an end.
Yours in Christ Our Lord,
Christopher R. Altieri
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/07/2018 02:29]