Priestly Pederasty

Paul Rahe writes in The Federalist,

Sixteen years ago, reporters at The Boston Globe conducted an extensive investigation of the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Not long thereafter, reporters elsewhere detailed similar abuse in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the like. The word used in the press to describe what had been going on was pedophilia, which is a misnomer deliberately employed to cover up what journalists then considered and still consider now an inconvenient aspect of the truth.

As a report commissioned by the National Review Board of the American Catholic bishops and issued in 2004 revealed, something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and very few were, in the strictest sense, children. They were nearly all what we euphemistically call young adults. They were male adolescents on the younger side — at the age when boys as they mature can briefly be downright pretty.

What was involved was what its advocates call man-boy love: a sexual relationship between a grown man who serves as a mentor and a boy who is under his care or simply admires or stands in awe of him. The ancient Greeks, who practiced this systematically in the classical period, called this phenomenon pederasty…

…In the course of these investigations, a number of other things came to light. First, a priest named Gerald Fitzgerald — who in 1947 founded a small religious order named Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete to counsel priests who had difficulty with alcoholism, substance abuse, celibacy, and the like — had for decades been trying to alert the American bishops and officials in the Vatican (including Pope Paul VI) to the fact that priestly pederasty (which, he said, was unheard of before World War II) was a growing problem within the American Catholic Church. He had persistently tried to persuade the hierarchy to forbid the perpetrators’ supervision of boys and to laicize them, all to no avail.

The report these three men produced was sent to every bishop in the country in May 1985, and then it was ignored. Bishop after bishop continued the long-standing practice of covering up the scandals that arose, of paying off the victims, eliciting from them a non-disclosure agreement, and transferring the perpetrators from one parish to another and even from one diocese to another.

…A few years ago, we also learned that a host of high-level figures in the Curia were being blackmailed by their male lovers. I am told that Pope Benedict, who had by that time contracted Parkinson’s Disease, resigned his office in this connection because he knew there needed to be a purge and he feared that he did not have the physical stamina to carry it out. In his memoirs, Pope Benedict touches on the “gay lobby” and confesses to a lack of resoluteness. As everyone understood at the time, the task of cleaning house was to be left to his successor.

Unfortunately, however, Benedict’s successor was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, the man who calls himself Pope Francis.

…Since his election, Pope Francis has done everything within his power to soften and subvert the church’s teaching concerning human sexuality. He put the Lavender Mafia in charge of the two Synods on the Family held in 2014 and 2015. They tried to push through their agenda; and, when the assembled bishops balked, they got a tongue-lashing from the pope, and he inserted in the final report without comment two paragraphs that had not received the requisite two-thirds vote.

In the last few weeks, we have received further evidence of the power of the prelate-pederasts. A grand jury convened in Pennsylvania has revealed that Donald Wuerl, while bishop of Pittsburgh, covered up a priest-run child-porn ring and a host of other abuse cases involving something on the order of 100 priests, using the age-old trick of pay-offs and non-disclosure agreements. This did not stop him from being named archbishop of Washington DC and of being made a cardinal — which is to say, a Prince of the Church.

He was not even high on the list of possible nominees submitted by the Papal Nuncio. Someone powerful in the Vatican wanted him promoted, and Pope Francis responded to the news of his guilt not by ordering an investigation into Wuerl’s promotion, but with a dodge — by attributing collective guilt to us all.

This past weekend, the chickens finally came home to roost. We had already learned of the predatory conduct of Theodore McCarrick, Wuerl’s predecessor as cardinal-archbishop of Washington. The evidence showed that he had buggered altar boys and seminarians while auxiliary bishop in New York, bishop of Metuchen in New Jersey, and Archbishop of Newark. Formal complaints had been lodged against him as the 1990s and continued to be lodged in later years, but they were ignored, and he was nonetheless promoted.

On Saturday night, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the papal nuncio in Washington from 2011 to 2016, released an 11-page testament, revealing that Pope Benedict had learned of McCarrick’s conduct, had acted against the man in 2009 or 2010 by silencing him, prohibiting him from travel, and forbidding him to say mass in public; that in 2013 he had himself personally warned Pope Francis against McCarrick, spelling out in detail the man’s misdeeds; that Francis had reversed the restrictions imposed on McCarrick by Benedict, taken him as his chief American advisor, and ignored the advice of the Papal Nuncio and accepted that of McCarrick in choosing archbishops and bishops for the United States.

Viganò also did something on Saturday night that, as far as I know, no high-ranking prelate has done in more than six hundred years. He called on the pope to resign.

As all of this suggests, we are now at a turning point. The Lavender Mafia controls the papacy and the Vatican overall, and Pope Francis is packing the College of Cardinals, who will elect the next pope, with sympathizers. Pope Francis and his minions have now been exposed, named, and shamed; and there will be a civil war within the Roman Catholic Church.

Either Francis leaves and his supporters and clients are purged, or the church is conceded to those who for decades have sheltered and promoted the pederasts and those who regard their abuse of minors as an indifferent matter. It is time that those bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who are innocent of such conduct stand up and force a house-cleaning. In the meantime, the laity should speak up loud and clear.

Read more here.