Ralph McInerny, Crisis Magazine, May 2002
excerpt:
There are seminaries in this country that are notorious for their predilection for sexual perverts. One is known as the Pink Palace. No one reading Rose’s book will be surprised at what is now all over the media. Our bishops have known about such scandals all along, and they have treated them in the three-monkeyed manner they now treat pedophiles. Good men have been systematically weeded out. It is not simply that the moral theology taught in seminaries is very likely opposed to Catholic doctrine and that the Mass is not a prominent part of the day; the behavior in many seminaries has turned them into Augean stables! [full article]
Chris Weinkopf, FrontPage Magazine, 1 May 2002
excerpt:
In thorough detail, Rose documents the sorry state of American Catholic seminaries, where men discerning a vocation to the priesthood receive the formation that will—or at least should—prepare them for and sustain them throughout their ministries. It is here where the left has waged its assault most aggressively, in the hopes of creating enough sympathetic priests to form something of a fifth column within the Catholic hierarchy. [full article]
Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 April 2002
excerpt:
It is no secret that in the last three decades there has been a dramatic decline in the number of Catholic priests and seminarians in this country. In recent years, the rate of decline has been slowed and maybe even reversed, but it is still widely perceived that the shortage of priestly vocations is a “crisis.” Some contend, and Michael S. Rose agrees, that the crisis is “artificial and contrived.” [full article]
Paul Likoudis, The Wanderer, 11 April 2002
excerpt:
Michael S. Rose’s new book on the crisis in Catholic seminaries in the United States and Europe, Good Bye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood, powerfully illustrates Pope John Paul II’s words in his Holy Thursday letter to priests on the “mystery of evil at work in the world.”… this book is an eye-opener, even for a reviewer who considers himself an informed Catholic. [full article]
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com, 5 April 2002
excerpt:
“Michael Rose has written a book that should serve as a call to arms to every faithful Roman Catholic, and Goodbye,Good Men should be required reading for any Catholic priest or layman seeking to understand the forces at work within the Church that seem bent on destroying it.” [full article]
William F. Buckley, National Review Online, 15 March 2002
excerpt:
“There is a new book called Goodbye, Good Men, in which the author (Michael Rose) contends that individual Catholic seminaries are seedbeds for the perversions we are reading about. In the words of one reviewer, 'Rose presents evidence that the leadership in some seminaries often discharged men [in the recent past] who were unabashed in their heterosexuality, while at the same time simply denying that an actual sacramental priesthood exists.'” [full article]
Rod Dreher, National Review Online, 13 March 2002
excerpt:
“I've just finished an early copy [of Goodbye, Good Men], and what it documents is absolutely astonishing, and cannot be ignored except by those who do not want to see. This bombshell book reveals a seminary underworld in which homosexual promiscuity and sexual harassment is rampant, in which straight men are marginalized and demoralized, and seminarians who support the Church's teaching on sexuality and the priesthood are persecuted, even to the point of being sent off, Soviet-style, for psychological evaluations. Many of these guys are rejected from entering the seminaries, expelled, or driven by depression to leave.” [full article]
Introduction
In the months before this book went to press, Catholics throughout the United States were scandalized by one revelation after another about sexual abuse among the Catholic clergy. First came word of the notorious crimes of John Geoghan, a defrocked priest of the Archdiocese of Boston who stood accused of more than 130 counts of sexual molestation in a thirty-six-year spree. He has thus far been sentenced to eight years in prison. If Geoghan’s recidivist crimes weren’t awful enough, the following week the archbishop of Boston, Bernard Cardinal Law—under mounting pressure from the Massachusetts attorney general—revealed the names of other priests or former priests of his archdiocese who had been accused of sexual misconduct with minors. Then a Missouri man alleged that Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell had sexually abused him while he was a seminary student. He also filed a federal racketeering suit accusing the Catholic Church in the United States of a pattern of illegal activity—a systematic cover-up of sexual crimes by Catholic priests.
The sexual crimes were horrible enough, but most shocking was this pattern of cover-up—the fact that Church officials knowingly protected repeat sex offenders and routinely reassigned them to posts that gave them access to new victims. Commentator (and Catholic) Patrick J. Buchanan likened the situation to Mafia dons providing safe houses for their henchmen. Such an analogy isn’t off the mark considering that Bishop James Quinn of Cleveland, in response to the racketeering suit, suggested that Church leaders should hide records of abusive priests at the Vatican embassy, which has diplomatic immunity against subpoenas. Arthur Austin, who had repeatedly been sexually abused by a priest in Boston, put it in stark terms: “If the Catholic Church in America does not fit the definition of organized crime, then Americans seriously need to examine their concept of justice.”2
Despite the media feeding frenzy, Church officials still hesitated to “come clean.” Although Boston’s Cardinal Law released the names of the offending priests to law enforcement officials, he would not reveal to the media the number of priests involved. Only by examining court documents and speaking with local law firms did the Boston Globe discover that the archdiocese had settled sex abuse claims against at least eighty priests during the previous decade alone. That number would later swell to nigh a hundred.
Law’s attitude seemed characteristic of far too many American bishops, who often seem to believe that they and their priests are answerable to no greater authority than themselves. Indeed, we are finding that what happened in Boston is routine in many dioceses; similar grave problems have been revealed in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, to name just a few. The fact is, orthodox Catholics are demanding honest and forthright action from the Church’s shepherds.
The big question now is: Why is this happening? The extent of the sex abuse scandals and the accompanying payoffs and cover-ups has mystified many of the faithful, who are simply at a loss to understand how this could have occurred and why it was swept under the rug for so long.
I researched and wrote this book over the past two years, interviewing more than 150 people, as a professional investigative journalist for the Catholic press, without any idea that the Boston debacle and its many ramifications would blow up just as Goodbye, Good Men was going to press. Although I did not set out to write a book about clerical sex abuse, what I discovered provides at least part of the answer to the burning question: How could this have happened?
Goodbye, Good Men presents documented evidence that the root of this problem—the cover-up and the sexual scandals themselves—extends down to the very place where vocations to the priesthood germinate: the seminary. Too often men who support the teachings of the Church, especially the teachings on sexual morality, are dismissed for being “rigid and uncharitable homophobes,” while those seminarians who reject the Church’s teaching or “come out” as gays to their superiors are given preferential treatment and then ordained to the Catholic priesthood. A corrupt, protective network starts in many seminaries where gay seminarians are encouraged to “act out” or “explore their sexuality” in highly inappropriate ways.
No doubt, for the average American, Catholic or not, much of the material presented in this book will come as a surprise—even a shock. Nevertheless, as one recently ordained priest confided in me after reading the prepublication manuscript, the revelations herein have long been known within the inner circles of the Catholic Church—among bishops and priests especially. The problem in vocations offices and in seminaries is a profound spiritual problem, a sickness of untold proportions. This is a book that seeks first to identify that sickness, or at least a portion of it, in hopes that the pathogen can be removed and the body healed. In short, many have hijacked the priesthood in order to change the Catholic Church from within.
The trouble starts in the seminary, and gross sexual immorality and the protective network formed around that immorality is only one of the major issues that needs to be forthrightly addressed by the shepherds of the Catholic Church, as Goodbye, Good Men reveals. The fact is that many qualified candidates for the priesthood have been turned away for political reasons over the past three decades. Systematic, ideological discrimination has been practiced against seminarians who uphold Catholic teaching on sexuality and other issues; dissenters from Catholic teaching—including teaching on homosexuality—have been rewarded.
Goodbye, Good Men exposes this corruption: the deliberate infiltration of Catholic seminaries by what Andrew Greeley has dubbed the “Lavender Mafia,” a clique of homosexual dilettantes, along with an underground of liberal faculty members determined to change the doctrines, disciplines, and mission of the Catholic Church from within. Through the seminaries, liberals have brought a moral meltdown into the Catholic priesthood. If the sex scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church are to end, the individuals responsible for this moral meltdown must be rooted out. Only then will the “dark shadow of suspicion” be removed from “all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice.”
Michael S. Rose
April, 2002
