Fred Martinez is staff religion editor of the Conservative Monitor and a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Faith, a Northern California newspaper. He can be reached at [email protected].
Time fired the first salvo with its May 20 article “Inside The Church's Closet: Gay priests talk about their hidden lives, love of the church and fear of being scapegoated in the sex scandals.” CWR shot back with its May issue piece “Attitudes That Must Die: If the American bishops do not know how to respond to a public scandal, the laity must lead the way.”
Time in its alliance with the Gay movement did a preemptive attack on what it called one “of the few concrete decisions the U.S. Cardinals made following their meeting in Rome with the Pope last month was to dispatch a team, called an apostolic visitation, to inspect all the nation's 220 seminaries and other preparatory institutions.”
In what seemed an attempted to give marching orders on the strategic spin, Time almost immediately gave the rights to print the article to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation website. The spin in the article was to call the apostolic visitation to the U.S. seminaries a “witch hunt.”
According to the Time‘s article, the inspection’s “purpose is to determine whether the schools have been upholding orthodox moral doctrine in their applications process and in their classrooms… Details about the visitation won't be worked out until the June 13-15 meeting of U.S. bishops in Dallas, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”
The article’s solution to the Catholic Church’s scandal was not “upholding orthodox moral doctrine” in the seminaries against sex abuse, but to teach “open dialogue.” The director of St. Patrick’s seminary in Menlo Park, California, Rev. Gerald Coleman said, “psychosexual education and open dialogue are among the best ways to prevent inappropriate sexual behavior.”
According to TV commentator Bob Enyart, this is not the first time Time promoted open dialogue. Enyart said, “They [Time] printed a puff image piece on Peter Melzer, the editor of NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association)'s journal. In the article “For the Love of Kids” (Nov. 1, 93, page 51) the ACLU defended this seriously misguided individual arguing that if we condemn “NAMBLA today, who is it tomorrow?” Melzer is also a New York City public school teacher. He published an article called “In Praise of the Penises,” on “how to make that special boy feel good.” As to a police report on Melzer’s alleged sexual abuse of a Filipino boy, according to Time, there is no hard evidence that he abused this “or any other boy in the U.S.”
The Gay movement’s foremost publication “The Advocate,” which interviewed Bill Clinton in 1996, also promoted NAMBLA’s position in an article called, “Getting Over It” on May 5, 1992. Enyart said, “Carl Maves wrote, “How many gay men, I wonder, would have missed out on a valuable, liberating experience, one that initiated them into their sexuality, if it weren’t for so-called molestation?”
Both Time and the homosexuals' foremost publication have had open dialogue on child molestation. With its own recent history of open dialogue with sex abuse, Time next made a statement on recent church accounts on the reasons for the sex abuse scandal.
The magazine's statement was contradictory. The article said, “Since most of the victims are teenaged boys, the thinking goes, the perpetrators [male priests] must be gay – and that must be the problem, not sexual repression, not leaders who ignore serious criminal allegations.”
Time’s logic can only lead to two conclusions it didn't intend — one ridiculous and the other to the point. Heterosexual priests are only pretending to be homosexuals when they commit homosexual acts on teenage boys or homosexuality is an objective disorder like alcoholism which can be treated, so even though one commits homosexual acts one is not to be identified with a treatable disorder.
The logic gets even thinner when the article says that the reason for the sex abuse is sexual repression. The last thing Time or anyone else could accuse Boston serial sex abuser Fr. Paul Shanley of is that he controlled, checked, or suppressed his sexuality.
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette on April 9 published a article by the Associated Press which said,” In 1977, a woman from Rochester, N.Y., sent a letter to [then bishop of Boston] Medeiros with a summary of a meeting about homosexuality that Shanley attended. The summary quoted Shanley as saying he could “think of no sexual act that causes psychic damage — 'not even incest or bestiality.'”
Shanley is an example of the one valid statement in Time’s explanation of the reasons for the scandal. The fact is that church leaders did “ignore serious criminal allegations.”
Lawyer Roderick MacLeish said that documents proved Law knew of Shanley's sex abuse and rape behavior since 1985, but the cardinal paid tribute to him in a 1996 letter for his “years of generous and zealous care” and said “you are truly appreciated.” MacLeish said there had been 10 detailed complaints in the church documents and at least 26 complaints altogether filed against Shanley.
The Catholic editor of CWR, Phillip Lawler, agreed with Time that church leaders ignored sex abuse. In the editorial “Attitudes that Must Die,” he said, “…many bishops behave as if clerics had special rights. Far too often, Church leaders and chancery aides defended the interest of the clerical fraternity rather than the Christian community.”
CWR and Time also agreed that there are a high percentage of homosexuals in the priesthood. Time said “the proportion [estimates of 15% to more than 50%] is higher than that of gay men in the male population at large,” while CWR contended that even the lowest estimates of no higher than “the population in society at large” is a “profound crisis.”
On page 40, CWR addressed “An Open Letter” on this crisis to the U.S. bishops who will meet in Dallas. The letter said, “In many ways the tepid response [of church leaders] has been more scandalous than the abuse itself…evidence makes it impossible to ignore the widespread acceptance of homosexual activity among American priests…[this] is a grave problem in itself because it causes disdain for Catholic doctrine and fosters a climate of hypocrisy among those who are the official representatives of Church teaching.”
Time at the beginning of the article made sure to use words such as “hate” and “scapegoat” to color faithful Catholics' and the Church's attempt to uphold its own twenty-century-old moral teachings in its own seminaries. At one point the piece made sure to quoted an active homosexual priest saying, “We're all sort of like Anne Frank's family, up in the attic, waiting for the Nazis to come.”
According to Father John Trigilio of the Harrisburg diocese, the opposite is true. The Nazis or Stalinist-like totalitarian gay subculture in the seminary that included the faculty made his twelve years in the school something out of “Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”
A priest in the diocese of Austin, in reference to the pro-homosexual seminaries, said, “…the dynamic paralleled the brain-washing strategies of the Communist re-education camps. Even the connotations of the terms 'rigid,' 'pre-conciliar,' 'anti-community,' resonated with Communist terms like 'Capitalist,' 'bourgeois,' and 'anti-democratic.'”
Both these priests spoke to Michael Rose, author of Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood. According to the book, Father Andrew Walter “'began assembling a lawsuit” against St. Mary’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, because he was “subjected to a Church-run psychiatric gulag, usually operated by theological liberals, often by men who are openly and actively homosexual.'”
Rose, for his book, interviewed 125 seminarians from 50 dioceses and 22 major seminaries, dozens of whom were “recently ordained priests, seminary faculty and vocation directors.” His book (without his intention) makes the case that the next group which may sue the U.S. bishops for sex abuse is former seminarians.
In a chapter called “Gay Subculture,” Rose recounts seminary cases where:
• Heterosexual seminarians had to get “restraining orders” to stop homosexual advances.
• Heterosexual seminarians were expelled for refusing homosexual “intimate relations.”
• Heterosexual seminarians experienced months of ‘gay rage’ by senior seminarians.
• Heterosexual seminarians were forced to be trained by homosexuals obsessed with them.
• Orthodox Catholic faculty members were spit in the face.
• Orthodox Catholic faculty members were threatened.
• Heterosexual seminarians were threatened to be kicked out into a “very bad neighborhood” unless they submitted to a superior’s sexual advances.
• Heterosexual seminarians were constantly being told they were “latent homosexuals.”
• A novice was attacked and homosexually raped.
• “Homosexuals were well organized and since they had the support of the seminary authorities, they openly intimidated us heterosexuals,” according to Father Norman Weslin.
Liberal and so-called moderate bishops sometimes say they can’t just mandate that orthodox Catholic moral doctrine be taught let alone be practiced in the seminaries. But, Rose recounts how Cardinal Egan of New York after just being installed “asked for and accepted the resignations of a great number of faculty members at St. Joseph’s Seminary.”
Rose said, “If Egan’s actions proved nothing else — some critics say he “pruned the wrong faculty — it demonstrates that the local bishop has the authority and opportunity to quickly “re-form” his seminary.”
CWR knows that it is true that church leaders can act with authority because their publisher, Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., was exiled by the Jesuit order after criticizing immoral teachings at University of San Francisco (USF), including a play promoting sex abuse.
In the middle of the sex abuse scandal coverage on April 23, the San Jose Mercury reported that Fessio, despite being America’s top orthodox publisher of “Roman Catholic literature, has been forced into an obscure chaplain's job in Los Angeles after he criticized the University of San Francisco as too liberal and sought to open his own orthodox college.”
Even though Fessio, 61 years old, has close ties with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the Pope’s chief advisers, he was unable to stop the move, which took place in May. He said, “They are trying to get me out of the way. Why else would they exile me? I am highly educated. I'm in the prime of my life. I have so much more to contribute than to minister to the sick.”
The California Province of the Society of Jesus in Los Gatos — which was in the middle of its own sex scandal — refused to comment on the rationale for his displacement. But, according to the Mercury a former Catholic seminarian said, “They see him as a great threat to their agenda, which is to basically change the church into another world order concept, a much more liberal one.”
The forced exile has moral “implications” for faithful Catholics, which have been ironically “overshadowed” by the sexual abuse scandal. The Mercury mentioned that one of the main reasons for the exile was a “long-running criticism” of University of San Francisco, a Jesuit-run school, by Fessio, the head of Ignatius Press.
“I don't think they're trying to make me suffer,” Fessio said of his superiors. “But what I was trying to do with Campion College was offensive. They probably saw it as an implicit indictment of them. I just wish they would really allow a diversity of voices, including ours.”
In the May issue of Fessio’s CWR, Theron C. Bowers, Jr. MD said, “As a psychiatrist I have a not-so-tongue-in-check strategy for clearing up the scandal. We could hypnotize the bishops into believing that these sexual offenders are orthodox, pre-Vatican II troglodytes.”
Bowers hits on a truth that the U.S. bishops seem to not be getting. Faithful Catholics are losing faith in their bishops. The CWR open letter to the American bishop put this loss of faith in question form: “How many people have been turned away from their Catholic faith by this scandal?”
This writer knows of an admittedly lukewarm Catholic who said she is afraid to look at any priest’s face because of the scandal. Another person who has strong faith and works in a Catholic diocese said she had a crisis of faith because of the scandal.
The Dallas meeting on June 13-15 is the mother of all battles in the sex abuse wars. The question is will the U.S. bishops enact measures to end its sex scandal or cave in to the Gay-Media axis.
In an attempt to end the scandal, CWR in the open letter said, “The willingness to tackle difficult problems, and impose necessary discipline, should be recognized as a sign of capacity for leadership… Effective pastoral leadership entails not only addressing moral problems, but also encouraging the practice of virtues.”
CWR asks faithful Catholics to copy their open letter or make their own and send it to their diocesan bishop. Catholics or anyone else who want the sex abuse scandal to end can find their local bishop’s address and phone number in their local phone books or online here.
