Since his election, Pope Francis has done
everything within his power to soften and subvert the church’s teaching
concerning human sexuality. He also packed the College of Cardinals with the
Lavender Mafia.
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, and I wrote extensively about it 26 years ago
in the first part of my hardback book, “Republics Ancient and Modern” (the
pertinent chapter can be found in the first volume of
the paperback edition).
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.
It also
turned out that in 1984, when a scandal of this sort broke out in the diocese
of Lafayette, Louisiana, a Dominican priest named Thomas P. O’Doyle —
who was a canon lawyer working for the Papal Nuncio in Washington and had seen
numerous reports of a similar kind cross his desk — joined with a Louisiana
lawyer named F. Ray Mouton, Jr., and another priest, a psychiatrist named
Michael Peterson, who directed a hospital for troubled priests and knew a great
deal, to conduct an extensive investigation of clerical misconduct along these
lines throughout the United States.
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.
Not long after the scandal first broke and the National Review
Board issued its 2004 report, I was a guest at a dinner hosted by a Catholic
friend, as was a highly intelligent, young local priest who, everyone knew,
would someday become a bishop. By then it was evident to anyone who bothered to
read the report that pederasty, not pedophilia, was the problem, and I had long
known that there were seminaries in the United States that were essentially
cathouses in which all of the cats were male.
When talk turned to the clerical scandal, I suggested that the
fatal decision the American bishops had made in 1985 to continue covering
everything up must have come from Rome. If, I argued, every diocese followed
the same procedures, the bishops must have received guidance from the center.
Could it then be the case, I asked, that this was not a peculiarly
American problem — that this was going on elsewhere, all over the world; that
Rome was the epicenter; and that the Papal nuncio in Washington or his
superiors at the Vatican were complicit? Could the colleges in Rome,
established for the education of especially promising seminarians from all over
the world, in effect be gay bordellos and promotion into the hierarchy for many
a young priest came at a price?
My host knew what I was talking about. He had once been a Jesuit
novice, and had been expelled from the Jesuits by the provincial for
complaining about the sexual misconduct going on in the novitiate all around
him. What I remember most vividly, however, was the silence of the young priest
at the dinner table. He had been talkative. Now he said not a word. He was even
then a handsome young man, and had studied at the North American College at a
time when he was no doubt even more striking. As we left, I remember saying to
my wife, “He knows more than he is willing to divulge.”
I do not mean to say that he was complicit. I doubt that very
much. I do mean to suggest that he had received unwanted attention and knew
that, if he talked about it, it would halt his clerical career.
Later, of course, it became evident that my suspicions of Rome
were justified. In the intervening years, there have been scandals identical to
the American scandal in Canada, Australia, Belgium, Bavaria, Ireland, Honduras,
Chile, and elsewhere.
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.
In the
interim between Pope Benedict’s papacy and that of his successor, we received
another indication of the depth of the problem. In the newspapers of
Scotland, we learned that
Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien, a cardinal and archbishop who was the primate of
Scotland, had been buggering seminarians and young priests for years and
nothing had been done in response to the complaints they had submitted to the
Papal Nuncio. It was only when they went public in 2013 that the Vatican acted.
Unfortunately, however, Benedict’s successor was Jorge Mario
Bergoglio of Argentina, the man who calls himself Pope Francis. As a Belgian
cardinal named Gottfried Daneels — who had been removed as an archbishop
because he had covered up the pederasty of another Belgian cardinal and had
come out in support of contraception, divorce, gay marriage, euthanasia, and
abortion — revealed in his memoirs, Bergoglio’s candidacy was promoted by the
St. Gallen Group, a part of what Catholics call “the Lavender Mafia.”
This disgraced figure stood on the balcony with Bergoglio after he
was elected pope. He was chosen to say the prayer at the new pope’s
inauguration. And there was joy in the ranks of those inclined to break the vow
of celibacy.
If you want
to get a sense of what such people thought, I suggest that you read “The
Vatican’s Secret Life,” an article that
appeared in Vanity Fair in December 2013. It is an eye-opener. Its
author, Michael Joseph Gross, is not scandalized by what he found. He
celebrates it and, tellingly, never once mentions, even under the guise of
pedophilia, the propensity of prominent priests to indulge in
pederasty. As Gross observes:
At the Vatican, a significant number of gay
prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may
not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they
inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned.
Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia
in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general
population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay,
according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his
well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at
the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood,
is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.
Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of
ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of
celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited
degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they
remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least
common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life.
Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the Italian
press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight journalist
pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a ‘honeypot’ and
entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual situations. (The cardinal vicar
of Rome was given the task of investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)
There are at least a few gay cardinals,
including one whose long-term partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant
denomination. There is the notorious monsignor nicknamed ‘Jessica,’ who likes
to visit a pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old
novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the bed of
John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a secret life as a
gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of the innermost corridors
of the Vatican. Whether he received this privileged access from some friend or
family member, or from a client, is impossible to say; to see a known rent boy
in black leather on a private Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.
I recommend that you read the whole article. The author
interviewed a great many clerics in Rome, and makes it clear that they were
delighted with the choice of Bergoglio and his selection of advisers.
They had
reason to be delighted. 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.
All of this
— including the machinations of the St. Gallen Group and the role Daneels
played — is laid out in detail by an English Catholic, who was in Rome during
the early year of this papacy, and who writes under the pseudonym Marcantonio
Colonna. The title is “The Dictator Pope: The Inside
Story of the Francis Papacy.”
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. This includes Blaise Cupich, the
cardinal-archbishop of Chicago, and Joseph Tobin, the cardinal-archbishop of
Newark.
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.
In the
meantime, Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume, former first counsellor at the
apostolic nunciature in Washington D.C. has emerged to confirm that
Viganò‘s predecessor had been instructed to confine McCarrick by Pope Benedict,
that he had witnessed the confrontation with McCarrick, and that everything
else that Viganò had said was true. To this, we must add that Viganò named
names in the Vatican, specifying which high officials had obstructed the
investigation into McCarrick’s conduct.
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.
This article originally appeared on Ricochet.com and
is reprinted with the permission of the author.
Paul A. Rahe holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise
K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, where he is
professor of history.