Rod Dreher's Blog, page 56

The ‘Esoteric’ Benedict XVI

I got a Google News alert about The Benedict Option, tipping me off to this column by an Australian Jesuit criticizing the concept. He wrote, in part:

A few years ago in the United States, marked by greater polarisation and consequently sharper judgment of particular social trends, such disgust led media commentator Rod Dreher to propose the Benedict option. At that time a recent convert to Catholicism, he was appalled by the collapse of support for traditional marriage, the tolerance of abortion and the pressure for gay marriage. Untypically, he associated these trends with the excesses of economic liberalism, militarism and corporate greed. The Benedict option, named after the fifth century Catholic saint who founded monasteries and whose Rule has been adapted by monastic movements throughout Western Europe, invited Catholics in particular to withdraw as far as possible from society. They were to form intentional communities held together by such practices as common prayer and home education for children.

Where to begin with this? The priest couldn’t possibly have read The Benedict Option, because in it, I make clear that I am an Orthodox Christian. I have not been Catholic since 2006, as most people who read me know. Second, I do not “invite Catholics in particular to withdraw as far as possible from society” — a concept the priest later mischaracterizes as my proposing a “carefree” escape.

The book was published over four years ago, and I still have to deal with these bad faith takes. As is perfectly clear from the text of the book itself, and from many things I’ve written about it, I propose Benedict Option communities for Christians (Catholics and otherwise) who live within society, so they can hold on more firmly to their faith even as they live and move within post-Christian, and increasingly anti-Christian, society. Of course the concept is open to criticism, and I welcome criticism. But criticize what I actually propose, not the straw man you think I propose! 

At this point, I am almost of the belief that this is intended as misdirection to prevent Catholics and others from defending themselves. It so happened that also in this morning’s e-mail I received the latest Letter (N0. 66) from Robert Moynihan (archives here), writing from Rome about the Catholic Church. In it, Dr. Moynihan publishes this text from a reader [emphases in the original]:

Benedict XVI’s Confession

By Michel Eduardo Beleza Yamagishi

July 25, 2021

I hold that Benedict XVI’s letter, “The Church and the scandals of sexual abuse,” contains a concealed Confession.

The manuscript was masterly written and intertwines distinct thoughts in a single piece which makes its reading somewhat challenging.

In this note, Benedict XVI has addressed extensively the sexual scandals, but his conclusion disappointed many experts and could be resumed in a brief sentence: the sexual scandals are just one among other symptoms of a moral decay in the hierarchy which resulted from the changes in the moral teaching of the Church. No new insight at all.

Still, his letter has another important theme. From its very title, one should recognize that Benedict XVI is mainly concerned with “The Church,” and the sexual scandals are just but one (horrendous) sign of something terribly wrong within Her.

He starts by saying: “I try to show that in the 1960s an egregious event occurred, on a scale unprecedented in history.”

He cites only two events.

One outside The Church, the “sexual freedom movement” of 1968 and the other, the Second Vatican Council (SVC).

Regrettably, he did not say which one was the “egregious event.”

The chronology seems to point toward the Second Vatican Council because it took place before 1968.

Additionally, Benedict XVI asserts that the Second Vatican Council was a turning point in the Catholic moral theology: “Until the Second Vatican Council, Catholic moral theology was largely founded on natural law,” but afterwards “the natural law option was largely abandoned.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this so because of this”) is an ancient fallacy, but one is tempted to ask whether the sexual freedom movement was actually an unintended collateral effect of the Second Vatican Council, at least in the ex-Catholic countries.

Benedict XVI is not only worried about the change in the moral teaching of The Church. It gives the impression that he had in mind something even worse than moral decay. Something that was so overwhelming that it requires “a new beginning” (“what I could contribute to a new beginning”).

A careful reading of his text shows that Benedict XVI actually reveals the origin of all problems. He openly confesses that his generation created “another” Church: “What must be done? Perhaps we should create another Church for things to work out? Well, that experiment has already been undertaken and has already failed.”

I should stress that they did create “another Church,” and its failure does not mean that it is over, but it did not deliver a “better” Church. Only those who, like Benedict XVI, knew the Church before the Second Vatican Council can understand this statement in full. For they were baptized in one Church and they will die in another, without ever leaving the former. Arguably this event has no precedent in History. Romano Amerio wrote a magnificent book (Iota Unum) enumerating a long list of changes in the Catholic Church during the 20th century. Amerio died in 1997. If he were alive, I guess he would say that the Church has changed beyond any recognition. She is disfigured (the parallel between the Church nowadays and the Suffering Servant was originally proposed by Giuseppe Cardinal Siri in his book Gethsemane). “The experiment” is a historical fact. Nobody in good faith can deny that.

Benedict XVI’s words suggest that “the experiment” reached a point of no return where only a “new beginning” of the Church will do.

For the record, this is not the first time that human beings believed that we could make a “better” Church. The history of the Mystical Body of Christ is full of this kind of vanity. Though, since the Arian heresy, no other attempt to change the Church was so profound and long-lasting.

Benedict XVI’s confession is important because he was one of the enthusiasts of “the experiment.” He was not one of the architects, but he undeniably played a significant role. It took time, but the bad fruits of their “experiment” forced him to realize that he was duped by that longstanding temptation, and he bitterly concluded: “it is rather obvious that we do not need another Church of our own design.”

It should have broken his heart to write: “My books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk.” In the seminaries of “the experiment” his books were included in the post-Christian index librorum prohibitorum where, now, most of the Catholic literature is proscribed.

By the way, why did Benedict XVI tell this? The Truth is censured by “the experiment,” and Benedict XVI knows that firsthand. Probably, his last texts are so enigmatic just to reach the press (remembering those seven letters found in the Apocalypse of St. John which only Christians could understand. Only at that time the censure came from outside).

The Truth cannot be proclaimed out loud anymore, but: “It is very important to oppose the lies and half-truths of the devil with the whole truth.” (cf. John 8,32)

Benedict XVI wrote many phrases that hint at his despair: “The Church is dying in souls,” “Indeed, the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus,” “But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope,” “Indeed, the weeds in God’s field, the Church, are excessively visible, and the evil fish in the net also show their strength,” “Yes, there is sin in the Church and evil,” “Today’s Church is more than ever a ‘Church of the Martyrs’ and thus a witness to the living God,” “It was necessary to send out a strong message, and seek out a new beginning, so to make the Church again truly credible as a light among peoples and as a force in service against the powers of destruction.”

What went so wrong? “The experiment” was supposed to renew the Church, but it almost eclipsed Her instead.

Against all odds, Benedict XVI reaffirmed the Catholic dogma: “But even today there is the Holy Church, which is indestructible.”

Indeed, the only reason why the Church was not definitively destroyed is because She is not from this world.

Unfortunately, “the experiment” is still running. Both the “Holy Church” and “the experiment” coexist, and probably they will do for a while.

At this point, one may think that my reading of Benedict XVI’s letter is farfetched. In my defense I cite Benedict XVI own unambiguous words: “The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God, through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped.” Could he be clearer?

I submit that the Benedict XVI’s missive is like a palimpsest.

There are so many ideas packed in just 6000 words! However, there is a hidden inner coherence in his thoughts.

If one considers that Benedict XVI’s major subject is “The Church,” then the manuscript starts to reveal its secrets.

An intelligent and erudite man like himself would not write a dense piece, from his self-imposed reclusion, just to discuss the sexual scandals. It would be wiser and sufficient to recommend reading “The book of Gomorrah” by St. Peter Damian because the sins of the flesh are as old as humanity, and The Church has been addressing them for millennia.

Therefore, the frustration of those who expected a breakthrough in Benedict XVI’s manuscript comes from their ignorance of history and human nature.

So, why did Benedict XVI dare to break his silence and speak? What only he could say? His Confession.

“The experiment” should be completely destroyed in order to make way for a “new beginning” of the Church.

St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried to do it, but both faced the “rulers of the darkness of this world” and, unfortunately, they were defeated.

“The experiment” is so powerful that, in just few years, it has deteriorated the millenary Catholic culture that built the Western civilization, and consequently many souls were lost forever.

Trying to answer his own rhetorical question (What must be done?), Benedict XVI recurred to the Catholic Tradition and found the following proposal: “In the old Church, the catechumenate was created as a habitat against an increasingly demoralized culture, in which the distinctive and fresh aspects of the Christian way of life were practiced and at the same time protected from the common way of life. I think that even today something like catechumenal communities are necessary so that Christian life can assert itself in its own way.”

This survival tactic (new beginning) is remarkably similar to that proposed by Rod Dreher in his book The Benedict Option (St. Benedict).

I do not know if this strategy will do. Perhaps, we are already the “little flock” to whom Jesus said: “do not be afraid.” Nevertheless, even frightened, we should not surrender. We are The Militant Church.

We should rebuild the Church founded by Christ just like St. Francis did in his time.

It will not be easy. It never is.

Just think about the hardships that St. Athanasius had to endure when Arianism was widespread.

God will assist us in our mission which is simply: Keep the Faith!

I pray for Benedict XVI. He did tell the Truth no matter how late and despite his almost cryptic way.

Moreover, I recognize within the Benedict XVI’s Confession letter the Beatific Grace. God is keeping His promise: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt. (“You are Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against her.”

You can read the entire text of Benedict XVI’s extraordinary 2019 essay here. In it, Benedict ruminates that “the Church is dying in souls,” because of the post-Christian nature of our society, because of internal corruption, and other factors. I’m not interested in the strictly ecclesial aspects of the Pope Emeritus’s critique. I am interested in BXVI’s proposal for “catechumenate communities” to make the Church live once again in the hearts of the faithful.

Here, from BXVI’s essay, is the context for a quote cited in the letter to Moynihan:

The moral doctrine of Holy Scripture has its uniqueness ultimately predicated in its cleaving to the image of God, in faith in the one God who showed himself in Jesus Christ and who lived as a human being. The Decalogue is an application of the biblical faith in God to human life. The image of God and morality belong together and thus result in the particular change of the Christian attitude towards the world and human life. Moreover, Christianity has been described from the beginning with the word hodós [Greek for a road, in the New Testament often used in the sense of a path of progress].

Faith is a journey and a way of life. In the old Church, the catechumenate was created as a habitat against an increasingly demoralized culture, in which the distinctive and fresh aspects of the Christian way of life were practiced and at the same time protected from the common way of life. I think that even today something like catechumenal communities are necessary so that Christian life can assert itself in its own way.

Longtime readers will recall the amazing address that Archbishop Georg Gänswein, BXVI’s longtime personal secretary, gave at a September 11, 2018, event in Rome. It was part of the book tour for the Italian edition of The Benedict Option. I wrote about it here at the time. I was present at the event, and had no idea what Msgr. Gänswein was going to say about my book. Italian journalist friends had advised me that whatever he said, I should be aware that Benedict XVI approved every syllable. BXVI is a hero of mine — indeed, I’ve said for years that he is the “second Benedict of the Benedict Option.” If he had not liked my book, I would have been heartbroken. In fact, the Gänswein speech was an excited endorsement of The Benedict Option!

I have no opinion about whether or not the 2019 BXVI essay contains an “esoteric” message. I believe it plainly contains an exoteric message, which is that as Western civilization collapses morally and spiritually, believers need to gather within strong communities of faith and discipleship to hold the line, and to be a light to a world groping in the dark for a way, a hodós.

No Christian community can proclaim the Way if it has lost the map, and an internal sense of direction. BXVI here warns about relativism, and (though he doesn’t use the word) Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, in this discussion of the reception of the 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor (The Splendor of Truth):

I shall never forget how then-leading German moral theologian Franz Böckle, who, having returned to his native Switzerland after his retirement, announced in view of the possible decisions of the encyclical Veritatis splendor that if the encyclical should determine that there were actions which were always and under all circumstances to be classified as evil, he would challenge it with all the resources at his disposal.

It was God, the Merciful, that spared him from having to put his resolution into practice; Böckle died on July 8, 1991. The encyclical was published on August 6, 1993 and did indeed include the determination that there were actions that can never become good.

The pope was fully aware of the importance of this decision at that moment and for this part of his text, he had once again consulted leading specialists who did not take part in the editing of the encyclical. He knew that he must leave no doubt about the fact that the moral calculus involved in balancing goods must respect a final limit. There are goods that are never subject to trade-offs.

There are values which must never be abandoned for a greater value and even surpass the preservation of physical life. There is martyrdom. God is (about) more than mere physical survival. A life that would be bought by the denial of God, a life that is based on a final lie, is a non-life.

Martyrdom is a basic category of Christian existence. The fact that martyrdom is no longer morally necessary in the theory advocated by Böckle and many others shows that the very essence of Christianity is at stake here.

What powerful words! We are, in these days, fighting for the very essence of Christianity. If there are no truths worth dying for, then Christianity is not Christianity. It seems to me that Benedict XVI is saying that we have to relearn this within “catechumenal communities,” because the institutional Church has failed to uphold and pass on these fundamental fact of Christian faith and discipleship. Not one of us Christians has the excuse to surrender to this occupation! We have to figure out how to live faithfully under this dictatorship of wokeness. These are not normal times.

The post The ‘Esoteric’ Benedict XVI appeared first on The American Conservative.

Amy Thomas Will Save America

The least shocking news of the summer:

As President Joe Biden completed 100 days in office, the country was optimistic about the coming year, but now, just after hitting the six-month mark, Americans’ optimism about the direction of the country has plummeted nearly 20 points, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.

A majority — 55% — of the public say they are pessimistic about the direction of the country, a marked change from the roughly one-third (36%) that said the same in an ABC News/Ipsos poll published May 2. In the early May survey, Americans were more optimistic than pessimistic by a 28-percentage point margin. Optimism is now under water by 10 points. Looking ahead to the next 12 months, fewer than half — 45% — now report feeling optimistic about the way things are going, a significant drop from about two-thirds (64%) in the May poll.

The decline in optimism has occurred across the board among Democrats, Republicans and independents. Optimism is down about 20 points among Democrats and Republicans and down 26 points among independents. Among Democrats, about 7 in 10 (71%) now say they are optimistic about the direction of the country over the next 12 months.

Violent crime is up. The southern border is open. Covid is not conquered. And everywhere we turn, wokeness conquers. Last week at a rock concert here in Budapest, I met in the crowd a Hungarian soldier who had recently returned from training at a US military base. He told me he was shocked by the things he saw. Among the most shocking was the demoralization among American troops. He said that those he talked to were scared to say anything around those they didn’t already deeply trust, out of fear that they would be turned in to superiors as suspected “extremists”. It sounds like the political witch hunt within our woke armed forces is doing wonders for unit cohesion and morale.

Yesterday I heard from a white Evangelical friend back in the US who said that many churches and Bible studies he knows about are splitting over Critical Race Theory. He spoke of a longstanding Bible study group in which a family member participates, which broke up after one member announced that everything they talk about henceforth should be analyzed through the lens of “systemic racism.” Introducing race ideology into the Bible study caused friends to turn on each other. Now it’s over, that Bible study. Dissolved by mutual mistrust and hostility.

As goes a Bible study, so goes the country. You watch.

Take a look at this short, brave blast by Amy Thomas, a mom in Overland Park, Kansas, who is sick of being gaslighted by the Blue Valley school district, which denies that it is teaching Critical Race Theory. She has documents, and is not going to be lied to by educrats. Here she is at the school board meeting last week:

Frankly, I find that optimistic. We need to raise an army of Amy Thomases (but not an army led by Gen. Mark Milley, please!). But we have a long way to go to fight the institutional capture by the woke. I note that in her glorious tirade, Amy Thomas pointed out that CRT divides America (and all societies) into Oppressors and Oppressed. Here’s a short clip from Live Not By Lies, explaining how the cult of Social Justice Wokeness justifies its totalitarian agenda:

The Central Fact of Human Existence Is Power and How It Is Used

Politics is the art and science of how power is distributed and exercised in a society. For SJWs, everything in life is understood through relationships of power. Social justice is the mission of reordering society to create more equitable (just) power relationships. Those who resist social justice are practicing “hate,” and cannot be reasoned with or in any way tolerated, only conquered.

There Is No Such Thing as Objective Truth; There Is Only Power

Who decides what is true and what is false? Those who hold power. Religious claims, philosophical arguments, political theories—all of these are veils concealing will to power. They are only rationalizations for oppressors to hold power over the oppressed. The value of truth claims depends on who is making them.

Identity Politics Sorts Oppressed from Oppressors

In classic Marxism, the bourgeoisie are the oppressor, and the proletariat are the oppressed. In the cult of social justice, the oppressors are generally white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. The oppressed are racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and religious minorities. (Curiously, the poor are relatively low on the hierarchy of oppression. For example, a white Pentecostal man living on disability in a trailer park is an oppressor; a black lesbian Ivy League professor is oppressed.) Justice is not a matter of working out what is rightly due to an individual per se, but what is due to an individual as the bearer of a group identity.

If you don’t understand what is happening to our school boards and many other institutions, read Live Not By Lies and get educated — then get active to fight it!

We are living in a country in which rich, powerful people in media, education, and elsewhere, are working to separate our kids from their sexual identities. According to a Gallup poll from earlier this year, nearly 16 percent of Generation Z youth (aged 18 to 23) identify as LGBT. Heretofore, the number of LGBT people in the US held steady at between three and four percent. This is what propaganda does. I suspect that most of these confused young people will settle back into a heterosexual identity, but not after a long, messy period of experimentation that leaves them broken and perhaps unable to form stable families. And you wonder why people are not optimistic about the future of America.

I was talking over the weekend with a friend back in America who is an expert in military policy and national security issues. He’s pretty down about the future of the country too, based on what he sees in his work life. He’s deeply concerned about the adoption of wokeness within the US military’s officer class, and says that there is no way an officer can hope to have a successful career in the new military without saluting wokeness. But aside from wokeness, he says, there is a broader corruption in the senior officer class. He contends that too many senior officers are busy thinking about how they can cash in on their military service after retirement, and that this affects the decisions they make. Why are so many of these generals and senior officers so eager to embrace wokeness? Part of it, my friend theorizes, is that they can see that Woke Capitalism rules corporate America, and they want to make themselves more lucrative hires post-retirement.

My source also said that the officer class is extremely sensitive to political winds, and are reticent to innovate, or to take risky stands. He said that there are senior officers who have lost their jobs because of being on the wrong political side, but none who have been removed for poor performance or lying the the public, despite what we saw in the Afghanistan papers. If you have the right politics, performance is irrelevant.

He also said that within the US military, people don’t tend to be promoted for merit. It’s rather a big machine that neither rewards nor punishes based on actual performance, but on politics and other factors. If you point out real problems within the system, he says, you are likely to be punished. Thus, you are incentivized to keep quiet and play the game. Along these lines, our analysis of the state of the world and the enemies we face — here he’s talking about not just within the military, but within the broader academic national security sphere — is blinded by ideology. Too many of the smart people on whom we rely to tell us what the world is like so we can prepare for national security threats are the kind of people who believe the mantra Diversity Is Our Strength, because it’s what everybody around them believes, and you have to say and act like it’s true if you want to get ahead.

My friend said that we haven’t won a war against a real opponent in a long time. Meanwhile, the US military capacity is decaying from within — and nobody is addressing this, because the kind of people who would point out that the Emperor has no clothes would destroy their military or academic careers in this ideological environment.

We are living in a situation that Czeslaw Milosz wrote about in his great book The Captive Mind, about why intellectuals surrendered to Communist totalitarianism. I mention it in Live Not By Lies. Excerpt:

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”

What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?

You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.

What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.

Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.

Under the emerging tyranny of wokeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practice one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly conforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: “They swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.”

Americans are not optimistic about our country because they see that the Lie is gaining power, and destroying who and what we were. They see a Democratic Party that fully embraces it, and a Republican Party that has neither courage nor intelligence in resisting it. They see every institution of society — academia, media, Hollywood, sports, law, medicine, the military, much of the church — lined up against them, in service of the Lie. And they see that most people, even the ones who know this is all a lie, chewing Murti-Bing pills by the handful, hoping to make the scary stuff go away.

Well, Amy Thomas is not one of those people. God bless Amy Thomas. May her tribe increase, in every sphere of American life. It had better, or we are done as a nation. Get in touch with your inner Amy Thomas, and get loud. But don’t misunderstand: we are not going to vote our way out of this crisis. It’s going to take a lot more.

The post Amy Thomas Will Save America appeared first on The American Conservative.

From Pillar To Post

The Washington Post is out with a critical story on The Pillar‘s scoop about the now-former CEO of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ alleged serial use of the gay hook-up app Grindr. The piece is behind a paywall, but here are some excerpts.

Flynn and Condon’s story also punctuates how America’s religious and journalistic landscapes have changed. Institutions and hierarchies now have to contend with scrappy start-ups taking matters into their own hands.

And in the growing conservative Catholic media scene, their newsletter and its takedown of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill represents a new power and boldness of those demanding their church be purged of leaders who they see as too permissive on issues like abortion, gender norms and sex outside of heterosexual marriage.

Note well that that is not what J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon have done here. They didn’t publish Burrill’s data because they don’t agree with his stance on various issues. They did it because they found evidence suggesting that the top leader in the US Catholic bureaucracy was a serial user of an app that facilitates gay sex hook-ups.

More:

[Flynn and Condon] also compared their Burrill piece to one done by the New York Times’ Opinion section, which explored the dangers of leaked smartphone data and used such data to identify a person who was near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The New York Times piece quoted one man who was interviewed and agreed to his name being used.

One of the writers of the Times’ piece Friday said the whole point of the reporting was to expose the vulnerability of such data, and that they didn’t name anyone without consent.

“This was the nightmare scenario that we were talking about to some degree. . . . To see it happen is just confirmation of just how dangerous this type of information is,” said Charlie Warzel, who has since left the Times and now is also publishing on Substack, the same online newsletter platform the Pillar uses. “Despite the fact that I don’t think there are any ethical similarities with what we did and this, it obviously makes me feel terrible that our work was used as a justification in this.”

Gosh, maybe Flynn and Condon should say that they wrote their story as a warning to other gay monsignors to get off of Grindr, pull their pants back up, go to confession, and repent. If so, yay for them.

Back in June, the journalism site Pro Publica published information from an illegal leak of the IRS tax information of a number of wealthy Americans. Unlike Msgr. Burrill’s private information, these data are protected by law. Where was the outrage over this? It was muted, because apparently enough journalists and public commentators believe it is in the public interest to reveal that quite a few superrich paid no taxes some years. What’s really going on here in the Burrill case, I think, is that many liberals don’t believe that it’s a big deal for a prominent Catholic priest, one in charge of policies that affect the entire national church, to violate his vows by having anonymous gay sex. Many conservative Catholics disagree. Flynn and Condon write for them.

If these two had legally obtained data indicating that the top clerical official at the USCCB frequented white supremacist meet-ups, would these same people be just as outraged by Burrill’s privacy violation? Of course not. They would be praising it. They’re just mad because Burrill’s serious wrongdoing involved sex, and gay sex at that.

More:

Flynn was interviewed for a 2018 master’s project at the University of Missouri about ethics in Catholic journalism.

In that paper, he said he thought all journalists are the same in that they all have a “guiding set of assumptions. . . . The concept of objective journalism is a myth.”

However, the paper described Flynn as saying that Catholic journalism has a different set of ends in mind than simply to inform and educate. The difference, he argued, is that “the Catholic perception of the common good is, ultimately, the salvation of souls, and more generally the Church’s ideas, developed over the centuries, about what constitutes human flourishing.”

Yes, that’s right. If I were a Catholic, then I would say that after two decades of vile scandal emerging from the inability of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy to govern the sexual habits of priests, a story like The Pillar‘s serves the common good, ultimately the salvation of souls.

Back in 2015, the gay news site Queerty outed a conservative Lutheran pastor by revealing his Grindr screenshots in which he discussed sex with men, and tried to arrange dates. The pastor was married and a father at the time. Queerty outed him because the pastor was openly antigay in his sermons. I think this pastor was absolutely fair game for Queerty. Had he been outed by a conservative website disgusted by his betrayal of his wife, his kids, and his vocation, that would have been fine by me too. If not, why not? By what moral logic do pastors have the presumption of privacy to arrange sex on hook-up apps?

One more:

Flynn and Condon’s story also punctuates how America’s religious and journalistic landscapes have changed. Institutions and hierarchies now have to contend with scrappy start-ups taking matters into their own hands.

Yeah, and you know what institutions and hierarchies have to do this? Ones like the Washington Post, which don’t want to do the kind of reporting that spears their sacred cows. Several years ago, when The New York Times was breaking Ted McCarrick stories, I sent leads and other information to a Washington Post reporter to help the Post advance the story, and get ahead of the Times. The information was about lavender mafia stuff having to do with McCarrick and a network of DC priests. Had they panned out, these would have been great stories that would have added a lot to our understanding about how the corrupt McCarrick exercised power and facilitated sexual corruption within the Catholic institution.

I mentioned to a seasoned DC observer of religion and journalism how mystified I was that this reporter showed no interest in these leads. That source, who knows everybody in Washington journalism, said the reporter is a good person, but so bought into the liberal narrative that they would never, ever, ever report anything that cast a negative light on gays. Even if there were solid evidence to suggest that gay male Archdiocese of Washington priests collaborated with Cardinal McCarrick in a sinister network that covered up their own sexual activity, and promoted those who can be trusted to play along, that would never see the light of day in the Post, the observer told me. I don’t think the Post is alone in this at all. I think this is standard operating procedure for the mainstream media.

I’ve mentioned here in the past that back in 2002, when I was headed down to Dallas for National Review to cover the USCCB meeting — the first since the scandal broke big out of Boston — a freelance journalist who had been hired by Fox News to join their team covering the meeting reached out to ask me for a briefing. This reporter, X., was not up to speed on the issues facing the Catholic bishops. When I arrived in Dallas, I met with X. at the conference hotel to give a basic rundown of relevant history, key personalities, and themes that would be discussed at the meeting.

When I got to the gay part, and told X. that X. needed to seek out the Catholic journalist Phil Lawler, the Catholic writer Michael S. Rose, and the Catholic activist Stephen Brady, all of whom were there, and all of whom had done excellent work writing about the culture of promiscuous homosexuality among the Catholic priesthood, X. stopped me cold. “Orders from the top of the network: don’t go there,” X. said.

“What do you mean, ‘don’t go there’?” I said, shocked. “The lavender mafia is not the whole story at all, but you can’t understand this story if you don’t understand that part of it!”

“Sorry,” X. said. “Those are my orders.”

This was 2002, when the late Roger Ailes was running the network. If even Fox News had declared a moratorium on this aspect of the story, how likely do you think The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the networks were to look at it?

Again, my theory is that liberal Catholics and mainstream media journalists are more scandalized by what Flynn and Condon reported about Msgr. Burrill than they are by the fact that the top organizational official of the USCCB was apparently a serial user of an app whose users were described by one of their own as “a bunch of thirsty dudes in geographic cesspools hunting one another.”

Catholics in America need to understand that this crisis will never end in their church without cleaning the sexually active priests out of the Augean stables. The abuse of children and minors happened within the context of a decadent clerical system. There is no way to rely on secretly debauched priests (homo or hetero) to govern the Church in a morally sound way. Catholics have waited for decades for the hierarchy to clean up the Church they lead. They can’t, or won’t. Flynn and Condon write for those Catholics who are fed up with the lies and deceit, and not willing to surrender their church to canoodling careerists in Roman collars, and who know that they can’t count on the mainstream media to tell the whole truth when it threatens their own ideological favorites.

The Pillar is what reform looks like. If this blog has become a Pillar stan account these past few days, it’s because I know personally the pressure that Flynn and Condon are under right now. If I were Catholic, you’d better believe I would be subscribing to that Substack, and donating money besides. 

What needs to be known now is how Msgr Burrill got to that high position of authority without what appears to be a hidden gay sex life being revealed by vetting. You know who is not going to do that reporting, despite having the resources to do it — and you know who is going to do it, if they have the financial support of subscribers.

UPDATE: A Catholic reader writes:

I think a major reason for the official invocation of anathema sit against the Pillar is the serious fear by other wealthy, powerful, and influential people that similar measures might be employed against them,. and that they might well expose an undercurrent of gay male subculture in the US that is very, very different from the sanitized image of the committed and long-standing couples that have been aggressively promoted to the general public since the 1990s.

Particularly among middle and upper class types my understanding is that there is ample grist for the mill and I would keep in mind that this is the exact same elite that was completely fine with Epstein and his activities for literally decades.

I think you can deplore the fact that vigilantism has emerged while still recognizing that if this kind of behavior isn’t what you want, then it is vital to establish an actual mechanism for policing and curtailing this behavior — as opposed to the current assumption that the faithful should just shut up and suck it up. You can deplore that the circumstances have arisen that require such individuals while still acknowledging that they are unfortunately needed in the current context until official mechanisms emerge. I would submit that it is even possible to justify this through the Thomistic principle of double effect since the goal is to identify and eliminate these corrupt and predatory networks rather than a voyeuristic interest in the sex lives of the clergy.

If they will not protect our children, then our problems have now become theirs in a way that they cannot simply ignore.

UPDATE.2: A helpful short comment from a secular reader:

There’s definitely a disconnect in world views around sex and sexuality that prevents the more secular from understanding how this is viewed by a devout Catholic. But since I have been reading you for a long time I will attempt a secular analogy.

It’s similar to a professional with a fiduciary duty acting against the best interests of their clients, and in a manner that benefits the professional. It might go unnoticed but will slowly erode the moral character of someone doing it.

The post From Pillar To Post appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Joy Of Ákos

(A version of this appeared on my subscription-only Substack newsletter.)

Here’s what a friend and I did on Friday night in Budapest:

That’s my friend John O’Sullivan, the legendary conservative journalist, and me at the Ákos concert at Budapest Park. Akos — pronounced AH-koash — is a major Hungarian rock star. He is also a conservative, a serious Catholic, and a family man (his oldest child, a daughter, performed a duet with him onstage the other night). I met him shortly after I arrived in Hungary, but had no real idea what a big deal he is here until Friday night. All I knew before is that he’s a genuinely nice man, and that his wife Krisztina Öry, a well-known journalist, is one of the kindest people I met in this country. Here I am having lunch with them on the day we met, May 6. Akos is clowning around with a Tucker Carlson story on his iPhone:

 

A Hungarian who knows the US pop culture scene told me that Akos is like Jon Bon Jovi. Imagine a slightly more techno Jon Bon Jovi as an out and proud Catholic and conservative, and you have Akos.

Akos and Krisztina invited John and me to the show last night, the penultimate one on a tour of the country Akos has been on to celebrate the post-Covid re-opening of the country. The name of the tour is “Fel A Szivikkel,” meaning “Up With Hearts” — the title of Akos’s latest song. It’s about reclaiming joy after the season of Covid darkness. I can tell you that the 6,000 or so people at Budapest Park Friday night were all on board with the joy. Look:

 

 

Believe it or not, that was John O’Sullivan’s first-ever rock concert! John is 79, and from Liverpool. He was there when the Beatles were a local band, but never saw them. Never saw any rock or pop stars in concert, until last night. His reaction was characteristically English, and characteristically John: “This is charming!”

One of the gifts of being John’s friend is the pleasure of being around a true cosmopolitan who takes the world as it comes, and is genuinely surprised and grateful to experience new things. It’s hard to believe that he’s nearly 80. There are people in their twenties who are not as sprightly and eager to embrace life as John. I saw that once again last night at the Akos show, and boy, what an invigorating thing for a guy like me to observe.

John and his wife Melissa (who has been in the US visiting family all month) are friends of Akos and Krisztina, who invited us backstage after the show:

 

I came home last night feeling on top of the world. I had loved the music, of course (I’m listening to an Akos playlist on Spotify as I write this), but also thrilled over how much live music can do to lift one’s soul. I’m a year older than Akos (he’s 53), so I should have learned by now that live music is one of the best ways to beat the blues. Yet I keep forgetting it. How grateful I am to Akos and Krisztina for reminding me!

It was a short course too in artistry. Again, I had never seen Akos perform until Friday. My experiences with him had all been at lunch, or just hanging out, where he acted like a normal guy. Onstage, he is a riveting performer. John said to me during the show, “Look at how he commands the stage.” It was true. My friend had the entire crowd in the palm of his hand, and knew how to give them what they wanted. The thing is, there is nothing cynical about Akos. He really does love his fans, and loves performing for them. It was startling to see my friend, just this dude, transform into a rock star, and then backstage be his normal self again. All in a day’s work.

It was also uplifting to watch the big Hungarian crowd in such a celebratory mood with Akos, their hero. Akos Kovacs has been making music all his adult life, having begun with the band Bonanza Banzai in 1989, the year Communism fell; he was 21. I was hanging out with a 29-year-old Hungarian before the show. I told him that I’m surprised that he’s into Gen X music. He said, “Are you kidding? Akos is legend. My generation spent our childhood listening to his stuff with our parents. This is my music too.”

(I didn’t mention this in the Substack version of this post, that that 29 year old is Gaspar Orban, the son of the prime minister.)

I stood on a terrace looking out over the crowd last night, and saw three generations of Hungarians rocking out. I noticed one little girl, maybe four years old, on her father’s shoulders. I could make out that she was singing the lyrics herself. It was such a beautiful moment. This is their thing. Akos is their guy, singing their songs in their language, which nobody else in the world speaks. They welcomed me into their evening, as they have welcomed me into their country this season, and I even though the Akos show could never really be mine, it was close enough to bring me joy. One more reason that I will go back to America on Labor Day Weekend a different man, and a happier one. I wish all Americans, especially those who are down on Hungary because of what they’ve read in the US media, could experience the fullness of this great country. Turns out that Tucker Carlson and his crew are coming over early next month to do some filming and interviews here. Finally, American viewers will get to see a more complex story about Hungary.

Hey readers, if you can go hear live music this week where you live, why not do it? You might be surprised by how much good it does you. As Akos says in this post-Covid song that gives his current tour its name, “Up with hearts!”

 

By the way, if you like that upbeat number, check out “1956,” his somber tribute to the heroes of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets. I’m only sorry I can’t speak Hungarian, and can’t appreciate the lyrics. Several people told me at the concert the other night that for Akos, the lyrics are the main thing, and that they are quite poetic in the original language:

The post The Joy Of Ákos appeared first on The American Conservative.

Letters From The Abyss-Adjacent

I opened the mailbag for the first time in a couple of days, and boy oh boy. I received this extraordinary letter from a Catholic woman in her twenties. I share it with you with her permission. She is responding to my earlier blog post, “Custodians Of The Abyss,” in which I reflected on the pain of realizing that the only thing keeping you from falling into the abyss is an institution run by cretins. The reader writes:

I’ve sat down to write this letter a few times now. Each time, running over things in my mind, I find myself at a loss for exactly what to say, and how to say it. I think the problem with writing this out is that it isn’t in response to something definite. There are a lot of things that have happened recently to make me feel the effects more sharply, but there’s nothing I can quite pinpoint as that one final straw. It’s just a sinking feeling, and a heavy one at that.

In short, I feel that I am caught at a crossroads. I don’t want to say I feel that I am losing my faith. I don’t feel that way- in fact, at times I feel it is stronger than ever- but I think you put it quite aptly when you spoke about the lure of the Abyss. I feel that lure constantly, and the feeling is overwhelming at times. There’s a sensation something like hanging over the edge dangling from a rope, and sometimes you are strapped in with a climber’s harness, perfectly safe, and sometimes you have a few threads wrapped around one hand, cutting in and hurting you as they try to keep you from falling.

The struggles with the Catholic Church are immense, to be sure. To go from Pope Francis’s ill-timed and uncharitable targeting of the Latin Mass to Monseigneur Burrill’s scandal-ridden resignation in the course of a week leaves a person feeling bruised at the very least. It’s almost laughable, in retrospect, that the news broke in this way. That our leaders feel more concerned about minor divisions among the faithful (divisions which are, for record, a problem, and which did need solving- but not like this) and less concerned about the plague of virtue-less clerics that continues to drive hundreds away from the Church every day is among the more especially ironic realities we who call ourselves Catholic live with, and that is no joking matter. It is this kind of absolute hypocrisy that has led so many to reject the faith as so much show and circumstance, and to seek out some other religion of niceness elsewhere.

Those of us that are left are left with a particular kind of internal division. The problem of feeling the lure of the world while having to constantly reject hypocrisy. I do not excuse the behavior of the Church officiates. I reject it wholeheartedly. But this leaves me feeling spiritually homeless while in my own places of worship. And it is then that the call from the shadows grows strongest- saying to me “if you can’t fix them, then you may as well leave.”

You asked, in one of your recent posts, how anyone could honestly believe in the legitimacy of the Catholic hierarchy while watching everything they do. [Note From Rod: I meant not the “legitimacy” in the literal sense, but in their competence and moral uprightness. One can affirm the legitimacy of the hierarchy as valid holders of office, without having any confidence in particular bishops’ leadership. — RD]. The reality is, I don’t. Or at least, I believe they are legitimately in office, but I don’t hold that I am obligated to support them, and I reserve the right to question their decisions that are not made in the name of the authority of the Holy Spirit (infallibility, etc.) What one man sets in place and another man reverses has no impact on my mental state. I am neither obligated to laud one decision or boo the other, and I will be obstinate in remaining an independent figure. I think a lot of people forget that Church officials are like politicians in many respects. I may hold, for example, that the President of the U.S. holds legitimate authority over me in certain situations and under certain practices, wielding the power vested in him by the state, but I am not obligated to applaud his decisions nor am I obligated to question them, whatever the tide of public opinion.

Similarly I may believe the Pope is the successor to St. Peter and that he wields legitimate authority over the Church, both spiritual and temporal, but I am not obligated to think everything he does is great. The only nuance is that when he is, in fact, in a situation where he speaks authoritatively about a serious spiritual matter (I cannot dive into the explanation of papal infallibility here-it suffices to say that it is rare and specific) I am asked to believe that he speaks with the voice of One who is not he, but Who, by speaking, speaks for the whole Church. It is worth noting, I think, that this sort of situation and the conditions it occurs in occurs so seldom that I can rarely be expected to have to even witness it, let alone argue about it. But this has nothing to do with the legitimacy of much of the upper ranks of the clergy.

So then, my belief in the Church’s legitimate authority can be said to be solid. What separates me, and those like me, from others is how we interpret that legitimate authority. Many Catholics of a particular type argue that if you believe in and respect the authority of the Church you should never question any decisions handed down by officials, no matter how trivial. Nor should you question their personal lives, or expose their scandals. All of this leads to harmful division, and is so much bickering amongst ourselves. These Catholics are wrong in a very specific area: they assume that all of this means they are somehow being disloyal to the Church. However, as Christ intended it, (as Catholics believe) The Church is not the sum of so many individuals sitting behind desks at the Vatican. The Church is as much a spiritual household as it is a collection of multitudes, and we are not being disloyal to the Church by arguing for our rights in the faith or by exposing corruption. We would be being disloyal to the Church if we ignored these things, because to truly be disloyal to Christ’s Church is to turn our backs on Her teachings, the most fundamental of which is to love the Lord our God with all our strength, and to put no-one, (and nothing) above Him.

This applies also to the popes and the bishops and so on. When we fear more for the scandal of revealing the sins of one of those who holds power than we fear the impact of his sins on the vulnerable, we hold him in higher respect than we do God, and we turn our backs on the Church. When we fear more that we shall spread division by arguing against a move on the part of a member of the clergy that we know to be unjust than we fear how our silence will drive our children away from the faith, we hold union with our fellow Catholics in higher respect than we do God, and we turn our backs on the Church. When we fear more that we shall be seen as sinners for not receiving our Lord in the Eucharist when we are not in a state of grace than we fear the consequences of mortal sin on our immortal souls, we hold the opinions of our fellow Catholics above those of the Lord, and we turn our backs on the Church.

I speak of all of this in connection to myself, because frequently of late I have asked myself what should I do- what can I do about all of this chaos in my spiritual life? I have spent hours upon hours reading and immersing myself in arguments and debates (including on your own blog) trying to sort out what it is I should be doing to fix all of these things. It occurred to me, a few days ago, when the news about the Latin Mass hit and I was struck once again with a sense of “what now?” that I have barely prayed in the last 6 months. I have been so wrapped up in trying to figure out how I, a young person, can solve the problems of the Church and give myself and my future children something to hold onto that I let my grip on the rope slide further, and nearly gave in to despair. I have been letting myself be consumed by fear. I have been more afraid of what will happen if I lose my connection to the physical ‘sense’ I have of being Catholic than I have been about what will happen if I lose my spiritual connection to my faith, and in doing so, I have turned my back on God.

It is hard not to be consumed by fear. Every day I wake and the world seems more difficult, more strange and more harsh. Every day I forget a little of what made me hold on to my faith as a child and begin to question, again and again, why I am doing these things. But the darkness isn’t comforting, it’s terrifying and filled with anguish, and I hope I never leap into it. I don’t have a lot of hope for my future as a Catholic in the world right now. I believe, for example, that my vocation calls me to married life- but I have begun to despair of ever finding a person who is close enough to me in spirit that I would be able to share that vocation with them. I believe that I would like to be more involved in my faith, but I can find hardly anything beyond the wall of meaningless fundraisers at my parish that I could do to have that involvement. And I believe I would like to do my part to make things better for other Catholics, but I have neither the means nor the opportunity to do those things right now.

But it strikes me that all of these things are still part of the world, not part of heaven. And like most things that are of the world, I cannot let myself be so consumed by them that I lose sight of my real purpose. To Love God, and To Know Him above all others. I think this is what a lot of Catholics struggle with- our faith is so massive and full of traditions and filled with people and buildings and places that have all sorts of meaning to us. It’s wonderful to have a culture behind your faith, but this is all still of the world, not of God. The most beautiful cathedral in Rome cannot compare to the wonders of heaven. The most beautiful singing cannot compare to choirs of angels. The most reverent of liturgy cannot impose in our hearts the awe we should feel in God’s presence. That does not mean we should not try, but if we are caught up thinking about how good or bad our efforts are, we have failed to be “in the world but not of it.” Because we are thinking, like Peter on the mountain, with our human minds, building tents for deities who do not need them, and questioning their motives for our own gratification.

Likewise, I spend so much time thinking about what I can or cannot do for my life in the Church on earth that I fail often to remember that when I say I am Catholic, I am saying I am part of a universal faith that extends outside of the boundaries of the here and now. That my connections with my peers who are alive with me is no less important than my connection with those that have already gone, and that I should worry less about physical things and more about spiritual ones. That I should pray more, and fear less.

Doing this isn’t easy. Saying it, reaching this point, is easy. Doing it is harder. It is hard to drown out the loudness of all the problems to focus on God. But I must, or the darkness will continue to be the loudest voice in my head, asking why I don’t just let go and let all these things fade away. I need to believe that as long as I focus on Him, He will provide me with the answers I need to solve the things I can solve, and the patience and fortitude to weather the things I cannot. And I need to remember that I am not turning my back on the Church by questioning things of earth. I am only turning my back if I question things of heaven.

To that end, I’d like to leave off with the first verse of a hymn that is particularly special to me. It is the favorite hymn of a very holy priest who was a family friend when I was young, and it has become a constant prayer in my life as its words are about the Eucharist, and ask an important question:

Jesus, My Lord, My God, My All,

How Can I Love Thee As I Ought?

And How Revere This Wondrous Gift,

So Far Surpassing Hope Or Thought?

Sweet Sacrament, We Thee Adore,

Oh, Make Us Love Thee, More and More.

(Oh, Make Us Love Thee, More and More)

All the best, and feel free to share my letter with others if you think this might help someone else.

That’s very powerful. My best advice would be to withdraw from thinking about the goings-on in the institutional Church. Pray, pray, pray. Live a Catholic life. Refuse to let your thoughts be dominated by this darkness. It’s hard to do without turning into one of those See-No-Evil types who is afraid to look at the truth. You don’t sound like one of those people at all. But trust me, from personal experience, your faith will not survive if you keep going like this. Go find a soup kitchen to volunteer in, or do some other work of mercy. That will steady you. After my Catholic experience, I came into the Orthodox Church determined not to involve myself at all in the goings-on of the institutional church, because for me, that was was spiritual death. I backslid on that personal vow, and got into spiritual trouble at one point. I learned my lesson. I never, ever think about the bishops or the institutional Orthodox Church (which, fortunately, makes that easy). My own spiritual challenges regarding my own repentance, and my own struggles, are sufficient. I had trusting institutional religion burned out of my from 2001-2006. If one of you readers has better advice for her, please put it in the comments. I feel so inadequate to help this young lady.

Then there’s this:

I have no sympathy at all to Mgr Burrill and his ilk who won’t live out their celibacy vow. I am an incel, which is an involuntary celibate. Nobody knows this but God and my wife, but I am a married man whose wife abandoned him within the marriage years ago. No sex, no intimacy, no nothing from her. I don’t know why, though I would say that she had some kind of nervous breakdown, because she changed a lot about her life and the way she relates to others. I would bet my life there has been no infidelity. Maybe a therapist would figure it out, but my wife won’t co-operate. After over a decade of a happy marriage, I have been living in a kind of hell for coming up on 10 years. We stood there before our priest and our families and made our vows of till death do you part. I’m living the death part out now, inside of me. Every damn day.

I’m not gay obviously, but what if I put a straight hook-up app on my phone, and started screwing around? It would be mortal sin, and I would be in danger of Hell. Unlike many of the clergy, it seems like, I believe that with all my heart. Though my wife has frozen me out, I do not have permission from God to seek out sexual and emotional comfort anywhere else. If I did, I would betray my wife and our kids, my vows, and my God. You wrote about the “abyss,” and it feels like I am hanging over it every day. I could probably get an annulment, but I don’t want to drag my family through that, and I can’t swear to tell the truth and at the same time try to prove that the marriage never took place. I don’t know what happened to my wife, but I think it’s mental illness. We were happy once. I have been over this in my mind a million times, and I can’t figure it out. Sometimes things just happen. I can’t get a divorce either, because what about our kids? What kind of dad would I be if I walked out because I am lonely and without hope, and have been this way for years and years?

I have to man up every day and carry this Cross. Don’t anybody tell me that poor old Burrill deserves pity because he got outed as a gay pick-up artist. He doesn’t have kids. If he can’t stand the loneliness and isolation of the priesthood, he can leave anytime. If he were any kind of man, he would either clean up his life or leave the priesthood. He has a way out, maybe not a really honorable way out, but more honorable than living like he does. I am dying here in this loveless marriage, but I can’t see any way out, though maybe when the kids are grown, I will revisit the question. My curse, I guess, is that I really believe that marriage is what the Church says it is. I believe that sin is real, and that there will be consequences for sin in this world and the next. What I really need is a Church that will help me carry this Cross faithfully. When I see fakes like Burrill, and hear Catholics defending him, it discourages me even more … and I don’t have that much courage left.

I don’t want to hear anybody telling me that a priest or pastor committing sexual sin with consenting adults is a victimless crime. Think of these two souls.

The post Letters From The Abyss-Adjacent appeared first on The American Conservative.

Grindr Priests Of Newark

The latest from the independent Catholic news site The Pillar:

The Archdiocese of Newark says it will investigate the possibility of clerical sexual misconduct, in response to questions from The Pillar about the use of location-based hookup apps at several parish rectories in the archdiocese.

While a spokesperson told The Pillar it is “not acceptable” to use apps “inconsistent with Church teaching,” the archdiocese has also expressed concerns about the “morally suspect” collection of app signal data.

More:

The Pillar contacted the Newark archdiocese after a review of commercially available app signal data showed patterns of location-based hookup app use at more than 10 archdiocesan rectories and clerical residences during 2018, 2019, and 2020. There are 212 parishes in the Newark archdiocese.

The analysis of commercially available signal data obtained by The Pillar, which was legally obtained and whose authenticity The Pillar confirmed, shows evidence that both homosexual and heterosexual hookup apps were used in parish rectories or other clerical residences with a frequency suggesting, in several cases, residence in those locations.

While it does not identify the names, addresses, or telephone numbers of particular users, data collected, commodified, and sold by hookup apps with the consent of users can include the usage location of particular devices at particular times.

Without compelling public interest regarding individual priests serving in archdiocesan ministries, The Pillar did not undertake to de-anonymize data about parish rectory app usage.

According to the story, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark refused a request for a face to face, off the record meeting with The Pillar to discuss this information.

What is Grindr? According to the website VICE’s guide to using the gay hook-up app, it’s not like a gay version of the hetero dating app Tinder:

If you picture Tinder’s interface like a filtration system, imagine Grindr like wading through a swamp with no shoes on. Anyone can send you unsolicited nudes as their icebreaker. ANYONE. There’s no degree of separation for a vetting process, it’s just a bunch of thirsty dudes in geographic cesspools hunting one another.

Because it’s not like Tinder, you shouldn’t be modeling your Grindr profile like one. Tinder is where you can post vacation photos with maybe a family member or best girlfriend to make it look like you’re a fun and functional human being. Don’t do that on Grindr. Grindr is for hookups, without having to go through the boring formalities like “What’s your name?” or “What do you do when the sun is up?”

So yeah, no innocent use of Grindr.

A lot of people are still piling on The Pillar for its reporting using data. Andrew Sullivan is upset about it:

Burrill does indeed appear to have broken his vows systematically. His only defense is a plea for mercy. But the high-tech outing is still a troubling sign that the church’s attempt to both retain gay priests and not police their sex lives is unraveling. (My deep dive on gay priests is here.) The well-financed Catholic right is sending a clear signal: that if the hierarchy does not purge the church of sexually active gay priests, they will. Their tactics will not be conventional; and their violation of basic privacy will now be routine. The pressure brought to bear on perhaps half the Catholic priesthood just intensified some more.

Uglier are The Pillar’s insinuations about a typical user of Grindr: “in a 2,800-word article, over 1,300 words suggest and explore a possible connection to the sexual abuse of minors, despite admitting at the outset that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that Burrill was in contact with minors through his use of Grindr.’ The article mentions multiple examples of criminal, abusive behavior by priests alongside Monsignor Burrill’s story, as if they are related.” Rod Dreher immediately equates Burrill’s consensual adult sex with abuse: “It’s important to know if [Burrill] used his position at the NAC to groom others, or in some other way participated in, or turned a blind eye to, predation.” He calls Burrill “a gay sex freak priest” and “a sexually compulsive closet case.”

I don’t apologize for that. If Burrill had sex on these encounters tracked by Grindr, then he is exactly what I called him. It is one thing for a priest to slip up a couple of times. Burrill’s data suggest that the closeted priest used Grindr compulsively. A priest who has vowed celibacy but who regularly uses an app to facilitate sex with men is a gay sex freak priest (and a straight one who did the same with women would also be a sex freak). If you can’t live by your vows, then leave the priesthood. Stop it with your double life. Stop abusing the trust of the faithful, and living off their donations even though you are a fraud. Stop convincing people to trust you and look at you as a spiritual father, and a reliable caretaker of the institution, when in fact you just want to get your rocks off in gay bathhouses.

I reject Andrew’s claim that I “equate Burrill’s consensual gay sex with abuse.” Read what I actually wrote. Here it is:

If Burrill is guilty of what the data indicate, then it’s important to know if he used his position at the NAC to groom others, or in some other way participated in, or turned a blind eye to, predation. It cannot be said enough: these things happen in networks! The late Richard Sipe, a sociologist who knew more about the sociology of sexually active priests that anybody, repeatedly said that the culture of sexual abuse depends on a broader culture of sexual misconduct, which is itself sustained by networks of sympathetic corrupt priests.

That’s not “equating”; that is pointing out that there is a valid and well-established association between a culture of sexual disorder and vice that does not involve abusing minors, and the tolerance of the abuse of minors. Back in 2002, when I was writing a lot about the Catholic scandal, I read testimony in one court case in which one priest was sexually abusing a minor in a bed, and another priest walked in and out of the bedroom while it was happening, and neither moved to stop it nor report it. Why not? Because that priest was gay and involved in sex with grown-ups at that beach house too. To pretend that there is no possible connection here is completely untenable.

A Catholic reader and friend whose job involves tech security writes:

As someone with a healthy awareness of surveillance capabilities and their capacity for abuse I would obviously prefer that cyber vigilantism not occur. That said, it is abundantly clear in 2021 that the Catholic hierarchy can’t or won’t take meaningful action because of the extent of the corruption, the pervasive nature of either corrupted or compromised figures at the highest levels, and the unwillingness to absorb the pain that meaningful action would require. In the absence of another Julius II to crush these modern Borgias, that leaves the faithful with either accepting the corruption of their faith, supporting select actors that they have vetted, or taking vigilante actions.

Any meaningful action against the rot is going to uncover a massive amount of corrupt and overlapping networks of both homosexuals and pedophiles as well as their enablers and enough conspiracy and cover-up to satisfy any QAnon adherent. No doubt doing so would involve no small amount of damage to the credibility and integrity of the Church, though that would have to start by acknowledging homosexual networks and undercurrents that are currently considered unspeakable due to modern political correctness.

So when a modern Julius II arises to crush this group I am definitely behind him, but until then why should I get exercised about vigilantism? Again, vigilantism is something that occurs when there is a loss of legitimacy and credibility within formal structures that leaves angry and desperate people inclined towards alternative measures. It is a very ugly and very punitive and brutal thing, which is why you associate such actions with things like posses, lynch mobs, and communal violence seen in the uglier parts of the Third World. But if you don’t want to see it happen then you develop actual and formal structures rather than polite window dressing to act on it.

For whatever it is worth, I would probably favor a temporary homosexual ban for at least a decade as the networks were being uprooted. For anyone who is seeking a celibate life while experiencing homosexual inclinations the current priesthood would seem to be the least likely place for them to avoid temptation and stay faithful. Every single revelation indicates that there are pervasive and entrenched grooming rings operating throughout seminaries irrespective of whether or not they are pedophiles with the net result being to produce priests who treat their own vows loosely. You don’t have to be a genius to understand the kind of culture that attitude creates or the implications of it.

You can listen to the latest Pillar podcast in which J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon talk about their reporting, and defend it. J.D. quotes a priest commenting on the abuse scandals: “Deception breeds deception breeds deception.” Ed explains that the General Secretary of the USCCB — until this week, Monsignor Burrill — is the figure who actually runs the organization. Thanks to The Pillar’s reporting, Catholics now know that the priest who ran the entire USCCB was a frequent user of an app whose purpose is to arrange sexual hook-ups. As Ed Condon points out on the podcast, Burrill was intimately involved in shaping the USCCB’s response to the McCarrick scandal. I would point out that back in 2002, when I first started making calls about McCarrick, based on information I had received from a priest, a prominent closeted gay lawyer phoned my editor to say that he was calling on behalf of his friend Cardinal Ted McCarrick. He said that the cardinal knows that Rod Dreher is working on a story that would report “something true but not criminal” about the cardinal, and that the cardinal requests that the story be spiked. The story was not spiked, but I never could report it anyway, because nobody who knew about McCarrick would go on the record or provide documents. I bring that up here because it was interesting to me that there are people — this gay lawyer is one of them — who believe that a priest having sex with adults is not news. In McCarrick’s case, this was possibly criminal, in fact, as he was forcing himself on seminarians. Anyway, this mentality that it is not newsworthy, in an era of clerical sex scandal, that a cardinal was having sex with men is not newsworthy is just blind.

Moreover, as I have mentioned here before, I was aware back in 2012 that a freelance reporter was working on a long piece for The New York Times Magazine about McCarrick. He called me because someone he ran across in his reporting told him that Dreher had worked on the story, and might have information for him. The man called me about it, but it turned out that not only did he know everything I did, he knew far more, and even had court documents he had unearthed, and at least one on-the-record interview with a McCarrick victim. I congratulated him on nailing the story, and told him I was eager to read it. He said it would be out in a few weeks.

A couple of months went by, and no story. I phoned him back to find out what the deal was. He said he had no idea. The editor who commissioned the story had left to take another job, he said, but the new editor kept throwing roadblocks in front of the story. The journalist had no idea why. I asked him, “Is your new editor a gay man?” Yes, said the writer; his gay wedding announcement was in the Times last week. But why is that important? he asked.

I told him that my guess is that the gay editor believed that sex between adult men was their own business — even if there was evidence that the sex was coerced. Six years later, a different Times reporter and editor believed otherwise, and McCarrick was exposed. But as far as I know, the Times had this story in 2012, but a gay editor buried it.

On the podcast, Ed Condon explains that the reason they chose to report this is that the evidence of frequent use of Grindr by Msgr Burrill was overwhelming. Plus, given the responsibility Burrill had over the USCCB, particularly over the sex abuse scandal response, the men decided this was a story in the public interest. The USCCB’s response to the scandal also involves developing policies over the use of sex apps. Does the fact that the head of the USCCB uses these apps matter?

The men say on the podcast that there’s a third factor behind their decision to report that story: that they found seven priests in the past few years have been arrested for having sexual contact with minors through these apps. Andrew Sullivan calls it an “ugly insinuation” that Burrill might have been involved sexually with minors through Grindr. That is not at all what they reported! WGBH, the public television station in Boston, reported earlier this month that Grindr has been connected to the sexual abuse of minors. 

Something else from the podcast: J.D. Flynn talks about how The New York Times used commercially available data to track the moves on January 6 of people accused of having invaded the Capitol. Why is that ethically okay, but what The Pillar did not? Does it depend on whose ox is being gored?

One more thing: Flynn and Condon say that they went to Burrill directly asking him about the data before publishing, asking him if it was accurate. They never heard from him. Had he said it wasn’t true, and shown them it was wrong, they wouldn’t have had a story. Same from the USCCB. They did go to the Church ahead of time, and even to Burrill — but there was no denial.

Andrew writes: “The well-financed Catholic right is sending a clear signal: that if the hierarchy does not purge the church of sexually active gay priests, they will.” Yes, that’s correct, and I think that’s overdue. These men live a religious life without integrity. Again, if you cannot or will not live a life of sexual integrity as a priest, then get out of the priesthood. Catholics have a right to expect this from their priests, especially after the devastating abuse scandals. Is the Church supposed to be holy, or not? Is it holy for priests to have sex? Yes or no. One has the impression that the Catholic hierarchy and institutional leaders really doesn’t care about sexual integrity among their priests. One had the impression that the Catholic hierarchy and institutional leaders want to give the impression that they care. But do they really? Do they really?

Andrew says the Pillar’s reporting is an expression of “the Catholic right.” It’s very strange that the Catholic left would be indifferent to Catholic priest atop the US hierarchy using Grindr. Maybe they would, I dunno. But surely at least some liberal Catholics object to this disgusting behavior?

What Flynn and Condon are doing is the hard work of cleaning up their own Church. If you listen to the podcast, you can plainly hear how much it bothers them to have had to write about this. I believe those men are doing a hell of a job — a job that lots of Catholics say that somebody should do, but don’t seem to like it when somebody actually does it. If you are not a paid subscriber to The Pillar, the guys could use your help — click here to subscribe.

UPDATE: I’ve thought about this overnight, and I want to make a few more statements in defense of The Pillar. Most of these are recapitulations of what is above, but not all.

First, I want to emphasize that Condon and Flynn went to Monsignor Burrill first to ask him if what the data showed is true. Had it not been true, Burrill had the opportunity to show that. Burrill refused to answer their inquiry. The two also went to the USCCB with it before publishing. The USCCB was apparently stalling, trying to figure out what to do about it, when Burrill’s resignation happened. The idea that they ambushed Burrill is absolutely untrue.

Second, they used a reporting technique that other journalists, including from the NYT, used: acquiring commercially available — legally available —  mobile phone data, and mining it for information. If you don’t think this should be legal, well, that’s great! Let’s pass a law guarding our privacy. I would be all for that. Most people have no idea how compromised our privacy is in the digital world. Read Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to learn more. But in the absence of privacy laws shielding digitally harvested data — or better yet, laws forbidding companies from gathering the data in the first place — you really can’t expect journalists not to use this information if it helps them uncover serious wrongdoing. If you didn’t object to the Times using the same kind of data to track where protesters were on January 6, then you can’t object to this in principle.

Third: however, you can object by saying that Burrill’s sex life does not constitute wrongdoing serious enough to merit violating his privacy like this. You would be wrong here. I don’t think there is a compelling reason for any of us to know if a businessman, a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor, a barista, etc., is using Grindr. I don’t think there is a compelling reason to know if most journalists are, but if I was using Grindr, then given the public position I have taken on LGBT matters, I think it would be fair game to publish my Grindr information, because it would reveal me to be a hypocrite; I would have brought the scrutiny onto myself.

I think it is 100 percent legitimate to publish the Grindr information about the CEO of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. First, he is a Catholic priest who vowed celibacy, and who presents himself to the public with the presumption that he lives a life obedient to his vows. Second, he is the highest-ranking non-bishop cleric in the US Catholic Church. He has tremendous influence on the institutional life of the US Catholic Church — including how it responds to sexual misconduct by its priests. If he is not living a life of sexual integrity, that impacts his job directly. And third, it has been well established that the abuse scandal was made possible in large part by a culture of sexual libertinism, secrecy, and cover-up within the institutional Church. If you go through the literature of the scandal — especially if you read the work of the late sociologist A.W. Richard Sipe — you will discover that the criminal sexual abuse of children and minors happened within a clerical culture that was sexually corrupt. It is reasonable to presume that most sexually active gay priests did not have sexual contact with minors. But it is also reasonable to assume that there was an immense amount of tolerance for those who did, because so many of these priests lived double lives of sexual compromise.

True story: back in 2002, I did an interview with a man who had been a priest, but who left to marry back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I can’t remember exactly. He had been ordained for a major East Coast archdiocese. He told me that all five of the straight men in his ordination class eventually left the priesthood to marry. Living celibacy was hard, but what made it harder was the fact that so many of the gay priests in that archdiocese — which was led during those years by a sexually corrupt archbishop — openly flaunted their sex lives, knowing that the archbishop didn’t care, and that there would be no penalty for doing so. (In fact, the sexual corruption within that archdiocese was later documented publicly, and extensively.) The man told me that the sense of demoralization and defeat that he and his straight priests felt was overwhelming. They felt isolated and alone in their archdiocese, as if the licentious contact of their brother priests (the gay ones) was taunting them. Five vocations to the priesthood were lost there. This stuff matters, even if minors aren’t involved.

Last point, and I mean this emphatically. I’m angry thinking about it. Back when I was doing the kind of work Flynn and Condon are doing (2001-2005), I often heard from priests and laymen working for the Church, who told me about clerical sexual corruption and cover-up. For example, I heard from two priests who separately informed me about Cardinal McCarrick’s dirty deeds. None of these people would ever go on the record with their allegations, but all of them would say things like, “You have to do something about this!” They wanted someone else — me — to do the difficult work of exposing the evil in the Church, but did not want to risk anything personally for that to happen. Make no mistake, it would have been a big risk for them to take, as priests and/or church workers. But absent on-the-record, credible accusations, or documentation, nobody can touch the wrongdoers. Lots of Catholics want the Church cleaned up, so the bleeding will stop, but they don’t want to do a thing about it if it stands to draw criticism to themselves. Unlike so many fearful, and maybe even cowardly, Catholics, Flynn and Condon had the courage to use legally available documentation to expose serious corruption at the highest level of the American church. And now they’re getting dogpiled for it by many fellow Catholics.

It infuriates me. I know why liberal Catholics have an interest in these stories not being told, but why are conservative Catholics so angry at them? Do these people not understand that the institutional Church by and large has little interest in cleaning itself up, and rooting out sexual disorder among its clerics, and within its institutions? It’s only going to happen when the bishops and priests, who apparently don’t fear God, learn to fear a laity that has had quite enough of this filthy behavior. Straight or gay, if you can’t keep your pants up, you don’t belong in the Catholic priesthood. One could be forgiven for thinking that there is a certain kind of conservative Catholic who cares more about protecting the image of the institutional Church, and guarding his own peace of mind about the institution in which he places his faith, than about moral reckoning, repentance, and serious reform.

Catholics ought to be grateful for Catholic journalists like J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon. As someone who used to be Catholic, and who lost my Catholic faith covering the scandal, I know how much reporting this stuff must hurt them personally, as faithful sons of the Church. If you listen to their most recent podcast, you can hear in their voices how agonizing this stuff is for them. But sometimes, a person gets to the point where they are so damn sick and tired of the corruption, and the lies about the corruption, and the moral gutlessness within the institution, that he willingly takes on the spite of clerics and lay Catholics to tell the truth. That is admirable. They are doing the Catholic Church a great service. Subscribe to The Pillar. 

UPDATE.2: A reader directs me to this piece by Chris Damian, a Catholic who is critical of the Pillar’s work on Burrill. I want to address a couple of Damian’s points. Excerpts:

Though the editors at The Pillar may have thought carefully about how and why to use this kind of data, it’s possible that they will be remembered in journalistic history as the individuals who opened up a new world of tabloid targeting. They didn’t create the monsters in the box, but they may be remembered as the journalists who opened the lid.

“Tabloid targeting”? That term implies that The Pillar did this for the sake of sharing titillating gossip. It did not. This involved a very senior Catholic clerical official, one with authority over policies and practices of the national church — including the response to sexual abuse and misconduct. It is a smear to accuse Flynn and Condon of “tabloid targeting” here.

More:

Many are criticizing the piece, by asking: What was the point of it? This is the focus of Simcha Fischer, in asking about whether it was necessary to make the details of the priest’s misconduct public. There could be a number of reasons to publish a piece on clergy misconduct:

To uncover institutional corruption and the failure to adequately respond to such misconduct.To protect persons who are vulnerable, and to encourage others to come forward.To shed light on an issue that the public is unaware of or is trying to ignore.

It appears that soon after the USCCB was made aware of the misconduct in this instance, the priest resigned (perhaps after pressure or encouragement from his employer). As Fischer puts it:

“I know very well that the Church will often not act unless it’s forced into it, and public exposure is an effective tool. Apparently, The Pillar approached the USCCB and let them know the story was in the works. The USCCB agreed to meet, got rid of the guy, and then told the Pillar, ‘You know what, we’ll talk some other time.’ The Pillar then published the story. So in effect, this is a story about someone making a report of wrongdoing, and the USCCB responding appropriately.”

We are almost twenty years away from the Geoghan trial in Boston, which kicked off the national sex abuse scandal. There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Catholics have learned more about their Church, and its inner workings, than they possibly could have wanted. Yet it still has not sunk in to many of them that the institutional Church cannot be trusted to police itself. If Burrill was so reckless as to use Grindr for anonymous gay hook-ups while he was the top non-episcopal Catholic official within the US Church bureaucracy, what was his clerical life like before then? How did he behave when he had the responsibility for character formation of seminarians in the North American College in Rome, where the US Church sends its most promising seminarians? It is possible that Burrill had self-control until he got to Washington, but is it likely? What does it mean for a sexually incontinent gay priest — one whose sexual desires are so reckless that they drive him to use an app to arrange anonymous hook-ups — to rise through the ranks to positions of real authority? Who facilitated his rise? What role did he play as a gatekeeper at the NAC? Twenty years ago, the Catholic writer Michael S. Rose penned a book called Goodbye, Good Men, about how gay and pro-gay gatekeepers within Catholic seminaries kept men who opposed normalizing homosexual behavior out of the priesthood. We knew this was going on at least twenty years ago! A.W. Richard Sipe, the well-known Catholic sociologist, said repeatedly that the Catholic priesthood was honeycombed with networks of gay priests, including bishops, who used their power within the institution to favor each other for appointments, and to sideline those priests and seminarians they saw as a threat.

Here’s the point: If you think that a man like Msgr Burrill rising to the very top of the USCCB is merely a story about a priest who has a moral lapse, you are deluded. It is possible that nobody else in the Church knew about Burrill’s dark secret. I have seen and read way too much over the past twenty years to believe that, though. What needs to be known now is who promoted Burrill’s rise through the ranks, and what did they know about his sexual proclivities? I hope that seminarians who were at the NAC when Burrill was an official there are reaching out to Flynn and Condon if they have relevant information. You might not be aware that there is an official Church investigation underway of allegations of gay sexual predation at the NAC. Again, you have to be willfully naive to believe that the Burrill story is contained, and that now that he’s been removed from power, there is nothing else to be learned here.

More from Damian:

Sam Sawyer, SJ argues in America that, while the priest in question here has damaged trust in the Church, this type of reporting also damages trust and communion:

[I]t is also a breach of trust in the life of the church to know that unnamed parties are approaching Catholic journalists offering to assist them in the technological surveillance of the clergy. It also weakens trust in the life of the church to learn that any and all users of smartphones have effectively already been tailed for years by the world’s most thorough private investigator, at least if someone has the funds and expertise to find an individual through data mining. It also injures trust in the life of the church to have leaders cast down—and widely vilified on social media—without knowing why or how their secret sin was targeted for revelation, how broad a net was cast or how widespread their pattern of sin was.

As I noted earlier this week, once the hunt for hypocrites has begun, no one is safe. And trust is a death-sentence. The only way to escape the hunt is to throw yourself on the fire by preemptively posting your deepest darkest secrets on social media. It’s a scary place to be in.

Wait … what?! A significant number of Catholic priests are living lives of sexual corruption, in violation of their vows and the bond they have with the laity, and Father Sawyer is blaming those who would expose them for breaching the “trust”?! You know what “weakens trust in the life of the church”? Priests who go to gay bathhouses, who seek out blow jobs from anonymous men via hook-up apps, and who otherwise betray their vows in the dark, while presenting themselves as something else in public. As to Damian’s point, we are all hypocrites to some extent, but priests, like teachers and cops, are rightly held to a higher standard because their roles — their chosen roles! — in society give them special responsibilities. If a cop is crooked, it matters to us all more than if a bread baker is crooked. If a teacher sexually exploits minors, that matters more than if a sales clerk does. And if a Catholic priest is chronically unwilling to live by his vows of celibacy, especially (given what we know about the abuse scandal) if he is participating in an underground culture of homosexual licentiousness, that matters a lot more than if a bus driver uses Grindr.

I know so many Catholic laity who have lost all trust in the clergy and in the institution, and who are hanging on by their fingertips. The bad guys here are not J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon. The bad guys are the priests and bishops and church bureaucrats who flout the vows they took, and/or who don’t think it’s such a big deal, and use the trust that laity place in them by virtue of their office as a shield to protect them from exposure.

One more from Damian:

Goldstein opines on the founding of The Pillar:

“Two men with families don’t quit their jobs to start a Substack without substantial seed money. There’s a donor behind this.”

Others might be wondering whether the donor/funder of the dataset provided a full data set, or if they may have reviewed the data and removed individuals they did not want targeted. Many want to know about the motives and ideological dispositions of the donor. Of course, it’s standard practice for journalists to keep their “sources” confidential. But one must wonder about the extent to which a donor or commercial enterprise providing data is a “source.” To the extent that the provider of the data is a “source,” journalistic ethics may require keeping their/its identity confidential. In any event, many believe that an important part of the story is where the money for it (and for The Pillar) came from. But as someone who gets his paycheck from a large corporation, I’m not sure I’m in the best position to criticize how they get paid.

I don’t know how to break it to Goldstein, but most journalism requires funding. This is not illegal or immoral. National Public Radio depends on donors. So what?

This is a classic move to discredit reporting that disturbs others. Back when the Boston Globe was breaking stories about church sex abuse — before the 2002 tsunami, I mean — a lot of conservative Catholics, including Cardinal Bernard Law, blamed the Globe for being anti-Catholic. Nobody can deny that the Boston Globe does not share the moral views of priorities of Roman Catholicism, but come on: either the information they report is true, or it isn’t. The motive, or suspected motive, behind the reporting doesn’t matter. Or rather, it shouldn’t matter, though as a psychological fact, it does. My first cover story for National Review in 2002 was about the Boston scandal. I was told later by a prominent conservative Catholic that that story, appearing in a respected conservative magazine, gave psychological permission to Catholic conservatives to drop their defensiveness, and to admit that the Church really did have a problem — that it wasn’t just scuttlebutt ginned up by the liberal media to hurt the Church. The floodgates of information opened upon me after that. I was inundated by e-mails from conservative Catholics who had stories to tell about their own abuse, or abuse within their family; they felt that telling it to a conservative Catholic journalist (me) was somehow okay.

Furthermore, it’s a juvenile concept that information reporters receive has to be immaculately conceived in the minds of those providing the information. All that matters is whether or not the information is true, is credible, and is relevant. Sources often have mixed motives for revealing this stuff to journalists. Washington is full of people who leak true and important information on their political rivals to journalists in order to settle scores. It is up to the journalist to discern whether he is being unfairly used (yes, he’s being used, but that doesn’t discredit the story). A few years back, here at TAC, someone approached me with a set of lurid tales about a Catholic institution — nothing sexual, or remotely criminal, but stories of a culture of political and theological extremism that would make the institution look really bad if it were made public. I struggled over what to do with it, until my then-editor, who knew the source, urged me not to allow myself to be used by that guy to fight his own battles with the institution. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was an interesting story, but that it was probably more a case of this source trying to get me to seek revenge on an institution he believed had unfairly dismissed him. Even though I believe that source was probably telling the truth, I never wrote the story, because it didn’t seem right, all things considered. That was a case of me believing that the information was probably truthful, and knowing that the source was using me to get back at the institution. I could have lived with that — we’re not kids here in the journalism business — if the stakes had been high enough. It just didn’t seem worth it, as there was no criminal or moral wrongdoing at stake.

My point is that the information Flynn and Condon got on Burrill might have come from a donor who has disreputable motives (or one who has reputable ones). The only serious questions here are 1) is the data credible, and 2) are the stakes here worth it? I think they answered both questions in the affirmative. If the data were paid for by Cardinal Burke, or by the Freemasons, who cares?

 

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Christianity’s American Decline

For people who care about religion in America, Ryan Burge is a must-follow on Twitter. He’s a political scientist and a Baptist pastor, so he knows faith both professionally and personally. In his latest article, he highlights what he says “may be the biggest cultural shift in our lifetimes”: the exodus of Generation Z (those born 1996 and later) out of religion. Take a look at this chart of his:

 

He says that Generation Z is already the least religious generation in US history — and their leaving the faith (or never acquiring it in the first place) is the main driver of America’s secularization:

Consider this: every day in America, hundreds of people from the Silent Generation (19% nones) and the Boomers (25% nones) die off and are replaced by members of Generation Z (45% nones) having their eighteenth birthday. This, by itself, will make the United States much less religious in 2030 than it was in 2020.

This is going to have a big political effect too. Look:

The conservative Nones doubled (from 2017) in just three years! Burge writes:

There’s clear evidence that those who identify as politically liberal are much more likely to say that they have no religious affiliation. In fact, in every survey from 2016 through 2020, at least half of liberal members of Gen Z say that they are atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular. Among conservatives, the percentages are much smaller but they are growing. In both 2016 and 2017, less than 20% of conservatives said they were nones. That has steadily crept up to 29% in 2020.

This is something to keep an eye on going forward. Up to this point, the linkages between liberal politics and religious nones have been incredibly strong. But, with an increasing number of young conservatives indicating that they have no religious affiliation, they will be in a tough spot on election day. The Republican Party is overwhelmingly Christian and most national politicians pander to this base on a consistent basis. How the GOP pivots to attract and retain young nones will be crucial if they want to be a viable national party in the future.

I would like to know what separates conservative Nones from political conservative who are religious. That is, on what political points do they differ. Are the Nones pro-choice, for example? I’m guessing they are probably fine with gay rights, though I don’t know what they think about trans; maybe they’re for it. What, exactly, makes them conservative? I would guess — but it’s only that — that it’s anti-wokeness. I was at an event here in Budapest yesterday in which a friend of mine, a secular academic, said, “My conservatism boils down to this: I’m anti-woke.” I think that is a perfectly viable point of view, and probably one that a lot of secular people who identify as conservative share. Any of you readers of this blog who are secular conservatives, please say in the comments where you differ politically from conservatives who are religious.

Burge is correct that we on the Right are going to have to figure out some way to defend what religious conservative voters care about without alienating secular conservative voters. Hungary is a rather secular country, but one that is socially conservative. People generally hate wokeness, and they are mostly against LGBT rights, not out of religious conviction, but because they believe that the traditional family is a model worth affirming and even privileging. In the US, opposition to gay rights is tightly affiliated with religious belief, but that is 100 percent not the case in Hungary. This makes me wonder if there is a significant number of Americans who are more or less hostile to LGBT rights, but who consider themselves secular. I rather doubt it, but I do wonder.

If you would like to see Burge presenting his findings in a 15-minute TV interview, check him out from last week on Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN show:

Whatever the political fallout, these new data confirm the existential crisis for Christians that I wrote about in The Benedict Option. From the introduction:

I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church, and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in deed. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs.

This book does not offer a political agenda. Nor is it a spiritual how-to manual, nor a standard decline-and-fall lament. True, it offers a critique of modern culture from a traditional Christian point of view, but more important, it tells the stories of conservative Christians who are pioneering creative ways to live out the faith joyfully and counterculturally in these darkening days. My hope is that you will be inspired by them, and collaborate with like-minded Christians in your local area to construct responses to the real world challenges faced by the church. If the salt is not to lose its savor, we have to act. The hour is late. This is not a drill.

Alasdair MacIntyre said that we await “a new—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” The philosopher meant an inspired, creative leader who will pioneer a way to live the tradition in community, so that it can survive through a time of great testing. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI foretells a world in which the church will live in small circles of committed believers who live the faith intensely, and who will have to be somewhat cut off from mainstream society for the sake of holding on to the truth. Read this book, learn from the people you meet in it, and be inspired by the testimony of the lives of the monks. Let them all speak to your heart and mind, then get active locally to strengthen yourself, your family, your church, your school, and your community.

In the first part of this book, I will define the challenge of post-Christian America as I see it. I will explore the philosophical and theological roots of our society’s fragmentation, and I will explain how the Christian virtues embodied in the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, a monastic guidebook that played a powerful role in preserving Christian culture throughout the so-called Dark Ages, can help all believers today.

In the second part, I will discuss how the way of Christian living prescribed by the Rule can be adapted to the lives of modern lay Christians of all churches and confessions. The Rule offers insights in how to approach politics, faith, family, community, education, and work. I will detail how they manifest themselves in the lives of a diverse number of Christians, who have lessons to teach the entire church. Finally, I will consider the critical importance of believers thinking and acting radically in the face of the two most powerful phenomena directing contemporary life and pulverizing the church’s foundations: sex and technology.

In the end, I hope you will agree with me that Christians today are in a time of decision. The choices we make today have consequences for lives of our descendants, our nation, and our civilization. Jesus Christ promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His church, but He did not promise that Hell would not prevail against His church in the West. That depends on us, and the choices we make right here, right now.

I invite you, the reader, to keep in mind as you make your way through these pages that maybe, just maybe, the new and quite different Benedict that God is calling to revive and strengthen His church is . . . you.

From Chapter One:

Not only have we lost the public square, but the supposed high ground of our churches is no safe place either. So what if those around us don’t share our morality? We can still retain our faith and teaching within the walls of our churches, we may think, but that’s placing unwarranted confidence in the health of our religious institutions. The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls, but caters to selves. As conservative Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner has said, “There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which to be a Christian. It is a new epoch.”

Don’t be fooled by the large number of churches you see today. Unprecedented numbers of young adult Americans say they have no religious affiliation at all. According to the Pew Research Center, one in three 18-to-29 year olds have put religion aside, if they ever picked it up in the first place. If the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty.

Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudo-religion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). MTD has five basic tenets:

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better, but were still far from historic Biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying Biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness, and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, published in 2009, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18 to 23 year olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only forty percent of young Christians surveyed by Smith’s team said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are Biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms, but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.” These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who had been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations. MTD is not simply the de facto religion of American teenagers, but also of American adults. To a remarkable degree, teenagers have adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now, though that may have been disguised.

“America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”

The data from Smith and other researchers make clear what so many of us are desperate to deny: the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?

Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well, but knows deep down that they are not the future.

Americans cannot stand to contemplate defeat, or to accept limits of any kind. But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.
Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to . . . stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again? Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.

Fear not! We have been in a place like this before. In the first centuries of Christianity, the early Church survived and grew under Roman persecution, and later after the collapse of the Empire in the West. We latter-day Christians must learn from their example—and particularly from the example of St. Benedict.

Four years since its publication, evidence mounts that the message of The Benedict Option — its diagnosis of the crisis, and its alarming conclusions — was spot-on. Last autumn, I met a Portland megachurch pastor at a Nashville conference who told me that when the book first came out, people in his circles read it, but thought it was too alarmist. “Now we are living its reality,” he told me.

We all are — it has just arrived in some places sooner than others. The warning that Father Cassian Folsom, the Benedictine monk who was at the time the prior of the Norcia monastery, gave me is even more potent today: if any Christian family wants to make it through what’s coming, they are going to have to do some form of the Benedict Option. 

It is past time to stop falling back on this false dichotomy of being in the world vs. fleeing it. As I make very clear in the book, we lay Christians are generally called to be in the world. But if we are going to be in this post-Christian (and increasingly anti-Christian) world and hold on to our faith, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, and focus more intensely on what makes us unlike the world. The book explains this.

The signs are very, very clear: America is leaving Christianity behind. We are not going to vote our way out of this crisis. Christian pastors and Christian laymen who comfort themselves with the idea that we can keep living as we have always done, and hope for the best, are lying to themselves. I wish it were otherwise, but this is where we are. The time for clerical Grindr games, or pastoral preoccupations with worldly politics, or happy-clappy religiosity is over. We are in a fight for our religious lives. Souls are at stake: the souls of young people today, and the souls of those yet to be born who might never have the faith presented to them, because they will not have grown up in a home where it exists. It can’t get more serious than this, folks.

The post Christianity’s American Decline appeared first on The American Conservative.

Msgr. Burrill & The ‘Droit Du Monseigneur’

It looks like many Catholics, from the progressives to the integralists, are mad at The Pillar for outing a top USCCB cleric over his alleged use of the gay hook-up app Grindr, which is used to arrange impromptu gay sexual encounters. The Washington Post surveys the reaction. Excerpts:

Is Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill a victim of both the surveillance and morality police? Or a hypocrite who had it coming? The case of the high-ranking Catholic cleric who resigned after allegedly being tracked on the gay dating app Grindr quickly became a Rorschach test Wednesday for Catholics already mired in tension over politics, theology and culture.

Burrill until Tuesday was the top administrator for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He stepped down after a Catholic newsletter presented conference officials with allegations that cellphone data indicated he had repeatedly used Grindr and visited gay bars.

Catholics reacted with immediate intensity to the Pillar’s report. On Wednesday, some said they saw a story about a powerful priest violating his promises of chastity and the church’s ban on same-sex activity, while others focused on the ways digital surveillance can be used to expose someone’s private life.

More:

Kim Daniels, a former USCCB official and Vatican adviser, said in a tweet Wednesday that the Pillar’s lack of transparency about the data and where it came from didn’t help the church, but hurt it.

“Without that information readers can’t adequately assess the story’s credibility. The end result: efforts toward increased transparency are not strengthened, they’re undermined,” Daniels wrote. “The actions alleged in the story are wrong, violating Church teachings on many levels. And this all lands as yet another gut-punch for me and so many other Catholics. That’s one reason why credibility is so important here. Without it, we’ve moved backward, not forward.”

Spence said the Pillar’s use of anonymously gathered and analyzed data is “a new and frightening development.” He compared it to tactics used in the 1950s by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others to identify suspected communists.

“I think what is going on right now is a new McCarthyism in the church,” Spence said.

But some said they trusted the Pillar’s intentions and judgment.

Janet Smith, a prominent moral theologian, in a piece Wednesday in the conservative magazine Crisis, compared the right of Catholics to know about Burrill to the right of a spouse to know about their partner cheating.

“Certainly a Bishop has a legitimate reason to know the information about his priests and so, too, in my mind, does anyone who is entrusting their immortal soul to guidance by a priest,” she wrote. Smith called such surveillance and data collection “a necessary form of accountability or ‘due diligence’. Is abuse of funds a more serious offense that the abuse of people?”

Here’s a link to Prof. Smith’s entire piece in Crisis. This is a dynamite paragraph:

Let it sink in that Burrill from 2009 until 2013 was a professor and formation director at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. In a lawsuit by a former seminarian, accusations are being made that sexual predation has been common for a very long time at the NAC. I think a new line of investigation has just opened up.

If Burrill is guilty of what the data indicate, then it’s important to know if he used his position at the NAC to groom others, or in some other way participated in, or turned a blind eye to, predation. It cannot be said enough: these things happen in networks! The late Richard Sipe, a sociologist who knew more about the sociology of sexually active priests that anybody, repeatedly said that the culture of sexual abuse depends on a broader culture of sexual misconduct, which is itself sustained by networks of sympathetic corrupt priests. This is one of the reasons why Janet Smith points out that Catholic seminaries routinely screen the online connections of their seminarians, looking for pornography and other signs of online sexual misconduct. By what rationalization does a senior Catholic cleric have the right to seek out gay sexual encounters on his phone without anyone else knowing about it, but Catholic seminarians do not? Is this what you call the “droit du monseigneur”?

Do Catholics want their church cleaned up, or do they not? A priest who puts a Grindr app on his phone has consented to have his data collected by Grindr, and sold. The Pillar acquired the data legally — nobody really doubts that. The question is, was it ethical. Here’s a statement J.D. Flynn, the Pillar’s editor, put out:

I honestly cannot understand why anybody who believes that priests having sex is immoral would object to what The Pillar has done. It wasn’t, by the way, like Burrill was (allegedly) having sexual relations with a regular partner. The data published by The Pillar suggest that he was having quick, anonymous sexual encounters with men. Though I suppose it could be said that he only used Grindr to entice gay men into meeting with him so he could share the Gospel with them, and call them to repentance. This is within the realm of possibility, as we have no hard evidence that the monsignor actually had sex with the men he allegedly met via the app.

A Catholic parish priest e-mails to say:

I’ve been observing some of the online kvetching about the terrible, terrible, no good “invasion“ of Msgr. Burrill’s privacy. I think, given the nature of the app and online activity, anyone moaning about “spying“ on Burrill and conjuring up images of journalists peeping through windows either doesn’t understand how these things work, or is being deliberately obtuse.Obviously, I am not a journalist and not familiar with the canons of journalistic ethics. But I have an analogy that I think addresses the problem and might expose the real issue that the critics of The Pillar are having:Imagine that a priest was a member and contributor to an online forum for real, actual white supremacists, and under a pseudonym posted all manner of racist garbage. And imagine that someone was able, through comparison with publicly visible online activity elsewhere, and perhaps comparison with things like email addresses, to “pierce the veil“ of the pseudonym on the racist forum, and identify with confidence the racist priest. Having been so identified, the priest was subject to appropriate discipline and public protest. If someone thinks that the above scenario and outcome would be OK, but that what happened to Burrill was beyond the pale, then that person is not being consistent. That person ought to examine himself to see if their real problem is that they don’t think what Burrill did is really that big a deal. Or that they think that priests have some kind of “right“ to secret sin.

The post Msgr. Burrill & The ‘Droit Du Monseigneur’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Custodians Of The Abyss

A Catholic priest friend sent this to me:

I’m going to guess that other people have already sent this to you, but the General Secretary of the USCCB resigned today in disgrace, over allegations of sexual misconduct, “not with a minor.” This guy was on Grindr, going to gay bars, and bringing rent boys to pieds-a-terre, in multiple locations, and even whilst traveling on USCCB business. And this has demonstrably been going on for years.

This priest has been a high official of the USCCB since 2016. And the evidence says that he has been engaging in this behavior since almost the beginning. Which almost certainly means it was going on before he went there.

Rod, this is HUGE. In articles he is described as being “responsible for sex abuse cases“ and being a sort of administrator. But he was the equivalent of the CEO of the United States’ bishops’ official organization. In some respects he had more power than many bishops.

Furthermore, priest employees of the USCCB are supposedly subject to very intense vetting. I know of this both first and secondhand. Mostly what the Conference is looking for is what has been termed “French-cuffed moderates.” These are priests who have learned to be smooth, work the system, never say anything that will create controversy, etc. But they also supposedly look into a priest’s background to make sure that he is “suitable” and won’t turn into a source of scandal. Obviously that sort of vetting failed in this instance.

Or perhaps “failure“ is not the correct term. Given that this priest had been engaged in this sort of behavior for so long and so comprehensively (even whilst traveling on USCCB business, for God’s sake!) there’s no way that some of his confreres and even some bishops didn’t know about this. This guy was groomed and prepared and protected to get to his position. Make no mistake. If the church is fortunate, he or someone who know will spill the beans, and other shoes will drop. God send that that will happen!

The story was broken by The Pillar, the independent Catholic news organization helmed by J.D. Flynn (and to which I strongly urge you to subscribe). Burrill resigned in advance of the report, after the reporters contacted the USCCB to let them know what it was about to reveal, and to ask for a response. The Pillar writes:

[Monsignor Jeffrey] Burrill was elected general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference in November 2020. In that role, Burrill was effectively the highest-ranking American cleric who is not a bishop.

A priest of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, he began to work at the bishops’ conference as associate general secretary in February 2016. In that capacity, the priest was charged with helping to coordinate the U.S. bishops’ response to the Church’s 2018 sexual abuse and coercion scandals.

But an analysis of app data signals correlated to Burrill’s mobile device shows the priest also visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020, even while traveling on assignment for the U.S. bishops’ conference.

According to commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar, a mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.

In 2018, the priest was a member of the USCCB’s executive staff and charged with oversight of the conference’s pastoral departments. He and several senior USCCB officials met with Pope Francis Oct. 8, 2018, to discuss how the conference was responding to ecclesiastical scandals related to sexual misconduct, duplicity, and clerical cover-ups.

Burrill, then second-in-command at the conference, is widely reported to have played a central role in coordinating conference and diocesan responses to the scandals, and coordinating between the conference and the Vatican.

Data app signals suggest he was at the same time engaged in serial and illicit sexual activity.

This is staggering news. It really is. Almost twenty years after the scandal broke nationwide out of Boston, and after years of Catholic bishops assuring the faithful that the scandal was behind them, a gay pick-up artist was in place as the top non-episcopal USCCB official, and even coordinating efforts to respond to the scandal.

What are Catholics supposed to think? Back in 2002, I got into an argument with a bishop about my writing on the scandal, which he wanted me to stop doing. I finally told him that as a Catholic, one of the reasons I did this writing and reporting was because I did not trust the bishops to clean up the mess. He said to me, “If you don’t trust the bishops, why are you still a Catholic?” Fortunately, I knew that my Catholicism did not require me to believe that particular bishops are moral or competent; I only had to believe that they were validly ordained. But that bishop’s response was truer than I realized at the time. Once I came to believe that the entire clerical institution was honeycombed with sexually active gay men who had no intention of obeying their vows, and by bishops and church officials (straight or gay) who had no intention of stopping them, I began to question the entire Catholic model.

One day I realized that if one of my sons, small children at the time, told me that he felt a calling to the Catholic priesthood, I would throw myself in front of him to prevent him from entering into that pit of vipers. That was a shock. I knew then that my faith was in trouble. And so it proved to be.

I know this comment is going to draw the Catholic usual suspects making intellectual arguments for why I’m wrong. Fine, have at it. I have heard them all before. They may be correct, but I experience them primarily as a coping mechanism for people who are extremely angry — and justifiably so! — over the fact that so many priests and bishops see the Church as an opportunity for them to have secret gay lives built on defrauding the laity of their trust and their money. I know this because I applied the same coping mechanism myself, until its circuits fried from intense use. What are people supposed to think when this kind of thing keeps happening — that is, when sexually active gay men are groomed to take these high positions in the Church? What are people supposed to think when things like this happen, at the hands of the same bishop?:

How blind do you have to be to think that the fix isn’t in? Do you remember who was put in charge of the USCCB’s initial 2002 response to the Catholic sex abuse scandal? Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Here is the transcript of a May 2002 interview McCarrick gave to the USA Today editorial board in advance of the bishops’ annual meeting, the first one since the scandal broke. Excerpts:

Q: We’re coming off a bad week of headlines: the ongoing Boston trial, the shooting of an accused molester in Baltimore, the suicide of another priest. What assurances can you give that the problems will be dealt with effectively at June’s meeting of the USA’s nearly 300 bishops?

A: If I were 300 people, I could give you that assurance. But I’m only one. I can give you the assurance that this one is convinced that we cannot leave Dallas unless we say to the American people, “This is over.” That we know exactly, and you know exactly, what is going to happen in every case. I think we have to do that or we’re going to Dallas for nothing. How do you prepare for Dallas? First of all, you pray a lot. Secondly, you listen to as many people as you can. Thirdly, you get ready to have something that can be accepted by the bishops, and it’s over. If a month after Dallas, some case comes up, we know how to handle it. It’s right there, everybody knows what we’re going to do, one-two-three-four, and it’s done.

He was a predator, and knew he was a predator. Evil man, that one. More:

Q: Some of your brother bishops and cardinals say they don’t think homosexuals can be trusted in the priesthood. Others say you can’t treat an entire class of people as if they’re incapable of following the church’s teachings. What is your view?

A: You want someone who can live a chaste life; that is key for me. If somebody who would like to go into the seminary says, “All my life, I’ve tried to be chaste, I’m a heterosexual, and I have tried to be celibate, and I have proven that I can be,” I think you say “Fine.” If someone says to you, “All my life I’ve tried to be chaste, I have a homosexual orientation, but I’ve always tried to be chaste,” I think you do that one case by case. Probably beginning in this next school year, the question of admission to seminaries will be discussed. It might be that the overwhelming weight of opinion will say that homosexuals should not be ever admitted to seminary. I’m not there yet. But if that’s what they tell me to do, then that’s what we’ll do. Certainly, I’m there if we say anyone who has been active in a gay life should not be admitted.

Q: But virginity has never been a requirement for the priesthood. Weren’t several saints once married?

A: That’s right, not only married, but married non-virgins.

Q: So are they considering establishing that as a criteria, both for people who are homosexual or heterosexual?

A: This is a question I can’t answer at this time, because I don’t know that. However, I know that in some dioceses in the country, they are very, very strict. The bishop would not admit someone who had been involved in either a heterosexual or homosexual relationship. Now I think, that probably would not be — that certainly is not the universal standard. It would seem to me, that if someone has proven that they can live a chaste life over a long period of time, you give that person a chance. But you’d want to look at it case by case. Because you wouldn’t want to fill a seminary with people who’ve had all kinds of sexual experiences in the past, and unless you were very, very sure that they could be chaste.

This was a lie for the press to consume, and to distract the Catholic faithful. We have learned in recent years that the Vatican knew about McCarrick’s molestation of seminarians even before 2002. Nobody in authority cared! 

Nineteen years since McCarrick made these statements, we now find out that the top administrator at the USCCB is a gay sex freak priest who regularly used hook-up apps to arrange sex for himself. You think this comes as a total shock to the bishops?

 

The Pillar writes:

Within that discussion has been fierce disagreement about the extent to which sexually active priests and bishops in positions of authority have enabled, shielded or protected the activity of other sexually active clerics, including those whose conduct is abusive or coercive.

Psychotherapist Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and advocate for the victims of clerical sexual abuse, wrote to San Diego’s Bishop Robert McElroy in 2016, warning him about networks of protection and tolerance among sexually active clerics, especially those in positions of authority and influence.

“Sooner or later it will become broadly obvious that there is a systemic connection between the sexual activity by, among and between clerics in positions of authority and control, and the abuse of children,” Sipe wrote to McElroy.

“When men in authority—cardinals, bishops, rectors, abbots, confessors, professors—are having or have had an unacknowledged-secret-active-sex- life under the guise of celibacy an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviors within the system is made operative.”

Sipe’s letter also included a warning about McCarrick, which went seemingly unheeded.

Sipe, who is now dead, told me in an interview back in 2002 that gay men should not be admitted to seminary, for their own protection. Sipe was an old church liberal. I don’t know what his views were on the suitability of gay men for ordination in theory. His argument was that they were in danger of sexual predation if they entered the seminary. Why? Because, said Sipe, the Catholic seminaries (at the time) were often hothouses of gay sex, and were run by priests who kept them that way on purpose. Sipe told me that a young man with same-sex desires would be constantly hit on in seminary. If he succumbed even once, he would have compromised himself within the lavender mafia, and even if he never fell again, he would be known throughout the national network as tamed. This also explains, said Sipe, why so many gay priests who did not molest children or minors didn’t report it: because they knew that because they were sexually active gay men, and known to be so, they were vulnerable to blackmail by sexual abusers.

And so, in the Year of Our Lord 2021, nineteen years after Boston, and three years after the Church moved against Theodore McCarrick, it fell to faithful Catholic journalists to reveal that the top administrative official at the USCCB, the man in charge of leading the US bishops’ response to sex abuse, is in fact a sexually compulsive closet case.

Shocking, but at this point, not surprising. How are people supposed to trust this organization? I don’t know.

I read The Pillar‘s report on the same day that I read this deep reflection by Catholic theologian Larry Chapp on the Pope’s recent motu proprio all but banning the Traditional Latin Mass. Chapp says that this is a much deeper controversy than whether or not the Latin mass is worthy. Chapp says he thinks the Pope’s act was wrong, but … well, read on:

What is lacking is a piercing pastoral analysis of what has brought us to this point in the first place.  Why is it that so many Catholics of deep faith have grown weary of the “business as usual” Catholicism of our parishes and have felt the need to flee to an older iteration of the faith, in both liturgy and in theology, and who do so, not out of nostalgia for a past they never knew, but because they have found something there that rips open their souls with the passion of a lover?  We can prattle-on with spittle flecked outrage about the audacity of those who dare reject Vatican II or who dare criticize the Novus Ordo, but it will come to nothing unless we own up to the fact that the Church has failed to recognize that the anomic and nihilistic cosmos of post-modernity has laid waste to all of our standard structures of meaning, all of the traditions that embodied and made “real” that meaning, and all of the moral and spiritual weight of everything that came before five minutes ago.  The Church has failed to even notice and, therefore, to acknowledge, that modern Catholics in the West are drowning with a slow gurgling death in the chaotic waters of modernity’s hegemonic enchantments. That we live in a collective of concupiscence that enslaves us to the morbid regime of death and the allure of immortality through pleasure. The Church has failed to recognize that all “ultimates” have been killed as effective realities by the Mammon and Moloch of modernity and have been replaced with an endless panoply of penultimate counterfeits.  The Church has failed to recognize the “abyss” that Ratzinger outlines which has now opened up below us and into which we all feel inexorably drawn as we flail our arms about desperately trying to grasp hold of something (anything!) solid.

The abyss of the “unreality of God” has seized our culture and also our Church causing millions of Catholics to walk away from its insouciant drivel and its pretentious posturing as just so many empty lies designed to shore-up the last pathetic vestiges of its Constantinian trappings which have all been (surely now clearly!) exposed.  We wait in vain for a clarion call from the Church for a revolution of the soul, for a great night of collective repentance, for a great divestment of privilege, for a radical living of the Sermon on the Mount, or for the lifeboats to be dispatched forthwith to collect those adrift and drowning in the abyss.  There is none of that.  Instead, we get a motu proprio that simply scolds those who have apparently grabbed for the wrong lifeboat and which says “silence!” to the cri de coeur coming from its desperate sheep.

Ratzinger’s “abyss” (as I am calling it) is the deep existential reality of our time and the strength of its rip tide requires an equally strong response from the Church.  A parish priest who is a dear and close friend of mine said to me once: “the crisis we face is the crisis of a laity and of a Church that does not even seem to know which questions to ask and, therefore, which answers to offer.”  Ours is a Church that has failed to ask the right questions and has therefore failed to flip the script of our culture’s lies and deceptions.  We asked for bread.  We got stones.  And thus did some in the sheepfold seek bread elsewhere in the alternative Catholic communities made possible by Summorum Pontificum.  And if some have fled to such havens with a goodly amount of undifferentiated bitterness it should be understood not as the bitterness of hatred, but rather as the bitterness of the desperate.

What all of this points to is that the debates and controversies that we see now all around us are not going to go away until we start taking seriously the deep spiritual crisis that is at the core of every single one of them.  And we are not going to get anywhere so long as we persist in seeking bureaucratic or “structural” solutions to what are at root deeply spiritual problems.  You can legislate away the widespread use of the Tridentine liturgy, but you cannot legislate away the conditions of possibility that led to its rise in the first place.  You cannot legislate away the boring and banal mediocrity of so many suburban Catholic parishes.  I am a cradle Catholic, a former seminarian and a trained theologian.  And I attend an Ordinariate parish rather than my territorial parish.  And no motu proprio can legislate away the reasons why I do.  The Church can remove the Ordinariates tomorrow and ban every Latin Mass and every altar rail and every veil and every extruded tongue at communion time, and mandate that all Catholics must worship with the “Gather” hymnal in heart shaped churches, with bare concrete walls, holding sweaty hands, while watching maladroit octogenarians do liturgical dance in the sanctuary with streamers, sparklers, and sock puppets, and it will do nothing to ameliorate the spiritual dread that gnaws at us all.  All that such legislating will ever do is to deepen the abyss below us as it hollows out the heavens above us.

You should read the whole thing. Chapp is not a Traditionalist, and goes on to say that this crisis is not going to be solved by mechanical means. It is not the case that simply restoring the Traditional mass is going to act like a magical incantation that makes the crisis go away. Believing that everything went wrong at Vatican II, and if we can just find a way to ignore that Council, all will be well — Chapp says that is simply a coping mechanism that allows Trads to avoid the real crisis.

I think he’s right, and even more, Chapp’s analysis applies to all Christians. As much as I love and affirm Orthodoxy, I am confident that too many Orthodox priests and laity are unwilling to ask the right questions, and live the right answers. Same with Protestants.

What does this have to do with the gay sex maniac who just resigned as USCCB General Secretary? The answer is in the opening to Chapp’s reflection:

Joseph Ratzinger, in his marvelous book, “Introduction to Christianity,” speaks about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and her temptations to atheism and despair.  And all of these temptations came despite the fact that her entire life was framed by, and formed within, the matrix of a nurturing Catholic culture and family.  Ratzinger states, in a quote worthy of full citation, the following:

“In other words, in what is apparently a flawlessly interlocking world someone here suddenly catches a glimpse of the abyss lurking – – even for her – – under the firm structure of the supporting conventions. In a situation like this, what is in question is not the sort of thing that one perhaps quarrels about otherwise – – the dogma of the Assumption, the proper use of confession – – all this becomes secondary.  What is at stake is the whole structure; it is a question of all or nothing. That is the only remaining alternative; nowhere does there seem anything to cling to in this sudden fall. Wherever one looks, only the bottomless abyss of nothingness can be seen.”

Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill and the clerical bureaucrats who groomed him for that position, and saw to it that this sexually corrupt priest was in place to oversee the response to sexual corruption among the priesthood, are Custodians Of The Abyss. They are forcing Catholics to look into the abyss beneath the whole structure. Benedict XVI is right: It is a question of all or nothing. When I looked into that abyss, the abyss looked back into me, and I lost my Catholic faith. By the grace of God, I found Orthodoxy — but as I’ve said a million times, it was as a permanently wounded Christian that I climbed aboard the rescue boat of Orthodoxy. No church is without sinners in its clergy and hierarchy, that’s for sure. What we have to hope and pray for is that at least holiness has a chance to outweigh sinfulness, to the extent that when one looks into the abyss, one can affirm the structure all the same.

Popes, patriarchs, bishops, priests, pastors — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, whatever — shouldn’t make it harder for the faithful to hold on, is all I’m saying. And the Catholic Church should once and for all look hard at the problem of sexually active gay men in the priesthood. The media won’t do it (except for tough, faithfully Catholic journalists like J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon at The Pillar) — but until and unless it is done, nothing will change.

There are many Catholics with stronger faith than I had when I stared into the Abyss, and had my faith fried right out of me. They might make it. Many others don’t have faith as strong as I did, and they have averted their eyes from the Abyss. I used to view those people with disdain, but not anymore. The Abyss is terrifying! But if it keeps presenting itself, it will not be possible to avert one’s gaze. Then what? If the Church — Catholic, and other churches — can’t offer a powerful, authoritative response to rebuke the Abyss, souls will be lost. They already are being lost, for the sake of disgraced clerics like Jeffrey Burrill, Ted McCarrick, Michael Bransfield, and other sexually disordered and compromised senior clerics to continue exploiting Christ and the church to pay the bills while satisfying their own desires for pleasure and comfort.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R.:

Just saw this from (Father) James Martin on Twitter: “This is a disgrace: spying on bishops and priests to see if they’re being chaste and celibate. Why not spy on lay teachers at Catholic schools? Why not spy on all parishioners?”

He thinks there’s only one answer to this question, his answer, but it’s not the one I would give, which is: Because the bishops take heavier vows than any of us in the laity do, and if their own hierarchy isn’t going to hold them accountable, we the church will. I’ve been reminded by these hypocritical a-holes all my life that the church is not a democracy. Well, that also holds for Monsignor Burrill too, and we can’t be aghast that he doesn’t enjoy some sort of Catholic equivalent of constitutional search and privacy protections.

And how does Martin, as a priest, have time to spend all day on Twitter, like some sort of slacker millennial? Does no one need extreme unction? Are there no soup kitchens that could use another set of hands? The guy has three Master’s degrees, writes books and edits a magazine, sure loves mugging for the TV cameras, is involved in a theater group, acted in a Martin Scorcese movie, and has plenty of time to collect honorary doctorates and give commencement addresses. Between my full-time job and the unglamorous work I struggle to find time to do through my local church, I have only a few small windows of opportunity each day to read the Internet and comment on one blog, this one. How does a man who took vows of poverty and service have more time to fart around on the Internet than I do?

More importantly, how did Monsignor Burrill have time for an extracurricular sex life? He clearly didn’t have enough duties in the service of the church to occupy his time.

I’m so lapsed at this point that even though I jokingly call myself an “Orthodox Cafeterian,” I’m achingly close to done. I live near enough to Washington DC that when I look at my two local priests, all I see are hypocrites who may have been part of McCarrick’s shag gang. The priest who ran the private Catholic school in my hometown, and who took a little too much visible pleasure in debasing boys for minor infractions in the 1970s, we learned after his death was a pedophile. When the bishop shows up at midnight mass on Christmas Eve where my family lives and–true story–the only citation in his homily is Bette fricking Midler…come on.

I don’t expect my priests and bishops to be perfect. I expect many of them to slip up from time to time, especially with regard to sex. They’re human. But when it’s a lifestyle, and when it’s institutionalized…no. To hell with these sociopaths.

UPDATE.2: There’s a fierce debate going on about whether or not it was ethical for The Pillar to use this commercially available data to out this priest. There’s no question that they obtained the data legally. The question is: is this ethical? Or did The Pillar cross a line?

It’s important to point out that we have no evidence that this priest, Msgr Burrill, actually broke his vow of chastity. All we know is that there is a mountain of data indicating that he was using apps designed to make anonymous gay sex hook-ups possible, and going to locations using that app. If he were an ordinary parish priest, as awful as that is, it would be hard to justify making that public, in my view. But Msgr Burrill is not only the most senior non-bishop priest in the country, he is also the top official in charge of coordinating the sex abuse response. And the data indicate that he was probably completely compromised.

My guess is that this is the context that The Pillar used to justify its story. I think it is justified, in fact. But let’s understand that we are going to start seeing a lot more of this kind of thing, and not just in Church reporting. Bottom line: if you have a smartphone, your privacy is seriously compromised. You’d better get rid of your smartphone if you are up to no good. Or better yet, repent.

UPDATE.3: A Catholic reader writes:

In the absence of law, you find vigilantism setting in. If you want to deter it, then act against these networks, otherwise in due time vigilantes will. This is governance 101 stuff.

I find it to be no bad thing that priests who have been using Grindr for gay assignations now have to worry that they might be caught out.

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Orban: Let The People Vote On LGBT Law

Big news from Hungarian PM Viktor Orban today. Here’s part of the translated announcement:

The Hungarian government is initiating a referendum on the issue of child protection, Viktor Orbán announced on Wednesday. Questions will include what parents think about introducing sexual propaganda to children in public education institutions.

There will also be questions asking how much parents support  giving lectures in schools  about gender reassignment treatments. The Prime Minister is asking everyone to say no to these issues together.

Brussels has attacked Hungary in recent weeks for child protection laws, said Viktor Orbán. The prime minister added that the European Union is demanding an amendment to the Education and Child Protection Act.

[Quote from Orban:] “Brussels is now demanding an amendment to the Education Act and child protection rules. They regret that it is not possible with us, which is already permanent in Western Europe. There, LGBTQ activists visit kindergartens and schools, they provide sexual education. Here, too, they want this, which is why the bureaucrats in Brussels are threatening and instituting infringement proceedings, ie abusing their power.”

– said the Prime Minister. He added that the future of our children is at stake, so we cannot let go on this issue. When the pressure on our country is so strong, only the common will of the people can protect Hungary.

The referendum questions will be:

Do you support having a sexual orientation session in a public education institution without parental consent?Do you support the promotion of gender reassignment treatments for minor children?Do you support the availability of gender reassignment treatments for minors?Do you support the unrestricted presentation of sexual media content to minors that affects their development?Do you support the display of gender-sensitive media content to minor children?

This is a brilliant move. The Hungarian opposition did not vote on the law, because they saw it as manipulative. There was broad agreement among all parliamentarians that Hungary’s anti-pedophilia laws needed strengthening. Fidesz, Orban’s party, added to it the LGBT propaganda law banning the things implicit in those five questions. The liberal opposition believed — no doubt correctly — that this was a political move to strongarm them into voting for a bill (the anti-LGBT information bill) that they oppose, or stand accused of being soft on pedophilia. They’re right — it was a brash and manipulative political move. Nevertheless, the legislation itself, in my view, was correct and necessary. I found myself the other day speaking to a critic of the legislation, but when I explained to him how far this propaganda has gone in the US, he was visibly shocked, and admitted that he was out of touch, and had no idea that things were that bad in America.

Anyway, now the Orban government is going to give the entire Hungarian people the opportunity to vote on this. The Hungarian observer who first brought this to my attention says it is inconceivable that majorities will not deliver a resounding NO to all the referendum questions. If that happens, it will put the European Union leaders in opposition not just to Orban, but to a majority of the Hungarian nation. The EU’s attack on Hungary over this law will be clearly seen as an attack not just on Orban and the Fidesz-led government, but on the entire nation and its values.

Which is certainly is! But the referendum will make that explicit. There is no date set for the referendum. It would be a baller move to make it on the same day as the 2022 elections, to drive voter turnout for Fidesz, but my Hungarian observer friend says she thinks it will be held much sooner.

Is this an attempt by Orban to distract people from the Pegasus scandal? Sure, probably. But whatever his motivations, the fact is that this is an extremely important issue involving the fundamental moral sense of Hungarian society, and the protection of its children from this ideology. If I were Hungarian, I wouldn’t care what Viktor Orban’s motives were for this move — I would just be grateful that he was making it. All the Central European governments should do the same. Let the people vote. Quit allowing these liberal Western cultural oligarchs and their legislative water-carriers decide to rewrite the moral law.

We had similar referendums in the US on gay marriage back in the first decade of this century. Gay marriage was voted down in most, and maybe all, of them. But the Supreme Court overruled all of them. At least in Hungary, an oligarchical EU elite won’t be able to invalidate the will of the people. Good for Hungary.

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