By CHRISTOHER MANION
America’s Catholic bishops will be gathering for their annual meeting in Baltimore next month. What should they talk about?
An authoritative and surprisingly candid source offered some useful recommendations before last year’s meeting. Jayd Henricks, a longtime (and former) USCCB senior staffer, had been “entrusted with a range of some of the most sensitive work for the United States bishops,” he wrote in First Things, hopeful no doubt that his views would receive serious attention.
Henricks didn’t pull any punches. “Far too often,” he told the bishops, “fear appears to govern what is done or not done by you as a body. There is the fear of disunity, fear of conflict, fear of disrupting, and today, more than ever, fear of Rome. This culture of fear enabled the likes of Theodore McCarrick to attain power and to scheme and maneuver at the highest ecclesial and political levels.”
Powerful stuff. And there’s evidently still a lot for bishops to be afraid of. Last year, the conferees had intended to address some of the issues raised by Mr. Henricks, but their meeting was shut down by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich. He insisted that Rome would do the investigating of Cardinal McCarrick — his crimes of sexual abuse, his abuse of power, and his apparatchiks in the U.S. hierarchy.
Cupich’s ham-handed move was designed to bury the McCarrick investigation, and it worked. He suffocated the conference’s intention to discuss and even to pursue a wider investigation into the powerful Sodomite Syndicate. Since then, “McCarrick” has been a forbidden word in the USCCB, and every prelate the powerful predator promoted and protected there is still in office.
Meanwhile, Rome has laicized McCarrick. Turn the page.
So — will the conference this year insist that the truth be told? Not a chance: Henricks is right — they’re afraid of each other (Cupich will shut them down again), afraid of Rome (where the Syndicate is powerful indeed), and frankly, afraid of the laity (donations have plummeted, and lawsuits put their NGOs’ hefty government grants in jeopardy).
Money is an issue at the Vatican as well. “A confidential report from the Vatican’s anti-corruption authority shows that the Secretariat of State has used about $725 million, most of which came from the Pope’s charity fund, in off-books operations,” reported several news outlets. (The fund is the “Peter’s Pence,” for which a collection is taken in the U.S. every year.)
This unhappy news is unlikely to inspire increased generosity here at home.
The Casual Betrayal of Truth
Last year, Henricks identified a “dominant camp” among U.S. bishops that “regards the Church as a platform for political interests.” In the year since, that camp has in fact become even more dominant. Wilton Gregory, Washington’s new archbishop, sent a significant political signal when he presided over the September funeral of Ms. Cokie Roberts, a prominent member of the elite establishment and a strong supporter of abortion and homosexual “rights.”
Gregory even allowed Catholic pro-abortion Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another lapdog of the sodomite faction, to give the eulogy at the Mass (Pelosi didn’t mention “Catholic,” or “Jesus,” although she did gush that Roberts was truly God’s blessing to America). Gregory beamed.
Washington’s pro-abortion Catholics might get a warm reception from their new archbishop, but traditional Catholics have not been so welcome. When Bishop Athanasius Schneider was invited to preside over a Solemn High Mass on the Feast of Blessed Karl of Austria on October 21 at St. Mary’s, Mother of God Parish in Washington, parishioners reported that Gregory had refused permission for his brother bishop to celebrate it (the Archdiocesan Director of Communications did not respond to a request for comment).
Gregory’s stance is curious. He’s famous for admitting, as president of the USCCB in 2002, that “there does exist within American seminaries a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexuals think twice . . . it is an ongoing struggle to make sure the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men.” Since 2002, the bishops have paid billions of the faithful’s dollars in abuse settlements, and untold millions of the faithful have departed the pews. Will Archbishop Gregory raise this unwelcome disaster report at the Baltimore meeting? Don’t bet on it.
And yet, surprisingly, others have spoken up while Gregory is silent.
“One of Australia’s most senior Anglicans has told those lobbying for the church to accept same-sex marriage to ‘please leave’ rather than push for reform merely to ‘satisfy the lusts and pleasures of the world’,” reports Australia News 7. Sydney Archbishop Glenn Davies told the Anglican Church’s Sydney annual synod last week that “the church couldn’t bless same-sex marriage because it couldn’t bless sin.”
He got a standing ovation.
It’s rather embarrassing when Anglican prelates say what ours won’t.
Admittedly, Archbishop Gregory presides over one of the most radical sodomy-soaked cities in America. But given his 2002 acknowledgment of the “ongoing struggle,” one would think that he would want to do something about it, especially given the scandals that have ravaged the Church ever since.
Time will tell.
Challenges Threaten,
Authority Wilts
So what will the bishops do to address genuinely pressing issues at their meeting? Nothing. “Nothing to say here, move along,” is their lame and familiar message.
Perhaps they view the landscape as a calm after the storm. Their November agenda reads like a meeting of the garden club. They’ll be electing officers, accepting reports, assigning new chairmen. In reality, though, it’s all show, no go. The USCCB is dead on the water. They’ve proven incapable of addressing the most vital moral issues facing the faithful.
Consider: The vast majority of Catholic children attend public schools, where transgenderism, sexual perversion, and outright lust are featured in every curriculum. Where are our shepherds confronting this massive assault? Is it “fear” again? Do they fear that they will immediately be attacked for their “pedophile” scandals, and shamed into silence?
The fear that Henricks describes seems to be causing our shepherds to shrink into their faceless bureaucracy. Yet even there, they often ignore their own concoction of policies, protocols, programs, procedures, and protections that they have adopted in self-defense.
This is a critical time for the Church, a time for unprecedented witness by the American hierarchy. Yet they are silent, with occasional bleats about gun control and amnesty. There is a silent sense of hapless indecision, of course — but there is also the conflict that Mr. Henricks describes. Our bishops are indeed afraid of each other, and of Rome, to be sure — and that fear is certainly greater than it was a year ago. However, what they appear to be afraid of most is themselves.
Every bishop has the authority which bishops for years have manifestly neglected or outright refused to exercise. They fear the awesome power and duty inherent in that authority. So they are afraid to exercise it. Do they doubt that authority? Do they somehow feel that, in their frail human weakness (that all of us share), there’s no possible way that they could possibly assume the dignity and force of their consecrated duty and exercise it?
Do they really doubt their own charism, or do they doubt its source — do they really, really believe that, as Successors of the Apostles, they have the authority, the power, the duty, to cleanse the Church and cleanse the hierarchy and call the faithful and the world to reparation?
It’s a massive challenge. Perhaps it’s just too massive. Right now our shepherds might just want to take a page from Mr. Justice Brandeis. The Vatican is roiled in intrigue, the USCCB is haunted by scandals, the Germans are threatening revolt, and the Synod is mired in the Amazon jungle.
The world is too much with us. Maybe our bishops just want to be left alone.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress