By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Many men marry the one woman they want their lives to center around. They go home to find and serve her, in addition of course to Our Blessed Mother, whom every Catholic man is called to love and serve in imitation of Christ. Catholic men don’t go to church to find a second atmosphere dominated by women to whom leadership has been ceded by a weak priest, as is sadly so often the case. Men will not readily follow a priest who does not lead as they are each expected to do in their homes and at work.
Many of you know of Steve Wood, a Catholic convert, a husband and father, deeply and heroically dedicated to a wide-ranging and far-flung apostolate for Catholic men under the flagship website Dads.org. Recently Steve spoke out in damning terms about the “lasting damage” which he believes will be the result of the midterm report released by the Extraordinary Synod of 2014 without the context of the bishops’ discussions that largely belied the revolutionary text. The media received that midterm report before most of the bishops had seen it, and therefore we got the false and damaging news stories about changes in Church teaching.
As has been reported, some orthodox bishops, led by George Cardinal Pell, staged a rebellion against the synod’s orchestrators, among them Lorenzo Cardinal Baldisseri and Bishop Bruno Forte, demanding that the synod discussions also be released to the public. Baldisseri resisted, and they did not back down; the Pope ended the standoff by giving his consent to lifting the veil of secrecy.
Those who take the time to read the texts of the bishops’ remarks made during the course of the synod will easily see that the midterm Relatio Disceptationem was more of a Relatio of Deception.
Wood points out, however, that the damage has been done because most people, including most of the men his apostolate serves, will never read past the headlines to realize that the relatio not only betrayed Church teaching but also deceived the public about the true concerns and words of the bishops who were brought to Rome by Pope Francis to aid him in serving our families so severely under attack and struggling for survival on so many fronts today.
Wood, in his written public statement, quotes from Leon Podles’ book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity to make his point about many of our men and the roots of their withering attachment to the Church:
“If the feminization of the Church continues, men will continue to seek their spiritual sustenance outside the churches, in false or inadequate religions, with high damaging consequences for the church and society.
“The current attempts, within almost all Christian denominations, to normalize homosexuality will, more than anything else, convince heterosexual men that religion had best be kept at a great distance. Catholic churches that cultivate a gay atmosphere (Archdiocesan Gay and Lesbian Outreach, gay choirs, gay tolerance talks in schools) will keep heterosexual men away. Fear of effeminacy is one of the strongest motivations in men who will sometimes die rather than appear effeminate.”
Wood goes on to set the context:
“Millions of Catholic wives wonder why their husbands don’t want to go to Mass with them. Likewise, thousands of bright and beautiful young Catholic women wonder aloud, ‘Where are the marriageable young Catholic men?’ I’m afraid it’s goodbye to many good men because of the effeminate atmosphere of the contemporary Catholic Church. The contemporary homosexualized church atmosphere is the penultimate level of feminization, and it stinks in the nostrils of normal men.”
Wood analyzes the roots of the alienation of men for the Church in a lack of truthful assessment about the true nature of the sexual identity issue at the heart of the so-called sexual abuse crisis.
“It’s important to keep in mind that the public perception of the Catholic Church’s pro-gay drift hasn’t just grown out of news reports from the Family Synod. A long train of events and declarations have supported the pro-gay drift of the Catholic Church. I’ll mention just a few of the disastrous statements and actions leading up to the Family Synod’s interim report.
“Despite the denial of a few within the Church, literally the entire world knows that the Catholic clerical crisis was mainly a homosexual crisis. The striking failure of so many bishops ‘to connect the dots’ as they moved homosexual abusers from parish to parish revealed a lot about the moral framework of many leaders.
“According to the Pew Research Center, due to ‘the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and their cover-up by the Catholic Church, roughly a quarter (27 percent) of former Catholics who no longer identify with a religion cited clergy sexual abuse scandals as a reason for leaving the Church. Among former Catholics who now identify as Protestant, 21 percent say the sexual abuse scandals were a reason for leaving the Catholic Church.’
“A Barna Catholic youth 2013 survey reported, ‘Among all 18 to 29-year-olds who have a Catholic background, 43 percent say the ‘priest abuse scandals have made me question my faith’.”
More next week, and thank you for reading.
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(Follow Fr. Cusick on Facebook at Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick and on Twitter @MCITLFrAphorism. Father blogs occasionally at APriestLife.blogspot.com and mcitl.blogspot.com. You can email him at mcitl.blogspot.com@gmail.com.)
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