No More Pious Platitudes

How old is the Catholic Church? Well, what year are we in? It’s 2018 years old, the oldest, continually-functioning institution on earth. Along the way it’s been corrupted and reformed more than once and we’re overdue for another purge. When now-former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was credibly accused earlier this month of having molested young men and boys for decades, I was shaken. When the sexual abuse scandal first broke in 2002, McCarrick had been a prominent spokesperson assuring us all that he and other bishops would straighten everything out. Now we see he’d been a predator himself the entire time.

Then came the grand jury report in Pennsylvania earlier last week documenting that a thousand young people, mostly adolescent boys, were systematically molested by over three hundred priests. How many more were there who never came forth? Even worse, it was covered up for decades by other priests and bishops just like McCarrick. Those bishops live in mansions, but they belong in prison cells. How many clergy knew what was going on but lacked the courage to speak up? They should resign immediately. The time for pious platitudes is over.

Pittsburgh bishop's mansion

I was born a Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat in 1951 and went to mass every Sunday. I attended Catholic schools from second grade through high school. After eighteen, my attendance declined. After going out on my own I had stopped attending altogether. Only when I had children who asked me about God did I go back.

Some years later The Boston Globe published its 2002 Spotlight Series on the huge scandal in the Boston Archdiocese. Priests had been raping altar boys by the hundreds across eastern Massachusetts for decades — all covered up by bishops, Cardinal Bernard Law, and others until the Globe blew it wide open. The Globe had done us all a service but they were wrong about one thing. They spun it as a “Pedophile Priest Scandal,” and yes, there were a few pedophile priests who molested children, but the vast majority of assaults were by homosexual priests preying on pubescent boys and young men. It was most definitely a homosexual priest scandal, but Cardinal McCarrick and others the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) carefully painted it as something else. Now we know why. 

Several of their advisors, however, disagreed. According to a 2011 article in the Linacre Quarterly: “Dr. Paul McHugh, a member of the first USCCB National Review Board and former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, stated in an interview about the crisis: “I’m amazed that this fundamental bombshell [of the homosexual predation of American adolescent males] has not been the subject of greater interest and discussion. . . . I’m astonished that people throughout America are not . . . wondering about what the mechanisms were that set this alight.” 

A more recent article in US News and World Report cites research concluding that a majority of Catholic priests are homosexual. The Catholic Church has long taught that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered,” but it’s obvious now that many American and European priests, bishops, cardinals, and maybe Pope Francis, don’t believe it. Many, maybe most people in the pews don’t believe it either. How many Catholic readers here have heard homilies about homosexual sex at mass? I’ve heard only one in the past thirty years.

The Church also teaches that abortion is wrong, but how many homilies have you heard about that? Again, I’ve heard only two in thirty years. As many as half the people in the pews don’t believe homosexual sex or abortion are wrong and live accordingly. The late Bishop Fulton Sheen put it best: “If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.”

Such are the consequences of the last century’s sexual revolution. If the Catholic Church is to be saved, bishops and priests who don’t believe its teachings must leave. Those remaining must return to preaching that the only proper place for sexual behavior is in a marriage between one man and one woman that welcomes children. They must preach that abortion is always wrong except to save the life of the mother, which is hardly ever necessary. Most people calling themselves Catholics today think it okay to live lives in violation of Catholic teachings, and it’s increasingly clear that many in the clergy, too, think it’s okay to wink at the rules. This cannot continue.

To preach on church teachings, one must believe them and those homilies will very likely drive down both attendance at mass and revenue from the collection box. Many parishioners and clergy will join Episcopal, Unitarian, and other churches where rules are easier, or you can make your own.

We used to see the Catholic Church as holding fast to basic Christian principles against enormous world pressure to relax them. It’s harder to see it that way now.