Understanding the Rot in the Roman Catholic Church

Like most of you, I am sickened by what a Pennsylvania grand jury has exposed about abuse of minors in the Roman Catholic Church.  But what most do not understand is the abuse is largely the fruit of a corrupt and liberal hierarchy.   Yes, there are outwardly conservative clerics who were involved in the abuse and/or cover-ups. But the abuse would not have gotten to be endemic without it being enabled by libchurchers.

Peter Kwasniewski is one of the few who gets it and is not shy about saying so:

The ring of criminal Nancy Boys is the same ring that has been sedulously working for decades to undermine the integrity of the doctrinal, moral, sacramental, liturgical Church. These men – McCarrick, McElroy, Wuerl, O’Malley, Mahony, Cupich, Tobin, Farrell, Lynch, Weakland, Paglia, Maradiaga, their lovable mouthpiece James Martin, Thomas Rosica, and far too many others, including ones who have passed on to their eternal fate, such as Lyons, Boland, Brom – are the same ones who have destabilized and adulterated catechesis, theology, liturgy, and most obviously the Church’s commitment to the unchanging moral law, as we saw in the Amoris Laetitia debacle and all that surrounded and succeeded it….

These are not just men of bad moral character; they are apostates, and they are trying to remake the Church in the image of their own apostasy. The Church has been smashed up in front of our eyes in slow motion for decades and few can even begin to admit that we are now faced with a Church in actual smithereens. The Nancy Boys have conducted their campaign of demolition with a kind of imperial sway. It is not this or that aspect of the Church that is corrupt; the rot is now everywhere. It is a rot on which the McCarrick Ring still sups, like maggots feasting on a corpse. For this reason, to hear well meaning people say Bergoglio must impanel some investigative body to set things right is Alice in Wonderland lunacy. It’s like putting Himmler in charge of Nuremberg….

It is a package deal. This, above all, is what people need to see. The moral depravity, the doctrinal heresy, the liturgical devastation – all of it goes together.

Like I said, he is not shy, but he is right. The abuse and libchurch apostasy go hand in hand, so to speak.  Take Boston, Cardinal Law (spit), and Paul Shanley for example.  Before Shanley’s predations on boys became public knowledge, he was well known as a radical “street preacher” who opposed church teaching on homosexuality.  He even spoke in defense of pedophilia at a NAMBLA conference in 1979. So, even apart from his abuse, why did it take decades after that for him to be defrocked?

Damnable lib bishops, that’s why.  From a 2002 New York Times article: 

Bishop McCormack, who served as a top aide to Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston before his appointment to Manchester, oversaw the transfer of several priests from parish to parish even after evidence of sexual misconduct grew with multiple accusations made against them.

One of those he helped to transfer around the country was the Rev. Paul R. Shanley, who has been accused of the sexual abuse of more than 20 young boys and who publicly defended pedophilia at a 1979 meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

The rot goes all the way to Vatican. Rod Dreher reveals how Uncle Ted McCarrick became a Cardinal:

Back then, I received a tip from a priest who had gone on his own dime to Rome, along with a group of prominent US Catholic laymen, to meet with an official for the Roman Curial congregation that names bishops. It had been rumored at the time that Theodore McCarrick, the Archbishop of Newark, was going to be moved to Washington, DC, and to be made a cardinal. This group traveled to Rome to warn the Vatican that McCarrick was a sexual harrasser of seminarians. The story this priest shared with me was that McCarrick had a habit of compelling seminarians to share his bed for cuddling. These allegations did not involve sexual molestation, but were clearly about unwanted sexual harassment. To refuse the archbishop’s bedtime entreaties would be to risk your future as a priest, I was told.

Rome was informed by these laymen — whose number included professionally distinguished Catholics in a position to understand the kind of harm this would cause –that McCarrick was sexually exploiting these seminarians, but it did no good. McCarrick received his appointment to the Washington archdiocese in 2000.

That’s some of the “smoke of Satan” in the Vatican Benedict warned about.

Roman Catholics in the pews, like the mainstream Protestant counterparts, have put up with these libchurchers for too long. Kwasniewski again:

We need the apostates identified, denounced, and removed. We need a reaffirmation of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith. To clean up this mess, we have to clean up more than the scandal of homosexuality, with all of its attendant horrors. We have to denounce and reject the apostasy that powerful and influential homosexuals and their friends have insinuated into the Church over decades. 

Although I applaud and pray for those orthodox who are committed to reforming the Roman Catholic Church, I do not share Kwasniewski’s optimism that it can be done.  For one thing, Pope Francis has stacked the College of Cardinals with the likes of Blase Cupich and worse.  So I fear Benedict may be the last robustly orthodox pope.  Further, reform would require an orthodox pope with the will power and energy to clean up the Vatican and the College of Cardinals.  Not even Benedict had that nor has any pope since Vatican II.

That’s the thing about libchurchers. If you don’t put them in their place early, they end up taking over the place . . . with damnable consequences.

The rot in the Roman Catholic Church has implications of great import for Anglicans.  But I will get to that another time.