Unholy perfidy in Santa Fe

You’ve described quite well the implementation of the new religion that is being imposed on us. I have come to view the past 38 years as the spiritual equivalent of the Ukrainian Famine of the 1930s.

Look to the example of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and you’ll see what will be happening in the immediate future in Boston and elsewhere. The sex abuse scandals will serve as a pretext.

“Restructuring” (“realignment” in New York, “reconfiguration” in Boston) is used to divert attention from the raping and sodomizing of children and an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of structural changes that the hierarchy is impatient to see.

They will use the scandals as an excuse to drive the destruction and sale of church properties (including more schools, hospitals and medical systems) and to expand the oligarchical governance of the hierarchical structure by more and more clericalized laymen within “pastoral centers,” bureaucratic hierarchy, and parishes. Parish lay committees of every kind will be greatly expanded. It will all become much, much worse.

The Archdiocese of Santa Fe did this from ‘94 through to the end of the century. Some of the statements I’ve seen out of Boston are familiar to me from the early ‘90s in New Mexico. Just as the Archdiocese of Boston’s public threat of contemplating Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002 was identical to that of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe’s threat of contemplating Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1995 at the height of our huge sex scandals (165-185 from charges against more than fifteen priests from multiple dioceses and orders).

I’m a witness to the destruction and transformation of cathedrals and churches. Our Cathedral in Santa Fe was gutted in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. More work was done (the ubiquitous Jacuzzi “baptismal font”) in the late ‘90s. Now they’re going to renovate the Shrine of La Conquistadora. In the Diocese of Beaumont, Texas where I now live, the Cathedral is undergoing a $6-million renovation here (if the list of suggested contributions is a fair estimate). My previous diocese, Louisiana, gutted their Cathedral over ten years ago. San Antonio has done likewise. Each time we see the same slippery process: they start with a low estimate for some “sprucing up,” and then introduce their real agenda through meetings. The inevitable result is inordinately expensive gutting and transformation of the church building. The lack of anything like a normal reaction to this latest round of scandals disturbs me.

Archbishop Sheehan took over in ‘94 after the departure of Archbishop Sanchez due to his personal sex scandal. Among the first admonitions to us by Sheehan, and one repeated through the ‘90s ad nauseum, was to “remember all of the good he [Sanchez] did.” Sheehan said the same about priests who resigned due to their personal sex scandals in 1999 and 2000. The first thing he did in 1994 was to implement a Stewardship Program. In 1995 the Archdiocese threatened to declare chapter 11 bankruptcy due to the number of charges against priests sodomizing kids and the former Archbishop Sanchez’ legal defense.

This happened even though a Catholic high school was sold, one of the more valuable properties in Albuquerque due to its location. Also, there was the sale of other valuable church properties, including the chapel with the miraculous staircase of the of the Sisters of Loreto in Santa Fe, and the Dominican Retreat House that were built over decades in the south valley of Albuquerque, among others. At the same time, we learned later in the ‘90s that local parish funds were also tapped into supposedly to pay child-abuse settlements.

The charges from the ‘70s and ‘80s were all wrapped up by about ‘97 or so, yet the property sales continued. The entire St. Joseph medical system was sold just after the turn of the century.

When all of this broke in Boston in 2002, Archbishop Sheehan began speaking up, pointing to what was done in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to prevent future scandals of priests raping and sodomizing boys. In particular, he pointed to the increased lay participation through parish pastoral committees and lay involvement at the diocesan level.

Frankly, none of this was new, for these were the favorite programs of Archbishop Sanchez, one of the radicals in the class of bishops formed in the early ‘70s. From what I can tell, Santa Fe was years ahead of others when it came to Cathedral-gutting and the rapid implementation of lay-dominated bureaucracies and parish lay committees. Sanchez had been implementing them for 18 years. Lay involvement and the “priesthood of the laity” and “Apostolate of the laity” was driven home and the ordained priesthood de-emphasized, and social justice issues dominated. By 1993, an Archdiocese of about 350,000 active Catholics produced one seminarian.

Sheehan boasted in 2002 that there was only one scandal that involved children that had arisen since 1994. He failed to mention there were numerous other sex scandals, mostly involving women and priests, some had been long-term and had begun when the gals were teenagers. He also failed to mention that the “one incident” (in the mid-‘90s) was a priest’s accused of operating a child prostitution ring.

These acts are both sins and crimes, but Archbishop Sanchez has said that he views them as neither, but rather as a “disease.” In his ‘93 deposition the Archdiocese fought for two years to try and prevent them from being made public. They lost the court battle in ’95, but were successful in having much in the deposition blacked out.

The Holy Father himself was no doubt aware since he was in Denver, while it was being shown nationwide on 60 Minutes. Hence his weak statement during that year’s World Youth Day. He had to be involved, for in 1995 he signed the papal protection of the Order whose facility was dubbed a “pipeline for perverts” to which all of the priests from other dioceses were sent and from which they were then redistributed throughout the Archdiocese.

I’ve seen the “it’s not a sin” theme in one diocese after another. I’m no prophet. The Holy Father knew precisely what needed to be said in 2002. The timing is natural enough. The pre-”Baby Boom” generations are dying off, and the majority of Catholics (at least those who haven’t left the Church) have had the last vestiges of the Catholic cosmology and doctrinal formation ripped from their hearts, minds, and souls via the Renew and Renew2000 programs and the new liturgy and homilies.

Regarding Michael Rose’s book, The Renovation Manipulation, I suggest people save their money. The only thing one will learn from it is the deconstructionist method (or “process” if you prefer) that he describes. However, I think that most of us are familiar with it, either through the Church or via any international corporation or any other organization these days. Other than that, the book is now out of date. Ever since the USCCB-approved the document “Living Stones” (formerly “House of God”) replaced the unofficial document previously used Environment & Art in Catholic Worship (EACW), various lay “ministers” or “liturgical experts” (whom our local ordinaries hire at exorbitant fees in order to destroy and transform cathedrals) have all the official sanction they need.

One of the officials whom Rose cites frequently, Fr. James Moroney, director of the Bishops’ Committee on Liturgy, to demonstrate that EACW has no official status, now actually visits the diocese to give the initial presentations to justify the renovations rather than the “Liturgical Expert,” which are still identical to what they’ve always been. He came here to the Diocese of Beaumont for the purpose. It’s now impossible to argue against an official in the Church on these things.

Mr. Rose’s book was out of date less than two years after being published. “Living Stones” has everything needed from EACW to destroy and transform the churches and Cathedrals. The only difference is that it’s now an official document voted on by the Bishops. (Given the lack of canonical status of the Bishops’ Conferences, it’s still not clear to me how anything become official merely by such a vote, but I’m just a peon layman).

I simply point out that they seem to be used every time as an excuse to further implement programs already being implemented: only now the excuse being that its to prevent the raping of children. It’s nonsensical and insane. One does not have to transform the entire Church to deal with criminals.

Cardinal Mahoney, a close friend of Archbishop Sanchez and archbishop of the archdiocese that spawned many predator priests who raped our kids in New Mexico during the ‘70s and ‘80s states on his website that they treated it as a “sin” in Los Angeles. In Santa Fe from ‘94 to about ‘99 we had to put up with the incredibly stupid and untenable statements from Archbishop Sheehan that prior to ‘86 when the bishops first began dealing with this issue, many people didn’t know it was a crime. Sheehan repeatedly defended Sanchez’s claim that no one knew whether it was a crime to rape and sodomize boys (165 to 185 charges, and those only the ones formally filed in the ‘90s). It’s all the more incredible that Mahoney comes out with this statement in 2002. I’ve seen similar statements from O’Malley of Boston (another old hand at pre-Boston public sex scandals) speaking of the need for greater lay involvement because of the scandals and to prevent future abuses.

This is verifiable even through the secular press, in particular the Albuquerque Tribune. This nonsense from Archbishop Sheehan was also common in the People of God, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. The Dioceses of Phoenix, Las Cruces, and Gallup are all under the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

I lived in Las Cruces a number of years where the role of the ordained priesthood has been severely diminished. Again, only one seminarian in a diocese of over 100,000 active Catholics when I left in 1995 and where Bishop Ramirez was having priests at some parishes conduct communion services rather than offer the Holy Sacrifice at previously weekday Masses.

The assembled parishioners as “Eucharist” was a popular, even if subdued, theme there in the mid ‘80s to mid ‘90s. Their website shows that they’re now open and overt about it. The Diocese of Gallup was implementing parish closures and mergers in the mid ‘90s.

I’m neither a dissident nor a radical. Nor am I anti-clerical or anti-papist as these terms are traditionally understood. I am, however, quite anti-“clerical” where the clericalism is the new clericalized laymen and bureaucracies that the revolutionaries have imposed upon the Church militant for almost four decades. I am sick of it.

The Holy Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ on earth has been reduced to a shabby spectacle before the world, and the structure of the Catholic Church has become a pipeline for perversion and heresy.

By the grace of almightily God, I am a Catholic, a member of the Latin Rite, writing from deep within the humus (to use a term the Holy Father used regarding Christianity in Europe) of the Novus Ordo. I do not deny the Holy Father’s right to govern the Church on earth. I do, however, have problems with the way he governs her and his failure over 25 years to propagate the Faith or to ensure the sanctification of souls.

These men need to do their duty to God and to the human souls entrusted to their care. They need carry out what they have made formal vows and taken formal oaths to the Triune God to do. The new clericalized laymen who increasingly govern neither take oaths nor make vows, although their first and foremost duty is to God.

One can no longer take another’s profession of Catholicism at face value. As one opinion poll and survey after another demonstrate, the majority of American Catholics have ceased to be believers in any Catholic sense since at least the late ‘70s, and are now effectively, if ignorantly, apostates. When a Cardinal Archbishop can issue a public statement that will be construed as a denial of our Lord’s divinity, then I see no hope, humanly speaking. The best thing I can do is to pray to our Lord, with the request, repeated over and over like the old woman who pestered the unjust judge, to provide a vision of Hell to the Holy Father and the world’s bishops. Increasingly, however, I doubt whether they still believe in Heaven or Hell.

Mmmm... Rural western PA, thanks in great part to our bishop (Trautman), is a vanguard of this trend, and he has said this. Here we call it 'Consolidation'. Our local Catholic grade schools are united into one uber school, as a shining example to those not yet consolidated. In Erie, several consolidations of church and school have occured, I'm sure closings of the unused buildings are scheduled once the people get used to the changes. It's supposed to be about saving money and priest shortages. That's the word out at rel ed meetings and parish council meetings and such. The big concern is how to break it to the people and keep negative comments at bay. And, not surprisingly, many of the closed parishes and churches and their schools just happen to be the most devout, traditional and, often, most beautiful of all the local ones. Very sad.

It's just a cover, here, to root out and eliminate the 'old-fashioned' groups and assimilate them into the 'new' churches, with all their bland, generic, washed of all that is uniquely Catholic, new-agey Churches that remain. Sigh. Indeed, it's like their last stand, in the wake of the scandal, to make the last of their new age changes under the guise of 'healing'.

As an aside and not surprising, the recent Vatican clarifications of proper ways to celebrate Mass have only partially been enacted and many are openly hostile to Rome.

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