By Stephen Brady
As each day passes, Catholics in the United States learn a little bit more about the serious problem of clerical pedophilia in the Church. We’re often tempted to think it is a new problem, a consequence of the sexual revolution, but the facts that have emerged in just the past two years clearly indicate that the systematic sexual abuse of minor males by priests in the United States -- often followed by the recruitment of these victims into the priesthood -- has been an ongoing problem for at least 50 years, perhaps 80.
Certainly, throughout its history, the Catholic Church has had trouble with homosexual pedophiles within its ranks. That’s what prompted St. Peter Damian, a Doctor of the Church, in the 11th century to pen the furious letter to Pope St. Leo IX against the sodomites, the Liber Gomorrhianus. The nurturing of a homosexual/pedophiliac network in the Catholic Church in modern times, which parallels similar networks in government, business and education circles, may, some suggest, date back to the late 1920s and early ‘30s when the “Cambridge Apostles,” that elite clique of homosexual Marxists under the direction of Anthony Blunt (and including such notorious spies as Kim Philby), determined to seize control of the major institutions, especially the churches, newspapers, cinema and radio (and, later, television), universities, museums and government cultural agencies.
If the problem of a homosexual network in the Church is viewed in this perspective, one can understand more fully the remarkable role of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in creating an “American Church” that has become a trusted ally of all those various social, political and cultural forces promoting sexual libertinism.
Bernardin’s legacy to the American Church will be discussed and debated, quite possibly, for centuries. No one disputes his influence: as creator of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and United States Catholic Conference; as a bishop-maker who, working with former Archbishop Jean Jadot, gave the American hierarchy its pronounced pro-gay orientation; as a subtle provocateur who nudged, consoled and empowered dissenters while professing his loyalty to his Roman superiors; as an architect of proposals to deconstruct the Roman liturgy, Catholic education and the all-important field of catechetics.
Bernardin, it must be recalled, at least briefly, was sponsored, tutored and promoted by a number of dubious characters, not only his godfather, Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta, who served as a bishop in Charleston. Bernardin’s other “godfather” was Archbishop (later cardinal) John Dearden, who would be responsible for the appointment of such notorious pro-homosexual bishops as Detroit Auxiliary Tom Gumbleton, Ken Untener of Saginaw, Joseph Imesch, of Joliet, who, recall gave the suffering Catholics of Springfield, IL the loathsome Daniel Ryan.
Bernardin’s supporters look at all his accomplishments and call them good. To do so, they have to overlook many things, including his connections to some of the most evil men to ever enter the priesthood.
+ + + +
When Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, died November 14, 1996 of pancreatic cancer at age 68, he proved himself an impressario to the end, conducting a public relations/media blitz that crescendoed with calls for his canonization.
Typical of the sycophantry he was so skillful at evoking was that of the National Catholic Reporter’s Tim Unsworth, who wrote a week after Bernardin died:
“Bernardin's final months were spent just as he planned and predicted: in loving, compassionate and gentle service. He spent much of his time comforting other terminally ill cancer patients. He came to know many of them during his hospitalization at Loyola. ‘I felt like a priest again,’ he said often....Bernardin's biographer and close friend, Eugene Kennedy, has called him ‘the most influential bishop in the history of the American church.’...[A]t the time of his death he was the senior active American prelate among the country's more than 350. But his influence far exceeded his seniority. His writing and speaking on national and even global issues caused him to eclipse megabishops of the past such as Baltimore's James Gibbons (1877-1921), Boston's William O'Connell (1907-1944), Chicago's George Mundelein (1915-1939), New York's Francis Spellman (1939-1967) and Bernardin's own mentor, John Dearden of Detroit (1958-1980)....”
Everything he did, from the well-publicized death-bed visit by his dear friend Ann Landers, to the gay choir that sang at his funeral Mass, the visit by Hillary Clinton and the letter from her husband, Bill, to the Bernardin books and the documentary video produced and released as soon as he was buried, was orchestrated perfectly.
One of his closest friends – one of the original “Bernardin Boys” – Santa Fe Archbishop Michael Sheehan, who served as one of Bernardin’s four assistant general secretaries at the beginning of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, commented that Bernardin “was able to look at death as a friend, rather than as an enemy.”
There were many reasons why Bernardin welcomed death, least of which was that his carefully crafted image as the saintly prelate, the good listener, the consensus builder, the faithful son of the Church, was rapidly dissolving.
His closest friend from his South Carolina days, Monsignor Frederick Hopwood, had been accused of abusing hundreds of boys dating back to the early 1950s, when he and Bernardin shared a residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Charleston – where some of the alleged abuse took place.
An attorney involved in representing some of Hopwood’s victims told Roman Catholic Faithful, “Hopwood was not your ordinary pedophile. He abused hundreds of boys at the rectory – at a time when Bernardin was serving, theoretically, as assistant chancellor -- and at Camp St. Mary’s in Beaufort.”
Coming to the legal defense of Hopwood and the Diocese of Charleston came the Archdiocese of Chicago’s powerhouse firm, Mayer, Platt and Brown, which negotiated the cash settlements to Hopwood’s victims.
At the time the Hopwood allegations became public in late December 1993, Bernardin was having trouble on another front.
A former seminarian from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Steven Cook, filed a $10 million lawsuit against Bernardin and Cincinnati priest Ellis Harsham. The suit accused Harsham, when he was a priest at St. Gregory seminary in Cincinnati in the mid-1970s, of numerous coercive sexual acts against him, and then delivering him to Bernardin, then archbishop of Cincinnati, for the same purposes.
Several months later, however, in February ‘94, Cook dropped Bernardin from the suit, saying he couldn’t trust his memory. Cook never retracted his charges; nor did he say it was inaccurate – contrary to the accepted party line that Bernardin had been exonerated, which persists to this day. Four months later, Cook’s suit against Harsham was conveniently -- at least for Bernardin -- settled out of court. While Bernardin was allowed to remain as Archbishop of Chicago, Harsham was placed immediately on administrative leave when the lawsuit was filed; and he left the priesthood a few months later.
While Bernardin went on to have a very public (and filmed) reconciliation with Cook, showing the world what a generous man he was in forgiving a man who had accused him of sexual crimes, Bernardin’s lawyers were involved in hushing up another case in which seminarians in Winona, Minn., had accused Bernardin and three other bishops of participating in sexual/satanic rituals at the seminary. Among the facts that the plaintiffs in that case marshaled for their suit: Bernardin was frequently accompanied by Steven Cook! The settlement stemming from the lawsuit has been sealed, but Roman Catholic Faithful was given details of the settlement from a bishop who received a copy of the settlement.
In the two years leading up to his death – even as he orchestrated brutal assaults against victims of clerical sexual abuse and their parents in Chicago -- one after another of Bernardin’s closest clerical friends from his native Diocese of Charleston made the newspapers – all for charges of pedophilia: Father Eugene Condon, Father Justin Goodwin, Father James Robert Owens-Howard, Father Paul F.X. Seitz, in addition to continuing allegations against Hopwood.
It is the Hopwood case that, perhaps, raises the most suspicions about Bernardin.
Hopwood, ordained in June 1951 in Maryknoll, N.Y., began working as a priest in the Charleston Diocese in January 1952. He was incardinated into the Charleston Diocese in November 1954, and appointed assistant chancellor.
Bernardin was ordained April 26, 1952, at St. Joseph's Church in Columbia. In 1954, he was appointed Chancellor of the Diocese by Bishop John Russell, who, himself has been accused of satanism and sexual abuse by the same woman, “Agnes” who accused Bernardin of sexual abuse.
According to one man who was sexually abused by Hopwood in the late 1950s, Bernardin and Hopwood (and the other priests named above) “were buddies.” In an interview with Roman Catholic Faithful shortly after Bernardin’s death, the victim said that one of his co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Hopwood was sodomized by Hopwood and another priest, though that victim didn’t know who the perpetrator was because he had been blindfolded.
He also told Roman Catholic Faithful that in negotiations with the Archdiocese of Chicago lawyers in the efforts to settle the lawsuits without a trial, “Bernardin’s name came up a large number of times,” along with charges that Hopwood had presided over satanic rituals involving animals in the woods where some of his victims were abused.
While Hopwood was resident at the cathedral in Charleston, he was also working at Bishop England High School and acted as chaplain at the Citadel.
Bernardin was named monsignor in 1959, and continued to serve the Archbishop as Chancellor and, after 1966, as an auxiliary bishop in Atlanta, under Archbishop Paul Hallinan, his mentor who was among the most strident and aggressive “Americanists” in the U.S. hierarchy at the time.
Bernardin acquired power rapidly. As his friends back in Charleston continued buggering little boys, Bernardin used his influence, starting in 1968, as General Secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference, to select bishops (many of whom are still ordinaries) who would (to put it charitably) condone and promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle and tolerate the sexual abuse of children by priests.
In December 1994, another of Bernardin’s circle was accused of sexual abuse, Father Paul Seitz, then 67, pastor of Prince of Peace parish in Taylors, S.C.
At the time charges were filed, diocesan spokeswoman Mary Jeffcoat said, the abuse happened while Seitz was stationed in Aiken County 30 years before, in 1964.
In June 1996, another priest in Bernardin’s circle of friends, Father Eugene Condon, then 66, retired from active ministry, three weeks after the 9th Circuit solicitor’s office informed the diocese it was investigating Condon on charges he had sexually abused minor males and exposed them to pornography and alcohol.
In June 1995, Father Justin Goodwin, then 89, was charged with sexual abuse of minor males.
Goodwin had served in the Charleston diocese, which includes all of South Carolina, since 1953. Before that he served in Washington, D.C., New York and North Carolina churches.
Interestingly, he too spent time at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Charleston.
THE OTHER BOYS
Lest we forget, another aspect of the “Bernardin Legacy” was the notorious Rudy Kos case that ran for nearly four years in the Diocese of Dallas.
As the trial evolved involving Kos, who was accused of sexually abusing hundreds of males while serving as a priest in Dallas, it was revealed that two of “Bernardin’s boys” – Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly, OP, of Louisville and Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe – were responsible.
In 1976, Kelly, as assistant general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (who moved to the post after serving as a secretary to the papal nuncio in Washington, Jean Jadot, fraudulently approved the annulment of Kos’ marriage, so that he could enter the Dallas seminary, then under the direction of Father Michael Sheehan, and train for the priesthood.
The annulment Kelly approved, canon lawyer Father Thomas Doyle, OP, explained during the trial proceedings, was patently invalid for at least five reasons: Kos had lied in the evidence he presented; his ex-wife, who claimed that the marriage was never consummated and that her husband was a pedophile, was never interviewed during the process; Kos’ ex-wife was never notified that the annulment process had been initiated; and the Dallas priest who supervised the annulment process in Dallas acted as both judge and defender of the bond – a conflict of interest.
Sheehan, who had served as Bernardin’s “hatchet man” at the NCCB, ordering the resignations of longtime employees when Bernardin was restructuring and reorganizing the conference, accepted Kos into the Dallas seminary, little more than a year after he received his annulment, and less than a year after his predecessor, Monsignor Gerald Hughes, had rejected Kos.
Another Bernardin creation was Bishop Robert N. Lynch of St. Petersburg, who once revealed how, when he was a young man not knowing what to do with his life, was encouraged by Bernardin to enter the priesthood.
He took the advice and enjoyed a great career, moving, from his ordination in May 1978 as a priest of the Archdiocese of Miami, to seminary rector, to general secretary of the NCCB, and bishop of St. Petersburg in 1996.
Other Bernardin creations are Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, a native of Chicago, slated to be the next president of the NCCB; and Archbishop John Vlazny, former seminary rector in Chicago and former bishop of Winona.
Mention must also be made of the dissenter Archbishop John Quinn, of San Francisco, a native of San Diego and close friend and working ally of Bernardin. Bernardin thought so highly of Quinn that when he needed to move Quinn into a bishopric, Oklahoma City, Quinn was made its first archbishop – so that he could have a rank equal to his talents.
Quinn’s reign in San Francisco was marked by numerous scandals involving pedophilia and theft by some of his closest aides.
U.S. Catholics today are the questionable beneficiaries of the Bernardin Legacy, which includes:
* 25 -50 Bishops of Dioceses who owe their positions to the blessings of Bernardin;
* a national episcopal bureaucracy honeycombed with homosexuals and radical feminists. (Two deceased friends of Bernardin are the late Father John Muthig and the late John Willig. Muthig, a former editor at St. Anthony Messenger in Cincinnati, who went on to work at the National Catholic News Service, to the priesthood, and to posts at the United Nations and the Vatican. Muthig, who died young, allegedly of liver cancer, was a Bernardin protégé. The other Bernardin protégé, Willig, died of AIDS after he was exposed as the head of Dignity in Washington, D.C. Willig worked in the NCCB’s finance office, where he had access to all the financial information of America’s Catholic dioceses).
* a 30-year program of obstruction and obfuscation of Roman directives pertaining to education, liturgy, priestly formation, religious practice (altar girls, communion in the hand, etc.).
* a Call To Action agenda and Common Ground initiative which militate against sound Catholic practice, belief, and life.
As Shakespeare said (paraphrased), the good we do is interred with our bones, but the evil goes on and on and on.
It is clear that in the four years since his death, not only did Bernardin leave a legacy in his words and deeds, but in the bishops he helped create who continue the process of ecclesial deconstruction he engineered.
It is not the smoke of Satan which has infiltrated the Church, but the fire of Satan.