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Defend our pope - he is under malicious attack here at FR.

The pope has nothing to fear from FR. BUT, he might take a hard look at the homosexual subculture in the Catholic Church. Apparently, he is unable or unwilling to control it...

Michael Novak on Cardinal Bernard Law & Boston on National Review Online

December
13, 2002, 6:45 p.m.
The
Boston Disease
What
remains after Cardinal Law.

here is a uniquely
tribal quality to Boston, more so than in any other major American city,
even among others in the northeast. Bostonians don't take to outsiders
easily, and don't allow them to become insiders easily, either. And Bostonians
are themselves divided into tribes that to this day seem to mix with one
another as little as necessary. The
Late George Apley and other novels by John P. Marquand dramatized
the feeling quite well, and it hasn't yet entirely faded.
When I first went
to Boston (oh my!) just over 50 years ago, fresh from high school, I recall
visiting the home of a classmate in Quincy and being met at the door by
his very sweet Irish grandmother. Welcoming me warmly she was a little
puzzled by my name. "Novak?" she gently asked, "What sort
of name is that?"
"Slovak,"
I replied in as sprightly as voice as I could muster.
"Oh," she
said thoughtfully. "Well, that's nice, too."
"And you, Mrs.
Sweeney [not her real name]," I countered. "Have you lived your
whole life here in Quincy?"
"Ah, no!"
her eyes flashed merrily. "I was born out west." She added as
a clarifying afterthought: "In Worcester."
I figured out after
a while that I had to explain to people why Boston is called the Hub of
the Universe. The rest of the world is moving.
It so happened that
a few years later, when I was in graduate school at Harvard, my brother
married a young woman from Ireland who had relatives in "southie"
(i.e., south Boston). For the relatives, in those days, Harvard was another
country and spoke another tongue.
By accident, we also
had friends who moved in the circle of the old WASP families, from whom
various governors of the commonwealth had come, and that too was a different
world — banking, investments, an especially interesting veteran of
the CIA with vivid personal adventures overseas, insurance, etc. "Everyone
in Boston votes Republican," one young woman told me with total self-assurance,
not adverting to the total dominance of the Kennedys in Boston politics.
But then I realized she meant "everyone that matters," and in
her frame of reference was being quite accurate.
Others of our friends
were younger Catholic professionals (lawyers, surgeons) in Wellesley and
Newton, which was still another world.
During a season like
Christmas, my wife and I often found ourselves visiting a stunning array
of these enclaves, made poignantly aware by the nuances of jokes and humorous
asides of potential conversational land mines to be avoided. Boston seemed
to me a region of islands, an archipelago of mutually mistrustful rivals.
A fascinating and lovable city, but a little more content in its multiple
insularity than one would have liked. Wouldn't a kind of open meritocracy
have been easier on everybody, without so much reliance on who had which
roots?
One of my teachers,
the beloved David Reisman, warned me more than once about the fierce anti-Catholicism
that seeped from the roots of the ancient trees in Harvard Yard and Boston
Commons, "the ghosts of Puritan Boston." This pervasive anti-papist
feeling was compounded by generations of ethnic rivalry (and not only
on this side of the ocean), and again by monetary differentials, and differences
of manners. Not to put to fine a point upon it, the later arriving Irish
and Italians were looked down upon, and not really liked, by the old-timers.
You can see this genteelly put in one of Emerson's essays, invidiously
describing the faces of the Irish of Boston, as compared with the rosier
faces of London.
The tragic fall of
Cardinal Law has brought all these old memories to the surface. His fall
is tragic because it was through a weakness of his own (a weakness internal
to one of his virtues) that he did himself in. He believed it a bishop's
duty to be a father to his priests, to be especially compassionate to
them, to nurse them along — and he did so, the record shows, most
unwisely, and in the end destructively, both of some of them and of himself,
and of the reputation of the archdiocese. Meanwhile, he lost sight for
far too long of the gaping wounds inflicted on vulnerable young people,
on families, on the confidence and trust of the laity. His priests kept
letting him down, he became preoccupied with the priests, he forgot the
flock they were pledged to have been guarding. Some few shepherds —
but far too many for any one place — ran with the wolves. A bishop
is not merely a company commander, in charge of officers immediately below
him; his foremost duty is to his people, all of them, to protect them
from the wolves and guide them, to instruct them, and to bring them to
holiness.
The reputation for
lax discipline that had started long before Cardinal Law's time did not
compel his immediate attention on his arrival in Boston. In fact, he never
did really, deeply challenge and uproot it. Perhaps he never even diagnosed
it. Perhaps, having peered into it, he gave up, not finding in himself
the Herculean moral strength a real housecleaning would have entailed.
Perhaps he hoped to change it by small steps and gradual degrees.
I have learned from
friends in Boston these days that from the beginning Cardinal Law faced
four huge moral deficits in the Archdiocese of Boston. The first is an
unusually tribal and mutually protective, ranks-drawn-up clergy, circling
around its own three-generation tradition of moral fault; a pattern of
"weakness" or "corruption" in some few, but covered
over and unpoliced by the others, in a long-standing and defensive posture.
The second is a 40-year
period of massive moral dissent from Catholic moral teaching, especially
in regard to sexual and "gender" questions, in the principal
Catholic institutions of learning in Boston, including conspicuously Boston
College and the (Jesuit) Weston School of Theology. This fairly systematic
dissent, through which some have boldly called the theology of Pope John
Paul II (and Paul VI before him) wrong, mistaken, and based on untruths,
has had the inevitable effect of weakening the sense of right and wrong
in those faced with severe sexual temptations. It is hard enough to show
fidelity when right and wrong are clear. But in the mists and fogs of
inner uncertainty, driven rapidly ahead by passion, one most easily jumps
the curb, smashes into trees, plunges over cliffs.
Third is a laity
in very large numbers living in open dissent and rebellion, and encouraged
in this by many clerical voices — even among their own pastors —
first on many small things but gradually on many increasingly large things,
too. In fact, one can hardly be certain, listening to them parade their
utterly self-confident convictions, why they don't become Congregationalists
(and elect their own pastors), or Baptists, or Unitarians, or, at least
Episcopalians. They seem to abhor the most-distinctive features of the
Catholic Church, most notably full communion with Peter, the bishop of
Rome. They seem embarrassed also by her traditional and not-at-all-new
teachings of embodied personhood, the physical/sacramental nature of reality,
the full and rich sexuality of Catholic teaching (expressed in so many
great works of literature, painting, and music down the ages), the nature
of matrimony, and most obviously the tradition of celibacy and chastity
as high ideals affecting the lives of all. Does it go without saying that
the First Family of Catholicism in Massachusetts is led by Senator Kennedy,
and that his open and unrebuked dissents down the years have taken a great
public toll on the faith of others?
Finally, least significant
but not unreal, the aforementioned bitter and unrelenting anti-Catholicism
of Boston's elites and the media over which they seem to have almost total
control. To be sure, these elites are no longer purely, or even mostly,
Brahmin. On the contrary, liberals of all stripes stand upon the heights,
looking down upon the Church they find most contemptible, that lowly stumbling
block to their own ambitions. Included in their number, alas, is a fairly
large number of anti-Catholic Catholics.
And the worst thing
about the recent, rushed disclosures of the sins of the Catholic Church
of Boston is that they have dramatically verified the darkest Maria Monk
suspicions of Boston's oldest elites, concerning the inexorability of
Catholic moral corruption.
I will leave for
another time any mention of the McCarthyism in the legal procedures involved
in forcing these revelations out into public for public delectation (calling
to mind the practice of public humiliation in the stockades in the Commons
of old). These procedures, many of them gross violations of due process,
Boston's elite have here tolerated, because aimed at the Catholic Church.
They would never tolerate these abuses were their own interests threatened.
I leave these to the conscience of the Boston legal community, which will
one day pay for these precedents.
Providentially, it
is better for the Catholic community that the worst abuses come to light
now, all at once, so that no one will ever doubt how bad things have been,
or fail to gauge their exact dimensions. One day, comparisons will be
made with other institutions in Boston and elsewhere. Even if many recent
procedures have been unjust, still, this is a wound that the Catholic
community gave itself. It can be blamed on no one else.
Some years ago, a
priest called me aside after one of my lectures in the Northeast and begged
me to write something about the spread of homosexual abuses of young men
by priests. He described it as a scourge, covered over and protected by
those priests who knew better but were uncertain of being backed up by
their bishops, if they reported their confreres. I was stricken by his
remarks. I did not doubt him, but I did not have the evidence he seemed
to have. All I had was hearsay. I couldn't see how to proceed.
My interlocutor was
right. Something needed to be done. I left it for others.
Do you agree with
me, that we all have reason to stand accused in our own consciences for
our role in abetting, and refusing to confront, the "sexual revolution"
of the last 40 years? It was not only the Catholic clergy that was at
fault. So also were we, the laity.
May God have mercy
on us all.

BUT, he might take a hard look at the homosexual subculture in the Catholic Church. Apparently, he is unable or unwilling to control it...

I believe this is due to his diminished capacities ... I pray the next pope will take a firm stand against the homosexual subculture and also the budding feminist subculture in the Church. I am encouraged by the stand taken by Cardinal Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, and his efforts to purge the homsexuals from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. The news media do not mention him, but I do every chance I get.

I believe Cardinal Bernard Law is evil.

How he stayed in a position of power as long as he did is sick. Do you remember the comment about how "you treat the least...".

What if several priest had taken the Pope into a room and tortured him to the point that his life became a nightmare for years ... and then Cardinal Law covered for the monsters and worked so they could continue doing damage to the Pope and others? Well, that's what was allowed and it was worse than doing it to the Pope because it was done to children -- the most innocent among us.

People are not judged on how they treat the powerful, the wealthy or the famous, but how they treat the least among us.

Cardinal Law was evil and so were the "priests" who raped children, and the Catholics who let this go on and on and on. It's so sick.

I believe Cardinal Bernard Law is evil.

How he stayed in a position of power as long as he did is sick. Do you remember the comment about how "you treat the least...".

What if several priest had taken the Pope into a room and tortured him to the point that his life became a nightmare for years ... and then Cardinal Law covered for the monsters and worked so they could continue doing damage to the Pope and others? Well, that's what was allowed and it was worse than doing it to the Pope because it was done to children -- the most innocent among us.

People are not judged on how they treat the powerful, the wealthy or the famous, but how they treat the least among us.

Cardinal Law was evil and so were the "priests" who raped children, and the Catholics who let this go on and on and on. It's so sick.