Posted on 07/30/2025 7:31:24 PM PDT by ebb tide
Many articles have appeared recently about Sacred Heart Seminary faculty members who were fired by Detroit Archbishop Edward Weisenburger. Aware of Weisenburger’s record of covering up sex abuse which helps prelates get promoted in a Church controlled by the Lavender Mafia, I mentioned him in a February 14, 2025, article, “Pope and Bishops Have No Moral Credibility to Confront Trump.” I maintained, “The appointment of anti-border patrol Tucson Bishop Edward Weisenburger to the Archdiocese of Detroit is remarkably similar to the appointment of San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy to the Archdiocese of Washington. Both pro-LGBTQ prelates have a history of covering up sexual abuse, and both endorse Francis’ globalist open borders agenda in support of illegal immigration.”
Just as most gays and lesbians are pro-abortion in keeping with their belief that “LGBT Rights and Abortion Rights Are Inseparable,” so too are most closeted Catholic homosexual bishops inclined to see pro-life, pro-family Catholics who do not condone homosexuality as threats to the implementation of declarations like Fiducia Supplicans that involves the blessing of same-sex couples. Catholics who attend the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) are not inclined to view homosexual relations as moral and natural as the life-giving love between a husband and wife. Consequently, might this explain why Weisenburger, along with prelates like pro-LGBTQ Cardinals Robert McElroy, Blase Cupich, and others, have imposed limits on the celebration of the TLM?
Based on his past performance, one may surmise that Weisenburger may want his seminarians taught by faculty members who promote documents like Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Suplicans, while also supporting policies like those at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, CA, where seminary officials do not screen out homosexuals.
As long as the Catholic Church continues to ordain homosexuals whose orientation affects their behavior (both sexual and non-sexual), teaching, and ministry, and as long as Pope Leo XIV, with the advice of pro-LGBTQ Cardinals Blase Cupich and Joseph Tobin who serve on the Dicastery for Bishops, continues to appoint bishops like Weisenburger to Detroit, Robert Casey to Cincinnati, and Jeffrey Grob to Milwaukee, we can expect to see the recruitment, ordination, and promotion of more homosexual clerics, as well as the firing of more seminary staff members like Ralph Martin, Eduardo Echiverria, and Ed Peters who are faithful to the doctrinal and moral teachings of the Catholic Church.
For years heterosexually oriented seminarians like Vincent DeGeorge, Karl Discher, Anthony Gorgia, John Monaco, Stephen Parisi, Timothy Passow, and others, either resigned or were dismissed for reporting sexual predation and homosexual misconduct. Many seminarians, who witnessed this unjust treatment, felt that if they kept their mouths shut, they could get ordained, and “live happily ever after.” It seems that this doesn’t always happen when one reads comments like the following in response to “Clerical Homosexuality 101 for Catholics:”
“In the last few years in my diocese and adjoining ones, several younger priests ordained less than 10 years have requested leave from ministry for discernment, and have eventually discerned out of the priesthood to get married. One whole ordination class has been eviscerated.”
Most Catholics don’t realize the challenges straight priests face in an environment dominated by homosexual clergy. Because heterosexual priests receive little fraternal support from homosexual bishops and priests, and unless they have family members nearby or have other straight priest friends with whom they interact regularly, they can be prone to loneliness which can lead them to leave the priesthood or escape through addictive behaviors (e.g., alcohol, drugs, pornography, sex). This problem is even worse today than it was when I addressed it in a 2001 article entitled. “Home Alone in the Priesthood.”
Many homosexual priests experience support from their bishop and other gay priests with whom they may be emotionally and/or sexually involved. In cases where there are two priests assigned to a particular parish, bishops have been known to assign two homosexual priests who are “close friends” to live together as happened in the case of Monsignors John Renken and Kenneth Steffen, co-pastors at St. James Church in Riverton, Illinois.
Not all homosexual priests become sexually involved with other priests. A homosexual priest who was “turned” after being sexually abused when he was a Catholic high school student, was ordained for the Diocese of Charleston where he became a pastor. In time he became sexually involved with a man in the area with whom he entered into a same-sex marriage. When he felt hypocritical and told his bishop about the double life he was living, he said his bishop congratulated him on his “marriage” and told him to keep his relationship very private. Later, when he returned to his bishop and demanded that the priest who abused him be removed from ministry, he said the bishop said, “Father, did you just tell me that you ‘married’ a man?” The priest and his partner left South Carolina and moved to Canada where they now live.
Most Catholics fail to realize how closeted homosexuals have used the celibacy requirement to get their parishioners to think they are heterosexuals who sacrificed having a wife and children to follow Christ. Actually, the most outspoken supporters of the celibacy requirement are homosexual clergy who are known to violate it far more than heterosexual clergy. This is logical when one considers the fact that straight men have an average of 7.2 lifetime sex partners, while gay men average 96 sex partners in a lifetime.
One reader of my column wrote: “When I was doing my medical training….the Centers for Disease Control did epidemiology studies on the [gay] lifestyle….They found…the vast majority participate in group sex….Why would we expect gay seminarians, priests, bishops, and cardinals to be any different?”
In response to his comment, I wrote: “You are correct. A Polish Bishop resigned in October 2023 after an orgy was reported in his diocese at which a gay sex worker almost died. Even before a drug-fueled gay orgy was reported in the Vatican in June 2017, Stephen Brady, the President of The Roman Catholic Faithful, informed the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo Higuera, that a gay orgy took place in December 2004 at the episcopal residence of the Bishop of Springfield in Illinois.” The orgy involving then-Bishop George Lucas, Orange Bishop Kevin Vann, former North American College rector, Father Peter Harman, and other clergy, seminarians, and laymen, was covered up by a whitewashed 2006 internal investigation that employed a fraudulent polygraph test arranged by Lucas’ defense attorney designed to discredit the primary witness of the orgy. This is documented in a report entitled, “Clerical Abuse and Misconduct: Diocese of Springfield in Illinois.”
Bishops who cover up sexual predation and homosexual misconduct do not want their priests, or seminary faculty members, addressing these problems, especially with the faithful or seminarians. Weisenburger was rewarded for mishandling abuse cases in Oklahoma City, Salinas, and Tucson by being made the Archbishop of Detroit, just as Cardinal McElroy was promoted and made the Archbishop of Washington after covering up abuse in San Diego. If McElroy is retaining Father Carter Griffin and Father Adam Park who are accused of preying on seminarians, then why should we be surprised that Weisenburger has dismissed influential seminary faculty members known for their defense of perennial Church teachings including those which view homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered” and contrary to the natural law?
Gene Thomas Gomulka is a sexual abuse victims’ advocate, investigative reporter, and screenwriter. A former Navy (O6) Captain/Chaplain, seminary instructor, and diocesan Respect Life Director, Gomulka was ordained a priest for the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and later made a Prelate of Honor (Monsignor) by St. John Paul II. Email him at msgr.investigations@gmail.com.
Ping
Oysitr,
Weisenberger, Cupich, McElroy, Tobin, Fernandez, etc. were all promoted to their current positions by your hero, the Jesuit pope, whom you have claimed is already in Heaven.
Equally revealing is a look at Cardinal Bergoglio’s close associates in the Buenos Aires episcopate. The first to consider is Juan Carlos Maccarone, whom Bergoglio made an auxiliary bishop at the beginning of his tenure, in 1999. In 2005, Maccarone was dismissed from the episcopate by Pope Benedict after he was filmed having sexual relations with a homosexual prostitute in the sacristy of his cathedral. Yet Cardinal Bergoglio publicly defended him, asserting that the filming was a setup to bring the bishop down because of his left-wing political commitment. Maccarone, it is worth noting, declared that everyone was aware of his homosexual activities and he had been appointed bishop regardless of them.
Another friend and protégé of Cardinal Bergoglio was Joaquín Mariano Sucunza, whom he consecrated auxiliary bishop in 2000 although he knew that Sucunza had been cited in a divorce case as the lover of a married woman, whose husband accused him of having destroyed their marriage [6]. Bishop Sucunza has continued ever since as auxiliary and was indeed appointed by Pope Francis as temporary administrator of the archdiocese in 2013 after Bergoglio’s own elevation to the papacy.
No offense has been more damaging to bishops in recent years than the accusation of not having acted with diligence against priests suspected of sexually abusing children. Several bishops have had their careers destroyed over this issue, not always in cases of obvious culpability. Pope Francis himself proclaimed a “zero tolerance” policy in this area and supposedly introduced a new reign of transparency. Yet if we look into it, we find that his own past career is studded with episodes deserving fully as much scrutiny as those that have brought other prelates down.
The first case to be noticed is that of the priest Rubén Pardo, who was reported to an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 2002 for having invited a fifteen-year-old boy to his house and sexually abused him in bed. The mother of the boy had great difficulty in getting the ecclesiastical authorities to admit the case; she considered that Cardinal Bergoglio was protecting the guilty priest and was indignant at his giving him lodging in a diocesan residence. She complained that when she tried to speak to the cardinal at the archiepiscopal residence, she was ejected by the security staff. The priest died of AIDS in 2005; in 2013, a Buenos Aires court obliged the Catholic Church to pay the family compensation for the harm they had suffered. The mother’s opinion on the handling of the case was: “Bergoglio’s commitment is just talk.” (Ese es el compromiso de Bergoglio: de la boca para fuera) [7].
Another instructive case is that of Father Julio Grassi, who was convicted in 2009 of sexually abusing a teenage boy [8]. What surprises in this case is the exceptional efforts the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, under the chairmanship of Cardinal Bergoglio, devoted to getting Father Grassi cleared, commissioning a document of 2,600 pages for the purpose. It was submitted to the judges after Grassi’s conviction but before they had given sentence and was described by the attorney Juan Pablo Gallego as “a scandalous instance of lobbying and exerting pressure on the Court.”
Let us not deny the importance of defending innocent people against false accusations, but we are not left with the impression of a prelate with a “zero tolerance” record against sexual abuse. Perhaps more significant is a remark by Cardinal Bergoglio to Rabbi Abraham Skorka, published in 2010, a year after Father Grassi’s conviction, that cases of clerical sexual abuse “had never arisen” in his diocese [9]. It is an example of the characteristic habit of Jorge Bergoglio of disposing of inconvenient facts by denying their existence.
Another example of this foible is provided by the father of a pupil at the Jesuit school in Buenos Aires where Bergoglio had taught as a young man in the 1960s. Forty years later, when Bergoglio was cardinal-archbishop, that father was told by his son that the chaplain of the school had indecently propositioned him in the confessional. He reported the case to the cardinal and was shocked to find that he took no action, the response of Bergoglio that we find time and again in the face of misconduct of all kinds. Shortly afterward, the father was astonished to hear Cardinal Bergoglio, replying to a question in a meeting of parents of the school, declare that the problem of sexual abuse and of homosexual clergy was virtually nonexistent in his diocese.
In the light of these facts, the recent revelations about Pope Francis’s complicity in the cover-ups of sexual abuse in the United States fall easily into place. It is entirely in the character of a man who throughout his career had shown complete indifference to accusations of clerical corruption when they came to his notice. When we consider his promotions of Bishop Maccarone and Bishop Sucunza, it comes as no surprise that he was a friend of Cardinal McCarrick, who, in the years before Bergoglio’s election as pope, had already been disciplined by Pope Benedict for his widespread molestation of boys and young men but who was nevertheless able to play an influential role in Bergoglio’s election. It is also completely in character that, on becoming pope, he should have taken as his leading allies prelates such as Cardinal Danneels, who was known to have covered up child abuse in Belgium, and Cardinal Wuerl, whose role in the United States proves to have been equally murky.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.