I believe we can safely assume by now that virtually all faithful Catholics who are not in deep denial are at least somewhat shell-shocked, especially in light of this year’s explosion of the scandal of Catholic priests molesting boys. (Never mind that The Wanderer knew about it for years, it still came as a shock to those who had lacked the wisdom to avail themselves of this highly accurate source.) The problem is that shell-shock is not the best state of mind from which to try to figure out what needs to be done. For that we need a clear understanding of the nature of the evils we are dealing with, and that is precisely what most still lack. The general tendency is still to compartmentalize, to think in terms of this or that particular problem, to view it in isolation from other problems, then try to come up with a piecemeal solution for it. Paul Likoudis’ wonderful new book, Amchurch Comes Out: The U.S. Bishops, Pedophile Scandals, and the Homosexual Agenda, is about the best effort I have seen so far to remedy that situation. Likoudis assembles masses of material to show that what may seem to be an aggregate of unconnected evils in the post-Vatican II Church are in fact intimately connected, to the point of forming, together, a massive, concerted movement to destroy the last vestiges of the traditional Catholic faith and replace it with an entirely new, and, it could be argued, totalitarian religion. Indeed, it would seem that after all the arguments on the subject, there really is a seamless garment, but not in the way the late Cardinal Bernardin, a major actor in the movement of destruction, was thinking.
Right now, we have public attention here in the United States focused almost exclusively on recent revelations about priestly pedophilia and the failure of our bishops to do anything about it, to the point where, perhaps in the majority of cases, bishops have actually enabled this satanic behavior by moving problem priests to new parishes where they continue to have access to children and where the new parishioners are not even warned. It is tempting, certainly, to isolate this problem and view it principally as something calling for a management solution, like a zero tolerance policy that would laicize all priestly pedophiles. Sadly, our bishops, at their recent meeting, seem to have handled it in that way, refusing even to discuss the connections to so many other things happening in the Church. They in fact failed even to recognize that homosexuality among priests is a component of the problem. That is utter cluelessness (or just plain lying).
The problem today is not just that we have homosexual priests who prey on adolescent boys, appalling though that is. The problem is that we have a whole pattern of activities and institutions that support and enable this and indeed, much other deviant behavior. For instance:
We have seminaries and bishops that welcome homosexual candidates while discouraging normal persons from even applying. That means that we not only end up with many, many homosexual priests, but also that, being the beneficiaries of a kind of affirmative action, homosexuals tend to be a dominant group within the community of priests, a group wielding a great deal of power.
This is reinforced in many dioceses by an apparent policy of giving key jobs and promotions, as well as "plum parishes," to homosexuals. That gives the deviants a power out of proportion to their numbers. In addition, Likoudis brings out the appalling fact that some dioceses with notoriously pro-homosexual bishops even go so far as to recruit homosexual priests from other dioceses where they were not quite so welcome.
I find Likoudis especially insightful in his discussion of the formation of cliques of homosexual priests who have, in effect, formed a "good ole boy" network in the Church to protect their people from either Church discipline or prosecution and to see to it that homosexuals are able to get and keep institutional power in the Church. Likoudis points out that this is really a quite natural development when you have groups of people that have in common their wrongdoing, and need to act together for mutual protection from its consequences. There is also a kind of blackmail network here. When you know someone else has something on you, you are not about to tell the authorities what you know about him.
Certainly, when we look at the way even bishops with a reputation for orthodoxy continue to put up with the shenanigans of homosexuals, we have to suspect that many of them are being blackmailed. Many, many dioceses have incorporated sex education courses into their schools, courses which defy the Magisterium (as expressed, for instance, in the 1995 document The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality), which bombard even very young children with massive doses of quite graphic information not only about normal sexual acts (that would be bad enough) but about perverted sexual behavior. These courses, in addition, brainwash their students, from quite early on, with the belief that homosexual behavior is perfectly normal and even positively good.
Sex education of this kind is, of course, rooted in bizarre theologies, "queer criticism," and similar nonsense which actually maintains that homosexuality is superior to heterosexuality. After all, heterosexuals get all bogged down in having and raising children, while homosexuals are able to pursue a purely spiritual life untrammeled by such concerns. This is, of course, Gnosticism pure and simple. Gnostics throughout history (people like the Manichaeans of St. Augustine’ s time) have tended to reject procreation because it involves us in the material universe, which is evil. At the same time they encourage sexual behavior that does not lead to children. The problem is that Christianity, especially in its Catholic form, is just a little too earthy for such "pure" souls — they want a purely "spiritual" religiosity which saves them from contamination by the material world while at the same time not interfering with their favorite vices.
All of which is of course in turn supported and enabled by the proliferation of occult and New Age ideas and movements in the contemporary Church. Jungian psychology (perhaps the greatest Gnostic system of the last century) has played an enormous role here, teaching people to focus all their spiritual energy on seeking "the god within," while turning away from any notion of a God who is "out there." And if occultism goes far enough, it leads into out and out, explicit Satanism, something the late Malachi Martin was convinced had infected the Catholic priesthood (I hope he was wrong, but would’ t bet the farm on it).
All of these things have converged powerfully in the past couple of generations to create the picture of a group of people who are not Catholic or even Christian but who have hijacked the Catholic Church in the effort to drastically alter it in such a way as to radically transform our whole human relation to God, to the world, to our neighbors, and to ourselves (especially to our bodies), so that we in effect make ourselves gods. This kind of self-deification makes it easy enough to understand the contempt which these exalted souls feel for ordinary people who just do things like have and raise children, work to support them, and so on — people the elites dismiss as "breeders."
Because sexuality is so central to the human person, with his capacity for love which is, indeed, a crucial aspect of the image of God in him, if you can drastically redefine the whole meaning of sexuality you can, in turn, redefine the human person, turning away from the self which stretches out toward the other in self-giving love to the self which seeks only the gratification of its appetites (dressed up as "fulfillment" or "self-actualization"). This is a reduction of the person from a creature capable of the amor Dei (love of God) to one capable only of the amor sui (love of self), to use St. Augustine’s formulation. These reduced selves are easily dominated and controlled by their appetites, hence in the end those who have hijacked the Church are really committed to a totalitarian world, with the great scope it gives to their own libido dominandi.
It is said that the nineteenth century positivist Auguste Comte, founder of the radically secularized religion of humanity, wrote to both the Pope and the superior general of the Society of Jesus, attempting to enlist them in his cause, urging them to use their power to in fact convert the Catholic Church into the church of humanity. I do not imagine the Holy Father was particularly receptive, but it is beginning to appear now that many in the Church since then have been more than happy to take him up on his suggestion.
The expression "Amchurch comes out," in the book title, means not merely that homosexuals in the Church and in the priesthood are "coming out" — it also refers to the fact that the people who have for so long now been working for this transformation and destruction of the Church have come out into the open about what they are doing. They hardly even try to hide it any longer, apparently feeling secure in the belief that no one will do anything about them, a belief which has so far been mostly justified.
I try to avoid getting caught up in conspiracy theories, as if everything that has happened for centuries or millennia could be interpreted, in meticulous detail, as the result of micromanagement of events by the Masons or the Rosicrucians or some such group (or maybe the Jesuits — who knows?). Yet there is no doubt that people do conspire together. People with common interests, common passions, and, as noted above, common sins, do work together to protect one another and to advance the agenda, and may become very powerful. This is what Paul Likoudis is trying to tell us in his book, and he does it masterfully, presenting us with a mountain of evidence to show us that the activities of the hijackers of our Church do indeed form a seamless garment. This is a book which I would strongly recommend that Catholics read as a sort of companion volume to Michael Rose’ s Goodbye! Good Men. Rose’s book brilliantly presents the case that U.S. seminaries have, for some years now, been systematically excluding orthodox, heterosexual candidates while rolling out the red carpet for perverts, thus actually creating the priest shortage which they pretend to lament. Likoudis shows us the rest of the picture.
By helping us to see the unity of the evils which have befallen our Church in these times, Likoudis also helps us to see that only an overall, total reform of the Church, something analogous to the Council of Trent, can really respond to these evils, because they have to be responded to as a whole, not as isolated things that somehow just happened. We have got to do everything in our power to see that the hierarchy gets the message. Someone out there is a Martin Luther, someone who will come along promising to single-handedly reform the Church, but who will, even if his intentions are sound, only succeed in creating a new schism. Sadly, he is quite likely to be dismissed, rather than addressed. Had the hierarchy responded early on to Luther’s challenge, rather than waiting 30 years to begin the process of reform, the split in Christendom might never have occurred, or might have been fixed before it went too far. But sadly, people in power tend to be more afraid of someone rocking the boat than of corruption from within, and hence they will put off reform till they hit bottom. Let us hope we hit bottom soon.
Late in his book, Likoudis makes this remark: "Amchurch has come out. It is now time for real Catholics to say, ‘Get Out!’"
So far, so good, but I am inclined to suggest that it is also time for all of to say, "Begone, Satan!" for that is really what it is about. St. Paul was right. We are not fighting with flesh and blood, but with spiritual powers of evil, and it is time we invoked the name of Christ to drive them out.
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© 2002 George A. Kendall
