I dunno.
Posted on 04/04/2002 9:08:20 PM PST by churchillbuff
The Catholic Church's Watergate
This has nothing to do with anti-Catholicism because the Catholic Church is wholly to blame, says William Donohue
Interview by Deborah Caldwell
William Donohue is the president of the Catholic League, a 350,000-member organization well-known for going toe-to-toe with the media for anti-Catholic bias. Voluble and opinionated, Donohue delights in sparring with his many critics. These days, he says he's surprised even himself with his vehement anger at the church he normally loves to defend. He explains why, and pronounces his cure for American Catholicism's ailments, in this interview.
How important is this crisis to the church?
This is the Catholic Church’s Watergate, and these wounds are entirely self-inflicted. This has nothing to do with anti-Catholicism in the media or anyplace else. The Catholic Church is wholly to blame for this dereliction of duty, the collapse of standards. And I don’t think it’s any mistake as a believing, practicing Catholic that this series of events unfolded during Lent. I believe Christ gave the Catholic Church a huge cross, one that it has justly earned. And I believe that while the cross is a symbol of death, it is also a symbol of resurrection and redemption. I believe the Catholic Church will in the long run come out of this for the better, after it faces up to the crisis. It has yet to face up to the crisis. But it’s going to be forced to face up to it.
How will it be forced?
Lay people will force them to. Let me be specific. In the Bronx recently, a Father Gentile was sent off to a parish in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. Word got out he had been previously involved in a sex abuse scandal. The parish had contacted the Archdiocese and got nowhere. So they started pressing it themselves with petitions and flyers and they got it out.
If you pick up Newsday (April 2), a priest whom I know personally, Father Brian McKeon, was let go in November, because he was a serial pedophile. Now why was he let go? Because after some parents had complained and the dioc of Rockville center did nothing, one of the parents got so angry--and this is after he’d been sent off to Canada to get treatment and come back to Long Island, and was working in Nassau Hospital and doing work in parishes, a parent put over 100 fliers on people's windshields in the parking lot of Nassau University Hospital, saying the man is a pedophile and the diocese is doing nothing. And after that he was let go.
You’re going to see lay participation like this all over the United States. At the end of the day, it won’t matter if the bishop wants to move with alacrity, because he’ll be forced to.
And the media did a very good job of outing a Father Vollmer on Long Island. The day after he is outed, we see steps taken to release him. Between the media and lay Catholics, once they get word there’s a problem here, the day is gone when people are going to sit back and feel sorry for the priest. One of the fundamental problems with the clerics in the United States is an astounding lack of courage. They’ve gone soft. They’ve bought into the therapeutic movement. They flip-flopped 180 degrees from the rigidity of the Catholic Church of the 1950s and 60s to being kinder and gentler to such an extent that anything that was judgmental was wrong, they downplayed discussions of sin and hell. Everyone was to be loved. Anybody with a malady can be cured. We can save people. While there are obvious kernels of truth and goodness to what I’m saying here, it’s also true that if you make that the mainstay of your philosophy, where feelings triumph over reason, and where you don’t have the courage of your convictions to say this guy has to go...Even (a monsignor) who knew Father McKeown had problems, said, “Probably in hindsight I should have been more participatory." Probably? So he’s still not sure. There’s no courage there to make the tough decisions.
That kind of unmanliness is deeply ingrained in the Catholic Church. But you can find someone who is friendly and affable and at the same time accountable. I know many priests like that.
And here’s another problem. Too many of the bishops treated this problem of sexual abuse as being morally analogous to a priest who might have had a drinking problem. If a priest has a drinking problem, you can put the poor devil in the tank for a month and let him clean up his act and you can bring him back, because most of the damage has been done to himself. But this is a very serious crime. This is evil. And treated as something other than evil is moral delinquency.
I do think letting priests marry would bring more real men into the priesthood. And the priest shortage would ease - so the pressure to retain problem priests would also ease.
What is, by the way, the current Vatican view of homosexuality? It was a sin, at least when I was a boy, and now it is apparently required behavior.
This is so true. How else can you logically explain that more adults were baptized at our Catholic Church this year? The fact is, you can't.
Conversion is an 'inside job', and it is happening everywhere.
I dunno.
It certainly is a huge turn off for sissies who can't keep it inside their pants.
This is what I keep saying. The predatory homosexual exploitation can only continue as long as the bishops aren't man enough to give the pervs the axe. This "Give him another chance, he's really a good boy at heart." stuff is soft-hearted, motherly crap.
By the way, real men CAN be celibate and give their lives to God.
I do think letting priests marry would bring more real men into the priesthood. And the priest shortage would ease - so the pressure to retain problem priests would also ease.
One of the biggest disorders among society these days is a completely distorted view of ourselves and our sexuality. We have been sold an idea that humans are nothing more than animals who can't control our behavior, and trying to do so is the real problem. Almost the whole world has bought in to this idea, and obviously some in the Church have as well. We now have epidemic STDs, unwed pregnancies, abortion, AIDS, even South African child rape, and the list goes on. To change the policy on celibacy would be a capitulation to the idea that human beings are animals with no will. It will do nothing to cure the ills of society, and it will confirm that those problems can't be cured.
What would help the Church and the world today, is for the Church to reaffirm the value of celibacy, and embrace it boldly and proudly, even radically. Every priest that succeeds in his vocation, with God's help and his own will, proves that human minds can control our bodies, that we are reasoning beings, and that the problems plaguing our world today are curable. Can an adulterer, for instance, even in his own mind, claim that a priest is holding the man to an impossible higher standard than the priest is successfully holding to himself? Compared to celibacy, fidelity to one's wife is easy.
A celibate priest is a courageous man, who should be publicly encouraged and supported by Catholics and society as a whole for his act of self sacrifice.
A celibate priest is a courageous man, who should be publicly encouraged and supported by Catholics and society as a whole for his act of self sacrifice.
AMEN, Brother. You're right on the mark!!!!! We need to stand up for the Catholic Faith that teaches what these wayward priests are doing is wrong, as did the Assemblies of God stand up for the faith when their big name preachers Jimmy Swaggert and James Bakker fell to sin in the 80's.
Stand Up, Catholic Christians; defend your faith and your Priests who have not fallen. Pray for those Priests who have fallen.
Do not fault the Church founded by Christ; fault those who may have fallen, punish those who may have defiled the Bride of Christ. But, do not abandon her in the time of need.
I don't know. But Belief net is notorius for presenting politically correct religion, including peter jenning's "Jesus". Is this the entire interview, for example? And why did he talk with a notoriously anti Christian site about church policy?
Watergate is not the comparison. I always thought Thomas a Becket was the story: Using the sins of priests to destroy the political independence of a church that opposed certain government policies.
For an unquestionably Catholic view, see The Shame of the Shepherds. Crisis is an orthodox Catholic magazine; this article won't be on its website until next month (like many small publications, it doesn't put the current issue on its website).
Very, very perceptive. Pedophilia and homosexuality are definitely serious problems in the Church right now, mainly because of the replacement of doctrine by psychobabble, but I think the interest of the Press in this does not arise from its concern for Catholics (or even children).
I remember once it was revealed exactly how many people employed by the NYC public school system, some in the classroom and some in administrative positions, were thought to have a documented history (i.e., arrests) of pedophilic behavior. There was a minor stir - and then, silence, broken only by the occasional newspaper article about some individual teacher who had gotten nabbed while assaulting a child. In other words, the institution was not attacked, even though its behavior was almost identical to that of the Church. The school system didn't do background checks, ignored complaints, shuffled offenders from one place to another, and finally, if really forced to do so, took them out of the classrooms - but assigned them to administrative jobs and did not fire them.
The situation in the Catholic Church is terrible, and its response has been miserably lacking. But in many cases, that's not what is behind this sudden wave of interest.
Strangely enough, however, I think it will backfire. I think there will be a real clean-up, and many of the liberals - who paradoxically supported both the policies that put these guys in place and now support the attempt to destroy the Church through them - will start to see some genuine opposition. Maybe they've overplayed their hand.
Donahue is dreaming. He thinks it's the solution for the church, that citizens putting flyers on cars is the answer. He can't make the tough decision...he is in effect enabling the CRIMINAL. These SEXUAL PREDATORS need to be prosecuted and jailed, his brethren need to be charged with harboring terrorists, and he needs to quit mentally harboring criminals with his "blue smoke and mirrors" solution. The only thing that stops criminals is incarceration or death.
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