Posted on 07/19/2002 4:57:55 PM PDT by Polycarp
Comments?: editor@DioceseReport.com
July 19, 2002
Amchurch Comes Out: The U.S. Bishops, Pedophile Scandals and the Homosexual Agenda.
Author: Likoudis, Paul.
Publisher: The Roman Catholic Faithful, 2002.
“I would like you to read my book, let me know what you think.” It was a brief phone call, and a simple request. I must tell you, I did not see what was coming at all.
Later that afternoon I downloaded the file and printed out the text of the book, punching holes in the pages and binding them in a ring binder. It was a huge thing, a daunting read printed out in hundreds of pages as it sat there on my desk, and the decision to put of starting it until the next day was an easy one. As it turned out, it was a wise one as well, for had I started in that evening I would have been reading all night. Paul Likoudis’ book “Amchurch Comes Out: The U.S. Bishops, Pedophile Scandals and the Homosexual Agenda” is not the sort of book one closes until one has finished it, and once one has finished, it does not go up on the shelf; it demands another look-through, if not another thorough reading.
Here, a caveat to the reader. When I had finished, I phoned Paul and told him that I had liked it very much, and what I had liked about it. When I was done, he said, “Good. Glad to hear it. Write the Foreword.” And, after a moment of silence, I said, “Well, I never really wanted to be a monsignor anyway.” And -- not for the first time, by any means -- he and I shared a long, ironic laugh. The reader is forewarned, therefore: this is not a proper book review, as I’ve already done the Foreword and am not an unbiased reviewer. It’s just one of my usual rants.
I was still in the college seminary when a remarkable book came out, in the wake of the election of Pope John Paul II. Msgr George Kelly chose the right moment for “The Battle for the American Church,” a season of renewed hope for those who had grieved at the rampaging dissent sweeping through the Church in the latter years of Paul VI. Regnery published it in an elegant hardcover edition, with the prow of a Viking ship on the front cover. The book was a call to arms with the election of the new Pope, the announcement of a moment of decision, and a careful description of the state of the Church in 1979. Msgr Kelly devoted each chapter to an aspect of the situation: the battle for the liturgy, the family, the seminaries, religious life, Catholic higher education, catechetics. Copiously footnoted with references to books, newspaper articles and other sources, it was an impressive sketch of the various facets of an institution adrift, of a challenge to be faced.
As vividly as I remember that season of hope, I am all the more aware of the sad contrast with today. Twenty-three years later, one must look back at the intervening years as a time when, by every measurable standard, the institutional vitality of our Church has continued to decline. Initiatives and directives from the Holy See and even from the Holy Father himself have not been missing, but neither have they been effective.
These past four decades have been quite a ride. We went through a liturgical reform which was to have renewed the Church; a sixty percent decline in Mass attendance over thirty years resulted. There was a catechetical revolution, myriad new textbooks, methods, programs and approaches replacing the tried and true Catechism: forty years later religious ignorance abounds to such an extent that two-thirds of Mass-going Catholics cannot identify the Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist when it is presented to them. The Religious communities which were such a vibrant part of the Catholic scene before the Council underwent “renewal” and have been staggering towards the grave ever since. Even if one were willing to concede that the Catholic Church of the 1940s and 1950s could not possibly have been as solid as it had seemed given the turmoil which swept through it beginning in the 1960s, the turmoil and decline since the Council has been stunning, and there has been an unfathomable aspect to it as well: the aspect of the denial of reality. Why has it been that the leadership of the American Church has stubbornly continued to speak and act as though we were in an age of renewal even in the face of this disaster? Why is it that, even after forty years, there has not been an attempt at an honest, thorough re-assessment of the path we have trod?
And how to explain the fact that, although the details of the situation were so clear back in 1979 that Msgr Kelly’s book could be written, things have only deteriorated since? Why is it that every intervention and directive issued by the Holy Father or the Holy See for the correcting of the situation has been without effect? Can it be that, carefully as Msgr Kelly chronicled the problems, there is something far deeper wrong with the Church -- that as serious as were the irregularities and scandals he described, they were but the symptom of something far more serious?
Over the course of a couple of weeks, as I prepared to write the Foreword Paul had requested, I re-read the draft of the book several times, and I was conscious of two distinct reactions within myself. On the one hand, it was genuinely appalling to see the material he had assembled. For page after page, he recounts irregularity after irregularity, scandal after scandal occurring in different parts of the American Church over the last fifty years. To find such a chronicle assembled between two covers of a book is a disturbing experience.
But on the other hand, there was a reaction even more disturbing -- recognition. Most of this book cannot be classified as expose, because most of the stories set forth here are already known, and have been for years. They have all appeared in print. Paul relies upon his own reporting in his years as news editor of the Wanderer, and he relies upon the reporting in secular and church media. I have been a Wanderer reader for decades, and most of these stories I had seen before. As appalling as the stories are, as disturbing as it is to see them gathered in one place, far more appalling is it to realize that these things have all been known, have seen the light of day for years, even decades. And nothing has been done.
What sort of story does the reader encounter here?
One reads, for example, of the Bishop who agreeably gave a professor of a secular university an absolutely free hand to come into the Catholic elementary schools of his diocese and conduct a sexuality study designed to modify the children’s attitudes towards homosexuality, with a view towards studying the impact this would have on their parents. In the grant proposal the professor presented to the National Institutes of Health, he stressed that this was a valuable and unique opportunity, as he was being provided with access to a “hitherto shielded sample” of the population (Catholic elementary school children!!), and given “the freedom to employ treatments as progressive as any used anywhere in the country, in any type of school system, public or parochial.” And he was quite correct -- in fact, the study he would carry out would have been illegal in the state’s public schools.
Yet the diocesan bishop had committed himself not only to allowing the program to run its full three-year course, but to exercising no veto over the subject matter. Parents, it soon became clear, had at best the vaguest idea of the content of this program, which had been presented as an “AIDS curriculum.” As a result, eighth graders were learning about anal sex and bestiality in their Catholic school classrooms! And, as the full dimensions of the situation dawned on the parents, they found the diocese extremely unwilling to listen to their objections.
Now, undoubtedly, that story will sound utterly bizarre to you, and you will be thinking, “But, good Lord, that must be a total aberration.” This is why you need to read “Amchurch Comes Out.” I believe that, in its two hundred sixty pages, Paul has offered a compelling, credible answer to the mystery of the past forty years. Why have the multiple crises in the Church’s life been so studiously ignored? Why have laity so often found it impossible to obtain a hearing from the hierarchy over abuses? What is really wrong here?
The answer Paul offers confirms the suspicion that the abuses chronicled by Msgr Kelly in 1979 were indeed merely symptoms, not the disease. The disease is much deeper.
Paul contends that in the decade from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, there were promoted to the episcopate and other leadership positions within the Church a number of highly unsuitable candidates, unsuitable because of their perverse sexuality. From the mid-1960s on, the establishment of the bishops’ conference and the mushrooming growth of its bureaucracy offered all the more opportunity for such persons to move into administrative positions. Once entrenched, these men naturally sought to further the careers of others of like mind, and furthered as well a revolution in sexual attitudes which most Catholics never saw coming. In 1992, Paul Likoudis coined the phrase, “Amchurch,” as a shorthand referring to a deeply entrenched, dissident faction within the American Church’s hierarchy and its bureaucracy. This book describes how Amchurch ‘came out.’
Those whose immediate reaction to this thesis is to dismiss it need to stop and consider carefully what we have been through in these five decades. Why is it that it was so important to completely revamp religious instruction, the liturgy, the structures of Religious life, and then, when the experimentation had disastrous results, why was no attempt made to correct the situation?
As I was writing the preface to “Amchurch Comes Out,” a lay theologian offered a thought on this subject which I found so illuminating in its simplicity, I asked his permission to quote him. He said, “Years of watching the situation carefully have convinced me that it really IS all about sexual autonomy. People don’t turn institutions upside down because they’d rather hear the Mass in English. You can do that without destroying buildings and the structure of religious life, and catechesis. You turn institutions upside down to support a ‘complete change in teleological purpose’ in your life -- and eliminate unpleasant reminders that maybe your new purpose, sexual autonomy, isn’t such a great idea.”
And the more I thought about it, the more sense that made. Perhaps you’d prefer to say simply, “personal autonomy,” rather than “sexual autonomy” -- although you might revisit that after reading Paul’s book. But I think my theologian friend hit a bull’s-eye. If sexual autonomy is one’s goal, one will not want the traditional Mass as the central symbol of the Faith, for the very form it takes will always seem a reproach: one will want a pliable liturgy, something one can shape to one’s whims. One will obviously want to deconstruct Religious Life as well, that living image of the words of the Lord Jesus, “Seek first the Kingdom of God.” And as for catechesis: well, why else would one promulgate religion textbooks that avoided subjects such as commandments, precepts of the Church, original sin; why else would one find situation ethics attractive -- unless one were anxious to usher in a new religion, one much more amenable to one’s whims.
The elimination of everything which reproaches our constant search for gratification goes a long way to explaining the postconciliar crises.
Paul’s book is the most comprehensive, compelling and plausible explanation for the battering of our Catholic Church over these forty years. It is a disturbing interpretation of disturbing facts, but those who love the Church need to consider these things. As copiously illustrated as it is with examples of the perverse Amchurch agenda -- incidents which grew ever more brazen as the years passed -- the book offers a still greater service by tracing the interconnected clerical careers of the architects of this ecclesiastical train wreck.
As troubling as the public finds the stories of priests accused of sexual abuse, many are unaware of the extent to which such incidents have directly touched the American hierarchy. In recent years, we have seen the Archbishops of Atlanta and Santa Fe resign their sees due to affairs with women; two bishops of Palm Beach in succession resign under accusation of having abused young men; a bishop in Santa Rosa CA resign after credible accusations of having sexually abused one of his priests, and having bankrupted his diocese; a bishop in Springfield IL resign under accusations of homosexual promiscuity; an auxiliary bishop of New York die of AIDS after years of intermittent drug rehab; another auxiliary bishop of New York resign after admitting to affairs with women; an Archbishop of Milwaukee resign suddenly after a $450,000 payoff to a younger man came to light; a bishop of St Petersburg concede that a $100,000 settlement was made to an employee who had accused him of sexual harassment (and that bishop is still in office). I typed these cases out from memory, without referring to notes; obviously, there are others.
If you stop for a few moments and quietly ponder the fact that the percentage of bishops whose names have been linked with sexual incidents is appreciably larger than the percentage of priests, it begins to seem less mysterious that so many sexual offenders in the priesthood were tolerated by their bishops.
And, with all of these things to worry about, there remains a fact about which I am convinced we cannot possibly pray, think, and speak too much: the clergy sexual abuse problem is not an isolated cross we bear. We don’t have ONE crisis: we have at least TWELVE of the damned things, and we have had them for FORTY YEARS, and no one seems to be doing a blessed thing about them. Our Liturgy is a risible shambles in most places; our catechesis woefully inadequate; religious life, seminary formation, family life, moral theology, scriptural studies... Crisis after crisis after crisis. Why is it that, over the years, the persistent cry of the Faithful about these things has gone unheeded?
The current state of the Catholic Church in the United States of America is rendered much less mysterious by a careful reading and pondering of this book, by which Paul Likoudis has rendered a signal service to us all. To order click here. Do NOT pass up the book figuring that you’ll see the movie when it comes out -- your Mom won’t let you see this movie in a million years. Get the book.
Took some guts to post it, and I salute you Polycarp. The forum will soon be alive with predictable screed from the usual suspects.
But, I gotta think that believing Catholics are searching, wondering.
My advice: Swim the Bosporus.
The water is fine.
No matter where you are, there is an Orthodox church within driving distance. My drive is 74 miles one way. I do it weekly, and more for the Feasts.
You can see it here
http://www.dioceseofcleveland.org/gayandlesbianfamilyministry/mission/index.htm
Sometimes I wonder if there are multiple layers of problems and homosexuality is just one layer. What about those nuns who were so mean? You seldom hear of older nuns who were light-hearted and kind. What made them that way? Lives governed by unbending and superfluous rules?
The happiest catholics I have met are liberals. Some of the others seem bogged down.
Are conservatism and optism mutually exclusive?
On this point, I would insist that you are confusing the superficial human emotion of happiness with the spiritual notion of JOY.
Liberals may be "happy" and full of luv, but they are never full of the Charity or the Joy of Christ.
I have seen many smiling alcoholics for instance, but they wre not really "happy."
You cannot be a liberal, which implies dissent, and be truly Joyful.
Sounds plausible. Greek name.
Betcha a dollar he was nominal Orthodox who converted to marry the love of his life.
Part of the forty years mentioned in the article include the RC's attempts at reunification with the East. Some in the East have played footsie with that. Some have not.
The forum is not the place that I choose to say more than that. But, I would welcome FreepMail.
I have a great respect for Paul Likoudis. If I remember correctly, he was a convert from orthodoxy
I guess the Bosporus is a two way stream ;-)
In my medical practice I see approximately 100 patients a week, and the majority are old Catholics.
One thing I've learned is that those nuns who were so mean is a media/cultural creation, and in no way mirrors reality. "You seldom hear of older nuns who were light-hearted and kind" because that does not fit the stereotype that a fundamentally anti-Catholic pop-culture wants to present, and that liberal Catholics happily ape in order to undermine the validity of the traditional ways of Catholicism.
The vast majority of older nuns were indeed light-hearted and kind.
What exactly is Wilson trying to say in this statement? I truly find it almost bizarre.
Liberals may be "happy" and full of luv, but they are never full of the Charity or the Joy of Christ.
I have seen many smiling alcoholics for instance, but they wre not really "happy."
You cannot be a liberal, which implies dissent, and be truly Joyful.
So no Catholic can be a "liberal," in your view, without being unorthodox? And none can be full of the "Charity of Christ?" And liberals, in Catholicism, are like drunks?
It would surprise me if you didn't like a book by Paul Likoudis.
Don't be disingenuous...You know what I mean by "liberal."
I'm using it in the Catholic sense that liberal = heterodox.
What exactly is Wilson trying to say in this statement? I truly find it almost bizarre.
You would, Sink. Other Catholics understand it only too well.
Is it any surprise that one of the highest concentrations of homosexuals are to be found in the modern "liberal liturgists'" ranks?
If you want control over your marriage (and we moderns have wanted it, myself included) you distance yourself from Christ and put you and your spouse at the center, and for the best of reasons. But that placement of self at the center causes a whole host of problems and a distancing of the self and the marriage and interdependency of the marriage, from Christ--this has to happen because it is now about you. It is the will in opposition to the intellect which ultimately knows Christ must be at the center of all (the Catholic Intellect, I mean). We must bend our will and form our intellect to put Christ at the center of all things, most especially the marriage.
In the Latin mass this is a foregone conclusion (the centrality of Christ). V's wife.
He would, no doubt, think that a parish like ours, St. Michael's in Bedford, Texas, with 8,000 members, 5,000 of which attend Mass on Sundays, is liberal. Four or five children are baptized at Masses, every single Sunday; forty high-school juniors are confirmed every year; and we welcome anywhere from 60 to 125 new Catholics into our Church every single Easter.
The pastor, Fr. Johnson, follows the rubrics with almost no variation, but he never says the "traditional Mass." The 5:00 Mass on Sundays, dubbed the "Youth Mass", is standing room only and typically lasts two hours.
We have a volunteer staff, from lectors, to Eucharistic Ministers, to RCIA instructors and helpers, to youth ministry, to engaged ministry, to RCIA sponsors, that numbers over 500 dedicated Catholics.
Where do we fit in, with our smiling, happy parish family, in Paul Likoudis' dour view of American Catholicism?
Negative, negative, negative. If Paul Likoudis ever says one good thing about the modern Church, please post it on FR, as it will be breaking news for sure.
One man told of how his parents were alcholics and their house burned down (Kansas I think). He was shipped off to Boys Town and probably did fight. A priest tied him up and hauled him to Boys Town. I did learn that you can't take some of those stories at face value. It makes it harder to get at the truth.
I rather liked the happy nun in the "Sound of Music". That was Hollywood though.
The only nuns I ever knew are old now or deceased. They seemed pretty decent. My friend is an ex-nun and had to have knee replacements. She thinks it was caused by having to scrub hard floors on her knees in the convent. Her sister who was never a nun had to have a hip replacement, so it could have been genetic and had nothing to do with convent life. Another girl told of how she had been forced to scrub some statue or something for hours on her knees as punishment. Others told of being whacked on the hands with rulers. Allowing for exaggeration and outright fabrication, I think there was an element of truth in some of the stories I heard.
One catholic therapist told of having her nose broken by her mother (family member - not clergy related).
Before that, my perception had been that they were very strict but not necessarily cruel.
Perhaps not. Overall they seemed more upbeat about church life. Spiritual joy is something that has eluded me, although I had happy, bubbly periods in my younger life, so I wouldn't know about that.
The way you describe it, happiness and spiritual joy are two different things.
"If sexual autonomy is one’s goal, one will not want the traditional Mass as the central symbol of the Faith, for the very form it takes will always seem a reproach: one will want a pliable liturgy, something one can shape to one’s whims.
"'What exactly is Wilson trying to say in this statement? I truly find it almost bizarre.'
"You would, Sink. Other Catholics understand it only too well."
Well, I guess I'm not much of a Catholic, my friend. I don't get it either. Is the author suggesting the obverse, then, that the new Mass is not a reproach to those whose goal is sexual autonomy?
sitetest
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