Note: This is Part One of a two-part essay about the recent sexual abuse summit. Part Two will appear this Wednesday.
As the coverage of the meeting of bishops in Rome, the “Sex Summit,” has finally receded out of the news cycle, perhaps now is a better time to take a more critical look at what was accomplished and what will be the lasting effects of the meeting. After all, the meeting was supposed to take care of the unfinished business from last November's Baltimore meeting of U.S. bishops, which itself was a response to the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report in July of 2018 and the public “revelations” about the dissolute career of former archbishop Theodore McCarrick.
However, given the fact that the bishops in Baltimore couldn't even pass a non-binding resolution requesting the release of all sealed documents related to McCarrick, as well as being told at the last moment by Pope Francis to defer voting on creating a special commission of both clergy and laypersons to investigate cover-ups of sexual abuse (something Pope Francis agreed to in 2015 but later reneged on), it should have been clear how the summit would go.
So, what did we learn? Well, not much. Think about it: can you even name one of the Pope's 21 reflection points? Furthermore, it was clear even before the summit began that it was unlikely that the one issue—which by now anyone with even a modicum of honesty knows is and has been at the heart of the rot within the Church for more than half a century—was going to be discussed. As journalist Edward Pentin pointed out shortly before the summit began, “When this meeting was initially announced, it was to be about the protection of minors and vulnerable adults, but now it seems to be about protection of minors only.”
With that said, here are my somewhat sardonic, but not jaded, take away points from the Rome Sex Summit.
1. The Smoke of Satan has indeed entered the Church and it is Lavender Scented.
Sometimes you can tell a lot about someone's motives by what they tell you, but more often than not you can learn more about them by what they don't tell you. This was on clear display in Rome right from the beginning where, the Pope reiterated in his opening remarks that the meeting was to be about the “protection of minors” and to heal the wounds of the “scandal of pedophilia.”
This is certainly nothing to scoff at, but wasn't that what the Dallas Charter was all about, 17 years ago? Moreover, it misses the other half of the reason the bishops were summoned there in the first place, as was seen when Archbishop Charles Scicluna dodged Italian journalist Sandro Magister's question about the absence of one particular word in the Pope's opening remarks. Or when Cardinal Blaise “it could be consensual” Cupich outright snubbed CNN's Delia Gallagher when she asked him if the cover-ups of abuse were due to a shared code of silence among a subculture of clergy who are engaged in deviant lifestyles by saying, “it’s a hypothesis, and hypotheses have to be proven.”
Can everyone who is reading these words please grow up, grow a spine, and take your fear of the SJW's and the PC shameheads and give it back to our Blessed Lord? The presence of a rampant homosexual subculture in the priesthood, one that protects and promotes its own, has for many years now been responsible for the diluting of the faith and lies at the heart of so many of the problems in the Church today. From the decades of sexual abuse and their cover-ups, to banking scandals, to the spiritual gelding of “Catholic” institutions such as schools, universities, and charity organizations, and to the introduction of Liberation Theology and other Communist-sponsored agendas, at its root you will find gross sexual immorality in general, and homosexuality in particular.
As Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute pointed out in her book The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies are Destroying Lives and Why the Church was Right All Along, cultural elites have always used sexual liberation to push their various social engineering agendas and the Catholic Church has fought them every step of the way. That is, until Humanae Vitae came out in 1968, and within a few short years Catholics simply gave up the fight and entered into a sort of “don't ask, don't tell” kind of agreement with the clergy when it came to sexual morality.
Although the roots of the infiltration of the Catholic Church by social and sexual radicals actually goes back to the 1930's, the rejection of the Church's traditional sexual morality by huge chunks of the laity offered the perfect cover for those radical clergy to further open the Church's doors to all manner of sexual deviance in its seminaries and schools in the 70s and the 80s. Which, interestingly enough, coincides with the peak years of clerical sexual abuse cases.
To even hint that there is a relationship between homosexuality and the clerical sex abuse continues to be a singular sticking point among so many people, let alone Catholics. However, even if you want to dismiss Archbishop Viganò's 11-page letter back in August of 2018 as a screed from a disgruntled cleric with an axe to grind or Frédéric Martel's newest book released as the summit was ending as a book-length tabloid piece, the writing has been and still is on the wall for anyone to see.
From the moment the John Jay Report came out in 2002, the truth about the nature and extent of the problems caused by the rise of a homosexual subculture in the priesthood has been thoroughly examined and known. In books such Michael S. Rose's Goodbye Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church (2002), Leon J. Podles' Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (2008), and Dean R. Hoge's & Jacqueline E. Wenger's Evolving Visions Of The Priesthood: Changes from Vatican II to the Turn of the New Century (2017). More recently is a report by Fr. Paul Scullins, also at the Ruth Institute, who went through all currently available data to update both the 2002 and the 2011 version of the John Jay Report. This is to say nothing of all the alternative Catholic media sites, many of which had their genesis in the wake of the 2002 Boston Globe revelations. Outfits such as Church Militant, OnePeterFive, or The Stream (all of whom have their good and bad qualities) have been reporting on these facts for years and have been reviled and mocked for their troubles, but who are now having their own Nigel Farage-type “You're not laughing now, are you?” moments.
The truth is undeniable and until Catholics, leaders and laity alike, are ready to face facts, nothing is going to change.
Photo: Angelus