Why do we report so much about Catholic Church developments?
What is a significant factor causing the current weakness in the Church’s moral and spiritual leadership?
Much of the world looks to the Catholic Church, the largest religious
denomination in the world, to provide leadership in the struggle to
defend innocent human life increasingly endangered by an advancing
culture of death. They also look to the Church to provide strong
leadership to defend the natural family from a dictatorial and vicious
movement to force acceptance of alternative sexual lifestyles.
That is why LifeSiteNews reports so much on Catholic news
developments. But there are serious problems that remain unresolved in
the Church before it can once again be the force for social and other
good that it has been at various times in the past.
Before I continue from here let me emphasize that there are more good
priests being formed and ordained and courageous and faithful bishops
being selected in the Church today. This has been in large part due to
the cleaning up of many seminaries and much greater attention being
giving in Rome to the appointment of faithful bishops.
Not all the appointments are good for sure, but the batting average
of solid bishops being appointed seems to have gone way up. Many
dramatic changes for good in the US conference of Catholic Bishops are
also worth praising, as are many other trends.
Pope Benedict has taken many actions to decrease the influence of the
powerful distorters of the Second Vatican Council who have ravaged and
weakened the Church in so many ways.
But serious problems remain. Some have been partially dealt with
since the explosion of the sex abuse scandals, but the work needed to
eliminate this cancer within the Church is far from finished.
The cancer I’m referring to is the presence within the Church of
numerous active homosexuals among the clergy at all levels, within many
of the orders and among the laity in many Catholic institutions. It also
includes a rebellious acceptance of homosexuality by many
non-homosexual Catholics in positions of influence within the Church.
This has been and still is a much greater problem than the vast majority
of Catholics realize.
LifeSiteNews recognized this very difficult to discuss reality long
ago. It is ugly, disturbing and not something that most people want to
hear about. It involves tales of infiltration, seduction, rape, and
other abuses, rampant use of porn, sordid encounters and frequent
blackmail. It is nasty stuff, not for the faint of heart and holds the
potential to threaten faith.
The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus also wrote about this sordid
situation in the Church. He was blunt that homosexuality among the
clergy was a grave problem that was in many ways being ignored and not
being acted upon as it should. He wrote a series of articles in First
Things in 2002 (Part I, Part II, Part III)
documenting some of the shameful lack of action by the bishops to
acknowledge and rid the Church of this crippling sickness within the
clerical ranks. He saw it as the primary cause of the sex abuses.
Several thoroughly documented and lengthy books have been written
over the past few decades about the ugly scandal, perhaps one of the
worst, if not the worst in Church history, beginning with Fr. Enrique T.
Rueda’s 1982 massive The Homosexual Network. These books all included
reams of documented evidence and interviews and naming of names and
places and specific incidents.
They were written in the main by courageous and faithful Catholics
who experienced all their work being deliberately ignored by Church
authorities. They were also subjected to vicious personal attacks on
their character and credibility, the same as many victims of clergy sex
abuse experienced when they told Church authorizes about their abusers.
These authors suffered for their fidelity.
The books that these whistle blowers wrote are excruciatingly
difficult to read. I have a few in my office. I can’t read them. Even
for me, they are too disturbing and yet, I don’t doubt the validity of
much of what is revealed in the books and other documents that have been
sent to us.
LifeSiteNews began a Feature Page
on the Clergy sexual abuse scandals in 2002. After 2 years of
continuously adding updates to the pages in the section we stopped the
updating. There was just too much.
To emphasize again, there have been many positive changes in recent
years, but as Michael Voris of Church Militant TV relates in a recent broadcast,
the influence of networks of homosexual clergy within the Church is
still very strong. They are still an obstacle to strengthening of the
Church for the great spiritual and cultural war which is building.
