Clerical Scandals And The "Negligence Of The Pastors"

by John Vennari

Note: In light of the recent Church scandals in the news, this article published in 2002 is of even greater relevance.

It is hard to imagine a more distasteful subject than pedophilia and homosexuality in the Roman Catholic priesthood. It is even more disturbing to consider that homosexuals successfully targeted the Catholic Church for infiltration.

Yet these are the issues we are forced to confront at the same time Fatima revisionists claim that the 1984 Consecration of the world fulfilled Our Lady’s request for the Consecration of Russia, and that we are now witnessing the triumph of the Immaculate Heart. If the current state of the Church is an indication of Her triumph, I shudder to think of what would be Her defeat.

Crisis Foretold

In 1981, Father Joaquin Alonso, who had many conversations with Sister Lucy, and who was the official Fatima archivist for sixteen years, said, "It is therefore completely probable that the text (of the Third Secret of Fatima) makes concrete references to the crisis of faith within the Church and to the negligence of the pastors themselves [and the] internal struggles in the very bosom of the Church and of grave pastoral negligence of the upper hierarchy."(1)

Today’s clerical scandals are not because of mandatory celibacy, nor are they because we do not have women priests, married priests, or because there are no laity in Church authority. Rather, they are the result of the "negligence of the pastors" that Father Alonso (pictured above) maintained to be the essence of the Third Secret of Fatima.

The scandals are also the result of what Sister Lucy called the "diabolical disorientation" afflicting "so many persons who occupy places of responsibility" in the Church.(2) As will be demonstrated, the upper hierarchy has been so negligent and disoriented that it presided over a massive influx of homosexuals into the Catholic priesthood and religious orders.

And homosexuality is the real issue.

Most of today’s clerical scandals are not true cases of pedophilia (preying on pre-adolescent children) but of priests preying on teenage boys.(3) That’s homosexuality. Further, the homosexual network by and large is favorable to pedophilia and same-sex liaisons with teenagers.

This fact is admitted even by pederasts and many homosexuals. In 1998, for example, North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) representative David Thorstad eagerly proclaimed to a standing room only "gay" and lesbian group gathered in Mexico City that: "Pederasty is the main form that male homosexuality has acquired throughout Western civilization …"(4)

Further, it is well known, though not often reported in the press, that NAMBLA is a welcome participant in "Gay Pride" parades nationwide.(5)

Church Targeted

Father Enrique Rueda documented in his 1982 landmark work The Homosexual Network, Private Lives & Public Policy that homosexuals successfully targeted religious organizations for infiltration, especially the Roman Catholic Church.

The reason is clear. "There is no question" writes Father Rueda, "that the main stumbling block in the theoretical and practical acceptance of homosexuality by American society has been traditional religion. This has been perfectly understood by the leadership of the homosexual movement."(6) Further, "the importance of gaining the support of the churches or at least neutralizing them is widely acknowledged by homosexual leaders."(7)

The New York Times, for example, ran a story on January 25, 1977, entitled "From a Quiet Seminarian to Homosexual Spokesman". Journalist Lucy Fosburgh interviewed William R. Johnson, a homosexual activist who was "ordained" in the United Church of Christ.

In this interview, Johnson indicates several factors which are important for the advancement of homosexuality in the "church". (When Johnson says "church", he is misusing the term to mean all so-called Christian denominations as well as the Catholic Church.)

Johnson’s principles, explains Father Rueda, constitute a model program for the conversion of a "church" into an agent of the homosexual movement. The factors considered important to Johnson are:

* The desensitization of the church of sexual ethics.
* Promotion of pro-homosexual legislation by religious bodies.
* Organization of official commissions or similar bodies charged with studying the homosexual question.
* Establishment of homosexual organizations within the churches. (The so-called "Catholic" homosexual organizations of New Ways Ministry and Dignity will be discussed shortly.)
* The ordination of homosexuals to the ministry, preferably "liberated" homosexuals who are identified with the movement’s ideology. Johnson stated, "At the time I was deciding to try to get ordained, everybody told me: ‘Just pretend, hide the fact you’re homosexual. That’s what everybody else has done.’ But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t see how I could be a person of God and not be honest about myself".
* Willingness of homosexual clergymen to accept dual roles as leaders in their religious bodies and the homosexual movement—in fact, as agents of the movement within their churches. Johnson explained that his notoriety catapulted him into leadership in the homosexual cause. "It became apparent" he said, "that gay people were no longer willing to be shunted into the back room of the church today in an atmosphere of secrecy and guilt."(8)

Johnson’s priorities, comments Father Rueda, not only indicated how important the religious institutions are to homosexuality, but provide a checklist for ascertaining the degree to which a specific religious institution has been infiltrated by the homosexual movement.(9)

The Hierarchy Let it Happen



Father Rueda then documents a vast homosexual network among various denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church. Significantly, Vatican II’s encouragement of "inter-religious dialogue" is what made possible the pan-religious cooperation among homosexual groups.(10) Today’s high number of homosexual priests is one of ecumenism’s first fruits.(11)

Father Rueda chronicled five primary means by which homosexuals infiltrated seminaries, chanceries, and Catholic institutions.

1) Patterns of Collaboration, citing many instances of cooperation between Roman Catholic institutions and leaders of the Homosexual Movement.

2) Intellectual Infiltration: This is done by Catholic theologians and "experts" who publicly challenge the Church’s condemnation of homosexuality, and suffer no ecclesiastical penalty for doing so. A few examples follow:

* A 1977 editorial in the influential Jesuit magazine America made the false claim, "the application of Scriptural texts that condemn homosexuality is dubious at best".(12)
* Dominican Father Donald Goergen authored a widely-distributed, pro-homosexual book entitled The Sexual Celibate. Far from suffering penalties from the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious, Goergen was elected Provincial of the Chicago Dominican Province, after the book was published.(13)
* The February 1981 issue of Notre Dame Magazine, contained an article by Father Robert Griffin who spoke of a young homosexual man (un-named) who confessed that he had been "unfaithful" to his homosexual partner. Father Griffin writes that he absolved the young man’s "sin of unfaithfulness" and sent him home to his boyfriend.(14) There is no record that Father Griffin was ever disciplined by the bishops or the Vatican.

3) Networking: These are pro-homosexual groups such as the Catholic Coalition for Gay Civil Rights, "Call to Action" and numerous other organizations. Hundreds of Catholic "priests and religious in good standing" belong to these openly pro-homosexual groups.(15)




Father Enrique Rueda documented in his 1982 landmark work The Homosexual Network, Private Lives & Public Policy that homosexuals successfully targeted religious organizations for infiltration, especially the Roman Catholic Church.

4) Homosexual Clergy: Father Rueda quotes a number of pro-homosexual clergymen, most notably, Christian Brother Gabriel Moran. While speaking to the 1977 Conference of Christian Brothers, Brother Moran intimated that religious communities were the ideal setting for homosexual relations.(16)

Then there’s the following quote taken from Communications, a newsletter for homosexual Catholic clergy: "I am finishing up my theological studies at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago. I was ordained last June. I work part time as assistant pastor of an inner-city parish in the Black community. I am gay. I have been out with my superiors since I was a novice, and aware of my gayness, they have approved me for vows and now for ordination."(17)

Father Rueda also explained the tactic of the homosexual movement to present "homosexuality and heterosexuality" as "two varieties of the same question".

5) Homosexual Orders: These are not formally approved orders in the Church, but groups that have organized while the local bishop looks the other way. Father Rueda lists a number of these, including Agape Community, The Christian Community Association, and Augustinians of Charity. One group of "gay Roman Catholics" called Emmaus House claimed to "work closely with our Roman Catholic parishes", visiting the sick, shut-ins and those in need. "We bring the Blessed Sacrament to them," said the Brooklyn-based organization.(18)

The two most successful of these "orders" are: the influential New Ways Ministry,(19) an organization, complains Father Rueda, whose very existence is "more than passively tolerated" by the U.S. bishops; the other is Dignity International, whose purpose is "to unite all gay Catholics, to develop leadership, and to be an instrument through which the gay Catholics may be heard by the Church and society." Dignity makes no secret that its goal is to "promote the cause of the gay Community ... We move towards the time when a gay Catholic lifestyle is accepted."(20)

Father Rueda lamented that the United States bishops have taken no effective action against these organizations. New Ways Ministry and Dignity, he writes, are "more than passively tolerated" by the hierarchy. He further complained that in the case of these groups, "lack of action" from the U.S. hierarchy "can be legitimately construed to be ‘passive encouragement’."(21)

Father Doyle’s Warning

Making matters worse is the unwelcome testimony of Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, a Canon lawyer who formerly worked in the Vatican embassy in Washington.

Doyle co-authored a 1985 report sent to the U.S. bishops and the Vatican that warned of the vastness of the clerical scandals and predicted an "ungodly mess". The report urged tougher measures against priests who sexually abuse others.

This document proves that as far back as the mid 1980s, the hierarchy was aware of these continuing scandals, but took no effective action.(22) Another prize example of "grave pastoral negligence of the upper hierarchy".

On Fox News, April 23, Father Doyle further explained that even Pope John Paul II was made aware of the scandals "in ’84 and ’85. I know that". When asked how he knew, Father Doyle responded, "Because when I was at the embassy, I know the reports were sent over to the Vatican to inform him as to what was going on because of the media publicity that was being given to the situation in Louisiana as well as to other cases that were popping up around that same time frame."(23)

Father Doyle now appears as an expert witness for abuse victims, and complains of unscrupulous bishops who seem impervious to indictment. "I was involved in all the big cases," he said. "I saw the bishops lie on the stand. I saw the evidence, clear as a bell. But they survived. It’s like a Teflon hierarchy."(24)

Granted, no one has ever accused Father Doyle of being a traditional Catholic. His sympathies are with the progressivists. His main complaint seems to be not homosexuals in the clergy, but "pedophiles" and bishops’ cover-ups.(25)

Nonetheless, no one from the Vatican nor from the USCCB has challenged the truth of Father Doyle’s testimony. Even Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, spokesman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, admits knowing of the report but denies that it was ignored. "The bishops did learn from him, and from other sources" and took many actions then and later, he said.(26) The scandals surfacing nationwide indicate how effective were the bishops’ "actions".

Seminary or Feminary?



At the April 23-24, 2002 extraordinary meeting of the Cardinals in the Vatican, which I traveled to Rome to cover, Chris Ferrara asked a key question that the panel dodged. At the final press conference, Ferrara asked the panel, "In page 2 of the Memorandum, (the Cardinals’ final communiqué from the Vatican meeting) Item 3 acknowledges something that is important and long overdue: Nearly every single case has involved an adolescent and does not constitute a true case of pedophilia. So we’re dealing with the acts of homosexual males who could not control their predilection. To avoid what would be a perpetual bumper crop of this type of scandal, is the hierarchy in North America going to enforce the Vatican’s [1961] Instruction that homosexual males simply should not be ordained?"(27)

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s answer was astounding. He said that "no bishop he knows" and "no seminary he knows" would accept an active homosexual.(28)

This is balderdash, and everyone knows it. It leads me to ask, what is Cardinal McCarrick’s game? Is it incompetence or collusion? I personally know two young men who left a major East Coast seminary because, in their words, "it was not a seminary, it was a feminary."

Cardinal McCarrick giving shallow reassurances to the Press during the April 23-24 meeting of U.S. Cardinals in Rome.

The homosexual stronghold in Catholic seminaries has been an ongoing scandal for decades (especially since the destabilization of the Church since Vatican II) and is now documented in a recently released book, Goodbye Good Men. The author, Michael Rose, catalogs cases in which a homosexual subculture of both students and faculty in numerous seminaries deters the heterosexual man from continuing to study for the priesthood. "How many heterosexual seminarians," Rose writes, "have decided to leave the seminary and abandon their vocations because of the ‘gay subculture’ they were forced to endure, because they had been propositioned, harassed or even molested?"(29)

According to former seminarians and recently ordained priests, "this ‘gay subculture’ is so prominent at certain seminaries that these institutions have earned nicknames such as Notre Flame (for Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans) and Theological Closet (for Theological College at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C.) [Cardinal McCarrick’s diocese]. St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore [under Cardinal Keeler] has earned the nickname, ‘The Pink Palace’."

Along with many ex-seminarians, Rose interviews priests who somehow made it through the living hell of pro-homosexual seminaries. Father Andre Walter, speaking of the seminary in the Patterson, New Jersey Diocese said the problem was so bad, "some of the students and the faculty used to get dressed up in leather to go to ‘the block’, Baltimore’s equivalent to 42nd Street in Manhattan."

Similar horrors are reported from the Chicago Archdiocese (Mundelein Seminary) where seminary professors "tell their students that they’re gay and take some of them to gay bars, and gay students sleep with each other."(30) This will have an influence far beyond Chicago. More than half of the seminarians at Mundelein are from other dioceses.

Rose’s chapter entitled "The Gay Subculture" relates numerous accounts of the pro-homosexual agenda of many seminaries, and the persecution and harassment of heterosexual seminarians, even to the point of expelling the "straight" men. Joseph Kellenyi, former seminarian of Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary, explained, "The issue was never one of my suitability for ordination. Rather it was the gay clique had been given veto power over who got ordained."(31)

Though I do not agree with the solutions proposed in Mr. Rose’s final chapter (to rally around "conservative" Novus Ordo Bishops such as Bishop Bruskewitz, who, Mr. Rose may not know, is pro-Charismatic),(32) the book serves a useful purpose in baring the plight of the heterosexual seminarian.

Rose explains, "Seminarians who accept the Church’s teaching on sexual morality have not only been dismissed from the seminary as ‘trouble-makers’, they have also been threatened by classmates and faculty, especially in religious houses, that if they did not submit to homosexuality — to espouse and defend homosexual acts, if not take part in them — their priestly careers would be in jeopardy."(33)

Many good priests are suffering this persecution today.

Saint Sebastian’s Angels

In light of Mr. Rose’s documentation, it is safe to say that over the past thirty years, these seminaries and their bishops are responsible for the ordination of active homosexuals who now lead double-lives in countless parishes.

Stephen Brady, founder of Roman Catholic Faithful (www.rcf.org) has fought heroically to expose these homosexual priests and bishops, and was instrumental in removing Bishop Daniel Ryan from the diocese of Springfield, Illinois.

One of the most disturbing of Mr. Brady’s exposés is an international Internet chat-line of homosexual priests called "Saint Sebastian’s Angels" comprising pornographic photographs and obscene language and conversations among homosexual Catholic clergymen.(34)

Particularly offensive is the foul-mouthed Bishop Reginald Cawcutt, the Auxiliary Bishop of Cape Town, South Africa, who expresses over this chat-line his homosexual fantasies. Brady exposed this network over two years ago, yet Cawcutt suffered no sanctions by the Vatican for his participation in St. Sebastian’s Angels. He remained South African Catholic Bishops Conference’s Episcopal Representative for AIDS and for Social Communications. Bishop Cawcutt resigned in disgrace only after The Washington Times ran stories that exposed his involvement with Saint Sebastian’s Angels.(35)

Neither has Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, Prefect of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, taken any effective action against the multitude of homosexual clergy in the U.S. or elsewhere. Rather, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos spends a great deal of time bullying Father Nicholas Gruner and his Fatima Apostolate, and riding roughshod over Tridentine seminaries.(36 )

We now see the results: Cardinals and bishops who allowed homosexuals nationally to get a death grip on the clergy, who masterminded the inexcusable cover-up of priest-abusers, and who shifted these priests from parish to parish, and diocese to diocese, so that they could rape an even greater number of unsuspecting youngsters. The "diabolic disorientation" of the upper hierarchy has never looked so diabolic.

The Callous Dallas Bishops Meeting

This disorientation continues despite the recent convergence of bishops in Dallas. The bishops, true to form, went into that meeting seemingly determined to make no link between the "pedophile" scandals and the vast homosexual subculture of clergy now rampant in the Church under their watch.

The word "homosexual" appears nowhere in the bishops’ final "Charter for the Protection of the Children". Thus, the gay network of clergy and religious can breathe a huge sigh of relief. The bishops, once again, have shielded and protected them.

But if the bishops have shown themselves savvy in protecting their gay subculture, they have also shown themselves inept at protecting children from perversion. This was brought home forcibly by Randy Engel who for the past 13 years has studied the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood. She was commenting on a statement at the April 2002 Vatican press conference.

"As for the claim" says Mrs. Engel, "that the American bishops would never do anything to harm children, I think upon the millions of Catholic children in the United States who have been subject to more than thirty years of premature sexual seduction and spiritual and mental rape in the Catholic classroom via so-called ‘sex education’. By casting children as ‘sexual beings’ the bishops have primed Catholic youth for NAMBLA’s ‘sexual tutors’. It is no coincidence that the rise in clerical sexual abuse has paralleled the removal of traditional doctrinal catechesis from Catholic parishes and schools, and the substitution of absolutely demonic ‘sexual catechesis’."(37)

In short, the problem of homosexuality in the clergy continues unimpeded. The bishops themselves still flout pro-homosexual sex-education in parochial schools.(38) The new "Charter for the Protection of Children" is nothing more than an insipid "gentleman’s agreement", with no higher authority holding the bishops accountable.

And as for the Vatican, it pretends the problem doesn’t exist. Crisis Magazine Editor Deal Hudson traveled to Rome in early June to speak with Curia officials about the U.S. clerical scandals and returned home thoroughly shaken. On June 4 he wrote, "Most of the high-level Curia officials think there really IS no scandal. They told me it’s just another case of media bias against the Church ... that secular news reporters are just blowing things out of proportion." As far as the Vatican taking any effective action against the present crisis, Hudson lamented, "After my meeting with the Curia, I’m not holding my breath".(39)

"Only I Can Help You"

In human terms, the situation appears hopeless. But Our Blessed Mother gave us the key to the reason for our current malaise. The scandals we now face are because Catholic laity and Catholic leaders have not fulfilled the requests of Our Lady of Fatima. We have ignored Our Lady, and as a result, we have been left without the protection She was willing to give us.

The "diabolic disorientation of the upper hierarchy", under which we now labor, cannot co-exist with the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart. This triumph will only be realized when the Pope finally consecrates Russia in union with the world’s bishops to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart.

Let us beseech Heaven that the Pope and the upper hierarchy will finally orient themselves toward Our Lady of Fatima and do what She asked. Let us pray they will finally heed the words of the Mother of God who meant what She said when She warned, "Only I can help you".