_____Letters__________________________________________________________
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Objects to March cover
I’m sorry to take issue with your cover (March 2002). The rest of the articles were much better but the cover, I’m sorry to say, was not in keeping the general tone of Catholic World Report. I happen to be a friend of almost all the people involved and know that the media caricature of them as indolent and uncaring is wrong. Just how they made the terrible mistake in Boston I don’t know because I have dealt with cases in Boston, which were dealt with quite strictly, and almost with severity. Just how this one got through I’m completely puzzled. Cardinal Law, as you know, in the past and even up to the present has been a friend to traditional Catholics. He has criticized severely the Catholic Theological Society of America and others. I am told, unfortunately, that some of the middle management in the Boston archdiocese is rather liberal and trips him up. Perhaps this is what happened. I don’t know.

—Father Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR
Office of Spiritual Development
Archdiocese of New York

We hold Father Benedict in high esteem. Indeed we have been happy to publish some of his insights—addressed particularly to the need to promote virtue among priests and religious—in the pages of CWR. On this subject, however, we are bound to disagree.

The breadth of the sex-abuse scandal is now painfully apparent. At this point it seems clear to us that to accuse the bishops of negligence is the most charitable explanation of their behavior; the alternative explanations are far worse.

Since CWR readers reacted strongly to both the cover and the coverage of our March issue, we reprint a fair sampling of that reaction below, struggling—for the most part successfully, against the impulse to comment on each letter.

—The Editor

One solution: frequent confession
I must commend you on your handling of the scandal the Church is currently facing. In particular, I thought your interview with Richard Cross (March 2002) was a very clear analysis of the problem.

Despite all the safeguards put into effect in various dioceses to protect our children, there seems to be little thought given to discovering and changing or stopping the wayward sexual activities of the priests themselves. These activities are fundamentally immoral, sinful acts, and the place to remedy or arrest sin is in the confessional. That’s where counseling, forgiveness, and “firm purpose of amendment” are properly dealt with.

Put simply: Priests need to go to confession more frequently.

Speaking directly to priests around the world in 1984 in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (31), Pope John Paul II said:

“The whole of his priestly existence suffers an inexorable decline if by negligence or some other reason he fails to receive the Sacrament of Penance at regular intervals and in a spirit of genuine faith and devotion. If a priest were no longer to go to confession or properly confess his sins, his priestly being and his priestly action would feel its effects very soon, and this would be noticed by the community of which he was the pastor.”

And just as the Pope warned, the community has taken notice—big time!

Just two years before his death, Pope John XXIII wrote (in Journal of a Soul): “During my whole life I have kept faithful to my practice of weekly confession.” Do we have here the remedy for this sad affliction of clerical child abuse?

—Joseph O’Donnell
Silver Spring, Maryland

Survival instincts
For some time I have been dumbstruck by the amount of faith and trust the Catholic Church in North America places in psychiatry to cure men afflicted with sexual perversions. The Catholic hierarchy mistakenly believes that pedophilia, an immature form of homosexuality, can be successfully arrested and cured by psychotherapy. It is ironic that a Church founded upon faith in God would place her trust in a pseudo-science based upon theory and worldly deduction. A more realistic view might see sexual deviates as hopelessly flawed, infected with evil, with a very poor life-long prognosis.

As we all know, social experiments often go bad. In this case a failure to jettison priests with homosexual tendencies places innocent young boys in their field of prey, resulting in a repetitive pattern of sexual abuse of the vulnerable, and destruction within the Church. It is time for the Church to dump the hope of curing deviate priests and hone survival instincts which separate the wolves from the sheep.

—Michael Kramyak
Clifton, New Jersey

Bad taste
In my opinion, the cover illustration of the March 2002 issue was in extremely bad taste. While not unexpected in the secular media, I find it truly sad, to say the least, to see it flaunted in a publication presumably friendly to the Church.

Since to my knowledge the magazine is not sold on newsstands, it would seem that no need existed for a “jarring” cover to catch the eye. So why?

Overall, and as usual, the issue was very good. I read it routinely from cover to cover. But that cover! You can do much better, even to make the same point.

—J. H. Foegen
Winona, Minnesota

For the record, CWR is sold on newsstands.

—The Editor

Bishops merit respect
The cover on the March issue is unfortunate. Catholic bishops may or may not deserve serious criticism, but they certainly don’t deserve disrespect.

—James Swetnam, SJ
Pontifical Biblical Institute
Rome, Italy

The Pope’s responsibility
The cover of your March edition was an absolute classic! A picture that spoke eloquent volumes about the current state of play. It would have been even closer to the bone, however, if that soporific prelate had been dressed in white.

Truth be known, our deep respect for the present Holy Father, for both his personal sanctity and epic stand for human life, has led us to indulge in our own cowardly “cover-up”—of his critical failings in the administration of the Church. Certainly, if Msgr. George Kelly were to republish his famous book A Crisis of Authority today, it would need to be re-titled A Crisis of Papal Authority—referring to a failure to exercise that authority. This manifest and ongoing failure has even begun to alienate the Holy Father’s most faithful supporters—those fighting papal battles day after thankless day in the parish trenches—who have had their loyalty sorely tested by the effete wrist-slapping of dissidents and countless mixed messages which have emanated from the Vatican for 20 years.

Doubtless the Holy Father is surrounded in Rome by a good number of egregious liberals and time-serving sycophants, who don’t make his awesome and onerous job any easier. But for far too long we have excused or rationalized away his seeming paralysis before our scandal-ridden Church, which has deteriorated beyond measure during his tenure and is now in total chaos.

In the long-term, neo-ultramontanism and human respect have done a disservice to the Holy Father and thus to the Church. However belatedly, we now must put them aside and storm heaven with prayers that God will raise up a special Pope at the next conclave: a saint who can pull things together before many local Churches, like England, disappear off the ecclesial map.

—Rod Pead
Editor, Christian Order
London, England

Problems in Rome
It was Plato, I believe, who pointed out that man is continually in search of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These attributes (which attain their perfection in God) are not independent. It is no surprise, then, to read in CWR (March 2002) that immorality, the antithesis of the Good, is flourishing in dioceses and that the True, which finds its fullest expression in the Catholic Church, is no longer being upheld by our bishops, nor seemingly even presumed by them to be of importance. Nor is it surprising to note that our modern liturgy, translations, churches, and sacred art are almost universally ugly and depressing to the human spirit.

These problems are not confined to North America. One has only to read recent editions of the UK magazine Christian Order to find all too familiar examples of clerical immorality and episcopal disdain for orthodoxy, particularly in the field of catechetics.

Though some may have been offended by your bluntness, CWR was right to draw attention to the root cause of the problem in your satirical cover. To paraphrase Sydney Smith: One must believe in the Apostolic Succession, there being no other way of accounting for the descent of so many bishops from Judas Iscariot. For too long have the complaints of the laity, and parents in particular, been ignored or dismissed out of hand by both bishops and, yes, by Rome which seems more interested in staging ecumenical spectaculars and Woodstock-style youth jamborees than rooting out corruption and heresy within clerical ranks. Rome, after all, appointed or promoted these bishops in the first place, often despite well-documented complaints from the laity as to their orthodoxy or moral soundness.

—David V. Selby
Blenheim, New Zealand

Fair-weather friend
I was surprised and disappointed by the March 2002 issue, especially the “Scandal in Boston” article.
You take on a smug, almost gloating attitude, more like I would expect from the National Catholic Reporter. You also quote from the Boston Globe, which, you should know, doesn’t deserve to be quoted. You should be ashamed to admit you read that rag, but its influence on you shows through when you speak about “the number of pedophile priests . . .” without any qualifiers, such as “accused” or “alleged.” You’ve declared the entire list of accused priests to be flatly “pedophile priests”!

You sound very much like you’re using your 20/20 hindsight to place yourself on a pedestal a safe distance away from “that church.” The old phrase “fair-weather friend” comes to mind.

—David H. Cote
By email

“#2 scandal” is really #1
For my money, what Msgr. George A. Kelly describes as the “continued existence of what Pope John Paul II has called a ‘counter-magisterium’” and “the harassment of orthodox Catholics over the past 30 years” is the real scandal. (“The #2 Catholic Scandal,” March 2002)

Yes, the problem of priestly pedophilia is a scandal. But so are false accusations. And it should be noted that our bishops have acted no differently than school boards and the leaders of other denominations have acted for the past quarter-century—except that in their cases, the media have gone along with the cover-up.

For instance, the editor of the North American Man-Boy Love Association newsletter taught in the New York City public schools for years until the New York Post raised a stink. He was only transferred to an office job. The school board explained that they had to abide by the gay-rights laws, and that he only bragged in the newsletter about his sexual exploits overseas, so there was nothing they could do. You may have noticed that wasn’t national news. The news that the National Education Association recently voted to promote “tolerance” of homosexuality in the public schools was barely noted, while even in Allentown, Pennsylvania, we were getting daily updates on the Boston case.

I first noticed this double standard in 1993 when my local paper was carrying stories about a “priest-molester,” as the headlines called him. The “priest-molester” was a Catholic priest in another state who was defrocked in the 1970s but recently convicted of fondling the babysitter he and his wife had hired. At the same time, a case involving a local Episcopalian priest went all the way to the Pennsylvania state superior court and back, but stayed buried in the “local” news section.

Since then I’ve noticed how news about ministers, teachers, coaches, and therapists stay “local” news, while news about Catholic priests hits the big time.

As Philip Jenkins put it in Pedophiles and Priests: “The most quoted survey of sexual problems among Protestant clergy states that some 10 percent are involved in sexual misconduct of some kind, and ‘about 2 or 3 percent’ are pedophiles, a rate equal or higher than that suggested for Catholic priests.”

Nevertheless, Jenkins notes, “The pedophile issue has legitimized patterns for rhetoric and prejudice that would have been familiar in the era of the Know Nothings.”

—Don Schenk
Allentown, Pennsylvania

A modest proposal
Your dossier about the Boston scandal was excellent. I had wondered if anyone would recognize corrupt psychological theories and the trend to medicalize sin as part of the problem. Many lay people and obviously the bishops are unaware of pedophiliac culture in the West that is seeking validation. These men see transforming pedophilia into merely a medical problem as a step to gaining acceptance.

I have recently read about new allegations about Father Paul R. Shanley. Father Shanley was even a public dissenter against Church teachings on homosexuality. He also openly defended homosexual pedophilia. The hierarchy’s response is an astonishing example of ineptitude and failure to learn from the past.

I would have thought that the problem is with removing priests. However, after reading the essay about the attacks on orthodox clergy and the recent removal of Father Fessio, Church leaders have proven to be very effective at removing clerics who defend orthodoxy. The Catholic Church’s American hierarchy certainly seems to have priorities confused.

For the last 30 years Catholics (especially the bishops) have always been too concerned about being too harsh. The bishops have forgotten that Christ used harsh words and even a whip to confront sinners.

As a psychiatrist I have a not-so-tongue-in-cheek strategy for clearing up the scandals. We could hypnotize the Bishops into believing that these sexual offenders are orthodox, pre-Vatican II troglodytes. Hey, I know it sounds silly. However, it’s less silly than the calls for eliminating celibacy. At least my solution would actually remove sex offenders.

—Theron C. Bowers, Jr. MD
Houston, Texas

Celibacy is not the issue
There are many people clamoring for the “freedom” of priests to marry as a “solution” to the problem of pedophilia.

There is really only one fundamental difference between a celibate man and a married man, and that’s one woman.

If a man does not respond to God’s grace to strengthen his weakened nature to combat the forces against it (some natural and some unnatural), then it seems to me that the solution involves: self-control, self-discipline, mortification (which is the “prayer of the senses”), and of course throughout all this, a deepening of our relationship with our Lord (whose sacred humanity gives us great hope). Therefore if a man does not make this response to God’s grace to be chaste according to his state (married or celibate), then changing this state will have little or no effect on his character. Allowing priests to marry is not a solution.

I think sometimes people who do possess self-discipline marry an alcoholic out of the natural urge to help the person (and of course because they fall in love). However, I think history shows that marriage rarely “fixes” the problem of alcoholism, probably because the thing “missing” in an alcoholic is not a spouse, but a proper regard for himself and his body.

Likewise, the thing “missing” from a priest who does not maintain his proper state of chastity is not a spouse, but rather a wholeness on which spousal union will have little impact.

Together with thousands of others who struggle to live God’s call and an appropriate response to their state, this married man will attempt with his life to “overwhelm evil with an abundance of good” (as a contemporary saint commanded us). I guess a corollary to this would be to “overwhelm impurity with an abundance of properly oriented love.”

—Joe Kuefler
Stow, Massachusetts

Nervy but necessary
Congratulations for your last issue of Catholic World Report (March 2002). I didn’t think there was anyone left in the Church with that kind of courage anymore. A bit nervy and harsh perhaps, but true and necessary. Time and time again the other side is getting away with murder while the authorities remain silent. So it’s high time that someone from the good side should start to talk and to talk loud. Please keep up the good work. You have all my thanks and my prayers go with you.

—Father Raymond Tremblay
By email

Reparations needed
The scandal of sexual sin and sickness in the Catholic Church beckons the hierarchy to call for Catholics to hold a nationwide day of reparation. We need something dramatic and spiritual to begin the healing.

—Edward L. Bode
Jefferson City, Missouri

Venomous, bigoted
I recently cancelled my subscription to Newsweek for what I called venomous, bigoted, and biased coverage of the priests and pedophilia. After reading your own coverage and editorial by Philip Lawler I think I cancelled the wrong magazine, because your March issue was equally deserving of the epithets.

I rather expect those things in the secular media, but I am more distressed in seeing them in a publication with the word “Catholic “ on its masthead. Whose side are you on, anyway?

The Catholic Church is suffering much now, and needs the best defense possible, and not more of the “Let’s kick her while she’s down.”

The cover picture of the cardinal (bishop) was calumny in picture form, whether it was meant to attack Cardinal Law or all the successors of the apostles in the body of cardinals. I have heard that the anti-clerical artist Diego Rivera once painted a picture of Pius XII with full regalia and a cigarette hanging from his hand, and no other comment. The picture you used gives Rivera a run for his money.

You know, I don’t think the Church in the US is in so bad a shape as you seem to think. I see churches and schools bursting with occupants, many beautiful new churches being built, a generally friendly and respectful attitude of the faithful to priests and religious, many parishes with perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, prayer groups, and recitation of the Rosary before or after Mass. It’s easy to ignore all of these things and focus on pedophilia and “gay priests” as you did in an earlier issue. I daresay your March issue will cost you some subscribers, and that could be disastrous for a periodical already struggling to stay afloat.

—Rev. Msgr. James B. Nugent
Columbus, Ohio

Our disagreements begin with the perception of reality. We do not see “churches and schools bursting with occupants, many beautiful new churches being built . . .” Morale among Catholic Americans is near rock bottom, and any effort to paper over this crisis, by claiming that the overall condition of Catholicism is healthy, is doomed to failure. Yes, there are signs of spiritual vigor within the Church. But there is also manifest evidence of corruption. When we expose that corruption we are not attacking the Church, but defending her. And those who prefer to hide the corruption, allowing it to fester, are harming the Church. Whose side are they on?

—The Editor

Don’t blame the Church
I have been reading articles daily about pedophilia in the Catholic Church. As a Catholic I feel shame and humiliation for this harm that has been caused by Catholic priests against their innocent victims. I believe that the blame does not rest with the Church, but with the priests and bishops who have caused and/or ignored this problem. These priests and bishops ought to be punished for their egregious conduct.

The Church has laws that govern our moral conduct, just as our government has laws that govern our civil conduct. It is against the laws of the Church or state to steal. If a government employee were to steal, the employee would be guilty, not the government. As a Catholic, if I were to commit the same act, I would be guilty, not the Church. Those who are in authority in Church or state might be guilty of failing adequately to supervise their employees or members or to protect the victims, but the Church and the state are morally innocent because both entities condemn the act of stealing.

Prior to ordination to the priesthood, a seminarian has several years to reflect upon his commitment to celibacy. A priest is expected to lead an exemplary life and to avoid scandal. Needless to say, pedophilia heinously scandalizes the young. When a priest violates his vow of celibacy, especially in this way, he brings shame upon himself, his family, his friends, and the Church. Having done this, he is no longer worthy of this exalted position, for his actions are a profound betrayal of trust.

I love the Catholic Church, not because of the imperfection of her members—a defect that we all have in common—but because of the purity of her doctrine—which, sad to say, is being ignored by some of those whose role it is to guide us.

—James J. Clauss
Dunmore, Pennsylvania

A timely book
Your coverage of the clerical sex abuse scandal in the March issue of Catholic World Report was exemplary. It is perhaps providential in the forthcoming book Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood of which I recently read an advanced copy, is being published on the heels of this crisis. I hope the book will answer some of the deep concerns that Catholics have—concerns that could be boiled down to one simple question: How could this have happened?

Although Goodbye! Good Men is not a book about clerical pedophilia, it does present incontrovertible evidence that the root of the problem rests at the very place where vocations to the priesthood germinate: the Catholic seminaries. Too often men who support the teachings of the Catholic Church, especially teachings on sexual morality, are dismissed for being “rigid and uncharitable homophobes”—some are even dubiously branded sexually dysfunctional and potential sex offenders—while those seminarians who reject the Church’s teaching or “come out” to their superiors as homosexuals are wined and dined, given deferential treatment, and then ordained to the Catholic priesthood. The protective network starts in many seminaries (not all), where gay seminarians are encouraged to “act out” or “explore their sexuality” in vastly inappropriate ways.

At the same time seminary “gay subculture”—as Father Donald B. Cozzens calls it in his book The Changing Face of the Priesthood—desensitizes heterosexual priests to the problem of transgressions against clerical celibacy and the problems these transgressions effect. In sum, the trouble starts in the seminary, and sexual immorality is only one of the major issues that need to be addressed by the shepherds of the Church.

—Brian R. Barcaro
Editor
DioceseReport.com

Enough blame to share
Who’s to blame? What to do?

The current scandal in the priesthood centers around a few priests pursuing a gay lifestyle. But there is another problem among the laity, since more than 80 percent of Catholic married couples are said to be engaging in contraception, and therefore not living a chaste life by Catholic moral standards.

Bishops have been guilty of covering up problems by reassigning misbehaving priests. But priests have also been covering up problems by neglecting to mention unpopular truths in their homilies, such as: the fact that conscience is a matter of objectively discerning right from wrong and not deciding for oneself; that a person guilty of serious sin requires sincere reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation before receiving Christ in the Eucharist; that contraception is a serious offense against chastity; and that hell is real.

Many Catholic seminaries have done a poor job in the formation of priests. But again the laity have not done a proper job in the religious formation of their children, as seen in their lack of concern about sending the children to Catholic schools and providing a Catholic atmosphere in their homes.

Bishops have failed to protect children from sexual abuse by a few predatory priests. But Catholic schools have also failed by not providing a truly Catholic education, producing graduates who have knowledge and appreciation for their faith and motivation to practice it properly. Many schools have even been giving an un-Catholic approach to sex education.

While we set ourselves to resolve this most conspicuous scandal, we should also seek to remedy the others that have grown quietly. To do that, we must root out fundamental errors that lead to all the surface problems. Decades ago both Dietrich von Hildebrand and Frank Sheed diagnosed a systemic problem: the loss of the sense of the supernatural, the reality of Christ living in his Church and in all her members who are in the state of grace. That’s what we need to recover in our personal lives at every level of the Church, to keep us from falling into the rationalizations that have been plaguing us.

—Donald V. Murray
New York, New York