Waiting for Godot to Leave

Across the river from where I live, the neighboring diocese of Belleville, Illinois is a trend-setter.  They led the way with the sex abuse scandal in the Church long before the story broke nationally. NCR reports about Fr. Kownacki, a diocesan priest from the Belleville diocese ... Rev. Raymond Kownacki  In 1973, a 16-year-old girl, Gina Parks, contacted diocesan officials and claimed Kownacki, during a two-year period while he was pastor of a small parish in St. Francisville and later in a parish to which he was transferred in Washington Park, abused her sexually, had intercourse with her, even attempted to cause an abortion when she became pregnant. ... Parks said Kownacki gave her alcohol, promised to help her get into art school and assured her sex was OK because God "wanted people to love each other." The bishop, knowing this, and knowing that Fr. Kownacki had molested a girl from Guatemala and that "twin boys from Guatemala were living in the Wash...

My actors and I were once booked to perform at a Catholic Family Camp somewhere in the U.S. It was one of the spookiest places I've ever been to.  The lack of maintenance was appalling - everything was leaking, badly in need of paint, dreary, run down - truly a Catholic Ghetto in the worst sense of the word.  The crew and counselors take vows of celibacy - lay camp counselors taking a vow of celibacy.  Doesn't that sound like fun?  Kind of like being castrated in order to work at McDonald's. "We're not a cult," one of the staff told me when we got there.  "Every one in town thinks we're a cult, but we're not a cult!" Before we performed, I was forced to sign a "rider" to our Theater of the Word contract that gave this camp the right to tape our performance and do with it what they wished - including broadcast it or put it on the internet - with no compensation or royalty to be paid to me.  This was presented to me backstag...

These, I am told, are "hipsters" - and I feel a sudden desire to puke. A friend and blog reader writes that he thinks one of the hallmarks of the new "Hipster Catholics" - by which he seems to mean the cool young crunchy "independent music" types who are more or less orthodox (unless a bit of heterodoxy suits them) and who are self-consciously and deliberately "counter cultural" and "independent" in a way that shows how seriously and deeply they really do identify with superficial things - that one of the hallmarks of "Hipster Catholics" is "lack of masculinity".  Some of them, he even implies, have an "apostolate", which means they sponge off others while engaging in "ministry".  This is kind of like living off Mom, Dad and student loans while getting your second B.A. in Art History at age 30. He contrasts them with sober and mature men, who, whether lay or clergy, take responsibility for ...

Yesterday, on the road again, my actress and I attended a Vigil Mass somewhere in America.  It was definitely America, though it may not have been a Mass. The priest was a 70-something soft-spoken slow moving effeminate fellow, and the music was all the Bad Stuff, about a dozen of the worst "hymns" played over and over again on piano before Mass even started, kind of like an episode of The Twilight Zone where you're trapped in an elevator with horrible "muzak" and nobody else trapped with you seems to mind or even notice. The priest assured us in the homily that when Moses lifted his arms and God's staff before the Israelites battling Amalek ( Ex. 17:8-13 ), he was "giving them instructions on the battle," showing them where to attack and where to draw back, and so forth.  Far from being miraculous (which the text implies, the strength of Israel growing when the staff of God was raised and faltering when it was lowered), this was merely a n...

From an article at Religion News Service , Mark Silk writes ... A decade ago, I heard a Catholic lawyer who’d made a career of representing religious institutions in sex abuse cases describe the difference between reporting a wayward clergyman to a Methodist or Episcopal bishop versus “one of ours.” In the former case, he’d sit down in the Protestant leader’s living room, with the photos of children and grandchildren on the mantle, and the man’s sympathy would at once go to the abused. In the latter, the meeting would take place in a chancery conference room and the first words out of His Excellency’s mouth would be, “Poor Father.” And a seminarian comments ... Desmond Drummer   Oct 15, 2013 at 5:16 pm As a Catholic seminarian, I know well that the “poor father” (and “poor bishop”) syndrome is alive and well within the next generation of priests. It’s sad — VERY disturbing. Some seminarians feel that their pursuit of ordained ministry in the Catholic Church is some sor...

Not long ago I asked, "What would you do?" regarding a predator priest in the archdiocese of St. Paul, who had a long history of sexual misconduct with teen aged boys and who kept a camper on the parking lot of his parish, where he eventually molested two boys who were not yet teens.  Nobody told me what they would do, but Archbishop Nienstadt did nothing.   For this he was praised by conservative Catholics. Well, there's another scandal in St. Paul, and you can read about it in detail at the Minnesota Public Radio site ... but let me summarize it for you. While a transitional deacon waiting to be ordained to the priesthood, Jon Shelley caught the attention of counselors at a retreat center, who noted that he had trouble keeping proper boundaries with boys, and "wrestled" with some of them in a swimming pool. After being ordained, Fr. Shelley allowed an 18-year-old boy to live in the rectory with him at one point. Thousands of gay pornograp...

Rod Dreher  brings up some current sex scandals in the Church, some of which I've written about recently on this blog. One involves Fr. Riedlinger in New Jersey.  Riedlinger was a favorite of Msgr. Rossi, who is the rector of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC - enough of a favorite that Riedlinger claimed he would "vacation" with Rossi (who is a much older man).  Riedlinger would be introduced by Rossi to young seminarians, and Riedlinger would then proceed to hit on these guys and turn the talk around to gay sex.  Some of the young seminarians would complain about this, and their complaints would go unheeded. Eventually, two of them instituted a "sting" operation against Riedlinger .  Timothy Schmalz and his roommate Ryan posed as a 16-year-old boy on Facebook, and "friended" Fr. Riedlinger, who soon turned the conversation toward sex. The messages show Riedlinger needed little or no invitation to steer the conversa...

You would think that if we really were able to get exactly what we wanted, we would be happy.  But that is hardly the case.  Precisely and exactly the opposite is the case. *** On Tuesday I posted about what I consider the primary symptom of life without God - Unreality . We can live unreal lives in a number of ways, but sooner or later we get checked.  And even when the check is not sudden or dramatic, God's Reality (which I call Judgment ) has a way of checking our Unrealities little by little every day.  This "reality check" consists not so much of us "checking in" with Reality, but with Reality "checking" us, in the sense of a body slam that halts our progress.  And when Reality can't intervene and check us, we suffer.  I have known a few extremely wealthy people, and the worst thing their money does is shield them (and especially their children) from the consequences of bad behavior.  You might say that Blank Checks can ward off Reality...