Waiting for Godot to Leave

Catholic World News reports that the Vatican has suspended all priestly ordinations in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. If this is true, it's an indication that something far more sinister has been brewing down there than just the elevation of an alleged child molesting homosexual cult leader to the position of Vicar General.  This, after Bishop Martino of Scranton, PA made it clear that this man (Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity), who had been operating in his diocese, was not fit for ministry.  The Diocese of Scranton states (my emphasis) ... Bishop Martino clearly expressed his reservations concerning Father Urrutigoity, who was identified as posing a serious threat to young people. Bishop Martino also carefully and consistently expressed his grave doubts about this cleric’s suitability for priestly ministry and cautioned the Bishop of the Diocese of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay to not allow Father Urrutigoity to incardinate into his diocese . Despite these serious cautions, Bishop Rogel...

Dick Cheney's stunt double, Bill Donohue of the Catholic Defense League. Refusing to address a single one of the facts whistle blower Jennifer Haselberger has revealed in her deposition, in her interviews, and in the abundant documentary evidence that supports Haseblberger's claims about the scandal in St. Paul, Catholic Defense League's Bill Donohue instead goes after Haselberger personally. And why not?  This is a tactic demagogues of all shapes and sizes have used throughout history.  Avoid the evidence, don't engage on the issues, instead use personal attacks to discredit your opponents.  It may not be the most Catholic or Christian thing to do - but hey, it's us vs. them , so anything goes, right? Now if Donohue wanted to come after me or pretty much any other Catholic I know, and if he did his digging, he could find a ton of embarrassing and incriminating details that would make it hard for any of us to show our faces in public again.  I have yet to...

An anonymous commenter responded to my post here , with at least one question that I answered here.   And yet he or she claims I'm dodging the points he or she has made. So let me address them below: 1. Anonymous claimed that the sexual scandal in the Church is over.  This was the point I responded to in my follow up post : It most emphatically is not .  Bishops are still enabling sex abuse, and getting indignant when the press or the courts point this out.   2. Anonymous takes issue with the number of pedophile priests that are or have been active in the Church (reports range from 4 to 10%).  But the number of abusers is not the point.  The point is how the bishops continue to enable such abuse.  Even if the number is half what Pope Francis suggests - i.e., only 1% - the point is not that number.   The point is what should be done once a crime against a child is committed.  This is what can easily be fixed, and this is what the b...

Tolkien's amazing letter to his son Michael deserves a closer look.  Here it is again, with some commentary by me in boldface .   *** A man's dealings with women can be purely physical (they cannot really, of course: but I mean he can refuse to take other things into account, to the great damage of his soul (and body) and theirs); or 'friendly'; or he can be a 'lover' (engaging and blending all his affections and powers of mind and body in a complex emotion powerfully coloured and energized by 'sex').  Tolkien is setting up here three possibilities in relations between men and women:  1. A man can relate to a woman merely for the sake of physical pleasure (though really this can never happen, for we can never separate our bodies and our souls, and great harm of some sort comes to those men who try to do this; great harm also comes to the women involved) 2. A man can be "friends" with a woman (before old age, this is...

Eros - looking more like himself than the domesticated Cupid he later became. One of the things that has caught my attention the last week or so has been a remarkable essay by D. C. Schindler on Pope Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est , in which Schindler points out the Holy Father's Magisterial assertion that Love is One (as God is One) and that Eros - the love that is jealous, interested, invested, eager, lively, passionate, a love that possesses and that takes pride in its object - and Agape - the love that is disinterested, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, altruistic, condescending (in the best sense of the word) - are simply two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same unified thing: Love, viewed from different angles.  Indeed, Eros without agape becomes demanding and destructive; but Agape without Eros becomes clinical, dehumanizing and condescending (in the worst sense of the word). I am convinced that a deep mystery is here, one that offers a key to much of o...

One of the things revealed in the documents that have been released concerning the Fr. Kolar case in St. Paul is that after Kolar was sent away for treatment and it became obvious that he was both initiating sexual contact with adult women he was counseling, and also abusing a minors - and after the psychiatrists who evaluated him indicated the he had a serious personality disorder, the archbishop and his cronies decided that their options were either ... 1. Make Fr. Kolar DIRECTOR OF GUIDANCE at the seminary (where he could guide and form young men who were becoming priests) 2. Put him to work AT A PARISH (where he would be free to counsel more young women.  Note that the archdiocese made a point of not informing any laity of Fr. Kolar's abusive behavior, so women approaching Fr. Kolar for counseling at a parish would not know the risk they were taking.) And in neither case would any of the bishops around the country be informed of Kolar's previous work in NET Minist...

Jennifer Haselberger Anonymous comments on my post The Nature of the Problem ... Now it was a grave sin what those priests and Bishops did decades ago, but it is time to stop acting like what happened then is still happening now. The Church has taken many steps to prevent sexual abuse from happening.  But these are steps that are not being followed, at least in St. Paul , Kansas City and St. Louis .  The enabling of sexual abuse by bishops is still going on.   The sexual abuse is still happening. Read the recent affidavit  by Jennifer Haselberger.  You can tell yourself that she's a flaming liberal in it for the money - but at one point she says she had high hopes for Archbishop Nienstedt because he was "doctrinally pure".  So that won't wash. And most of what she describes is backed up by documentary evidence, and it rings very true. A friend of mine says the bishops have been behaving with "knavish imbecility".  It's a great phrase, ...

Here's a shortened version of a post from a year-and-a-half ago. I don't necessarily write better when I'm mad, but I write more honestly. *** What is the Catholic Ghetto? It is producers producing bad art for consumers who won't pay for good art.  It's hard to say which came first.  But the effect is bad Catholic novels, bad Catholic drama, bad Catholic audio CDs, bad Catholic videos ... ... My contention is the Catholic Ghetto exists only because of Unreality. Yes, Unreality, that odd little thing that is really just Idolatry applied to lifestyle. You see, I've tried hard to explain the Catholic Ghetto before and I've tried hard to explain Unreality before. It's only now that I assert clearly that the two are related to one another.  They spring from the same root.  And that root is lack of faith; or at least lack of courage when it comes to applying the faith; lack of Incarnational faith. We don't really believe God wi...

A friend will be interviewing me tomorrow for a class he's teaching on Beauty and Justice.  One of the topics he's willing to let me rant about is the lack of Beauty in our current Catholic culture: i.e, the Catholic Ghetto . With that in mind, I'm looking over a few old posts, including this one from last fall ... *** A Theater of the Word supporter, who has been trying to drum up business for us, writes to me (emphasis mine) ... ... the folks up this way completely balk at the price [of your shows], and this is unlikely to change if I try the pitch ten more times.  The youth / young adults ministry chap, though already familiar with you and your work, which he likes, said that $2500 is a youth ministry position for a year .  Indeed even if you were to halve the asking price for the show itself, then adding in the travel expenses, I have seen no indication that there would be any takers.   What he's referring to is that if a parish in his neck of t...

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has interviewed Annie Lobert, the founder of Hookers for Jesus, an organization that helps women break free of the sex industry . Lobert's point is that prostitution is simply the extension of the basic principle of a radically capitalist culture: everything can be bought and sold, including people, including the most intimate parts of a person's body, including the most intimate parts of a person's soul.  Lobert is a former hooker, who has managed to discover that sex exists only in a much larger and more profound context ( my emphasis ) ... “I love sex now, because I’m with my husband. But does it fulfill me? No. My husband’s relationship with me does, his care for me, his concern, ” Annie says. Sex is a part of all that , she adds, but only when it’s sex that can’t be dislocated and commodified. And while I'd guess that most of you out there have had nothing to do with the sex industry (beyond pornography, which victimizes addicts...

A s reported yesterday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch  (my emphasis in bold / my comments in italics) ...  On a morning when a historic sexual abuse trial was supposed to begin, the Archdiocese of St. Louis announced a settlement in a civil lawsuit against a defrocked priest. The first trial involving the archdiocese since the sexual abuse crisis broke in 2002 was set to begin Monday morning. [My Note: all the rest, 60 or more, have been settled out of court or dismissed]. The lawsuit involves a woman who claims she was abused by former priest Joseph D. Ross from 1997 to 2001 while attending St. Cronan Catholic Church. The woman, ... alleges the abuse began when she was 5 or 6 years old. The archdiocese maintains that the allegations made in the lawsuit are false and denies Jane Doe was ever abused by Ross.  ... At the request of the plaintiff, details of the settlement will remain confidential , Pesha said.  While the archdiocese denied Ross ...

A study by Abel et al. ( 32 ) of 377 nonincarcerated, non-incest-related pedophiles, whose legal situations had been resolved and who were surveyed using an anonymous self-report questionnaire, found that heterosexual pedophiles on average reported abusing 19.8 children and committing 23.2 acts, whereas homosexual pedophiles had abused 150.2 children and committed 281.7 acts.  From Psychiatry Online.