Got the story already, thanks

What Really Happened In Fr. Murphy Case? (Jimmy Akin)

The NYTwits at the New York Times have been guilty of some really sloppy reporting.

But they've done us the service of putting online a big cache of primary source documents regarding the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy and the sexual abuse he committed.

These documents paint a very different picture of what happened with the Vatican--and what Cardinal Ratzinger's role was--than what the Times and other outlets are suggesting.

So what are the real facts of the case, drawn from the documents themselves?

GET THE STORY.

What Pope defenders seem oblivious to is the fact that public opinion accurately reflects the credibility of the Church, even after you factor out the anti-Catholic bias. There's a good reason why the media and the public no longer give the Church any benefit of the doubt. We may be right on a handful of selected facts that happened to have received sloppy treatment by aggressive journalists, but to stand on this is a lot like the makers of the Titanic taking pride in dispelling specific errors by reporters over precisely how their great ship sunk. The point is, sloppiness in reporting and documentation notwithstandng, the unsinkable ship sunk. Catholics should just accept this as a sunk cost, pardon the pun.

Otherwise, we just look like we're still only interested in convincing ourselves the Church cannot do wrong. This is the opposite of repentance and humility, which the Fathers teach is the unceasing, unyielding posture of the Christian. This is no time to be counting pennies when we owe a mountain of debt to God and to victims for our sins as a Church. So no, I don't think I'll "get the story" when the story has already been laid out repeatedly for those who have eyes to see it.

Pope Benedict Let a Known Pedophile Work in His Diocese in Germany

Leon Podles:

March 12th, 2010

As the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger let a pedophile work in his diocese. The London Times reports

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal for the first time tonight as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The priest went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for “therapy” in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as “H”, was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence and fined 4,000 marks ($2,800 in today’s money). There have been no formal accusations against him since.

The church has been accused of a cover-up after at least 170 accusations of child abuse by German Catholic priests. The scandal broke in January but the claims, which continue to emerge, span three decades. Critics say that priests were redeployed to other parishes rather than fired when they were found to be abusing children.

The archdiocese of Munich and Freising said there had been no complaints against the priest during the therapy at a Church community in Munich. It said the decision to allow him to continue work in Grafing was taken by Gerhard Gruber, now 81, and then Vicar General of the archdiocese.

The Vatican noted in a statement that Monsignor Gruber had taken “full responsibility” for the priest’s move back into pastoral work but did not comment further.

Monsignor Gruber said the Pope, who was made a cardinal in 1977, had not been not aware of his decision because there were a thousand priests in the diocese at the time and he had left many decisions to lower level officials.

“The cardinal could not deal with everything,” he said. “The repeated employment of H in pastoral duties was a serious mistake… I deeply regret that this decision led to offences against youths. I apologise to all those who were harmed.”

However, he did not indicate whether the convicted paedophile would be allowed to continue working in the Church.

The Pope was Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982, then moved to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a post he held until his election as pontiff five years ago after the death of John Paul II.

“H”, the priest, went on to work in an old people’s home for two years after his conviction then moved to the town of Garching where he became a curate and later a Church administrator. In May 2008 he was removed from his duties in Garching and was not allowed to work with your people, but he still works in the diocese, according to the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the story.

In the cases in Germany I have studied, I have noticed that German courts give far lighter punishments for abuse than American courts do (this is true of all crimes).

Also note that the abuser was allowed to work in a parish until 1998 and is still an active priest. The rules about Zero Tolerance that American bishops made in order to save themselves (and their bank accounts) do not apply outside the United States.

It would be astonishing if Ratzinger had delegated such a sensitive decision to an underling. That alone would indicate a failure to take responsibility.

As Edward Gibbons, no admirer of the clergy, recounted, Pope Gregory the Great took responsibility for the poor of the city of Rome. When a poor man was found starved to death in the streets, Pope Gregory suspended himself for a period as public penance for his failure.

John Paul and Benedict both failed to punish bishops who tolerated and enabled abuse. Perhaps Benedict could start by making an example of himself - and then proceed against other bishops. It would be a striking and historic confession of responsibility - it might redeem Benedict’s papacy, which is being tarnished almost beyond redemption by the continued revelations of sexual abuse by the clergy.

What so-called "conservative Catholics" in America continue to willfully ignore is the ONGOING impotence of Catholic faith in the face of something as fundamental as sin. Look at the consistent response of bishops to known pedophile priests: therapy, always "therapy," usually some variation on Freud and Dr. Phil. Not much Catholic about it.

No clear-eyed, gut-level, commonsensical recognition that a priest who rapes a child has absolutely no business wearing a collar of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, much less touching with those same perverted hands the Most Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord. No serious penitential, ascetic, or monastic rehabilitation. No serious recourse to the Tradition or the Fathers. No serious engagement with the soul of the perpetrator. They were just "sick," strictly a SOMATIC dysfunction, not spiritual or even moral; something for "science" to take care of. The Church conveniently wipes its hands clean of the matter by passing the buck over to Science.

It's typical technocrat-bureaucrat mentality, coming from the heirs to the Holy Apostles, of all people. Look at how the same mentality crosses national borders and oceans without concerted coordination from the Vatican. We can't achieve liturgical unity and coherence despite all the papal statements and gesticulations and "new liturgical movement" light shows, but we effortlessly achieve unity and coherence on sheltering pervert priests and murdering the souls of thousands of children. And now we see this pattern of thinking go right up to the top. I'm not surprised, since I now see the same cancer of cynical, functional secularism and atheism everywhere in our crumbling Church. But I don't blame the bishops alone. We who take pride in the Church's glories must also take shame in her atrocities. WE ARE TO BLAME.

It's the same attitude by which we excuse in ourselves for what the Church used to take seriously as the Deadly Sins. Now stuff like pride, vainglory, gluttony, lust, avarice, sloth, etc -- they're just personal "imperfections," "part of our crosses," an aspect of "our woundedness" that makes us "who we are," part of our "faith journey," "under the mercy," and other such delusional, self-flattering, pietistic bullshit. The Deadly Sins are plastered all over the Catholic blogosphere, liberal and conservative. And conservative Catholics still pride ourselves on being members of an "objectively true" church. It's insanity.

Radical repentance and humility in individual Catholics is the only way out. Anything else from Catholics is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We've become a church that doesn't fear sin, death, or judgment anymore; it's no wonder Catholic Lent is a joke. I AM TO BLAME.

It's only in the Eastern Church that we find doors to repentance and humility that actually open and close. Fr. Freeman nailed it when he commented obliquely on the plight of modern Catholicism:

Richard John Neuhaus has written frequently of returning the Church to the public square. I think the problem is far deeper. In many cases we have to speak about returning God to the Church. In cases where practical atheism is the faith of a goup of “believers,” their presence in the public square makes no difference. Who cares?

Self-deceit

Nothing so feeds self-conceit as believing that you are completely devoted to others and never self-seeking, that you are quite free from self-love and always generously devoted to your neighbors.

But all this devotion that seems to be for others is really for yourself. Your self-love reaches the point of perpetual self-congratulation in the mistaken belief that you are free from self-love itself. All your anxiety is fear that you might not be fully satisfied with yourself, and this is the root of your scruples.

If you thought of nothing but God and his glory, you would be as keen and sensitive to the losses of others as to your own. but it is the self that makes you so keen and sensitive. You want God as well as other people to be always satisfied with you, and you want to be satisfied with yourself in all your dealings with God.

You are not used to being content with a simple good will. Your self-love wants a lively feeling, a reassuring pleasure, some kind of charm or excitement. You are guided too much by imagination, and you suppose that your mind and will are inactive unless you are conscious of their workings. So you depend on a kind of excitement similar to that which the passions or the theater arouse.

Because of your excessive refinement, you fall into the opposite extreme -- a real coarseness of imagination. Nothing is more opposed to the life of faith and to true wisdom.

There is no more dangerous opening to delusion than the false ways by which people try to avoid delusion. It is imagination that leads us astray. The certainty we seek through imagination, feeling, and taste is one of the most dangerous sources from which fanaticism springs.

This is the chasm of vanity and corruption that God would have us discover in our own heart: we must look on it with the calm and simplicity that belong to true humility. It is self-love that makes us so inconsolable at seeing our own imperfections. To stand face to face with them, however, not flattering or tolerating them, seeking to correct ourselves without becoming peevish--this is to desire what is good for its own sake and for God's sake, rather than merely reating it as a self-satisfying decoration.

So turn against this useles search of yours for the self-satisfaction you find in doing right.

~Archbishop of Cambrai, Francois Fenelon, The Royal Way of the Cross

The Cure

Many Western Christians, parched wayfarers in these dry and thirsty times, have become totally disillusioned as their Churches have joined the latest whims and infatuations of the surrounding culture in an attempt to be "relevant" and experience worldly glory. Moreover, they have come to understand that their secularized Western Churches have succumbed to Christ's three temptations in the desert instead of overcoming them, and that they belong to a Church that crucifies instead of being crucified. As one individual who became Orthodox expressed it, Western Christianity was "too outward" for him, "not inward." It was "too comfortable, having accommodated itself to the world and taken its lead from the world" [Fr. Damascene Christiansen]. As he and countless other converts to Orthodoxy have observed, the Western Churches offer only easy, trivial and shallow solutions to the deeper questions that confront all people on their journey through life. As a result, those Churches can only spread disappointment and despair to all who try to find something deeper and more essential. ~Steven Kovacevich

A faith is a true faith inasmuch as it has therapeutic benefits. If it is able to cure, then it is a true faith. If it does not cure, it is not a true faith. ~Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

Rowan Williams' Orthodox & Catholic coup

I confess a little reverse snobbery when I read Ochlo's take on Abp Rowan Williams' recent pat-on-the-head from Orthodox and Catholic institutions, but he puts an empathetic finger on my bitterness towards academic theology and its rotten fruit. So much Catholic theology and spirituality over the centuries has been concocted in ivory towers, not in monastic cells, choir stalls, or inner prayer closets. This is the real problem with the Jesuits and the "education" orders (and Orthodox seminaries insufficiently wary of Western "ideas of the university." As a young convert and divinity school chump, I was fed a fulsome diet of Jesuit(ical) boasting over their unique release from the requirement to communally pray the Divine Office as a liberating thing. At the time, I went along: oh yes, what beautiful clothes you emperors wear!

when I was in the world of academic antiquarian bookselling I had the misfortune of dealing with a considerable number of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox seminaries and came to have a very low view of such institutions - so often intellectually inbred, a magnet for spiritual and intellectual hubris, a hodge-podge of second and third rate social science, history, and philosophy which truly believes itself to be cutting edge and struts itself with an adolescently false confidence, a playground of egos (once you add the religious factor to the already megalomania inducing mechanisms of academia you are doomed). Generally speaking, the best seminary profs I have known have been those most forthright about their regular disdain of seminaries and seminary life. What I dislike the most regarding seminaries is the faux humility which so often abounds at such institutions and which is inculcated in so many of their students - obvious that the profs and the students are proud of what is going on there, but then such speak of seminary affairs in that slightly hushed toned slowly paced "pious" voice which always gives God the glory, etc., etc, even as it is utterly clear that they can barely restrain their glee at being in a position which (they think) commands respect in both the Church and the world (on the last count they are decidedly wrong, but the myth continues, because, you know, any given seminarian could be the next Reinhold Niebuhr public intellectual, or at least that much is intuited, not realizing that Niebuhr's place has been taken by Rick Warren, and that in Niebuhr's day most Americans wanted American pastors to be smarter than they were, but today most Americans want American pastors to be just slightly dumber than they are, and mildly funny, and with an extremely comfortable personality and preferably a hot wife - in other words, pastors are to be politicians within the niche of a religious political ordo). Thus the students coming out of seminaries can be roughly divided into two camps (which corresponds to sem profs as well): the best come out of seminary with a healthy degree of cynicism about seminaries, and the worst come out of seminary proud of their seminary experience, and thinking that it actually means something in the real world, and even more fanciful, thinking that it is academically respectable in the real academic world.

What amazes me is that for all the Apostolic and Patristic prophylactics of the Orthodox, their institutions remain vulnerable to the follies of secularist, modernist, elitist think. Wiser Orthodox souls are not amazed by this at all, of course, but it is a good reminder to romanticizing chumps like me that adherence to the Apostles and Fathers is still only a means to purity of heart and mind.

Immaculate Human Nature

This year for me the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is so simple. The All-Holy, Most Pure, Ever-Virgin Mary signifies the fact that God created us not for sin and death but for righteousness and life. From what other substance could the Son of Man take his own flesh? She marks the turning point in the history of human nature back towards our Creator's original intent. In Mary, God straightens what Eve made crooked. She was graced with the same human nature that Eve possessed, no more and no less inclined towards sin; the same human nature that would serve as the only fitting abode for the Son of God. Sure, you can say Christ is more properly the turning point, but why be so hair-splittingly stingy? I think Catholics have done the dogma a disservice by spinning it as some freakishly unnatural miracle of galactic proportions. Human nature couldn't be more natural than the Immaculate Conception -- that's the point. Somewhere along the way, we implicated sin into human nature rather than into the human condition. Big difference.

Kursk Icon Homecoming

KURSK, September 23 (RIA Novosti) - The head of the Russian Orthodox Church on Wednesday led a procession through the city of Kursk, 300 miles south of Moscow, to celebrate the arrival of a miracle-working icon from the United States.

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia carried the icon, called the Kursk Root Icon of Our Lady of the Sign, through the streets, where it was welcomed by over 30,000 people - almost 10% of the city's population.

Amazing. Over 70 yrs of Communist dedication to the destruction of Christianity and look how the people still remember their historic icons. It's like they're welcoming back a real human being, a long-lost family member -- icons as "hypostatic representations" of living saints. It's enough to make you forget it's 2009.

Orthodoxy's making a strong comeback because former Soviet bloc peoples have actual memory and knowledge of the reality of secularist atheism. So they're tired of mucking around with anti-Christian nonsense. We in the West haven't a clue, so our secular atheists get away with calling Christianity a joke and we Christians just pretty much play along slackjawed for lack of a better idea.

The eastern bloc peoples at least have had a full-bodied Orthodoxy to fall back on after Communism collapsed. What will we in the West have after our secular atheism collapses? Protestantized milquetoast Christianity that can barely remember anything older than the last census.

Do we Catholics have a national bishop like Kirill venerating with great dignity an old miracle-working icon (of all things in this technocentric world) with his people? No, instead, the closest we got is McCarrick venerating the dead ass of a virulently pro-choice Catholic aristocrat (RIP, Teddy), musing effeminately with the language and tone of Oprah and Obama about love, compassion, forgiveness, and social justice. Or Mahony venerating his corporate lawyers, his precious bodily fluids (aka, archdiocesan assets), and his demotic immigration hobbyhorse.

I really don't get triumphalistic Catholics. How can one have eyes wide open and not see that the future of Christianity belongs to the Orthodox and possibly a Catholic Church that has repented of its own abandonment of the Patristic sensus fidelium? It's up to Orthodox to bring it back home for us Western Christians.

HT: ROCOR United

Peters on Burke on the Catholic Funeral of the Year

Finally, canonist Ed Peters replies to the recent controversial Burke comments about Ted Kennedy's Catholic funeral. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping he'd address the overwhelming majority of the people at that InsideCatholic dinner who went home convinced that Burke was voicing authoritative, unequivocal opposition to Ted Kennedy's Catholic funeral and participation therein by Catholic prelates. Instead, Peters' treatment is a highly lawyerly and defensive piece of academic legerdemain that misses the forest for the trees.

Peters seems more interested in avoiding the appearance of conflict between his original post on the EMK funeral and the statements of canon law's top dog (which have yet to be released as a full transcript). This is standard lawyerthink: present your position as humbly conforming with a higher authority. So Peters starts out punching at a red herring popular with the dissenting Catholic left: Burke said "the Church erred." But it's a strawman issue that distracts from what conservative or orthodox Catholics have been wrestling with in the wake of the EMK funeral.

It's fine to point out the obvious: Burke never said the Church erred, but that hems around the question of whether Burke was communicating his opposition to episcopal blessing bestowed upon EMK. Clearly, Deal Hudson at Crisis Magazine thought Burke to be opposed. And I'd bet Raymond Arroyo felt nothing but smug vindication by Burke. Pro-life websites are now explicitly claiming Burke (who is their current incarnation of the Code of Canon Law) condemns granting Catholic funeral rites to pro-choice Catholics like EMK (here, here).

But Peters doesn't really address this beyond acknowledging "how the people are confused." Instead he cleverly spins Burke's comment on public signs of repentance as prescriptive, rather than descriptive of the law. For Peters, Burke was simply stating his advocacy of future amendments to the Code or canonical jurisprudence. The takeaway, however, for most has been that Burke's opposition to Catholic funerals for pro-choice Catholics is descriptive of the current state of canon law (ius vigens). Peters waves us off from finding in Burke's speech any criticism or opposition to his brother bishops (or Peters) who signed off on the funeral. I seriously doubt anyone left the dinner with anything close to this interpretation in mind. Peters may or may not be right on Burke's actual intentions, but it ignores the fact that Burke never stated that he "wants to see canon law come to require 'public signs of repentance'" in the future; and thus it's just as speculative as David Gibson's claim that Burke condemns O'Malley & McCarrick's participation in EMK's funeral (which is tellingly similar to what Arroyo, et al, are saying as well).

Sure, Peters can argue that he's a canonist and this is precisely what canonists do. But I'd counter that his audience is not primarily academic. Hands down, Peters is the premier canonist for the Catholic blogosphere. At the end of the day, Peters is completely in the right on the canonical merits of EMK's funeral. I just wish he were a bit more honest about what Burke actually did say and how it gave fuel to more, not less, confusion.

The Rush of Blood

Illusion acts in one way, and God in another -- God the illimitable Master of man, who was and is now their Creator. He who created and re-creates, does He not remain always the Creator? Therefore, beloved brother, listen how the action of illusion differs from divine action. Illusion, when it approaches man in thought or in dream, in some subtle idea, by some apparition which can be seen with the physical eyes, or by a voice from on high heard by the physical ears, never approaches as an absolute master, but comes as a charmer who seeks acceptance by man, and from his acceptance gains power over him. The action of illusion inside or outside man is always action from without; it is open to man to repel it. Illusion is always met at first by a certain doubt in the heart: only those whom it has conquered decisively accept it without question. Illusion never unites a man who is divided by sin, it does not stop the upsurge of blood, does not lead the ascetic to repentance, does not make him small in his own eyes; on the contrary it fires his imagination, encourages the rush of blood, brings him to a certain tasteless, poisonous enjoyment, and flatters him insidiously, inspiring him with self-conceit and establishing in his soul an idol -- 'I'.

Bishop Ignatii Brianchaninov, from The Art of Prayer, p. 147.

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy everywhere nor any drop to drink

Social and cultural liberals love to invoke the hypocrisy of abortion foes when it comes to the death penalty, war, torture, environmentalism, etc. Apparently, it's hypocritical to see a difference between a constitutionally protected right of a private individual to execute innocent, defenseless human life and the constitutionally protected right of the state to execute convicted, adult humans who have intentionally committed heinous crimes against the innocent. And it's hypocrisy to notice a difference in the way death row convicts get due process of law, but human embyros don't. It's also hypocrisy to note that the death penalty kills at most in the low three-figures per annum while abortion kills over one million per annum.

Who knew there's no difference between abortion and death penalty? And who knew that hypocrisy flows only in one direction: if you think abortion is wrong, then to treat death penalty or war or torture ANY differently makes you a hypocrite; but if you think death penalty or war or torture is wrong, then to favor abortion rights is perfectly A-OK. Who knew hypocrisy only applies to pro-lifers?

No one ever acknowledges, however, that the accusations of hypocrisy against pro-lifers can come from social conservatives on the flip side as well. If you're against Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a constitutionally protected right, you must needs be opposed equally to Lawrence v. Texas, which made sodomy in the privacy of one's home a constitutionally protected right. And in the six years since that decision, have we seen a massive effort from social conservatives to topple it? Ask any pro-life Catholic whether they care to see Lawrence overturned and most will think of their local St. Lawrence parish before a SCOTUS decision.

Oh, the hypocrisy of these pro-lifers. They're not fooling anyone about their social-conservative bonafides. They're no different than the social liberals who want to ban guns and religion.

Would any social liberals care to join this non-existent chorus faulting pro-lifers for not being equally opposed to Lawrence v. Texas?

Center-of-Attention Liturgy

Narcissists come in both homo- and heterosexual versions. They are attracted to the clergy, because they can be the center of attention and manipulate other people. Within the clergy, they tend to rise to the top, because they want more attention and more opportunity to manipulate people.

And so the People of God get archbishops like Weakland and Sanchez. And children are abused and die. ~Leon Podles

Nothing to see here, people. Addiction to versus populum liturgy has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Velimirovic didn't respect Spanish Catholicism much

Fascinating 1916 critique of church history don Adolf von Harnack by St. Nikolaj Velimirovic, by way of Ora et Labora:

Christianity is founded upon a drama and not upon a science; therefore its growth and development are dramatic and not scientific.

Proto-Balthasarian? St. Nikolai would probably have a lot of critical things to say about von Balthasar's theodramatics, but it's still noteworthy that both affirm the dramatic nature of Christian faith in contrast to the scientific or positivist mindset of the modernist heresy.

The killed and martyred kings, princes, bishops, priests and laymen from these [Orthodox] countries will not be ashamed before the martyrs from the Coliseum.

I do wish Catholics acted as if their every decision were made looking the holy martyrs unblinkingly in the eye -- another useful feature of icon veneration.

Roman Catholicism in Spain came through its test very badly. Before the Islamic invasion, and after it for a long time, the Christian population showed itself inferior to the Moors, in work, in justice, in progress. But to the honour of Roman Catholicism I must say that it stood the test very well in Croatia and in Hungary in its struggle against Islam. German cathedral Protestantism failed in its test. It is destroyed as a religion, it exists only as an archival science. It ceased to be what Christianity really sought to be--a drama; it is transformed into an indifferent scientific medium for reading, exploring, classifying, comparing, criticising. It is no more a living, dramatic being--no more the serving, ruling and suffering Christ. There is very little heroic or divine in it!

I have no idea specifically what about Spain, Croatia, and Hungary St. Nikolai is talking about, but the question he's answering is an important one. What does the Church's response to persecution and opposition by the princes of this world say about its members and their understanding of the true faith?

Catholic 'Imagination'

I've always had a problem with the so-called Catholic mystical or contemplative tradition. Having studied it in div school, I never found it very personally edifying or, more importantly, for real.

As I slowly wade through St. Silouan the Athonite by Elder Sophrony, I keep coming across insightful comments that inadvertently explain my many discomforts with Tridentine Catholicism.

The second [pattern of logismoi] applies to those who practise the first form of prayer and indulge in 'visual meditation' -- who conjure up scenes from the life of Christ or similar sacred studies. It is generally neophytes who adopt this course. With this sort of imaginative prayer the mind is not contained in the heart for the sake of inner vigilance. The attention stays fixed on the visual aspect of the images considered as divine. This leads to psychological (emotional) excitement, which, carried to an extreme, may result in a state of pathological ecstasy. One rejoices in what one has 'attained', clings to the state, cultivates it, considers it to be 'spiritual', charismatic (the fruits of grace) and so sublime that one thinks oneself a saint and worthy of contemplating Divine mysteries. But in fact such states end in hallucinations, and if one does not succumb to physical illness, at the least one continues 'bewitched' and living in a world of fantasy.

I have yet to read a Catholic anticipate and defend these concerns, whose scope reaches everything from Ignatian to Carmelite spirituality. It probably says more about my ignorance, but the current de facto sense of the faithful is that human imagination is a wonderful unalloyed good to be given free reign "in the Spirit" so long as it does not directly conflict with Catholic doctrine. I hear this Oprahesque sentiment all the time from priests, bishops, and religious. See how we tend to define spirituality legalistically and negatively, devoid of Christological substance? Christ is more often than not a foil or a guard rail to our imagination, not the purifier of the imagination.

Prof. Michael Perry is liberal Catholic scum

Laurie Goodstein's recent NY Times piece appears to be a credible, truthful, and completely believeable expose of our bishops' prior notice that pervert priests were running around murdering young souls with little fear of episcopal discipline. Her coverage doesn't tell us much we didn't already know. And it confirms my own disgust with the bishops' collective delusion and cowardice. The sanctity of their sacramental office remains the only thing we have with which to judge them. If it seems insufficient, then it is because we (lay & cleric alike) have clericalized it, bureaucratized it, degraded it, and made it small.

But leave it to our "liberal Catholic" brethren to outdo the NY Times in the cowardly anti-Catholic cheap shot department:

These are the men--the men!--whose insights regarding the complexity of human sexuality we are expected to genuflect before. Gimme a break. If women had been bishops--indeed, if mothers had been bishops--would this have happened?

He calls himself a "Catholic legal theorist" when the obvious rebuttal to this dreck -- since apparently so many out there must think likewise -- is that if children, puppies, or rocks were bishops the scandal wouldn't have happened either. If the Catholic Church or the human race didn't exist, the scandal wouldn't have happened either. And this is held out as a Catholic legal theorist's argument for women priests?

And is genuflection to the "insights" of the individuals who hold the office of bishop what we do when Catholics stand for orthodoxy? Funny, since that's quite the opposite from what I believe. I genuflect instead to the bishops' lack of personal or private insights. I bow to their conformity and conductivity to the fullness of the Apostolic teachings.

It is proof of their mindless commitment to secularist Protestant totalitarianism that liberal Catholics, instead of dealing with real suffering in a real world or a real Catholic Church, must twist everyone's suffering into a mere pretext for their own solipsistic worship of themselves and their Castro District Cosmos.