The Lavender Mafia in the Church formed a ready-made career network for the gay priests who joined in the fun. Dig this article in the Catholic News Agency. Sorry for the long excerpt, but it illustrates the point well which I will make before you read it.
Imagine you're a devout, young Catholic man and you decide to enter the Seminary. You encounter the gay cabal, but in spite of the corruption all around you, you stick it our and get ordained. Now you're a young priest, working in a parish and learning your job. The gays get ordained as well, but when they leave seminary, they have "uncles" all around them with whom they've partied, drank and, in some cases, had sex.
In any career, a strong social network is a huge advantage to getting ahead. The gays had it in spades. It wasn't just an ordinary social network, it was one with the deeper bonds that come from sex. The straight priests were essentially solo artists while the gays had all the connections.
One of the things that jumps out at you from Virgano's letter is how he kept sending warning letters up his chain of command about predators like Cardinal McCarrick, but they never got responses or action. It's clear there was a layer of protectors from the Lavender Mafia keeping the news from doing any damage. I'm sure that wasn't by accident. The cabal took care of its own and probably did so strategically, working out just where to put their men in order to keep a lid on things.
Back in the parishes, the good priests were a majority, but they didn't have the power because they were clean. They hadn't formed the tight bonds that the partiers did. Their devotion to us in the laity and their faithfulness to the Church was what made them weak while the cabal grew stronger and stronger.
Vigano's letter is huge because it allows us all to form a public network. We're the vast majority in the Church and we're now aware of the cabal. We're not going to rest until heads roll. Those protective social networks won't work any more. In fact, it's a huge disadvantage because now we're going to start pulling the threads and exposing them. They're screwed.
And now, on with the excerpt.
CNA recently spoke to six priests of the Archdiocese of Newark, and one priest member of a religious order who was a seminarian in New York in the early 1970s, while McCarrick was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York...Imagine being a young seminarian and trying to blow the whistle on that. You're isolated and they're not. Well, that problem has been flipped on its head now. The good guys are backed by the laity and the Lavender Mafia's great strength, it's web of connections, is now its downfall.
The religious priest who spoke to CNA said when he studied in a seminary in New York, McCarrick, who was then an aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York, would sometimes visit the seminary. The priest said that McCarrick’s reputation was already well established by this time.
“The dean of our theology school was a classmate at CUA with McCarrick, and he knew about the rumors,” the priest told CNA, “he spoke about them with the other faculty and theologians very openly.”
So well-known was McCarrick’s reputation, the priest said, that when McCarrick would accompany Cooke to visit the seminary there was a standing joke that they had to "hide the handsome ones" before he arrived...
The priest told CNA that, in addition to trips to a house on the shore, McCarrick would invite young men to stay the night in the cathedral rectory in central Newark.
“Priests would tell me ‘he’s sleeping with them’ all the time, but I couldn’t believe it – they seemed like perfectly normal guys,” the priest said...
Fr. Desmond Rossi was a seminarian in Newark in the late 1980s. He has publicly alleged that, in 1988, two transitional deacons sexually abused him.
According to Rossi, he told archdiocesan authorities about the assault and went before a review board. He said that his story was “found credible, but nothing happened.” Instead, he claims the archdiocese turned against him for bringing the allegation forward.
“They tried to turn it on me," Rossi said...
In recent years, several priests said, Weiner is known for hosting cocktail parties in his rectory, which other homosexual priests of the archdiocese are known to attend.
Three Newark priests independently gave CNA nearly identical accounts of being invited to these parties when they were newly ordained.
One recalled that he attended a cocktail party, thinking he had been invited to a simple priests’ dinner. “I was led into the room to a chorus of wolf-whistles,” he said. “It was clear right away I was ‘on display.’”
Another priest told CNA that he was also invited to a party hosted by the priest. “They were all carrying big mixed drinks, pink ones, it was like something out of Sex in City.”
He recalled that after asking for a beer, he was told by his host, “you need to try something more girly tonight.”
All recounted overtly sexual conversation at the cocktail parties. “I was fresh meat and they were trying me out,” one priest said.
All three said they left quickly upon realizing what was going on. “Everyone was getting loaded and getting closer on the couches, I wanted out of there,” a priest told CNA.
We're going to find every one of you.
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| Check under your beds every night, guys. We're coming. |
1 comment:
I think the Church is beginning to repeat the mistake they made last time. They are forgetting that the scandal has two parts: one is the abuse, and the other is the coverup. There seems to be the idea that the problem is entirely that they let some bad people into the priesthood, and that all that needs to be done is to get rid of the bad apples and be more selective in the future.
But, being perfectly selective is impossible. There will always be some bad priests. And the culture of the Church is still to keep priest misconduct an entirely internal matter, which encourages secrecy and coverup to keep outsiders from finding out about it.
And this is the setup for the next scandal. Even if they reduce the number of bad priests, some will sneak through, and eventually the coverup of them will fail and it will all start again. They are setting themselves up for failure, and don't even seem to know it.
What the church needs to do is what everyone else is expected to do in these situations. If they have a credible accusation that a priest has broken the law, they need to remove him from his position and hand him over to the judicial system for trial. And until they start doing that, they are going to have the same scandals over and over and over again. And even if only one priest in a million is a sexual predator, people will again think that all priests are. And the church will still have no defense against it because it will still be clear from their behavior that they were hiding something, and it will still be easy to assume that they were hiding way more than was ever discovered.
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