Situational Awareness

I've given some thought to crisis management here lately, and an episode from last week gives me reason to think more about it.

On Christmas week, Facebook suspended the account of Christian evangelist and philanthropist Franklin Graham — son of the late evangelical giant Billy Graham — for a 2016 post about North Carolina's bathroom bill. Facebook blocked him for 24 hours, but rescinded the ban and apologized. Even so, the action is likely to spark an uproar across the Christian community.

So some mid-level busybody millennial tech-bureaucrats decided to fire a warning shot across a prominent Christian's bow during Christmas week. Pure coincidence, huh? And keep in mind that the Facebook higher-ups are simply playing good cop-bad cop in rescinding the ban. The tech monoculture has made somewhat more progress with the atheist-libertarians like Carl Benjamin on the self-styled "intellectual dark web", but they're employing the same formulas and same strategies with Franklin Graham, and this simply isn't the last time they'll use it. As a matter of policy, they'll continue to ban "hate speech" as they arbitrarily define it, and they'll "rescind" such bans based on their whims and what they had for breakfast.

CCC 2357-58 is going to be a target, depend on it. Given the precedent with Carl Benjamin, Fr X can focus his YouTube channel on issues like angels or the Immaculate Conception and come nowhere near same-sex attraction, but because his organization calls it "objectively disordered", he's guilty of "hate speech" whatever he said or didn't say on YouTube. This is going to happen. The surprise for me is why it hasn't already. Depend on it, it will.

Corporations have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to plan for how hurricanes, earthquakes, civil disturbances, and other potential disruptions will potentially affect their operations and have policies and plans in place for responding to them when they happen. In many cases, such plans have been implemented in disaster situations, and companies like banks and utilities have responded and recovered very well.

A social-media "hate speech" attack on the Church is more predictable than a hurricane at this point. It's going to cause a crisis for the Church when it does. The only good part is that the Church doesn't depend as much on Patreon or PayPal as independent YouTubers, and many prominent social-media commentators like Fr Z and Fr Longenecker have set up independent donation channels, something the YouTubers are now being driven to do. But cutting the likes of Bp Barron, EWTN, or Ascension Presents off YouTube would be a crisis that needs to be foreseen and, to the extent possible, forestalled.

To be effective crisis managers, the US bishops, the CDF, and the Holy Father really need to have a response in place. A good plan at the diocesan and USCCB level would include hardening the Church's fundraising channels against arbitrary suspensions by processors like PayPal, a legal strategy that can be implemented quickly with drafts of ex parte motions and restraining orders, a prepared press and public relations response, and in fact an ongoing proactive campaign to indicate the Church is aware of first-amendment issues in the culture at large and will defend its positions.

Someone like Bp Barron from the Church of Nice won't be the guy to do this, though. Whether the Church can come up with an effective plan is an open question.

About Those Hinky Jesuits

I've got to admire the public-relations job Bp Daly's people in Spokane have done in responding to press reports about the Jesuit sex offenders who lived at Cardinal Bea House at Gonzaga University, without university administrators or Spokane law enforcement being notified. As far as I can see, the bottom line is that nobody in Daly's scope of authority is guilty of any sort of misconduct, and they in fact seem to have worked behind the scenes since 2015 to get the problem out of Spokane, which they did.

Yet once the issue came to light, they were able to make it clear that on one hand, it hadn't happened on Daly's watch, Daly had in fact worked to fix it -- but maybe more important, the response didn't directly stir up more bad publicity for the Jesuits or Cardinal Cupich, both of whom were culpable for the situation. Again, I hope this will help Bp Daly prosper in his career.

But let's look at this story, which came out in the left-wing press. A note at the bottom says that one of the editors was Narda Zacchino, a hard leftist from the 1960s married to Robert Scheer, another aging hard leftist and Castro sympathizer. This should give observers pause over the grist Catholic scandals provide for totalitarian propaganda -- even in the 1930s, a Nazi anti-Catholic talking point was sex abuse by priests.

It's also worth noting that the problem the Jesuits had with the former Oregon Province has gone unmentioned, as far as I can tell, in the books covering the First Crisis -- it doesn't appear in Engel's The Rite of Sodomy, for instance. In 2008-2009, though, both the Oregon Province and the Diocese of Fairbanks declared bankruptcy as a result of hundreds of lawsuits for Alaska abuse.

The abusive Jesuits at Cardinal Bea House were part of the Oregon Province’s outsized problem with sexual misconduct. The province had 92 Jesuits accused of sexual abuse, by far the most of any province in the country, according to data we compiled from church records, a database maintained by advocates for sex abuse victims, and information released earlier this month by the Jesuits. In addition, about 80 percent of accused abusers worked in Native communities in the Oregon Province.

The story focuses on the most egregious case, Fr James Poole, who had been sleeping with Alaska Native girls and women since his arrival in the state.

In a 1960 letter to a Jesuit official, local Jesuit leader Segundo Llorente fretted over Poole’s conduct. Poole regularly had long, one-on-one conversations with young girls about sex, Llorente wrote. Llorente’s letter speculated that Poole, “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere. Some think that may be (sic) he is projecting outwardly what is eating him inwardly … he is deliberately placing himself at all times in dangerous situations.”

There might have been some personal insight in those words. The names of both Llorente and the Alaska church official with whom he was corresponding, Father Paul O’Connor, appeared on a list released by the Fairbanks Diocese in 2009 of priests accused of sexual misconduct.

The pattern here is familiar because it's so often repeated: priests and religious whose conduct is extreme and clearly recognized by superiors, but tolerated and in fact enabled, at least in part because the superiors are guilty themselves. At minimum, a superior who takes serious action is subject to blackmail under such circumstances. But it seems to me that one way to avoid a problem with octogenarian offenders living in comfortable retirement at Jesuit facilities would be to laicize them when the crimes come to light and turn them over to civil authorities.

A National Public Radio report on other Alaska abuse cases raises a case that Bp Lopes may find relevant to the "Gilbertines" in Calgary. Fr George Endal, SJ, met an Army veteran and drifter in 1959 who had briefly been a Trappist, Joseph Lundowski. Endal quickly designated Lundowski a "brother" and put him in charge of the boys' dormitory at a mission school. Several witnesses observed Lundowski's misconduct with boys, but Lundowski routinely followed Endal to new assighments. Correspondence took place among Church officials for more than a decade over what to do with Lundowski, who continued to call himself "Brother" but had no official status. No action was taken.

Endal, meanwhile, asked that Lundowski be made a deacon; Church officials dithered. Endal unofficially made Lundowski a "deacon" anyhow. A bishop later officially endorsed the move. Finally in 1975, Endal had Lundowski flown out of his territory in response to yet another complaint, but Endal himself continued to abuse children. By 2004, at least 28 men filed lawsuits against the Jesuit province and the Diocese of Fairbanks due to abuse by Lundowski and Endal.

Bp Lopes, shut the "Gilbertines" down.

Two Bishops, Two Approaches

Barring any new revelations from state investigations, I think we've learned all we're going to know about the hinky Jesuits at Gonzaga. But the data points we have lead to compelling conclusions.

Then-Bp Cupich was the ordinary in Spokane from 2010 to 2014. In 2011, we know that the Jesuit provincial told him about at least seven of the hinky Jesuits at Gonzaga. Cupich had already been Bishop of Rapid City, SD from 1998 to 2010, so he presumably had more than a decade learning the job, and he'd been a bishop throughout the First Crisis. But as far as we know, he did nothing about the Jesuits who were theoretically living under "safety plans" but were free to come and go.

We know that Bp Thomas Daly took over from Cupich in 2015, and the press release a week ago from the diocese said he "was not informed by the Jesuits or Gonzaga University that these men were living at Cardinal Bea House." Whether he was told anything by Cupich is unclear, although the issue seems not to have concerned him much between 2011 and his departure for Chicago.

On the other hand, the hinky Jesuits don't seem to have been a complete surprise to Daly, either, however he learned of them. In 2016, they all suddenly left Gonzaga for California, a complete coincidence, I'm sure. (However, they were relocated to the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, California, in the diocese where Daly had previously been auxiliary.) By 2017, the Spokane diocese was updating its policies to be sure that no more hinky Jesuits (or hinkies of any other stripe) could come in without the bishop's knowledge and approval.

The result was, at least from a bishop-as-corporate-manager point of view, Daly had been acting prudently to deflect potential blame from the diocese, should the story become public, which in fact it did. He was also acting as a good shepherd, both protecting potential future victims and protecting the faithful from fallout over any new scandal.

The question is why Cupich, a decade older and with that much more experience as a bishop under his belt, didn't take equivalent action while he was in Spokane.

Let's look at the pattern we began to see in the First Crisis: certain bishops, like Law, Levada, and Mahony, simply had a record of protecting criminally abusive priests. But this didn't happen in a vacuum; they tolerated a great deal more open same-sex conduct and advocacy among all their clergy. There's probably a law enforcement analogy here: when police enforce quality-of-life laws, subway fare evasion or low-level vandalism, the overall crime rate decreases. The same, I strongly suspect, applies to dioceses.

Thus in the Second Crisis, we see similar records with Tobin, McCarrick, and Wuerl. And it's probably no coincidence that there are financial issues with these bishops as well. On the other hand, we're beginning to see bishops like Thomas Daly who are moving proactively, recognizing that it's simply part of a bishop's job to keep the lawn mowed, the windows clean, and the trash picked up. Even if Cupich tries to claim the Jesuit provincial didn't spell things out in words of two syllables or less, why did Daly see and act on a problem, knowing even less than Cupich, when Cupich apparently ignored it?

Although Cupich, if you get right down to it, doesn't strike me as very smart. This may be why he's where he is, and why he's still Pope Francis's point man for dealing with the Second Crisis.

Let's hope Bp Daly continues to advance in his career.

Cardinal Cupich And The Gonzaga Twenty

There's been a puzzling story over the past week about a number of Jesuit priests, apparently about 20 to 24, who had been credibly accused of sexual impropriety and had theoretically been confined to Cardinal Bea House, a Jesuit-owned residence on the Gonzaga University campus in Spokane, WA. According to the Register,

The sexual-abuse accusations against the priests living on Gonzaga’s campus were not made known publicly by the university, the Jesuit province or the diocese. Most of the accused priests were reported to be living at the Gonzaga residence in retirement or due to declining health.

The house is a residence owned by the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus and not overseen by the university. The credibly accused priests living there were reportedly subject to “safety plans” that forbade them from engaging with students.

According to the media reports, at least some credibly accused priests had regular unsupervised access to the university campus and unsupervised visits with students and were permitted to lead prayer services in other settings, including on Native-American reservations.

The Diocese of Spokane went into more detail in a December 21 press release:

According to files given to the Diocese of Spokane by the Oregon Province of Jesuits, these credibly accused priests were living on campus with safety plans requiring such things as chaperones for any trips out of Cardinal Bea House and restricting their public ministry. The reporting by Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting indicates that these credibly accused Jesuits were free to come and go on campus. This was an unacceptable situation.

In June of 2011 the Jesuit Provincial, Father Patrick Lee, informed then-Bishop Blase Cupich that seven priests with safety plans in place were living at Bea House.

Bishop Thomas Daly—who was installed in 2015—was not informed by the Jesuits or Gonzaga University that these men were living at Cardinal Bea House.

It's likely that some of the Jesuits in question were aged and infirm, unlikely to go far or do mischief. But others were in a different position. According to Complicit Clergy,

Rev. James Poole had at least 20 victims during his career with the Catholic Church. Court documents show one victim was only six years old. Another, who was impregnated by him at the age of 16, was forced to get an abortion before Poole blamed her father (who later went to prison).

. . . . Rev. Frank Case, the chaplain for the school’s famous basketball team, apparently “recommended a pedophile priest for a job at a Tacoma hospital three decades ago.”

That priest? James Poole. Case said he was unaware of Poole’s litany of abuses, but after working at that hospital for over a decade, he “retired” on Gonzaga’s campus in 2003. (Poole died this past March.)

Case resigned in the wake of the revelations, along with another Gonzaga administrator, Rev. Pat Lee. Lee informed then-Bp Cupich of the accused priests' presence at Cardinal Bea House in 2011. According to the Diocese of Spokane,

Bishop Thomas Daly—who was installed in 2015—was not informed by the Jesuits or Gonzaga University that these men were living at Cardinal Bea House. After May 2015 any Jesuits assigned to the Diocese of Spokane or problems with Jesuits living in the Diocese of Spokane were discussed in the regular communications between the current Jesuit provincial, Father Scott Santarosa, and Bishop Daly. None of the Jesuits on safety plans were ever a topic of discussion."

Other sources report that the Jesuits were "migrated" away from Bea House to a facility in California in 2016, while the diocese itself had been updating its policies "for religious order priests and extern priests. The changes to the policy were approved by Bishop Daly in November 2018." Among other things, they must present letters of suitability from their superiors and ordinaries, request faculties from the diocese, and get the approval of Bp Daly.

This suggests that Daly had been well aware of the issues before they became public, and at least he was on top of them when the news broke. In fact, I would estimate that this was an excellent set of crisis management responses by the diocese -- once the issue became public, it had been fully addressed, and the resignations of complicit parties were coordinated with the release.

I would guess, though, that the public information is just the tip of an iceberg, and more could come out, likely to Cupich's discredit, at any time. The tone of the diocese's release suggests Cupich didn't leave warm and fuzzy feelings behind.

North American Ordinariate Year-End News

My regular correspondent sent me an update on two relatively new communities:

I just wanted to update you on one of your stories from earlier in 2018: Dcn (Blake) Gregory Tipton and the OCSP community of St Aelred, Athens, GA, I was interested that their monthly DW mass is now celebrated on Sunday afternoon in the chapel of St Joseph School, where Mrs Tipton works, rather than in the parish church, but the investigation is complicated by the fact that the diocesan parish doesn't have a church, really. Having outgrown their downtown building the congregation has been using the multipurpose gym at the school for the last two years while a new church is being planned.

This is obviously good news for the growing parish but I can see that attracting current Episcopalians to this worship environment might be challenging. I cannot find any pictures of the school chapel on the web, unfortunately. There are two Episcopalian churches and one "continuing" Anglican church in Athens with attractive traditional church premises. Both the rector and the associate rector of the local TEC parish of which Dcn Tipton was previously a member are former Catholic priests---the Rector was a Capuchin for many years.

Dcn Tipton has a blog on the St Aelred website, and I must say that his writing skills have not improved since the earlier samples which you labelled "word salad." A disconcerting blend of Wikipedia-style information of dubious relevance and random personal observations. Dcn Tipton is still teaching history and theology at the local Catholic high school and I must say I do not envy his students. It will be interesting to see if/when he proceeds to priestly ordination.

Mr Philip Mayer at St James, St Augustine FL is expecting to be ordained priest January 27 2019 according to the St James website.

Let's hold up the mirror of the gay-networks crisis in the larger Church to this minor news. One theory of Anglicanorum coetibus is that it's an attempt to swell the diminishing ranks of celibate priests by taking in disaffected Anglicans, perhaps also as an experiment to test larger acceptance of married clergy. But the examples of Dcns Tipton and Mayer aren't apples-to-apples comparisons -- Dcn Mayer appears not to have worked out over years as a Pastoral Provision candidate in the Diocese of St Petersburg, while Dcn Tipton appears to have been a marginal candidate for TEC ordination who looked to the OCSP only after he failed to get a footing in the local TEC diocese.

I think we can begin to conclude that the reason for Anglicanorum coetibus is careers within the Church, with laity playing a very secondary role. In our more recent broader perspective, Steven Lopes has followed an existing career path, becoming secretary to a corrupt cardinal, William Levada, much as Donald Wuerl became secretary to John Wright. One question is why he wasn't given a small territorial diocese on the normal promotion ladder for bishops, when instead he got a project that's turned out to be a loser from the start. There's been no real change over the Steenson regime, either.

Nor is the OCSP bringing in exceptional parish priests. The roughly 60 mediocrities don't strike me as any answer to the problem of diminished celibate vocations, and in fact, there's been no real decrease in the risk exposure, given the examples of Frs Kenyon and Reese. This is almost certainly because Anglican priests who consider leaving their denominations for the OCSP are almost always doing this because they aren't succeeding as Anglicans, and a certain percentage of these aren't succeeding because their Anglican vestries and bishops want them out for good reason.

Looking at Anglicanorum coetibus from the broader Church perspective, I think a better solution to the problems it's presumptively meant to address will be to reform the seminaries and get the gay networks out of the vocation business, while encouraging vocations in parishes by strong preaching and personal example and the influence of server programs and reverent liturgy.

Crisis Management

Corporate crisis management is a field that interests me a lot. I sometimes worked in the related field of disaster recovery -- I had a lot of fun helping an employer recover from the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. But the earthquake was a physical problem for the company that caused a perceptual crisis, from which it had a much harder time recovering. My wife and I met while we both worked for another company that had a perceptual crisis from which it never recovered -- and it was a very good company; we've kept up with good people we worked with there.

As a blogger, I'm interested in new media, and I have a certain obligation to maintain situational awareness in the field. Over the past few weeks, I've been watching the self-immolation of a new-media company that seems not to be fully aware that it's in a crisis that needs to be managed. This can lead to some insight for another organization that's in a major crisis, the Roman Catholic Church.

Patreon emerged five years ago as a way to manage and regularize voluntary donations to YouTubers. According to Wikipedia,

Patreon was founded in May 2013 by artist Jack Conte, who was looking for a way to make a living from his popular YouTube videos. Together with Sam Yam he developed a platform that allows patrons to pay a set amount of money every time an artist creates a work of art. . . . Unlike other online platforms such as YouTube and Facebook which use trained algorithms to identify potentially inappropriate content, Patreon's trust and safety team monitors users and investigates complaints of Terms of Service violations. In December 2018, Patreon banned the controversial right-wing personality Milo Yiannopoulos a day after he created an account, and also banned anti-feminist Carl Benjamin because he had made a homophobic statement and said "nigger" in a YouTube interview in February 2018. The move was criticized by atheist Sam Harris and American libertarians who have accused it of being politically motivated. Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson announced a plan to launch an alternative service that will be safe from political interference.

Wikipedia's take doesn't fully explain the issue, I think because Jack Conte doesn't fully understand YouTube and new media. New media and blogging emerged primarily as a result of the 9-11 attacks, when articulate people with time on their hands became dissatisfied with traditional media's reporting on Mahometanism and terrorism. Blogs like Instapundit became very popular, because they presented an alternate view of Western civilization that was more credible than the squishiness of mainstream media, centrist politicians, and the academic establishment.

YouTube was a development that followed on blogging as bandwidth and computer capacity increased to allow wide distribution of special-interest video. Like blogs that followed the Instapundit model, an important faction of YouTube commentators, like Carl Benjamin and Jordan Peterson, tends toward libertarianism and atheism or agnosticism, although they also emphasize an Aristotelian understanding of natural law even if they don't specifically characterize it that way.

But to call Carl Benjamin or Jordan Peterson "anti-feminist" is about like calling Aristotle "anti-feminist", which of course is what now passes for education at Princeton and Ann Arbor. But this is the crux of the issue. Western elites have moved to embrace a corporate state religion that discounts traditional virtue while privileging favored interest groups as well as Mahometans, apparently because if they're given the leeway to do so, Mahometans will kill Jews and Christians, something the corporate-state elites will generally temporize over, as believing Christians and Jews have never been fully amenable to globalist regimes.

The current difficulty is that the Silicon Valley corporations that make money from YouTube and other new media are manifestations of a global corporate state that operates outside US constitutional protections. Thus they enforce European restrictions on speech within the US whenever they find it convenient, and they regulate speech within the US that the privileged groups favored by the corporate state also find unpleasant.

The heavy-handed cancellation of Carl Benjamin's highly visible account was a blunder. And for whatever reason, Patreon, a relatively minor player, was unable to get YouTube on board with deleting Benjamin's videos, so they remain available, and Benjamin himself continues to use YouTube to advocate on his own behalf. Worse, an even more popular figure, Jordan Peterson, canceled his own Patreon account and announced an effort to start a competing service.

Not only did other highly visible (and lucrative to Patreon) users cancel their accounts as well, but the evidence we have is that thousands of small donors canceled their accounts, so that rank-and-file YouTubers with no direct involvement in the Benjamin controversy found their incomes from donors cut by half or more. In a newly disclosed case, another YouTuber had his account "frozen" for unspecified reasons, whereby donors continued to send money to Patreon, but Patreon did not forward payments to the YouTuber.

The bottom line for Patreon is that donors, whose payments to YouTubers were entirely voluntary, saw plenty of reason not to continue them, with no penalty to them for stopping. The YouTubers took major financial hits for circumstances beyond their control, with their confidence in Patreon destroyed. Mr Conte so far seems not fully aware that Patreon is facing a crisis that could end its existence in a matter of weeks -- instead, he's taken his version of the story to the New York Times. A Rumanian commentator noted that the office shown in the lead photo could hardly seem more like the dreary interior of Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

As a person who's worked in badly-run companies, my instinct is that Mr Conte was never cut out to run a real corporation, and he and his team are in way over their heads. A major blunder was hiring a Jacqueline Hart to run the "trust and safety council" -- she canceled Benjamin's account soon after she started at the company -- and then giving her free rein to try to fix the crisis she created. In one disaster, she called a YouTuber ally of Benjamin to try to mollify him. In the course of the call, she asked several times if he was recording it. Well, he wasn't -- he apparently either had a court reporter listening in, or he was using transcription software. The call wasn't recorded, but a transcript of the call immediately became available.

Conte probably lost his chance to salvage the situation when he didn't fire Ms Hart on the spot. Instead, she now stars in a New York Times piece, looking like a slightly less frumpy Angela Merkel. This is the face of Patreon.

What can the Catholic Church learn from this disaster in crisis management? The first step is probably to recognize there's a crisis, and take it seriously. The second step is to be up front, admit errors, and make it plain that the organization is learning from the errors and is correcting them. The third step is to have a credible spokesman -- Comical Ali is not who you want.

A good start would be to get Cardinal Cupich out of the picture.

Merry Christmas

Here is the nativity display in the sanctuary of our archdiocesan parish:

You can see the elephant that's brought the Magi on the right. Almost invisible to the left is a camel.

Here's a slightly better view of the elephant. Both photos were taken from a distance with a cell phone, and the elephant is a bit shaky.

In the procession for this evening's Christmas Vigil mass, our pastor will carry in the Christ child and place Him in the manger, in the center-left distance above.

There are many wonderful things we've seen in this parish that we've never experienced in any Episcopalian parish. Why try to settle for almost-as-good when better is close at hand?

Illinois Discrepancy

From the Chicago Tribune:

A scathing report from Attorney General Lisa Madigan finds the number of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse against children in Illinois is much higher than previously acknowledged.

The report said accusations have been leveled against 690 priests, while Catholic officials have publicly identified only 185 clergy with credible allegations against them.

. . . Although the report says that “Clergy sexual abuse of minors in Illinois is significantly more extensive than the Illinois Dioceses previously reported,” it does not estimate how many of the allegations against the 690 clergy should have been deemed credible. Some of the allegations go back decades.

Yesterday's Download from Church Militant addressed this story.

The discussion raises one possible issue. At about 3:40, it quotes the Archdiocese of Chicago's reply, "Starting in 2002, we have reported all allegations of child sexual abuse to civil authorities, and at that time, we reported all historical allegations."

However, the question is what "child sexual abuse" means here. The Pennsylvania grand jury report, as well as the well-publicized allegations against McCarrick, refer to abuse of those below the age of consent, 18, and not just "children". It's plain that the Cupich agenda is to restrict the discussion to children and reiterate that policies to "protect the children" are in place.

But this leaves out the issue of sexual harassment against teens and adult seminarians over the age of consent, an issue corporations in particular have had to address since the 1970s, but which the Church seems reluctant to confront. This probably accounts for the discrepancy, but it will be a struggle to get Cupich and others to acknowledge the real issues.

I do find one encouraging aspect to the Church Militant discussion: the consensus seems to be that the gay problem, as well as the actual abuse of teens and adults, is limited more to chanceries and seminaries, and it's much less common in parishes. This is consonant with my impression of our parish clergy, as well as to remarks by Fr Schmitz and others on YouTube that they've never actually seen the sort of conduct that's reported by state authorities. This strikes me as credible.

Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Resigns

According to CNN,

Pope Francis accepted Auxiliary Bishop Alexander Salazar's resignation Wednesday, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gómez said in a statement.

Salazar most recently was vicar for the Office of Ethnic Ministries of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Gomez said.

"I regret to inform you that in 2005, a year after he had been ordained a bishop, the Archdiocese was made aware of an allegation against Bishop Salazar of misconduct with a minor," Gomez said in the statement.

Gomez said the accusation against Salazar stemmed from alleged misconduct in the 1990s when he was a parish priest and not an ordained bishop.

"Although the allegation was never directly reported to the Archdiocese, it was investigated by law enforcement in 2002, and the District Attorney did not prosecute," the archbishop said. It was not immediately clear why the case wasn't prosecuted.

According to Wikipedia,

In 1977, Salazar entered St. John's Seminary in Camarillo. He was ordained to the priesthood by Timothy Cardinal Manning on June 16, 1984. . . . On September 7, 2004, Salazar was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles and Titular Bishop of Nesqually by Pope John Paul II. . . . In 2005, the Archdiocese learned that in 2002 civil authorities had investigated a claim that Salazar had been accused of sexual misconduct with a minor in the 1990s and decided not to prosecute him. According to Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith then "conducted an investigation and imposed certain precautionary measures on the ministry of Bishop Salazar".

In 2013, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gómez barred his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, from public ministry in Los Angeles, due to accusations that Mahony had covered up widespread abuse among priests in the archdiocese. Mahony is one of the figures that Randy Engler singles out in The Rite of Sodomy as influential in a cluster of gay- and gay-friendly bishop cliques that dominated the US Church in the 1990s. The St John's Seminary is also noted by Engler as gay-dominated, although the impression I have is that some very good archdiocesan priests have come from there as well.

Mahony, who made his reputation as a political liberal by allying himself with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s and 70s, was close to the California political establishment, and it can't be ruled out that the Los Angeles District Attorney decided not to prosecute Salazar on that basis.

Gómez succeeded Mahony as archbishop in 2011. A year later, Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala resigned at age 60 after informing Gómez that he had a "wife" and two children in another state, so Salazar is the second scandalous auxiliary to resign on Gómez's watch. Zavala, another political liberal, was also popular among the establishment. Gómez inherited both Salazar and Zavala from Mahony.

The Wikipedia entry notes that the CDF investigated Salazar in connection with the 1990s allegations in 2005 and had placed "certain precautionary measures" on his ministry, but he lasted another 13 years as an auxiliary. This suggests that Salazar had something like what the Japanese call a "window seat", a job without many duties, but was being kept around to preserve appearances. The Los Angeles Times, a Mahony ally, would certainly have been complicit. My impression is that Gómez is moving about as quickly as anyone can in his position to clean things up.

More On Sui Iuris In The Caribbean

Several visitors have provided additional information on the sui iuris mission in the Cayman Islands under the Archdiocese of Detroit that I mentioned in yesterday's post.

As it happens, there is a very similar arrangement between the Archdiocese of Newark and a sui juris mission in the Turks and Caicos Islands. According to that site,

According to Canon Law (cf: canon 368), a Missio Sui Iuris, or mission in its own right, is just the beginning of the establishment of a particular church in a concrete territory. In fact, after planting the word of God into a territory, the mission territory becomes a Church entity called Missio Sui Iuris.

. . . The next step for the Missio, according to the size and growth of the Catholic community is the establishment of an Apostolic Vicariate.

. . . The final step of the Missio Sui Iuris is to become the principal form of a particular Church, that is, a diocese.

All well and good, but in the cases of both the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands, we're talking about numbers of priests and Catholics that are roughly equivalent to a single US parish, and there's no sign they're going to turn into dioceses any time soon. More troubling is this, farther down in the same site:

On the 17th of October, 1998, two days after its detachment from the diocese of Nassau and entrustment to the Archdiocese of Newark, His Grace The Most Reverend Theodore E. McCarrick (now Archbishop Emeritus of Washington and Cardinal of the Church) was named its second Ecclesiastical Superior.

Now, there could be very good and holy reasons for this, but the problem is that they aren't easily discernible, while many others are much more possible -- and the reputations of both the Detroit and Newark archdioceses aren't good. I retain an open mind, but here are comments from visitors, rewritten into bullet points:

• It's a good excuse for the Bishop of Detroit who oversees it, (at the time it was erected in 2000, Adam Joseph Cardinal Maida was the Archbishop of Detroit) to visit/vacation under the pretext of working and a plum assignment here creates the possibility of rewarding some lucky priest (confidante, male friend, benefactor, co-conspirator, make up/insert your own sadly possible descriptor here) as the Vicar administrator to the Cayman Islands. (Or Turks and Caicos)
• Who wouldn’t want to have not only an excuse to go “play” in the Caymans, but to also have all expenses and accommodations taken care of as well? Talk about having your cake and eating it, too. Of course, everything could be above board, run of the mill, good ol’ Catholic outreach. Hard to say.
• Request of a wealthy Detroit major donor to have special attention for his church needs without being exposed to locals out of fear of harm, kidnapping. Many locals only speak pidgin. Detroit has quite a race situation that terrifies many well-heeled and flipflop heeled whites.
• Money stashing haven for the diocese or several priests. "I got to know a Jamaican accountant (Brit Jamaican) who left a lucrative position there because she found everything too corrupt and knew that it's the accountant who usually does the jail time."
• Predator hunting grounds. The gay lobby loves Caribbean hangouts because access to prey is so easy and overlooked. Perhaps some influential Detroit clergy pushed for this.
• Wasn't Szoka an influential money-handling bishop? Not to mention McCarrick. Vatican bank money-laundering locus through Detroit or Newark connected handlers.
• "My curiosity is why Detroit? That's a much further flight than a bishop from any southern state would have to make. Were the bishops in Detroit trusted to funnel monies from the Vatican after the scandal with its bank?" Another visitor answers, "I checked and see that Detroit has an air carrier with nonstop flights to Grand Cayman. It's much nicer than a 5 hr layover in miama."

It seems to me that today's Vortex from Church Militant is pertinent here:

Investigators on various levels and wide-ranging government agencies are staggered at what they are finding as they peruse files and notes from private meetings with insiders and whistleblowers from dioceses and archdioceses all over the country.

Without pinpointing any single diocese or archdiocese, we can tell you that in addition to the sexual scandals and corruption, investigators are, unsurprisingly, also coming across ample amounts of embezzlement, insurance fraud and so forth.

And this all happened under John Paul II.

An Odd Footnote

A visitor picked up on my post concerning the Archdiocese of Detroit to raise a question: according to Wikipedia, there is a Roman Catholic Mission sui iuris of the Cayman Islands that

comprises the entirety of the British dependency of the Cayman Islands and consists of five parishes, including Saint Ignatius in George Town, Christ The Redeemer Church in West Bay and Stella Maris Church on Cayman Brac.[1]

The independent mission is exceptionally not exempt (directly dependent on the Holy See) but a suffragan in the ecclesiastical province of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Kingston in Jamaica, and a member of the Antilles Episcopal Conference, while held in personal union with the Metropolitan see of Detroit (Michigan, USA).

According to catholic-hierarchy.org, it was erected in 2000 from the Archdiocese of Kingston in Jamaica. The number of Catholics it serves has ranged since then from about 4,000 to about 7,000, corresponding to a steady 11-12% of the population; the number of priests has ranged from 1 to 3. There is currently one parish in the mission.

The visitor wonders why this was done, which strikes me as a very reasonable question. The Cayman Islands are a popular vacation spot, and I assume that priests from many dioceses go there, and some may well own condos.

Does anyone have more information about this?

More Chains Of Paternity: John Nienstedt

John Nienstedt's successor as Archbishop of St Paul-Minneapolis, Bernard Hebda, publicly "clarified" a couple of days ago that Nienstedt, "like any priest facing similar allegations, would not be free to exercise public ministry in this Archdiocese until all open allegations are resolved." The allegations are substantial, and the lack of action from the Vatican on down is a scandal in itself. According to Church Militant,

Nienstedt was revealed in a formal investigation conducted by officials in the chancery of the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to have been a promiscuous homosexual when he was a student and Vatican official in Rome. This 138-page affidavit from the Ramsey County Court in Minnesota contains sad details about Nienstedt's life as a priest and bishop. Other details are available on Minnesota-based media websites.

Nienstedt and the current Archbishop of Detroit, Alan Vigneron, were classmates at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. Both appear to have been protégés of Cardinal John Dearden, who was Archbishop of Detroit from 1958 to 1980. Vigneron and Nienstedt rose together in the archdiocese.

It is now known that during the years Vigneron served as vice rector of Sacred Heart Seminary (SHS) under Nienstedt, who was rector (from 1988–1991) there were situations where Nienstedt was advancing his deviant designs on seminarians. The two classmates were elevated to the rank of auxiliary bishop in the same ceremony in 1996 in Detroit.

This site gives more details on Nienstedt's earlier career:

John Nienstedt was initially a center-left Detroit priest (e.g., open to women's ordination in 1974) whom the liberal John Dearden mentored and employed. With Dearden's impending retirement in 1980, Nienstedt was sent to Rome to complete a doctorate in moral theology and to work in the Holy See's Secretariat of State, whereby he learned first-hand what it took to become a bishop under John Paul II's reign. With mentoring by Vatican insiders such as Carlo Viganò and Justin Rigali, as well as friendships with those possessing right-wing ideologies and dispositions like Thomas Olmsted, Nienstedt adopted hardcore, un-pastoral conservatism, at least in rhetoric and appearance, to ladder-climb. Upon returning to Detroit in 1985, Nienstedt served Polish-American Edmund Szoka, the ruthless anti-Dearden, who was one of John Paul II's favorite bishops. When Szoka gained further power through positions in the Vatican, he rewarded Nienstedt (and others) who dutifully served him with the office of bishop, even after Adam Maida removed Nienstedt as Rector of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in 1994 for misconduct. (NB: *Maida received letters detailing Nienstedt's misconduct over the years, including a letter from the majority of college seminarians at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in 1994. These letters should be held in the archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit. Like those alleging McCarrick's behavior was an open secret and church officials did not act thoroughly, either did Maida with Nienstedt. **James Heathcott, a former Sacred Heart seminarian, testified to sending a letter to Edmund Szoka regarding Nienstedt's improprieties (pre-1990). Szoka never replied! This and other letters may well be in the archives.)

This account suggests that Nienstedt has much in common with other "conservative" bishops like Bernard Law and William Levada. In addition, the Nienstedt case adds complexity to the Viganò story, according to the Crux link above, since although Nienstedt eventually resigned under fire in 2015 following numerous allegations of misconduct,

In 2014, Nienstedt ordered his senior auxiliary bishop to investigate claims against him, which he did with the support of two outside law firms. The findings from that investigation were turned over to then papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, and according to Father Dan Griffith, who served as the archdiocese’s Safe Environment coordinator at the time, Viganò brought a halt to the investigation, even ordering evidence in the case to be destroyed.

Francis, however, forced Nienstedt's resignation in 2015, which this site argues prompted Viganò's 2018 letters.

After a half-year hiatus, Nienstedt was taken in by a friend who served as pastor of St. Philip Catholic Church in Battle Creek, MI. John Fleckenstein (NB, former seminarian at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit; ordained 2002), who was to undergo medical treatment, employed Nienstedt temporarily at the parish beginning on January 6, 2016. Michigan residents protested for two-weeks until Nienstedt's resignation was announced on January 21, 2016.

Later in 2016, Timothy Busch, a friend of Viganò and Nienstedt, took Nienstedt in at the Napa Institute, which caters to the agenda of likeminded wealthy, laissez-faire capitalist, ultraconservative US Catholics. Busch is a native of Clinton in rural Lenawee County, MI. He attended Western Michigan and later Wayne State for his law degree. His brothers and he still own Busch's Fresh Food Markets in Southeastern Michigan, though Busch relocated to Southern California in 1982. Busch also owns the Busch Firm, which specializes in estate planning for the wealthy, and the Pacific Hospitality Group. Together, Charles Koch and Timothy Busch donated $25 million to Catholic University of America's Business School, WHICH CUA ACCEPTED (NB, now called The Busch School of Business; Busch is interested in propagating the compatibility of Catholicism with laissez-faire capitalism). Besides the Napa Institute and the Catholic University of America, Busch is involved with "the Papal Foundation, Legatus, Magis Institute and the University of Notre Dame."

Nienstedt has been described as a "conservative", but I think we're beginning to see that political, theological, and liturgical orientation is largely a matter of which way the Vatican winds blow.

Nienstedt's case seems to be very close to the center of what ails the Church these days, and there's probably much more to learn.

I'm Starting To Wonder About This Anglican Business

The visitor who follows the Italian press sent me this gem from a blog that seems to be called La Quotidiana. Translation is by Google.

We are honest. If a man becomes "woman" he changes his name, right? And therefore it is necessary to baptize it again [note the criminal misgendering of the pronoun here -- jb] because the old name of baptism has now expired. It's a matter of logic, that's all. This is the beautiful find of the Anglican Church that we could call "baptism of transsexuals".

The Conference of Bishops of the Church of England has promoted an initiative called "affirmation of the baptismal faith". This is not a new baptism, they want to clarify, but it has all the characteristics to seem such. In fact during this ceremony the Church of England blesses the new life and a new name is imposed on the transsexual. Then this sexual renaissance is sucked through the sprinkling of the head of the "baptized" with water and blessed oils, reciting some verses of the Book of Psalms and signing a veritable baptism certificate.

The clumsiness of Google's rendering here, I suspect, reflects ironies in the original. Further,

"Rebirth" is the key word to understand this carnival blasphemous. According to Catholic doctrine baptism allows us to be reborn in Christ because before, because of original sin, we were dead. In the Anglican version, rebirth involves sexual identity. The discomfort of living in a body that does not feel its own can be assimilated to the feeling of dying by leading an existence into a certain sexual identity. The rebirth happens in the exchange of sex. Therefore it seems reasonable to bless this rebirth even in the church. And it seems obligatory to conclude that this second "baptism" is worth more than the first, since the first baptism had been done on a creature that had not even begun its caterpillar-to-butterfly journey.

It is then to be noted that this para-baptism overturns exactly the meaning of authentic baptism. In fact, he hinges the person into sin even more. If after baptism we must do everything to remain immaculate, trans baptism, blessing sexual rectification, blesses sin, because it qualifies as right to throw into the bin that identity intended for us by God in order to replace it with another invented by we. A clear rejection of the natural laws desired by the Creator.

Those who've been following this blog recognize that there's something quintessentially Anglican about this. The problem I have is why liberals like Bernard Law or Francesco Coccopalmerio should want to bring Anglicanism into the Church in a formal and unique way, rather than to accept individual ex-Anglicans as converts to the faith in the same way that any other non-Catholics come in. Perhaps it's the appeal of all the weasel-worded ambiguity that we see here in the justifications of sorta-kinda rebaptism, for instance.

I think the characterization of Anglicanorum coetibus as some sort of generous gesture by Pope Benedict ought to be subject to reinterpretation. Yet again, my instinct is not to go anywhere near an ordinariate parish -- I'd sooner visit old friends at St Thomas Episcopal Hollywood knowing what I was doing, rather than step into an ordinariate parish with nothing like that clarity.

Demons exist. Playing footsie with demons is dangerous indeed.

"Imperious Meets Bulkhead"

The other day I commented on Cardinal Levada blowing a .163 when pulled over for erratic driving in Hawaii in a 2015 incident, and I speculated that this could reflect a problem of long standing. A visitor who was at least familiar with figures at that level in the Church commented,

Once saw Levada knocked silly on a TWA flight back to Rome. Imperious meets bulkhead.

Since TWA ended its existence in 2001, this would date the episode here to Levada's time as Archbishop of San Francisco, but I suspect his BAC would have been similar to what he blew in Hawaii.

Wikipedia says Levada is a conservative, but I'm more and more of the view that liberals vs conservatives in AmChurch are pretty much a good guy-bad guy ploy. A better characterization of Levada might be this one:

So, exactly what sort of work did Bp Lopes have to do when he became Levada's secretary in 2005? Indeed, he must have established his trustworthiness for handling confidential issues well before then.

Fr Longenecker, Cardinal Coco, And The Anglican Project

In a post yesterday, Fr Longenecker takes up the question of Cardinal Coccopalmerio's published reservations about Apostolicae Curae, Pope Leo XIII’s ruling that Anglican orders are “absolutely null and utterly void". He quotes the UK Tablet:

“When someone is ordained in the Anglican Church and becomes a parish priest in a community, we cannot say that nothing has happened, that everything is ‘invalid’,” the cardinal says in volume of papers and discussions that took place in Rome as part of the “Malines Conversations,” an ecumenical forum.

While I'm not a Coccopalmerio scholar, this reminds me of another widely quoted remark, which I found in Wikipedia:

Nevertheless, if I stop at doctrine, I don't see the people anymore. But if I observe that two people really do love each other, say they practice charity towards the needy...then I can also say that, while their relation remains illicit, in those two people there emerge positive elements.

In both cases, he seems to be saying, well, if there's some good there, who's to judge? This of course violates the basic moral principle Bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu “An action is good when good in every respect; it is wrong when wrong in any respect”. Mr Foley, my 9th-grade English teacher in public school, taught me that. This is tangential to Fr Longenecker's concerns, but insofar as Coccopalmerio seems to represent some Bergoglian views, I think it's worth addressing the Anglican project from this angle as well.

I think Fr Longenecker comes closest to my worries here:

The liberals on both sides of the Tiber clearly think the ecumenical work is over. They believe we are all already united in a World Council of Churches kind of way. This is, of course, a lie, and The Tablet goes on to point out one of the pebbles in the shoe–or perhaps one of the Frankenstein monsters in the vestry…

Yet the major difficulty for the Catholic Church in recognizing Anglican clergy would be the perception of validating women priests, something that was strongly ruled against by John Paul II.

I was going to say, “Add to that Anglican gay clergy and bishops” but realize we have already achieved a certain ecumenical unity on that issue. . .

Oddly, while Fr Longenecker mentions the Pastoral Provision, he doesn't mention Anglicanorum coetibus, which is a much clearer lab experiment on how Anglican outreach is already taking place in the Church. It's a sleight-of-hand in many ways, one that I think Coccopalmerio would be pleased to examine: Anglicans with just about any level of formation are accepted with perfunctory remedial work. Those Anglican converts who supervise their formation have no experience as Catholic formators and don't strike me as especially intelligent -- our archdiocesan vocation director is in residence at our parish; I frankly don't think he'd take Fr Perkins seriously.

Gays are clearly no problem for Bp Lopes or Fr Perkins. I go back to a Nazi-Germany analogy here, which I normally hate to do, but I think this one applies. One justification that's been reported that rank-and-file Germans gave for Hitler was basically, "Well, here we have particularly extreme Nazis, but they aren't the rule. In fact, if Hitler knew what these people are doing in the name of the Party, he'd put a stop to it." Sorry, Luke Reese and the Gilbertine gays aren't a bug, they're a feature.

I think Bernard Law had this in mind when he started the whole Anglican project, in fact. Law was a liberal. I'm not so sure about Ratzinger, for that matter.

Michael Voris On Chains of Paternity in Detroit

Randy Engel doesn't have a lot of detail on the Archdiocese of Detroit. This says more about the extent of the rot in the US Church than about Engel; she acknowledges how big the task of documenting the abuse of teen boys by Catholic priests is. And the predation of underage boys is just the most reprehensible part of a bigger problem, the widespread toleration of gays in the priesthood, which in turn is fostered by bishops.

Engel raises the specific case of only one Detroit priest, "Father Robert N. Burkholder, one of Michigan’s most notorious clerical pederasts who confessed to molesting at least 23 young boys."

A priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit, Burkholder started his criminal career of molesting young boys almost immediately after his ordination in 1947. He engaged in fondling and oral sex with his victims as well as group sex. He told them that “Their bodies were gifts from God and, therefore, were to be shared with priests.”

Complaints to the Detroit Chancery from parishioners whose sons were assaulted by Burkholder were ignored. For at least two decades Cardinal Dearden simply shuffled the priest from parish to parish. Finally, in the 1970s, the cardinal pulled him as a pastor and assigned him to a hospital chaplaincy.

In 1981, Burkholder claimed “sick leave” and moved to Hawaii where he took up a residency in Makaha on the western shore of the island of Oahu. (p 770)

Although he was never incardinated in the Diocese of Hawaii, he worked as a contract military chaplain and said Mass at St. Elizabeth’s Parish in Aiea.

The Archdiocese of Detroit claimed that Burkholder has been prohibited from any ministry since 1993, when it received complaints about him. Come again? The archdiocese knew of the priest’s criminal activities at least from the late 1960s. If Burkholder was in Hawaii, how could the Archdiocese of Detroit possibly monitor the priest’s activities? Did the archdiocese alert the Honolulu Diocese that the priest was a sexual predator with a fondness for boys between the ages of 13 and 15? (p 771)

Burkholder was eventually extradited to Michigan to stand trial for molestation of a Michigan boy while in Hawaii; he was convicted. In today's Vortex, Michael Voris brings up the case of Fr. Gerald Shirilla:

Shirilla was the chief organizer for the archdiocese of Detroit's papal visit by Pope John Paul II in 1987 and was on the faculty of Sacred Heart Seminary. He was, in fact, a very well-known priest in the archdiocese and was a serial homosexual predator for decades — and despite incessant rumors constantly surrounding him, continued to be given plum assignments. For example, he eventually became the director of the archdiocesan Office of Worship.

He was ordained for Detroit in 1968 by the uber-liberal Cdl. John Dearden. At the time of his ordination, he had already been molesting the first couple of the Paciorek brothers, taking them back to his room at Sacred Heart Seminary on frequent trips.

In 1970, he was placed on the faculty of Sacred Heart and used his office space to continue the molestations. The rector of Sacred Heart at the time, Fr. Thaddeus Ozog, became best friends with Shirilla and both routinely vacationed together in a camper, well known by Detroit clergy and hierarchy.

Ozog was also a molester — the archdiocese of Detroit releasing his name posthumously just two months ago that there was a credible report of sex with a minor. He died of AIDS in 1994.

Court documents reveal that in 1973, Shirilla was ousted from the seminary for sexual impropriety, yet remarkably he was allowed to continue on in his priesthood, despite some higher-ups saying he was "unfit to serve as a priest."

Shirilla's predation continued until 1993, when a victim complained to the archdiocese.

[T]he archdiocese had barred Shirilla from ministry, sent him to the well-known St. Luke's in Maryland for treatment and suggested that he would no longer be a priest — that they recommended to him to leave the priesthood. But the archdiocese never followed up and forced the issue as you would expect.

In fact, after time at St. Luke's, Shirilla formed a Virginia-based pilgrimage travel company with another Detroit molester priest who was eventually convicted and imprisoned, Fr. Harry Benjamin, close seminary friend — in fact, best friend of eventual archdiocesan power broker Msgr. John Zenz.

According to archdiocesan personnel present during the scandal, Zenz was instrumental in trying to keep the wraps on the Shirilla news, along with McGrath.

Why is all this pertinent now? Because even after all this, men like McGrath and Zenz retain massive influence in the archdiocese, exercising enormous power and control during the reign of Cdl. Adam Maida from 1990–2008, nearly 20 years.

This is yet another example of Engel's thesis, that gay networks infiltrate seminaries and chanceries and perpetuate themselves for generations. None of these instances, from diocese to diocese, is unique; they're all part of a much larger pattern. The question is why they've been tolerated at the Vatican, which must certainly be aware of the situation.

Has The Outfit Put Out A Hit On His Holiness?

From the UK Independent via a visitor:

Pope Francis's life is in danger from 'ndrangheta, Italy's most feared crime group, a leading anti-mafia judge has claimed.

Nicola Gratteri, a magistrate in the southern city of Reggio Calabria, near 'ndrangheta's heartland, has said the Pontiff's crackdown on financial corruption in the Vatican, has angered bosses in the brutal crime syndicate, which is thought to rule Europe's cocaine trade.

It does appear that 'ndrangheta, a version of the mafia located on the toe of the Italian boot next to Sicily, has been the subject of a European crackdown. From the BBC, via the same visitor:

Members of the notorious 'Ndrangheta Italian mafia have been targeted in a simultaneous police sting in Europe.

Hundreds of police are understood to have been involved in the operation in Belgium, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.

At least 90 people were arrested, and more than three tonnes of cocaine and 140kg of ecstasy were seized.

Italian restaurants and ice cream parlours used to launder money were among the premises raided.

Well, as a true crime fan, I especially like mafia shows. I justify it to my wife by telling her it's Catholic history. But as far as I can see, at least so far, something doesn't fit. In 2009, Pope Benedict put Abp Viganò in charge of cleaning up Vatican finances. According to Wikipedia,

In 2009, Viganò was appointed Secretary General of the Vatican City Governatorate. In that role he established centralized accounting procedures and accountability for cost overruns that helped turn a US$10.5 million deficit for the city-state into a surplus of $44 million in one year.

In 2010, Viganò suggested that the Vatican should drop out of the Euro currency agreement in order to avoid new European banking regulations. Instead, the Vatican chose to adhere to the Euro agreement and accept the new scrutiny that tougher banking regulations required. In late January 2012 a television program aired in Italy under the name of Gli intoccabili (The Untouchables), purporting to disclose confidential letters and memos of the Vatican. Among the documents were letters written to the pope and to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, by Viganò, complaining of corruption in Vatican finances and a campaign of defamation against him. Viganò, formerly the second ranked Vatican administrator to the pope, requested not to be transferred for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions in higher contract prices.

. . . On 13 August 2011, Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone informed Viganò that Pope Benedict was appointing him Nuncio to the United States. Reuters reported that Viganò was unwilling to take that assignment. Viganò stated that this decision was not what Pope Benedict XVI originally had manifested to him. One of the letters leaked by Benedict's butler in 2012 revealed that Viganò had gone over Bertone's head and complained in a letter to Benedict of corruption in the Vatican, for which Bertone arranged to transfer Viganò to Washington over Viganò's objections.

The letters were leaked as part of the Vatileaks scandal, which observers tend to connect in some way to Benedict's resignation.

But in 2013, Francis appointed Msgr Battista Ricca, who appears to be a thoroughly corrupt individual, as prelate over the Vatican Bank. It's difficult to imagine Ricca cleaning anything up.

We'll have to see what develops, but Francis, in demanding a "loan" from the Papal Foundation that's caused problems in the US, doesn't so far seem to be on the side of cleanup. We'll probably have to see what falls out, but I can't imagine that the Outfit is all that unhappy with him, though the threat we see here could simply be a worthwhile reminder to the guy to stay with the program.

In fact, if we take Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, or Sam Giancana as examples, the Outfit generally doesn't bluff and bluster before it whacks guys -- it simply does it and lets the world speculate for decades over who did it and why.

A Visitor's Theory Of Benedict's Resignation

Theories of Benedict's resignation that I've found most credible center on a "Wikileaks dossier" that exposed misconduct in the hierarchy, delivered to Francis late in 2012. For instance, Michael Voris has mentioned these theories several times, as in this piece from last October:

[T]he original dossier was compiled in the wake of what was tagged "VatiLeaks," a reference to the theft and release to Italian journalists of various private documents of Pope Benedict.

The Holy Father ordered an investigation into the thefts but various media reports said what began as an investigation into one area quickly diverted into an entirely unforeseen area: homosexuality within the hierarchy here at the Vatican.

Three cardinal-investigators eventually compiled their findings into a dossier and presented it to Pope Benedict just a couple of months before his surprise retirement in February of 2013.

The explanation derived from this circumstance is basically that the revelations in the dossier convinced Benedict that he didn't have the energy to pursue the implications and decided to leave this task to a successor. That would certainly be taking an easy way out -- popes have been called to martyrdom, after all. I'm open to a better explanation.

A visitor had a suggestion:

[A]fter reading today’s post I am becoming more and more convinced that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI resigned because of his role in the unfolding homosexual scandal in the Church hierarchy. I suspect Pope Benedict expected former Cardinal McCarrick to recognize the gravity of his sins and the peril of his immortal soul when he asked him to retire from his ministry and live out the remainder of his life fasting, praying and repenting. It is a testament to the evil in McCarrick’s heart and the obvious lack of faith in the doctrines of the Church that he did not avail himself of that voluntarily and that he did not explain that to the Holy Father when Pope Francis requested him to “come back out.”

Pope Emeritus Benedict, I have come to believe, is a good and decent man who has seen what he allowed and/or facilitated by promoting very flawed men. As he expected McCarrick to do, I think he prescribed the same punishment for himself and he has withdrawn to a life of prayer, fasting and repentance. Perhaps Pope Benedict thought that by his example, the other Cardinals and Bishops who have wrought this blight upon our Church would also VOLUNTARILY do the right thing and resign their offices as well, allowing the Church to heal with as little scandal as possible.

The fact that almost NONE of these men have done this speaks volumes to the “Smoke of Satan” that has permeated our Church and the intrinsic evil that entails. I might be way off on this, but, the more I see, the more I think I might be right, and if so, my admiration for the integrity of Pope Emeritus Benedict grows and I think history will judge him better than our current Catholic brethren do. I also think, Pope Francis is beginning to understand this as well and seems to be turning the corner. We’ll see….

One thing that's kept troubling me is the number of corrupt bishops and cardinals who were promoted, not just by John Paul II, but by Benedict as well. Cardinal Levada rose under JPII among a corrupt Mahony clique -- all promoted by John Paul -- but Benedict made him a cardinal. The impression I have is that Levada sometimes said the right things, but his personal example was poor. The drunk driving arrest suggests a serious problem with alcohol that must have been of long standing and was probably of a piece with other private conduct -- and Steven Lopes, his secretary for some years, would have been a facilitator.

And Benedict must have been aware of this. Why, also, did he demote Abp. Viganò just as Viganò seemed to be getting a handle on Vatican financial corruption?

That Benedict may have felt remorse for some level of complicity in the scandals strikes me as credible, but as the visitor said, we'll see.

Cardinal Levada DUI

I mentioned Cardinal William Levada in a recent post as a member of Roger Mahony's "Gang O'Four" from St John's Seminary in Camarillo, CA, the seminary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. A visitor sent me a link to a 2015 story on Levada's arrest for DUI at age 79 while on vacation with other priests in Hawaii. Levada, let's recall, was Joseph Ratzinger's choice to succeed him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when Ratzinger became pope in 2005.

All I can say is that these old guys must be hard partiers. Levada's colleague Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio is reported to have presided over the cocaine-fueled orgy at which other arrests were made in the CDF building in 2017; the report is that Coccopalmerio was advised to leave by the police before they began making the arrests. My only question about Levada is what BAC he blew when the Hawaii police pulled him over; as someone who partied at the Animal House myself in my younger days, I'd love to know how the old guy did! (A visitor helped out: he blew a .168.) Of course, drunkenness is a mortal sin, and somewhere in early middle age I resolved not to consume any alcohol if there was a chance I'd be driving.

Levada had an extensive record before this, however. Ms Engel gives a summary of his career in The Rite of Sodomy:

Bishop William J. Levada, like Roger Cardinal Mahony and Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann, was an alumnus of Our Lady Queen of Angels Junior Seminary. After graduation from St. John’s Seminary, Levada was put on the ecclesiastical fast track. He was sent to Rome for advanced theological studies at the “Greg” and was ordained a priest of the Los Angeles Archdiocese in St.Peter’s Basilica in December 1961.

After a brief return to Los Angeles during which time he served as assistant pastor, Levada went back to Rome, completed his Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and then came back to St. John’s Seminary where he taught for six years.

In 1976, Levada was called back to the Vatican and assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1982, Cardinal Timothy Manning asked that Levada be released to fill the post of Executive Director of the California Catholic Conference in Sacramento. One year later, Manning ordained Levada an Auxiliary Bishop.

In the fall of 1986, only 14 months after Archbishop Mahony took possession of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Levada was appointed Archbishop of Portland, Ore. When the Archdiocese of San Francisco opened up in December 1995 with the resignation of Archbishop John R. Quinn, Cardinal Mahony obtained the coveted post for his former classmate. Not surprisingly, Archbishop Levada’s motto is Fratres in Unum, or Brothers at one, taken from the first verse of the 133rd Psalm. (pp 803-4)

This leaves out the whole sorry saga of Levada's protégé Bishop of Santa Rosa, CA G.Patrick Ziemann, who abruptly resigned in 1999 after a former Ukiah priest filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault. A series of lawsuits followed, based on accusations of abuse dating back to 1968. Levada, at the time Archbishop of San Francisco, continued to cover for Ziemann even after his resignation. Engel in an update to The Rite of Socomy continues Levada's story:

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI has appointed “gay friendly” Archbishop William Levada, former Archbishop of San Francisco to head the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and has awarded him the red hat. Levada in turn, with the help of “gay friendly” Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, has secured his former archdiocese [San Francisco] for his boyhood buddy “gay friendly” Archbishop George “Brokeback” Niederauer. Levada and Niederauer were classmates at St. John’s Seminary and pederasty training camp in Camarillo, Calif., and they co-own a retirement condo in Long Beach. Niederauer insists there is no link between pederasty and homosexuality and is a proponent of ordaining “gays” as long as they are “celibate.” (p 1171)

Following his retirement, Levada lives at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, CA, which Engel describes as "another 'Pink Palace.'" (p 810) It's worth pointing out that another Levada protégé, now-Bp Steven Lopes, is a graduate of St Patrick's Menlo Park. According to Wikipedia, Lopes was ordained a priest on June 23, 2001, for the Archdiocese of San Francisco by William Levada. He was a personal aide to Cardinal Levada while Levada was Prefect of the CDF from 2005 to 2012. This is a career path similar to Donald Wuerl.

In fact, when Lopes was made Bishop of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter in 2016, his consecrators were Gerhard Müller, Donald Wuerl, and Levada himself. Thus it goes with a certain type of aristocracy in the Vatican. Jeffrey Steenson was unavailable for comment.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds,

Regarding Bp Lopes, this might explain why Fr Catania, who had a very rough time of it during the Steenson regime, was given a plum posting by Bp Lopes. As I have mentioned, while waiting for Fr Scheiblhofer to pack up at St Barnabas, Omaha (he is now ministering at a local diocesan parish) Fr Catania was living in the rectory at Holy Trinity, Omaha and supplying while the Pastor went on vacation with---Bp Lopes.

A Catholic Looks At The George HW Bush Funeral

A visitor referred me to a post at the Traditio Fathers site (scroll down to the entry for December 9) on the George HW Bush (George XLI?) funeral. While a bit over the top, it makes some worthwhile points.

On the occasion of the funeral of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush on December 6, 2018, the world was graphically shown the difference between the true Catholic faith and the heretical Protestant knockoffs, including the New Order (Novus Ordo) sect. In fact, this was not really a religious funeral, but a secular government meeting that happened to be held in a church building.

The funeral services were conducted by an heretical Protestant sect, the Episcopalians. Although some conservative Episcopalian sects have more "smells and bells" -- that is the derisive term by which the more Puritanical describe the Catholic liturgy --, the sect to which George H.W. Bush belonged seems to have been on the decidedly "liberal" side: a Neo-Protestant, Evangelical sect, which has no real funeral liturgy, just some readings from a Modernist version of the Bible and an incessant number of eulogies.

The words of Scripture read were taken from an ugly, Modernist vulgar-tongued version of the Bible. The Episcopalians, even on this highly formal occasion, did not use their venerable King James Version, let alone the Catholic Church's sublime, stately, incomparable Latin.

Indeed, the eulogies were endless. Now we see firsthand why the Catholic Church does not permit eulogies at a funeral. There were no eulogies at President John Kennedy's funeral in 1963, for example. What presumption! The Episcopalians apparently regard man as the judge, not God. The carillon at the cathedral was pealing in joy at a "saint" bound for Heaven, not tolling in mourning and humility at a soul bound for God's judgment.

The Apostles Creed teaches: Inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos [Thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead]. Catholic dogma, coming directly from Scripture, accordingly teaches that God judges each soul at death (the Particular Judgment). The Bush funeral was, for the presumptuous Episcopalians, a "done deal." Man, not God, was the judge, and Bush passed in the eyes of man.

Thus, the funeral was a virtual apotheosis into Heaven. This is the Protestant and Newchurch heresy of "Universal Salvation." The color was the white of a pre-judged saint, not the black of humility before the judgment of God. What does the Lord say: "Nor do I judge according to the look of man; for man seeth those things that appear; but the Lord beholdeth the heart" (1 Kings 16:7/DRV). The Episcopalians have no idea what occult sins Bush may have had, what the actual state of his soul was at death, and what penance may have remained. That is why God, Who sees the heart, is the final judge, not man, who should refrain from judgment.

This brought to mind Hilaire Belloc's remarks on William Laud in Characters of the Reformation:

But at the same time Laud is a still more striking example of the way in which the Reformation had made the Protestant attitude of mind unescapable for those who had broken away from Catholic unity. In other words, the interest of his career lies in this —that in spite of certain sympathies with Catholic tradition and in spite of their recovering certain sides of the general European culture, the Protestants throughout Europe and even in England (where Catholicism was still so strong), were condemned to be the victims of the original violent rebellion which had taken place in their lathers' time.

In the case of Laud, and of England in general, this was particularly striking because the force which made against their returning to Catholic unity was the force of nationalism; that is, the claim of lay society and its Prince (or King) to independence from the general moral unity of Christendom and the West. All of this is summed up of course in the refusal to accept Papal Supremacy. (p 173)

I think the post at Traditio Fathers is completely correct in saying that the Bush funeral was a manifestation of a state religion, hitchhiking on certain Protestant forms. However, there is a great deal of scriptural authority for the view that the appropriate response to a state religion can be martyrdom. It's worth noting the mainstream media consensus that the one public figure who seemed uncomfortable at the solemnities for George XLI was Donald Trump.

Trump, at least at Christmas and Easter, does attend an Episcopalian parish in Palm Beach, FL. I would guess that he must George XLI's strain of Episcopalianism less seriously than the Bush family -- indeed, at the Christmas Eve 2016 midnight mass, the Palm Beach Episcopalians gave Trump a standing ovation when he came in. A different crowd, it would seem.

Raymond Arroyo Interview With Bill Donohue

On December 6, Raymond Arroyo interviewed Bill Donohue of the Catholic League on his World Over show:

Donohue has been criticized as something of a squish on the matter of "priestly abuse", but I think what he does in this interview is perhaps unintentionally cast a light on the breadth and complexity of the Second Crisis, whose focus is only partly on the "priestly abuse" that was the nominal issue in the First Crisis. I think he makes several worthwhile points:

• Traditional media hasn't been transparent in accusing Catholic bishops of "inadequate response" to accusations of abuse. At about 3:30, he outlines a number of problems: media tend to favor "victims' groups" that often have an anti-Catholic agenda or simply serve as fronts for class action lawyers, while failing to cite the sources of the statistics they quote or define more specifically what an "adequate" response from bishops would be.
• At about 7:00, he brings up the inability of individual priests accused of abuse to rebut charges against them in grand jury reports -- which do not constitute legal determinations of guilt or innocence, but do in fact serve to destroy reputations nevertheless.
• At about 10:15, he makes the important point that the campaigns by state attorneys general are often selective, doing things like removing statutes of limitations only for Catholic institutions, but not treating public schools -- where abuse is statistically more prevalent than in Catholic institutions -- equally. He refers to Pennsylvania, but the same thing has happened in California and elsewhere.
• At about 13:30, he acknowledges that the Second Crisis is not about pedophilia, it's about homosexuality, something the media will not acknowledge.

I think Donohue is perceptive in recognizing that the media will continue to push the Second Crisis as simoly a replay of the First, that it's about "priestly abuse" of pre-pubescent children, when Donohue makes it plan that he understands as well as other Catholic laymen that it's about a subculture particularly in seminaries and chanceries, as well as cliques of gay prelates who promote their own. It seems to me that the appropriate response is to insist that media coverage be precise in its reporting, just as much as we insist that the bishops be responsive in addressing the full scope of the problem.

Nevertheless, it's also worth noting that in creating these related scandals, the bishops have given ammunition to the very real anti-Catholic strain in modern culture. The laity have just as much interest in protecting the faith from people with an anti-Catholic agenda, and I can't disagree with Donohue over this.

Hilaire Belloc's Characters Of The Reformation

Fr Longenecker began a series of podcasts reading from Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation. I'm not sure if he's continuing with the series or what, because he's now been putting up true fairy tales or something like that. But the readings he had were so intriguing that I went looking for the text online anyhow -- why wait to get it in dribs and drabs? Although it's apparently in print from Ignatius Press, you can get it for free download in various formats here.

For the past several months, Fr Longenecker has made various presentations on prior crises in the history of the Church, which I've found encouraging -- his point is that the Church has always faced them, it's been led by highly imperfect people throughout its history, but it's always prevailed. Here's some worthwhile analysis from Belloc on the course of the Protestant Reformation:

But meanwhile the Catholic forces in Europe had tardily woken up, and there had been started what is generally called the " Counter Reformation."

But neither the Counter Reformation nor the active fighting which succeeded in preserving a part of Christendom intact, would have been necessary but for difficult success of the Protestant movement in England.

This is the most important point to seize in all the story of the great religious revolution, and it is the point least often insisted on. (p 5)

This points to a conclusion I've come to after watching the course of Anglicanorum coetibus: Law and Ratzinger seem to have thought they could undertake some project of fixing the Reformation (and then, apparently, Benedict was going to go on and fix the Great Schism). And Jeffrey Steenson was going to general this thing, huh? This was about as well thought out as the Children's Crusade. We're going to need more serious popes.

A little later, Belloc says,

It was coincidentally with the beginning of the turn over in England, with the second half of the sixteenth century, that there began that effort against shipwreck which, I have said, is generally called "The Counter Reformation."

Vigorous Popes undertook, unfortunately too late, the reform of abuses; the Franciscans took on a new missionary activity for the recovery of districts lost to the Faith; a General Council (which the Popes before the Reformation had especially avoided because only a little while before General Councils had proved so dangerous to unity), was summoned and is known to history as "The Council of Trent." The most important single factor in the whole of this reaction was the militant and highly disciplined body proceeding from the genius of St. Ignatius Loyola. It came to be known by the name which was first a nick-name, but later generally adopted, of "the Jesuits." These, by their discipline, singleness ofaim and heroism, were the spearhead of the counter-attack. They were very nearly successful in England, they had very great effect in South Germany, and later in Poland. All these forces, combined, made for a general restoration of Catholicism. (p 8)

I agree with other conclusions here, too:

By the middle of the seventeenth century the struggle between Catholicism and the now enthusiastic spirit which had challenged Catholicism had definitely accepted a drawn battie. The Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 established the principle that subjects should follow the religion of their Government, and within the next ten years all Europe settled down into two camps—the Catholic culture on the one side and the Protestant culture on the other. The Catholic culture was, therefore, partially saved ; but it had failed to recover Europe as a whole, and within the Church arose new movements which the Reformation had started. (p 11)

We're going to need a bigger paradigm shift than what we've had so far.

DiNardo And The Anglicans

Anglicanorum coetibus has been less and less on my mind, so it's useful that my regular correspondent sent me another context to our look at Cardinal DiNardo:

Cardinal DiNardo has of course been closely connected with the North American ordinariate (OCSP) since before its official erection, as we read here. No doubt he worked with the Davises [see below] to have them fund Steenson's "visiting professorship" at St Mary's Seminary Houston ahead of his appointment as Ordinary, and the school at which DiNardo's brother-in-law, the husband of his twin sister, was president to create a chaplain's job for Fr Steve Sellers. Fr Sellers is now the President of St John XXIII Prep; his successors as chaplain have both been OCSP clergy otherwise unemployed. The school cafetorium is also the location of the St Margaret's, Katy OCSP community led by Fr Sellers.

Carl and Lois Davis first appeared here in a 2016 post. Major philanthropists, they are former Episcopalians who became Catholic, and since 2001, they've been members of the Our Lady of Walsingham parish, which before the erection of the OCSP in 2012 was Anglican Use, which meant it was part of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, whose ordinary has been now-Cardinal DiNardo since 2004.

As I noted in the 2016 post, the Davises are behind a non-profit called the Walsingham Foundation that has apparently received multimillion-dollar grants from the Carl and Lois Davis Foundation. As I understand these things, the Catholic Church works something like the Mafia in one important respect, in that the Operation gets its cut from all such donations. DiNardo would have been in a position to pass on a portion of his cut to Rome as well, as far as I can see.

It's notable that DNardo seems to have been much more willing to give up the Our Lady of Walsingham parish in 2012 than Abp Garcia-Siller of San Antonio was to give up Our Lady of the Atonement in 2017, which suggests to me that some equitable arrangement must have been worked out among Steenson, DiNardo, and the Davises before the OCSP was erected. The Davises, as far as I can see, continue to donate to Catholic, and presumably archdiocesan, causes outside Our Lady of Walsingham.

That plum positions for otherwise not-as-employable OCSP clergy continue to be available in Galveston-Houston archdiocesan jobs also gives DiNardo a measure of influence over Bp Lopes. But beyond that, there'a another question: where does Bp Lopes live? I can't imagine that the tithe from the dozen or so productive parishes in the OCSP can maintain anyone in the style to which bishops are accustomed. This makes me wonder if Lopes is accommodated in an archdiocesan facility. Can anyone answer this?

But DiNardo's role in Anglicanorum coetibus is a reminder of where he stands in the order of things. The constitution was a project of Bernard Law, which he presumably was able to supervise much more actively when he went to Rome in 2003. Donald Wuerl became the delegate for implementing it in 2010-11. Our Lady of Walsingham was the principal Anglican Use parish and the location from which William Stetson, the secretary to the delegate, worked. There must have been considerable interaction between Wuerl and DiNardo in the runup.

DiNardo in any case, especially in light of my update to yesterday's post, had been a protégé of Wuerl at least from the days he served as spiritual director to the seminarians in the gay-friendly St Paul's seminary in Pittsburgh while Wuerl was rector. I suspect that nothing happened in the runup to the erection of the OCSP that was not to the explicit wishes of Wuerl and Law. DiNardo was with the program.

Is it any wonder that the two most public Catholics who are former Anglican priests are Fr Longenecker and Dr Marshall? Both operate completely outside either Anglican Use or the OCSP. Given DiNardo's less than reassuring background, I strongly suspect no action will be undertaken by the US bishops over homosexuality in the priesthood that rocks any boats.

George Neumayr On The DiNardo Chain Of Paternity

In a recent column, George Neumayr, who pursued Donald Wuerl with some prescience, asks a legitimate question: so, who made Daniel DiNardo, the current president of the USCCB and a leader of the presumptive moderate faction of bishops? The answer is neither very clear nor especially reassuring.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, whose Galveston-Houston chancery was raided this week by prosecutors in search of abuse-related files, always struck me as a pretty haunted and compromised figure. DiNardo came out of Pittsburgh and the corrupt milieu of Cardinal John Wright, who was an accused pederast and a mentor to such slimy prelates as Donald Wuerl. Google DiNardo and Cardinal Wright and a creepy picture comes up of a young DiNardo sitting next to Wright in a white tuxedo. Wright liked to dress his seminarians up in such attire, just as Wuerl would later delight in having his young priests wear waiters’ uniforms and serve appetizers at parties held at his Pittsburgh mansion.

For whatever reason, the Spectator didn't run the picture, but it's on Google, so here it is. DiNardo is seated to the left of Wright. The photo is noted as from the Bishop's Latin School, which DiNardo attended from 1964 to 1967 while Wright was Bishop of Pittsburgh. Neumayr calls Wright "one of the godfathers of a high-living, dilettantish Gay Mafia within the Church", although I think even a godfather had a daddy, and who that might be still isn't clear.

UPDATE: William M. Ogrodowski, standing to the right of DiNardo in the photo, was rector of St Paul's seminary in Pittsburgh from 1986 to 1990. DiNardo was a part-time professor and spiritual director of the seminarians there in the early 1980s. Donald Wuerl was rector of the seminary during the same period, 1980--85. An anonymous comment on a Washington Catholic blog, for what it's worth, says, "The saying was at St. Paul's Seminary in Pittsburgh that you couldn't make it unless you had a twrill [twirl?] with Wuerl." Engel says in The Rite of Sodomy, "The seminary had a reputation for rampant homosexuality going back to the days of Bishop Wright." (p 712) In fact, Wright founded it in its current form in 1965.

Randy Engel doesn't mention DiNardo at all in The Rite of Sodomy, although she mentions Wuerl as a gay-friendly Bishop of Pittsburgh, and she's fairly detailed on Wright's career. DiNardo, 69, isn't that much younger than Wuerl, 78, and his earlier career was centered in Pittsburgh and the Vatican bureaucracy. According to Wikipedia,

DiNardo was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Vincent Leonard on July 16, 1977. He then served as parochial vicar at St. Pius X Church in Brookline until 1980. In 1981, he was named Assistant Chancellor of the Diocese of Pittsburgh and part-time professor at St. Paul Seminary. While at St. Paul, he served as spiritual director to the seminarians.

From 1984 to 1990, DiNardo worked in Rome as a staff member of the Congregation for Bishops in the Roman Curia. During this time, he also served as the director of Villa Stritch (1986–1989), the house for American clergy working for the Holy See, and an adjunct professor at the Pontifical North American College.

Upon his return to the United States in 1991, he was named Assistant Secretary for Education for the Pittsburgh diocese and concurrently served as co-pastor with Paul J. Bradley of Madonna del Castello Church in Swissvale. He became the founding pastor of Saints John & Paul Parish in Franklin Park in 1994.

John Wright, who was Bishop of Pittsburgh from 1959 to 1969, served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy from 1969 until his death in 1979. Wuerl became Wright's secretary as Bishop of Pittsburgh in 1967 and moved with him to Rome, continuing as his secretary as prefect. As Bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, Wuerl probably had some role in bringing DiNardo back to Pittsburgh from Rome and also served as a co-consecrator at DiNardo's 1998 consecration as Bishop of Sioux City.

Neumayr's article quotes a great deal mostly about Wright from other sources, which I've already quoted here, and in fact he's skimpy on other details of chronology, which I've had to fill in from Wikipedia. I think it's also significant that The Rite of Sodomy is sufficiently out of date that it doesn't mention DiNardo at all, even though he's now a key figure in AmChurch who owes his rise pretty clearly to Wuerl.

And this completely leaves out the role of mentors in Rome who must also have had a good deal of influence on DiNardo's advancement. There's a great deal more we need to learn.