We know that McCarrick was not high on the list of candidates to become archbishop of Washington. Is there nothing in the McCarrick file at the Congregation for Bishops about how he leapt over a dozen better candidates? Viganò suggests that two homosexual advisers have been bypassing the usual process for bishops’ appointments in recent years. Certainly, if decades ago, McCarrick had similarly powerful patrons in the Vatican, there must be some record of when and where they intervened. And how doubts were circumvented. You can’t help but feel that Ouellet has given an incomplete account of the files and what they suggest. And that only a more open and independent review of the whole matter will resolve various questions and – let’s hope – restore trust.This takes me back to the question my regular correspondent raised last week, and that I began to work on a couple days ago:
Cardinal McCarrick was born in 1930. Blaming his behaviour, or that of Fr Maciel (born 1929), Fr Cunningham (born 1931), Fr Shanley (born 1931) or many other serial predators on a culture which is accepting of sexual deviance and promiscuity is looking at the 1950s through the lens of a sexual revolution that arrived much later.There's another question here. Bernard Law and William Stetson were both born in 1931. We know that Law and Stetson were together at Adams House, the "gay house" at Harvard, in the early 1950s. Law and Stetson seem to have worked together and fostered each other's careers at least through the Pastoral Provision and up to Anglicanorum coetibus. My regular correspondent thinks that "politics" are responsible for making McCarrick the "bad guy" in the story, while Law is often portrayed as misunderstood or perhaps the victim of overzealous underlings.
I'm increasingly of the view that the First Crisis, c. 2000, was carefully spun via the John Jay Reports and elsewhere in the media to make it a "pedophilia problem" that could be blamed on cultural developments in the 1960s and 70s, as well as well-intended therapeutic approaches to pedophilia that turned out to be wrong. The one thing it wasn't, John Jay and the rest of the media assured us, was a "gay problem". My regular correspondent gives dates that strongly suggest there was a "gay problem" that sometimes happened to include sex with underage boys that almost certainly existed prior to the 1960s.
Law is sometimes portrayed as a "conservative". I'm just not sure how courting syncretism with Anglicans is a "conservative" issue. I think we need to look more carefully at what other agendas may be involved. But I think, as long as suggestions are now being made that the Second Crisis is a "gay problem", that there may be a need to revisit a "gay problem" in the First Crisis as well.
This goes to the issue Fr Mark Goring raises in this YouTube video. There's something out of kilter if the Church sees no problem with active same-sex conduct among clergy, especially bishops, as long as it isn't with minors.
