During the question period following the presentation from National Review Board (NRB) Chair Dr. Francesco Cesareo, Cupich told the body of bishops that examinations of offenses against minors versus adults should be separate.This is close to word salad, and I double checked the video at the link to make sure this is what he said. On one hand, he seems to be equating "consensual" sex with gay cruising in public parks or rest rooms, if he's using the term "anonymous". But in that case, it's extremely high-risk behavior, not just due to the possibility of blackmail or violence, but the likelihood of contracting disease -- and that leaves aside the scandal that would result from a public lewdness arrest. (That happens still, because people want to use their parks and public restrooms without surprises.)“Because in some of the cases with adults ... involving clerics, it could be consensual sex,” the cardinal said, “anonymous, but also involve adult pornography.”
“There’s a whole different set of circumstances that need to come into play here,” Cupich added.
Er, if a priest is doing this, shouldn't it be taken very seriously/ What if he's picking up disease in the public john and coming back and passing it on to 19-year-olds in the rectory? Is it OK because the Life Teen coordinator isn't underage?
I'm not at all sure that Cupich understands the range of same-sex conduct. The term "consensual" more frequently comes into play in the context of sexual harassment in the workplace, but this opens another huge can of worms. The standard definition of "sexual harassment" involves an overt requirement of sex at work in return for a promotion or simply keeping one's job.
But it's actually more complicated: if a vice president asks a low-level administrator out to dinner, isn't the employee at the bottom effectively under pressure to perform, whether or not a specific offer is made? And just because both the administrator and the vice president insist their relationship is "consensual", doesn't this open other legal issues? Let's say the atmosphere in the office is such that "everyone understands" that administrators have to put out to get promoted. A low-level lady who's Catholic and clearly not interested in fun and games can claim she's discriminated against on that basis alone. It's legal sexual harassment even if the VP never spelled the deal out specifically.
So let's talk about bishops and seminarians. If everyone, over 18 or not, understood the route to ordination led through going to the beach with Uncle Ted -- which seems to have been the case -- how is any of this "consensual"? Certainly if some of the seminarians are underage, we're adding statutory rape to the list of charges, but just because a seminarian is over 18 and is under pressure to call things "consensual" doesn't exonerate Uncle Ted.
This is part of the general dishonesty in continuing to pretend the problem is "pedophilia". Even assuming the US bishops are short-sightedly acting like risk managers only to limit their legal exposure and not encouraging holiness, there are huge legal exposures for in-house hanky-panky that fall well short of pedophilia. Even among Episcopalians, Bp Paul Moore Jr was forced into retirement due to a sexual harassment lawsuit from a gay male adult priest. We must assume this will happen soon in the Church, if it hasn't already and been thoroughly covered up.
Now we get to adult pornography, which Cupich just tosses into the mix. Let's take the case of Fr Montalbano, Fr Kalchik's predecessor at the Resurrection parish in Chicago.
[I]t’s a Sunday morning. The pastor doesn’t come down for the first mass of that day, which is a Spanish mass. There are three deacons there. The priest doesn’t come down. What do you do? Well, let’s find out what’s going on,” Fr. Kalchik told Voris.Cupich, as far as I can see, is suggesting that if it's just a sex machine, and there's no kiddie porn involved, these aren't the droids we're looking for. But what happens if, say, a plumber goes into the rectory and in the course of fixing a leak comes across the mirror, the sex machine, and the porn, even if Fr Montalbano isn't there? What if he goes to Church Militant? Or, failing that, it just becomes general knowledge in the parish? Does Cupich just write a stern pastoral letter telling the faithful to grow up, join the 21st century?“They break the door down from the Church to the parish house. They go upstairs to Montalbano’s bedroom on the second floor. They break into the bedroom and they find this man stark naked, hooked up to a sex machine. And this is in his room with the wall of mirrors on the one side, wall of mirrors on the one side,” continued Kalchik.
. . . “But in the immediate cleanup process of Montalbano, one of the deacons removed two full closets of gay pornography. Not just, you know, a couple of items, but between videos, and books, and everything imaginable, it was all put into black hefty bags – a sizeable, two full closet fulls, and this is all carted out to some suburban Chicago forest preserve, and burned in one of those super-size cauldrons they have there,” concluded Fr. Kalchik.
There's something seriously missing with this guy. Michael Voris wonders if he's ad libbing or if he consults with Rome before he makes any remarks. My sense of things is that he's basically a ding-a-ling, and he's been given basic talking points to supplement the letter to the conference, but it has words like "anonymous", "consensual", "pornography", and so forth that he doesn't quite know what to do with, so he just throws them in where they seem to fit. But the powers that be in Rome are also ignorant of the problem, the issues, and how this will play out.
Cupich is a poor choice of stooge, though Rome's case is so weak it's hard to imagine who can argue it better. But that's not Francis's intent, clearly -- a stooge will serve, because he's imposing things from above anyhow.
