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.

Michael Voris On Chains Of Paternity

In today's Vortex, Michael Voris adds to our knowledge of how AmChurch got to its current state:

First: Detroit Cardinal John Dearden, archbishop and eventual cardinal. He was here from 1958–1980. During his term, he unleashed a torrent of modernism on the Church. In fact, it would be fair to say that Dearden was the single prelate most responsible for the current condition of the Church.

He made Detroit a kind of petri dish for every liberal cause in the Church, and under his reign, the seminary here became nothing short of a gay nightclub which continued after his death.

It was Dearden that the Church in America has to thank for the second spiritual criminal we should focus on: Joseph Bernardin. Bernardin got his promotion up through the episcopal ranks owning directly to Dearden, who drew him out of obscurity in South Carolina and introducing him, so to speak, to the rest of the nation's bishops.

Dearden formed the National Bishops' Conference — today's USCCB — and made sure that when he ran it, Bernardin was his right-hand man, in addition to making sure he also became eventual president of the conference.

From that post, Bernardin, in practice, oversaw the appointment of close to 100 bishops in the United States, many of them homosexual or homosexual friendly, who went on to make sure that homosexuality became a fixed agenda item in the American priesthood.

Once cardinal of Chicago, he established the first gay ministry office in the country — which has never promoted Church teaching — and when he died, he directed that the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus sing at his wake.

Engel mentions Dearden fairly frequently in The Rite of Sodomy, but she never spells out his role in forming the NCB/USCCB. She does, though, stress the USCCB's role as a superdiocesan bureaucracy that has heavily influenced policy, and she does mention Dearden's role in promoting Bernardin, who in turn promoted Law.

This reinforces my view that so far, there's no definitive history of the Church in the US, not to mention anywhere else, that explains how we got here and can help establish a consensus traditionalist view. I also agree with Voris farther down:

This is not to say, as a fair warning to the unsuspecting, that all orthodox-speaking bishops are immune from the homosexual curse.

There have been and still are bishops who have a reputation for being orthodox and may, in fact, be to some degree, but who either live a double life in this area or have a blind spot because they themselves are homosexual — although not practicing.

Opus Dei Bishops And Other Topics

A visitor comments,

One thing that might not be understood by your average reader is that Bishops (and by extension, Archbishops) must resign their memberships in Opus Dei before they become Bishops. This has to do with the person or hierarchy to whom they must be obedient. In Opus Dei, the person is obedience to the Prelate. When a priest is made a Bishop, that vow to the Prelate is dissolved and a vow of obedience is then made to the episcopal polity ultimately headed by the Pope.

While I do not doubt there is some animosity between the Jesuits and Opus Dei, Archbishop Gomez is no longer a part of Opus Dei. Is there some Tom Hanks/DaVinci Code type of conspiracy for Opus Dei to subsume the papacy? Is our Holy Father paranoid about such a thing? I would put more money on the latter being true than the former.

Pope Francis has a track record of being suspicious and authoritarian during his history as a Jesuit and as a Bishop and now Pope. Archbishop Gomez has a history of faithfulness to Church teaching which has angered some who prefer an agenda of Social Justice over fidelity to the Magisterium. Which of these two seems to be likely targeted by the other?

These are difficult times for our Church. It is sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. Something tells me, a great winnowing is about to take place and the fire to burn the chaff has already been prepared and lit. Hold on to your catechisms, folks, it is about to get real hot!

Further on the putative feud, another visitor comments,

The feud between the Jesuits & OD is hype. Pope Francis chose Greg Burke as his spokesman. Most ODers don't admit that they are in OD unless it's good press for them---Burke is one of those cases.

Francis has also appointed at least 1 OD priest a bishop in Australia (& has appointed 11 Jesuits. 12,000 Jesuits in the world vs 3000 OD priests. And, obviously the Jesuits have 1500 years on OD.) The one thing Francis has not done is make the head of OD a bishop as JP2 did w/Portillo & Echeverria. OD has to get a OD-friendly bishop to do ordinations (& there's been no problem finding them).

Elsewhere, there's been much comment on Francis's reported remarks about homosexuality, for instance, here:

Rome (kath.net) Pope Francis is worried about homosexuals in the Church. "In our societies, it seems that homosexuality is a fashion, and this mentality also influences the Church in some way," said the head of the Church in a recent interview, which will be published in a book on Monday. This was reported by “ORF.” According to the interview, Francis is worried about homosexuals in the clergy and seminaries. [What about his close circle?]

So does this mean he's going to throw Coccopalmerio, McCarrick, Tobin, and all the others under the bus? Don't wait for it. If any of them crosses him, of course, all bets are off. As I commented yesterday, in a corrupt organization, the ruling clique has something on everyone, and anyone is subject to removal for "corruption" at any time. But as long as they stay with the program, they're safe, unless too much pressure builds up to make one of them an example no matter what.

Francis is triangulating here. At least it's an indication he knows there's concern out there -- but he'll always weasel his way out of any such statement and point to his "zero tolorance" in Paraguay if he has to.

Fr Carlos Urrutigoity -- The Rest Of The Story

In Thursday's post, taken largely from Engel's The Rite of Sodomy. we saw how Fr Carlos Urrutigoity, an SSPX priest originally from Argentina, had been bouncing from assignments there, in Wisconsin, and in the Diocese of Scranton, PA, leaving each time on the heels of misconduct allegations, until in Scranton he brought litigation on the diocese and eventually destroyed the reputation of Bp Timlin. But that wasn't the end for Urrutigoity. (Many thanks to a visitor who sent me the links.)

Engel discusses Urrutigoity's strange magnetism, which seems to have let him continue his career even after Scranton:

Little wonder that in his warning letter to Bishop Timlin in February 1999, Bishop Fellay described Urrutigoity as “dangerous” and noted:

The reason why he got into trouble with the Superiors of the Society of St. Pius X is mainly because we felt he had a strange, abnormal influence on the seminarians and priests, whom he seemed to attach to his brilliant, charismatic personality. When he asked me to recognize the society he intended to found, among the reasons of my refusal, I explicitly mentioned this strange personal, guru-like attachment between the disciples and their leader (p 964)

Engel uses the Anthony Blunt-Guy Burgess Cambridge spy ring as one paradigm for gay infiltration of institutions, and there certainly seems to be a parallel between Urrutigoity and Burgess, who struck outsiders like Malcolm Muggeridge as a "moral leper", but who struck Martha Powers in Conspiracy of Silence as having something like complete influence over Blunt.

Urrutigoity resurfaced in Paraguary in 2014 -- you'd think his career would have ended in Scranton!

Pope Francis sent a cardinal and an archbishop to investigate Carlos Urrutigoity in the diocese of Ciudad del Este. The two men visited the country July 21-26.

The removal is the latest demonstration of the pope’s “zero tolerance” of clerical abuse, and it suggests priests suspected of child abuse in one country can no longer find shelter in other countries.

In 2002, Urrutigoity was accused of sexual abuse of minors in a highly publicized lawsuit in the Diocese of Scranton, Pa. He and another priest, Eric Ensey, were suspended by then-Bishop James Timlin amid allegations they had sexually molested students at St. Gregory’s Academy. The diocese reportedly reached a $400,000-plus settlement in the case in 2006.

Urrutigoity, a native of Argentina, was transferred to Canada before settling in Paraguay.

The Vatican’s spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed Wednesday (July 30) that Urrutigoity had been removed from his position as vicar general, or deputy bishop, of the diocese on July 14.

And later that year,

After a Vatican investigation, Pope Francis removed a Paraguayan bishop from his post as head of the Diocese of Ciudad del Este because of "serious pastoral reasons."

But the bishop shot back later the same day, charging in an open letter that he was the victim of an ideological campaign by Paraguayan bishops in league with Vatican officials.

Bishop Rogelio Livieres Plano, 69, was told to step down as head of the diocese effective Sept. 25. Bishop Ricardo Valenzuela Rios of Villarrica del Espitiru Santo will temporarily administer the diocese.

A Vatican statement said the "onerous decision" to dismiss Bishop Livieres was made after a "careful examination" of the findings of a Vatican investigation conducted by the congregations for Bishops and for Clergy. An apostolic visitation to the diocese in July was led by Spanish Cardinal Santos Abril Castello, archpriest of Rome's Basilica of St. Mary Major.

The order for Bishop Livieres, a member of Opus Dei, to step down was based on "serious pastoral reasons" and motivated by "the greater good of the unity of the church in Ciudad del Este" and among Paraguay's bishops, the Vatican statement said.

That someone on Guy Burgess's moral plane should rise to vicar general of a diocese would certainly be cause for removing a bishop. On the other hand, as events have unfolded, Francis has certainly been selective in removing bishops. That Bp Livieres is Opus Dei suggests there may be some merit to his claim of political manipulation in the move -- one interpretation of Francis's papacy is that it's driven by a feud between the Jesuits and Opus Dei, and Francis is said to have an animosity for another Opus Dei bishop, José Gómez.

Rorate Caeli has made the point that Livieres, a traditionalist bishop whose policies in his diocese were otherwise commendable, let Urrutigoity become a pretext for his removal.

Urrutigoity was not himself the central issue -- the bishop was the central issue -- but he was clearly the first cause and center of origin of all the maze which ended up suffocating the bishop, even if his past in America was not the cause of all the trouble, but the catalyst of its unraveling. It was predictable.

One purpose of corruption in a corrupt institution is that, if everyone is tainted, the powers that be have something on everyone, and everyone is subject to removal for "corruption" at any time at the whim of the clique in control. That Francis can summarily dismiss certain bishops after a token visitation -- he did this recently with Bp Holley in Memphis in a similar move -- while rehabilitating or leaving in place cardinals who are far more corrupt, is an indication of how this system works.

Francis has "zero tolerance" for abuse only when it suits him.