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.

The Roger Mahony Chain Of Paternity

Roger Mahony retired as Archbishop of Los Angeles in 2011. According to Wikipedia,

On January 31, 2013, in the wake of a court order requiring the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to release its unredacted files on clergy sexual abuse, Archbishop Gómez relieved Mahony of all of his remaining public and administrative duties. Critics called Gómez's action "purely symbolic punishment" and "hand-slapping...a nearly meaningless gesture", and noted that Mahony remains "a powerful man" in the church. According to the archdiocese, Mahony remains "a priest in good standing" and may still celebrate Mass, but he may no longer speak publicly or exercise any responsibilities ordinarily reserved for a bishop. . . . Under canon law, as Mahony is a cardinal, he enjoys the "privilege of forum", meaning that the only the pope is competent to judge and punish Mahony in matters subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Gómez only has the authority to control Mahony's administrative assignments within the archdiocese.

Thus we had the situation mentioned in yesterday's post, in which Francis made Mahony his delegate to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Diocese of Scranton, from which Mahony withdrew after protests. Similar protests took place in Utah when Mahony was scheduled to keynote a fundraising event; he withdrew from that as well.

It seems as if Pope Francis had been trying to rehabilitate Mahony as he had McCarrick. This suggests Francis has been reversing a course he had apparently set in 2014, in which he publicly acted against a Paraguayan bishop accused of tolerating flagrant abuse -- I'll cover this tomorrow.

Throughout his time in California, Mahony has enjoyed remarkably good press. He rose in the Church via the same path that Bernard Law and Joseph Bernardin followed, allying himself closely with civil rights and anti-poverty causes, in his case Cesar Chavez and the first California governorship of Jerry Brown. This led to consistently favorable treatment from the Los Angeles Times and other California media. Although his indulgent treatment of sex offenders was comparable to Law's, he never attracted the same scrutiny in Los Angeles as Law did in Boston -- Law's association with the Bush family was probably his undoing, even though Law's practical positions on theology and liturgy were equivalent to Mahony's.

In fact, Mahony's impact on AmChurch probably exceeds that of both Bernardin and Law. Engel's The Rite Of Sodomy certainly has more to say about Mahony than Law, though I'm finding that its coverage of Mahony is poorly organized, and it often tells the story through Mahony's numerous protégés. But an example is the case of a 2003 civil suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of 17 victims of clerical abuse:

The December 2003 lawsuit exposes a portion of the clerical homosexual underworld operating out of Southern California with tentacles that reach into the American heartland. The lawsuit supports one of the major claims of this book—that clerical pederasts and homosexuals tend to gravitate toward and colonize certain administrative areas in a diocese, specifically the Chancery, diocesan major and minor seminaries, and departments connected to liturgy, religious education, canon law and finances.

According to attorneys Boucher and Drivon, unlike Cardinal Law of Boston, who was forced to resign in disgrace for his role in covering-up multiple clerical abuse cases, Cardinal Mahony has managed to survive the legal earthquakes that continue to shake the Archdiocese of Los Angeles because he enjoys the favor and protection of the ruling media and political elite.

. . . The lawsuit alleges:

In terms of shaping the make-up and philosophy ... of the archdiocese toward child molestation in the 1950s and into the 1960s, perhaps the most significant child molester faculty member of Our Lady Queen of Angels Junior Seminary was Fr. John Farris. Fr. Farris was among the most popular teachers and spiritual advisors at Our Lady Queen of Angels ...while rendering spiritual advisement, Farris sexually molested the young students at the junior seminary. During this time period, not uncoincidentally, the attrition rate of students dropping out from the junior seminary was extremely high. During this time many of the present archbishops and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in California were students at Our Lady Queen of Angels Junior Seminary, including Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop William Levada, Bishop John Steinbock, as well as former Bishop of Tucson Manuel Moreno. (p 807)

Engel describes a Mahony "Gang O'Four" that emerged from the Our Lady Queen of Angels seminary and the St John's major seminary in Camarillo, CA. These were Justin Rigali, Tod Brown, William Levada, and Mahony himself. These in turn sponsored or protected other gay or gay-friendly bishops, including Patrick Ziemann, the disastrous Bishop of Santa Rosa, CA; Bishop of Tucson Manuel Moreno; and John Steinbock, Ziemann's predecessor in the gay-friendly Santa Rosa diocese and later Bishop of Fresno, CA, where his record of handling abuse was at best mixed.

As far as I can see, this is just the tip of the iceberg, in large part because California media hasn't covered abuse cases as fully as media in other regions, and because the political establishment is aligned with liberal and gay-friendly prelates.

US Legal Updates

My own view continues to be that proceedings under secular law, especially in the US, will be the most effective short-term factor to curb an ingrained worldwide culture of Catholic sex abuse. Christine Niles mentioned the case of William Jeffrey Paulish of the Diocese of Scranton, PA in yesterday's Church Militant Headlines YouTube broadcast, but there was no equivalent print story on the site. However, it seems to have been well covered in local Pennsylvania news:

Paulish, 61, was transferred from one unsuspecting parish to another 11 times and granted two leaves of absences before he landed at St. Mary’s Church, now known as the Prince of Peace Parish, in Old Forge in October 2006, Williams said. He immediately began abusing Williams’ client.

“While Paulish, we have alleged, is the direct abuser of our client ... the diocese was responsible for having Paulish where he was in direct proximity to children,” Williams said. “It was clearly known by the diocese he was an abuser.”

The lawsuit, filed in Lackawanna County Court, names as defendants the diocese, Paulish, current bishop the Most. Rev. Joseph C. Bambera and retired bishops James C. Timlin and Joseph F. Martino.

This is yet another example of how we need a much better and more searchable index to chains of paternity. Engel in The Rite of Sodomy discusses an earlier problem in the Diocese of Scranton in which Bp Timlin protected a flagrant predator, Fr Carlos Urrutigoity, an SSPX priest who had been transferred repeatedly among seminaries for known abusive conduct with teen boys.

In February 11, 1999, Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X sent a formal communication to Bishop Timlin informing him that Father Carlos Urrutigoity had been accused of molesting a seminarian under his spiritual care at the SSPX’s St.Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minn.

Bishop Fellay also indicated that in 1987, prior to Urrutigoity’s acceptance by the Winona seminary, Fr. Andres Morello, Rector of Our Lady Co- Redemptrix Seminary in La Reja, Argentina had accused the priest of homosexual practices.

According to Fr. Morello, he had intended to expel Urrutigoity from the La Reja seminary because of his significant pride, his habit of forming “particular friendships,” his formation of a faction of seminarians acting under his influence and grave denunciations regarding moral matters. (p 963)

Despite these warnings, Urrutigoity was able to leave Winona and find a place at St Gregory’s Academy in the Diocese of Scranton. Timlin discounted the allegations against Urrutigoity, but he resumed his abusive activity at the new academy, where abuse was in fact widespread.

By early 2002, Bishop Timlin was aware that Fathers Urrutigoity and Ensey were accused of sexual molestation. The District Attorney’s office of Lackawanna County had launched a criminal investigation into the accusations of sexual misconduct by the two SSJ priests, but was forced to abandon the case because of the statue of limitations. (pp 968-69)

Bishop James Timlin retired from the Scranton Diocese on July 25, 2003, with civil litigation in the case still pending. In September of this year, one of his successors,

Bishop Joseph Bambera of the diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania announced he is forbidding Bp. Emeritus James Timlin "from representing the Diocese of Scranton at all public events, liturgical or otherwise."

Bambera maintains he is acting in response to a recommendation by the diocesan independent review board, the membership of which is confidential and "put in place to advise a bishop on the assessment of allegations of abuse."

However, Bambera was at the center of a controversy earlier in 2018, in which Cardinal Roger Mahony, under equivalent restriction in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for the same offenses, nevertheless was appointed by Pope Francis to be his special envoy to the Catholic Diocese of Scranton’s 150th anniversary Mass.

“We are most grateful to our Holy Father for appointing Cardinal Mahony to be his personal envoy for this special celebration, and we are honored that the Cardinal has so graciously accepted this invitation,” Scranton Bishop Joseph C. Bambera said in this press release. “This expression of the Pope’s pastoral support is another blessing as we mark the founding of our Diocese, and we look forward to welcoming His Eminence Cardinal Mahony to celebrate this historic milestone with us.”

Local Catholics then promised to protest the event and expressed to media outlet Church Militant their frustration that the Holy See was sending the disgraced cardinal as its representative.

“Bishop Bambera was informed late last week that his Eminence, Roger Cardinal Mahony, is unable to attend the Mass commemorating the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Diocese of Scranton Mass on March 4, 2018,” Bill Genello, the diocese’s executive director of communications, told LifeSiteNews on Monday.

Mahony himself is an interesting case which, barring more important news, I'll take up tomorrow.

Meanwhile,

Police have raided the chancery of the Galveston-Houston archdiocese for evidence about a priest charged with sexually abusing minors.

Several law enforcement agencies showed up at the archdiocese's offices in downtown Houston around 10 a.m. Wednesday morning to comb through the "secret archives" — the confidential documents that every diocese keeps about its personnel.

Authorities are looking for documents related to Fr. Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, a priest of the archdiocese who was arrested in September on charges of sexually abusing minors. Father La Rosa-Lopez was accused of sexually abusing two teenagers — one boy and one girl — between 1998 and 2001.

New Book On Benedict's Resignation

The visitor who follows the Italian press sent me a link to this review of Il Segreto Di Benedetto XVI, by Antonio Socci, on Marco Tosatti's blog. Even via Google translate, the Italian is somewhat murky, but it gives an interesting interpretation of the context for Benedict's papacy (I've tried to clean up the Google as best I can):

The resignation of Benedict remains for many a great question mark, a question with multiple concomitant answers. Socci offers here the thesis of the analyst Germano Dottori: "Although I have no proof, I have always thought that Benedict XVI was induced to abdication by a complex machination, ordered by those who had an interest in blocking reconciliation with Russian Orthodoxy, a religious pillar of a project of progressive convergence between continental Europe and Moscow. For similar reasons, I believe the succession of Cardinal Scola, who had been conducting negotiations with Moscow, was also stopped by the Patriarch of Venice ".

[Benedict said], "Nobody tried to blackmail me. I would not even allow it. If they tried to do it I would not have left because we do not have to leave when we are under pressure ". But the analysis by Germano Dottori is interesting. However, we are faced with a project of a unipolar world with American hegemony - which therefore has to bend a Russia that is independent and independent again - it is the last ideological folly born of totalitarianism since the twentieth century. . . It is an imperialistic project suicidal for the United States and very dangerous for the world, but so deeply impregnates the American establishment (both in the neocon and liberal factions) that even Donald Trump - who won against them and against this ideology - must now come to terms and is heavily influenced by this block of power,

It is important to remember, and it is good for Socci to do so, the maneuvers of the Obama-Clinton administration to organize a "revolution" in the Church. A revolution, in fact, there was, as we have seen, and as we see. And it is not few who link it to the strong financial and ideological powers that the Church of Benedict gave annoyance, and which bothered the American bishops, deployed in a cultural battle, which makes them define "cultural warriors" in a derogatory tone by the press priced - and this is not a way of saying - of the current regime.

I would say that more than a few American analysts would refer not to a Clinton-Obama administration, but to a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama foreign policy, but even that has been fairly consistent across all administrations in the post-World War II period. And from what we can tell, the corrupt Vatican financial dealings have thrived in that consensus environment.

I would also submit that if we put any tentative plans for reconciliation with Orthodoxy in the context of Anglicanorum coetibus, we must assume they would have been as feckless as the overtures to Anglicans. Beyond that, the Anglican program was undertaken at the instigation of what I think can be correctly called the Law-Bernardin wing of AmChurch. The view of Law that's emerged here with the help of a visitor who knew him is not of a cardinal opposed in any serious way to the Bernardin agenda.

Indeed, Law, as the principal figure behind Anglican outreach -- his protégé Jeffrey Steenson was groomed for his role from the late 1980s onward; he advocated for Anglicanorum coetibus with Ratzinger in a 1993 meeting set up by Law; and before Anglicanorum coetibus was promulgated, Law brought him to Rome, ordained him, and set him up for the eventual role of ordinary. With disastrous results. I'm not aware of any equivalent history of concrete steps toward Orthodox reconciliation, and certainly not at the initiative of AmChurch.

In fact, if anything, Anglicanorum coetibus amounts to a parallel effort to Eastern Rite jurisdictions, and in many contexts, an Orthodox outreach like it would be redundant. I think to take Socci's thesis here more seriously, we'd have to see concrete evidence of plans for new steps toward Orthodox reconciliation undertaken during the runup to Benedict's papacy equivalent to the Ratzinger meeting with Steenson and the subsequent draft of Anglicanorum coetibus.

I'll go one step farther. Earlier this year, I had a chance to conduct my experiment of mentioning Anglicanorum coetibus with a diocesan priest, a then-associate at our parish. It confirmed the result I'd predicted, he gave me a quizzical expression. Several weeks ago, I had a chance to repeat the same experiment with our pastor. I think I said, "I mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus to Fr _____, but he hadn't heard of it. You may know of Benedict's . . . "

Fr Jim, a Type A, immediately answered, "Oh, yes, I'm thoroughly familiar with it," but I'm not so sure -- he was hitting us up for the building fund, after all. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he must be one of very few busy and successful diocesan pastors who is.

But consider that of Benedict's two main initiatives, Anglicanorum coetibus and Summorum Pontificum, the first is unknown, and from someone who saw its implementation at close range, a failure. The second has had only mild success and is certainly subject to the whims of any bishop at any time.

Without a stronger argument, I can't sign on to any thesis that Benedict was on the verge of great things but was forced out by the Bushes, the Clintons, and Obama in concert with AmChurch. One of his two initiatives was at the behest of AmChurch -- and beyond that, it was Benedict who demoted Viganò to Washington, not Francis. On the whole, I'm coming to think Benedict is part of the problem, not a potential solution.

Another Italian Take

The visitor who follows the Italian press has sent another link to a good summary of the current crisis from the Italian point of view. (The translation is from Google translate with a few tweaks):

Pope Francis has insisted several times on the fact that at the root of the phenomenon of abuse is clericalism, a sort of abuse of power, leaving out the factor of homosexuality in the clergy. Even the journalists of the papal court are doing their best to convince everyone that homosexuality has nothing to do with it, even if the data say exactly the opposite.

Among the four components of the organizing committee stands out the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, much discussed both for his close friendship with the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick and for statements that seem to diminish the emergency created by the crisis for sexual abuse. At the meeting of American bishops last week in Baltimore, Cupich was the one who led the faction that managed to prevent the launch of a truth commission on what happened; in particular, Cupich - like the Pope - is opposed to the presence of lay people in the Commission of Inquiry, as advocated by the presidency of the US Episcopal Conference and by Cardinal Sean O'Malley, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Children, blatantly excluded from the list of the organizers of the February meeting.

Even the appointment of Cupich is a serious matter, given the contiguity with McCarrick, but moreover to strengthen the position of Cardinal Cupich is also another appointment, that of the Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias, of Mumbay, who firmly supports the right to gay marriages and the need to change the language of the Church regarding homosexuality.

With a similar team in charge of operations, it is clear that we want to avoid the issue of homosexuality in the clergy as a phenomenon to be monitored in terms of preventing abuse. There is also the risk in the position of those who maintain that the acceptance of homosexuality in the clergy would be useful to avoid sexual abuse.

One issue that I haven't been able to reason through is how the synod, if it addresses it at all, will deal with the question of "consensual" same-sex activity, at what age, and under what circumstances, and how this relates to traditional Church teaching on the sixth commandment as it relates to heterosexual marriage.

The basic problem is that same-sex activity bypasses the potential for procreation. This in turn bypasses Humanae Vitae and much else. So if you are allowing in some way for "consensual" same-sex activity, you're creating a whole separate category for sexual activity unrelated to procreation.

In that case, why forbid artificial contraception? But if the implication in Cupich's Baltimore remarks on "consensual" is that any same-sex activity by priests over the age of consent is outside the question under review, why continue to forbid fornication between men and women? Is it worse for a priest to have a woman concubine than to have a gay boyfriend?

For instance, how does this relate to former Los Angeles auxiliary bishop Gabino Zavala, who resigned under those circumstances in 2012:

Zavala informed the archbishop last month that he had fathered two children who live with their mother in another state, Gomez said in a letter to the archdiocese's approximately 5 million Catholics. The archbishop said Zavala told him that he had submitted his resignation to the pope.

"Since that time, he has not been in ministry and will be living privately," the archbishop said in the letter, which was posted on a Catholic blog.

So, must every bishop or auxiliary with a gay boyfriend living either in the rectory or in another state resign? Apparently not, but a bishop or auxiliary with a concubine apparently must, and the Holy Father won't dither over whether to accept the resignation, either.

Why the difference, or will we reform Church teaching in this matter?