Concerning Card. McCarrick

Card. McCarrick. What to say?

I remember that it was Card. McCarrick who suppressed information in a memorandum to US bishops from the Prefect of the Cong. for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Card. Ratzinger, about guidelines for voting in these USA.

I remember that it was Card. McCarrick who, after Card. Arinze – while presenting Redemptionis Sacramentum to the press corps – responded to my question about Communion for pro-abortion Catholic politicians, made a bee line to the cameras and microphones after the presser and said, “What Card. Arinze meant to say, was…” and then turned Arinze’s point on its ear.

My friend Fr. Martin Fox has an offering at his blog.  HERE

Phil Lawler has a very interesting point:

Why were so many journalists willing to let the rumors go unexplored? Or, if they did explore the rumors, why were they willing to drop the story, at a time when so many other allegations were splashed across the headlines? Could it be because, for anyone seeking to influence a cardinal, the threat of disclosure is more effective than disclosure itself?

Rod Dreher has more information on what this is about.  HERE

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44 Comments

  1. Sawyer says:

    What to say? I’m disgusted. Disgusted as much by the cover-up as the acts.

    So McCarrick is no longer to be a priest in public? Big deal. Based on his life as a prelate, one could doubt he ever wanted to be an alter Christus in the first place. He used priesthood as a means to obtain power, comfort, prestige and worldly happiness while flouting the vocation he professed to have. Now he continues to enjoy his retirement, pension, home, health care, all provided for by the Church. So he cannot be a priest in public anymore? What sort of punishment is that for a man his age? He will suffer minor embarrassment, but that’s about it. His comfortable material life goes on.

    Meanwhile, truly good souls who sacrifice for Mother Church suffer truly for the Church, sometimes at the hands of people such as McCarrick and his enablers and protectors.

    Where is the justice?

  2. mtmajor says:

    As a convert, (over 30 yrs ago), it is this allowance of behavior by our ecclesiastical leaders that I find very frustrating. The vow of obedience, lack of internal transparency, and protection from bad press continues to takes precedence over basic “right vs wrong.” My own children stopped attending Mass for this reason, among others. For crying out loud, according to writer Rod Dreher, even the homosexual media is complicit. The past abuse crisis obviously had limited effect on “political” bishops in the US and Europe. Frankly, until our bishops get a strong, orthodox handle on their own, there will continue to be a loss of attendance and participation in our Church.

  3. Arthur McGowan says:

    The next pope could clean a lot of sexual miscreants out of the hierarchy without the expense and delay of investigations. Just depose the known 915-haters.

  4. LarryW2LJ says:

    What to say?

    This is hard on so many levels. Although I never met the man, he was the first Bishop of my diocese. As a lay person, I never saw him at my parish, at a Confirmation or any other function. Nonetheless, we lay people look up to our Bishops. They’re supposed to be successors to the Apostles.

    So we’re all fallen, broken people. We fail, we make mistakes and we’re supposed to repent and be called to holiness. I don’t know enough of the situation to know if that has since occurred in his case, so I’ll keep my mouth shut with regard to that.

    But what’s even more troubling is that so many higher-ups had either a good idea of what was going on; or even worse – knew what was going on! And they either said and did nothing; or if they did they say something and tried to do something, they were ignored. How is trust ever going to be re-established if this stuff keeps happening?

    It definitely seems that “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph” and “On this rock I will build My church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it” are the only words you can hang your hat on.

  5. MrsMacD says:

    I recently heard that Bella Dodd, an American that was a member of the Communist Party before Bishop Sheen brought her into the church, said that they had put over a thousand young radicals into the priesthood. Is Father McCarrick one of these priests? Who are they? What is it when a priest becomes a priest not because he loves Christ and His Church but because of some other motive? Does it come out in weird ways like a priest keeping a mistress or having un-natural relations? There is an obvious problem in the Church. Some prelates don’t love God. What are they doing? Can they be expelled? When I become Pope … nevermind.

  6. Kenneth Wolfe says:

    “Why were so many journalists willing to let the rumors go unexplored?”

    Ditto for Newark Cardinal “Nighty Night, Baby. I love you.”

    Has anyone in the history of the world texted and/or tweeted that language to one’s sister?

  7. The Astronomer says:

    I grew up and then worked for the U.S. Government in Central NJ when “Uncle Ted” held high ecclesial office here. It was an open secret among heterosexual, orthodox RC priests that the archbishop (at the time) frequently took ‘willing’ seminarians and priests that shared his progressive views down to his beach house on the Jersey Shore on private, weekend retreats. Those who ‘complied’ saw their appointments and careers advance. Its an unfortunate fact that the Lavender Mafia (LM) is a notoriously well-known self-protective network of actively sodomite clergy that alternatively promote/advocate/blackmail in order to maintain their power and back in the day, “Uncle Ted” was one of its preeminent power players, along with Cardinal Bernardin.

    McCarrick mercilessly persecuted NJ priests who dared sprinkle a bit of Latin into their OF masses or promoted traditional orthodox Roman Catholicism. Several whom I know had to be incardinated in the Archdiocese of NY under the protective benevolence of Cardinal O’Connor. ‘Uncle Ted’ also had a barely concealed animus towards (now) St. John Paul II that was on full display during the preliminary planning for the security arrangements of St. JP II’s 1995 visit to the United States. My assertions here are not slander, because as a former Federal agent based in NJ from 1986-1995, I was privy to stomach-churning archdiocesan nonsense that was suppressed by his complicit LM fellow-travelers. McCarrick’s minions passive-aggressively made our work planning the safety of the Pope VERY difficult and ultimately, Federal agencies had to bypass the Archdiocese of Newark and discreetly engage Vatican Security directly.

    I know much more about the shenanigans of “Uncle Ted;” however, here in 2018, what’s the point? He will soon have to answer to the Ultimate Judge. The only true Catholic response is to pray for his soul.

  8. Dimitri_Cavalli says:

    The Soviet defector and KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin made handwritten copies and summaries of thousands of documents. A big one is posted online at the Wilson Center Digital Archive. It has an English summary of KGB efforts against the Vatican and religion. Mitrokhin, who wrote report, even provides list of priests who served as KGB agents.

    The original document is posted in Russian in PDF.

    Maybe a year ago, I approached the Catholic Historical Review if they could get the whole document (it’s nearly 50 pages) and translated and published. I was told by the editor that it would be too expensive for CHR to hire a Russian translator(s)–remember Russian uses the (or a?) Cyrillic alphabet–and then publish the whole thing in the journal.

    If anyone reads Russian, see if you recognize any of the names.

  9. Eric says:

    Every bishop that knew and did nothing should resign or be forced to do so. Semi-Chilean Protocol. On the bright side of things, the SSPX is ordaining strong orthodox men today in Virginia, Pray for those young men with so much evil facing the Church!

  10. byzantinesteve says:

    I remember that Cardinal Mccarrick was one of the original authors/signers of the Land O Lakes Statement. He set out to destroy (and succeeded) Catholic higher education in this country and even after you’d think he’s retired and out of the public eye, he’s still wreaking havoc on the Church.

  11. restoration says:

    Hmmm…ordained by Cardinal Spellman in 1958. Who wants to bet that Uncle Ted’s homosexuality goes all the way back to at least the beginning of his priesthood? If he was one of Spellman’s “boys”, we have an even bigger problem. The depth of this crisis was brewing on the eve of the Council. How many McCarricks were spirited through seminary, ordained and methodically promoted? Every appointment, transfer, promotion that McCarrick ever made must be scrutinized. I agree that he could have been recruited by one of Bella Dodd’s operatives.

    We need an independent czar to clean all the sodomites out…starting with every homosexual cardinal and bishop. Maybe a patriarch from the Eastern Church could help us or the Orthodox. We could heal the Schism at the same time. We clearly have zero credibility or ability to address an issue that goes back decades.

    I’m also thinking of someone like Kenesaw Mountain Landis who cleaned up baseball after the Black Sox Scandal could be a good choice.

  12. Heterodoxy is a huge red flag. If a priest publicly dissents from the moral law, why should we be surprised to find him failing to conform his life to that same law that he repudiates? And why should we be surprised to find him preying on others in order to feed the appetites that the law does not restrain?

  13. Paul of St Paul says:

    The Rod Dreher story and another of his I found in his twitter feed, + his reader’s comments have opened mine eyes. A man like that could become a prince of the church. And Dreher points out his archidiocese had very high numbers of vocations. What sort of priests have they become?

  14. HvonBlumenthal says:

    Would it not help if clergy were required to wear proper cassocks at all times? An SSPX priest of my acquaintance tells me it is a remarkably effective aid to staying on the straight path.

  15. robtbrown says:

    At KU I enrolled in a course in Ancient Philosophy taught by a man who was neither Christian nor Jew. When he was speaking about the Sophists, he said they were the sociologists of their day.

    Card McCarrick is a sociologist.

  16. robtbrown says:

    Why is McCarrick still a Cardinal?

  17. Malta says:

    I really admire Rod Dreher–but of course he converted to Orthodoxy after investigating the priest abuse scandal, and some details I won’t repeat here. But I have a friend who just got out of seminary, who is very far from being gay, and who is as appalled as Dreher at the scandals over a decade ago. Things might be getting better. As a father of five kids, and now a grandfather, it has been hard for me to weather the storm in the Church. But I made a vow to remain in it. At least fools like this McCarrick are being exposed.

  18. Southern Catholic says:

    ” I told him that on the Catholic Right, I found a strong unwillingness to contemplate the possibility that mandatory celibacy played a role in creating a culture of secrecy and abuse.”

    Is that right? Is that really what is creating a abuse?

  19. In 2010, I wrote the following:

    “I predict that in the coming decade, bishops will no longer limit themselves to turning on their priests, but will begin to turn on one another.”

    Closer to the present, the following is from the Dreher article:

    “[T]here was a deep reticence to think critically about the role of authority within the Catholic hierarchy, and how that played into a culture of abuse and cover-up. We conservative Catholics had made such a big deal about the loss of authority within the Church, and had developed within ourselves a chronic reluctance to confront facts that called the integrity of the system into question.”

    Looking back to 2002, faithful Catholics allowed progressives and enemies of the Faith from within, to take ownership of “the scandals.” They blissfully ignored a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring down at least one group of dissenters dedicated to the issue, ignoring irrefutable evidence that they were (and still are) operating under false pretenses. This problem should have been over by now. But it’s not. Between false accusations against priests and arbitrary background checks of parish volunteers, the bishops are looking for everyone else to blame but themselves.

    Meanwhile, undeterred, a small percentage of priests still hide behind their office as an excuse for discourtesy to the people whom they serve. Lives within a parish are disrupted, reputations are ruined. When a priest says “it’s my parish,” what others hear is “I am the parish.” And so the practice of “parish hopping” is taken for granted, as if the lost children of Israel search endlessly for their spiritual home, some of them never finding it.

    Nothing will be resolved, the crisis will not be over, until those of us who profess the Faith, those among us who preach the Faith, are who they truly purport to be. Until that day, to paraphrase the canon …

    “Status quo suprema lex.”

  20. The Church is infested with filth. (I seem to recall that was Pope Benedict XVI’s word.) But where are we to go? The world is even filthier.

    [It is horrible, but it is, on the other hand, a proof that this truly is the Church that Christ founded.]

  21. robtbrown says:

    Paul of St Paul,

    Dreher does not point out the high number of vocations. It was someone who commented.

    The heavy lifting was done in DC by Cardinal Hickey. Anyone ordained there by McCarrick had begun under the Hickey reign.

  22. NBW says:

    McCarrick should be removed. McCormick will have to stand before God Almighty for his actions, and for the souls he has damaged and scandalized. God sees all and will judge accordingly. As bad as things are, we need to stand with Holy Mother Church and defend her with all our might.

  23. Amerikaner says:

    He should be required to live out the rest of his days, in prayer and penance, in a monastery, particularly one with the extraordinary form.

  24. robtbrown says:

    The Astronomer says,

    It’s an unfortunate fact that the Lavender Mafia (LM) is a notoriously well-known self-protective network of actively sodomite clergy that alternatively promote/advocate/blackmail in order to maintain their power and back in the day, “Uncle Ted” was one of its preeminent power players, along with Cardinal Bernardin.

    When I arrived in Rome in 1989, I met an American priest, a very good man who had been named to straighten out the finances of a well known organization. Besides me, there were also two priests in the conversation. Mostly, he spoke and once mentioned that Cardinal Bernardin’s pajama parties (his phrase) were well known.

    Some years later I was eating dinner with a friend, a Korean priest, a very good man, and fellow Convittore. Bernardin (unfortunately) was still alive. When his name came up, I mentioned what a friend had told me: “He can steal your socks without taking off your shoes.”
    The Korean priest replied, “From what I’ve heard, he can also steal your underwear.”

  25. PostCatholic says:

    “Uncle Ted” was an open secret for years. Richard Sipe has written extensively on his efforts to make the Apostolic Delegation and the Holy See under BXVI aware of very credible allegations of McCarrick’s sexual harassment and abuse of seminarians. The only surprising thing to me about this decision is why, after so much time in which the sleaze was known, it was finally dealt with.

  26. Hidden One says:

    If there’s another sexually misbehaving prelate who “everyone” knows about… I hope “someone” speaks up now.

  27. Joy65 says:

    We Ordained 7 men to the Priesthood in our Diocese this morning. This gives me such GREAT hope and joy for Our Church. ALL Priests, Religious Brothers & Sisters, Deacons, Seminarians, our Pope, Bishops, Cardinals and all discerning a vocation to the Priesthood or Religious life need our UN-ceasing prayers. satan isn’t giving up until the end. I pray for Our One Holy Catholic Church and all who serve in Her and belong to Her.

  28. benedetta says:

    His whole hearted offering of communion to pro abort pols in DC was suspicious, to say the least, particularly in that his defense of the practice was incoherent and lacking in reason or even charity for those receiving or those opposed to it.

  29. Kathleen10 says:

    robtbrown asks the proper question, why is McCarrick still a Cardinal?
    McCarrick is still a Cardinal because it’s [“it’s”…??] a big boys club of disordered men and they don’t punish and they don’t eliminate what they agree with.
    Whatever this church is, it cannot be the Roman Catholic Church, no matter how much we may wish it to be. [So the Church has only pure members?]

  30. benedetta says:

    Also, I agree with the above poster that an Eastern Catholic patriarch at the helm would be extremely renewing for the universal Church.

  31. Peter Stuart says:

    What to say. Well, 40 years ago my SSA was busting to get out and the Bishops said I should sing silly songs and vote Democrat (while they were doing all that and God knows what else). Couldn’t take it and I left.
    7 years ago I came back thinking the silliness might have gone away like they told me it had. No fool like an old fool!
    Off to the SSPX for me. They seem a little more focused on saving sinners than on… singing silly songs and voting Democrat (and God knows what else). Nighty-night!

  32. Dismas says:

    As a survivor of the Rembert Weakland episcopate, I must say that Cardinal McCarrick must have had some serious connections, dirt, and influence at many levels in numerous places.

    Every predator, whether a feral cat or a sexual deviant, will intuitively search for any territory that allows plentiful and easy prey with minimal risk. The more intelligent predators are able to manipulate their environments to magnify their successes, such as wolves forming a pack. The same is true for the sexual predator. The sodomist’s (willing or unwilling) former catamites are also groomed for career advancement; whether they were broken or compromised matters not, for they have become his co-conspirators.

    How deep or wide this network goes is known to only a few, and none that walk this earth in the flesh today. May my suspicions be wrong, yet there are more than a few actions done at high levels that do not add up without them.

    Also of note, one of the more bizarre and mysterious aspects of sexual abuse is that it has a contagion effect; the abused often become abusers themselves. For all we know, Cardinal McCarrick called himself “Uncle Ted” because he was molested by an uncle of his own, or perhaps by a priest or bishop who wanted to be called “Uncle _”. How many iterations, branches, and sister networks like this exist in the tangle? I shudder, because I know that there was more to the 1968 rebellion against H.V. than mere concern for the collection plate.

  33. maternalView says:

    Everyone around him should be scrutinized as to whether they knew or participated in similar behavior.

    I believe there are more. The Church will not flourish in the US until we root them all out! I don’t care who they are – get them all out!

  34. CandS says:

    I looked over the Russian document from the Wilson Center site. I thought it was going to be a scan of handwritten notes and difficult to read. It is all typed up in a PDF that can be OCRed for character recognition. It is a long document at 50+ pages and would be involved to read the whole thing, requiring a historian’s knowledge to really understand, but from what I saw, I wouldn’t expect there to be any especially interesting tidbits dropped. The list at the end is for the most part codenames, nicknames, etc. of figures involved, including just major figures in the Church or Vatican at the time. You find a list of things such as “The Monk”, “The Dancer”, “Verdi”, “The Athlete”. It’s easy enough to transliterate the cyrillic (you can learn to make out cyrillic characters in about an hour, it’s not a daunting thing; learning Russian is quite another thing though!). I’ll post the transliteration below. Nevertheless, don’t expect this to be a Rosetta Stone for unravelling our current problems.

  35. Dimitri_Cavalli says:

    Thank you, CandS.

    I did not mean to imply that McCarrick, Fr. Richard McBrien, Fr. Hesburgh would be listed, or that Church scandals can be traced back to the USSR. As we know, sexual and financial corruption in the Church is as old as the Church. (Over the centuries, it’s been devout, orthodox Catholics who have often revealed the Church’s scandals. I believe there was one pope who accused his immediate, late predecessor of being a rapist and pedophile.) Still, the document could shed light on the KGB’s fight against the Church, and to what extent, if any, the Commie-priests gained positions of influence.

    Having conducted extensive archival research at different institutions over the decades, I am fond of saying that there are no smoking guns, but small pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle that have to be carefully assembled.

  36. Dimitri_Cavalli says:

    Around 2002, gay activists wanted to embarrass the Church by outing closeted cardinals and bishops.

    This scheme was quickly abandoned after the activists realized while indeed causing embarrassment, it would not cause the diocese to shutdown or get the Church to change her teachings. The pope would likely appoint a more conservative and combative who be more willing to deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians. In fact, there are large numbers of conservative Catholics who think too many bishops are weak, too eager to get along with everyone (except the Latin Mass people and the Alt Right), and too accommodating and would mind seeing them replaced despite bad publicity.

    So the gay activists restrained themselves and realized it would be better to leave closeted bishops in place since they wouldn’t rock too many boats, just call for more government spending, and possibly be blackmailed when the need arised.

  37. robtbrown says:

    Kathleen10 says:

    McCarrick is still a Cardinal because it’s a big boys club of disordered men and they don’t punish and they don’t eliminate what they agree with.

    Not many are disordered, but all do close ranks.

  38. robtbrown says:

    PostCatholic says,

    The only surprising thing to me about this decision is why, after so much time in which the sleaze was known, it was finally dealt with.

    There seems to have been a Vatican strategy to do this without public notice. Someone didn’t buy into the secretive approach and contacted the media

  39. TonyO says:

    Don’t know that anything I have to say is original – so many of the comments above are quite correct. We should pray for McCarrick, his soul is in danger. But we (the Church) should also punish him as Canon Law provides, by removing all of his ecclesiastical offices, and requiring that he submit to life in a strictly observant monastery, like the Cistercians of old. Just because he is in need of mercy doesn’t mean he is not in need of punishment: punishment can be a mercy, as St. Pope John Paul said.

    So true that we should have cleaned house in the Church in 2002, but at the time the secular gays and the Lavender Mafia managed to get the media and the wider culture to agree that “the problem” was strictly that of predators looking for under-age kids, and was not a matter of men going after other males. We should not have accepted that brush-off.

    In any case, we did learn a little from the 2002 scandal, but now we have to find the courage to apply it: we can’t just go after the individual priests who are active homosexuals, we have to go after the bishops, cardinals, and even pope(s) who protect and promote them, or even those who negligently turn a blind eye to the moral corruption. Even if it was a beloved pope. Yes, we need to throw every single one of the bums out. (By “we”, I mean that the proper Church authorities need to do it, but that won’t happen if they are not pressed to do it by the faithful laity in enormous masses. So that’s the other “we” that needs to act.)

    We also need to reform the selection process of bishops and cardinals. There is no “process” that involves humans that cannot be corrupted, but the secrecy that has held sway for so many centuries shows that corruption is easier with secrecy. We need to stop making people wonder “how in the world was a man like that made bishop” because the decision process is completely out of sight. So many of these bishops were bad priests, or priests who had known proclivities toward heterodox beliefs, or were constantly doing odd and unexplainable things. If the laity had been consulted before the rot had set in at the higher levels, the laity could have headed off most of the bad picks well before they got anywhere: bad priests would not have been made pastors of influential parishes, bad pastors would not have been made bishops, etc. There are only about 180 cardinals in the world, there is NO POSSIBLE EXCUSE for a pope making a man like McCarrick a cardinal other than allowing bad process and bad men to use him, and no pope should be letting that go on as if it were just “business as usual”. A pope has to know what kind of man he is elevating to the cardinalate, and has to know that he is sound morally and theologically, and (apparently) the popes can no longer rely on the old boy network to do the work for him, he has to rely on better sources of information than he HAS BEEN relying on, because those sources have failed signally far too many times.

    I am saying, then, that we need a fundamental reform of the method by which clerics advance in the hierarchy. The corruption cannot and will not be ended while the current system remains. I do not propose any sort of election system by the laity. Such a method might have been better than the existing system in the 1960’s, when the faithful, practicing Catholic laity were more sound morally and more theologically correct than the progressives that got hold of the system. But by this point, the laity has been mis-taught for 2 whole generations by progressive, heterodox priests, and they are no longer more theologically correct (broadly speaking). And the Church is not a hierarchy anyway.

    But to go back in history, there was a time when public knowledge of the candidates for a bishopric was part of the process, and public acclaim for the holiness and wisdom of one candidate over another was taken into account. We need the knowledgeable laity to be able to present valid and worthwhile information during the decision-making process, and not have their information cast into the black hole of “yeah, yeah, whatever.”

  40. TonyO says:

    Sorry, meant to say “the Church is not a democracy, anyway”. Got my nouns mixed.

  41. francophile says:

    I lost a very dear priest friend who was treated horribly by McCarrick. He was a good man…and now lost to the Church and to the world because of this bishop. Out of respect for him and his family, I keep his name in my heart. Needless to say, I am torn between contempt for this bishop and wanting to pray for his mercy. Depends on which day as to what I am doing. Two weeks ago I prayed for his descent into Hell. Today I pray for mercy for his soul, because now the truth is out in the open.

  42. Kenneth Wolfe says:

    HvonBlumenthal wrote: “Would it not help if clergy were required to wear proper cassocks at all times? An SSPX priest of my acquaintance tells me it is a remarkably effective aid to staying on the straight path.”

    I love this idea, and hope bishops and superiors have at least pondered the thought. While not a panacea, it would most certainly help when tempted. Sadly, it is natural to wonder what Father (Bishop?) is up to when he leaves the rectory in civilian clothes at night. It is a valid point to ask why all priests don’t wear a Roman collar 100 percent of the time in public.

  43. tho says:

    In all seriousness, we need to root out all who are making a mockery of Holy Mother Church. There are definitely good Bishops, but to get rid of the bad ones, Cardinal McCarrick should be water boarded. If the woman (I forget her name) who was just confirmed as head of the CIA is a catholic maybe she could help.

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