Letter of @BishopMorlino of @MadisonDiocese concerning the present crisis

Many bishops in these USA and in Canada are making statements in wake of L’Affaire McCarrick and the PA Grand Jury Report. Some are better than others.

The Bishop of Madison, Most Rev. Robert C. Morlino (aka The Extraordinary Ordinary) has issued a letter to the faithful entrusted to his care.

Remember that when reading these letters from bishops, even while we around the world are able to read them and even as the bishops know that, these bishops uniformly address themselves to the faithful their own diocese. Because of this, I, personally, pay attention to what these bishops say they are going to do, practically and concretely with and for their flocks.

In Bishop Morlino’s letter to the faithful of Madison, I saw a three things that are especially striking.

First, he calls for “more hatred”.

If you’ll permit me, what the Church needs now is more hatred! As I have said previously, St. Thomas Aquinas said that hatred of wickedness actually belongs to the virtue of charity. As the Book of Proverbs says “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate wickedness (Prov. 8:7).” It is an act of love to hate sin and to call others to turn away from sin.

Then he goes on to underscores what so obviously lies at the core of this crisis, namely, the influence of homosexuality, not just pedophilia, but homosexuality.

There must be no room left, no refuge for sin – either within our own lives, or within the lives of our communities. To be a refuge for sinners (which we should be), the Church must be a place where sinners can turn to be reconciled. In this I speak of all sin. But to be clear, in the specific situations at hand, we are talking about deviant sexual – almost exclusively homosexual – acts by clerics. We’re also talking about homosexual propositions and abuses against seminarians and young priests by powerful priests, bishops, and cardinals. We are talking about acts and actions which are not only in violation of the sacred promises made by some, in short, sacrilege, but also are in violation of the natural moral law for all. To call it anything else would be deceitful and would only ignore the problem further.

There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia – this despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more.

Before anyone freaks out, Bp. Morlino also clear says that homosexual inclinations are not, in themselves, sinful, but rather, as the Church teaches, disordered.  He emphasizes hatred of sin but love for the sinner. “[While hating the sin, we must never hate the sinner, who is called to conversion, penance, and renewed communion with Christ and His Church, through His inexhaustible mercy.”

Watch the libs in the local press ignore that point while they pile on attacks on him … as is their cliché wont.

Lastly, he makes a concrete declaration about reparation, which I’ve been bashing on about for a while.

Finally, I ask you all to join me and the entire clergy of the Diocese of Madison in making public and private acts of reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for all the sins of sexual depravity committed by members of the clergy and episcopacy. I will be offering a public Mass of reparation on Friday, September 14, the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, at Holy Name Heights and I ask all pastors to do the same in their own parishes. In addition, I ask that all priests, clergy, religious, and diocesan employees join me in observing the upcoming Autumn Ember Days (Sep. 19, 21, and 22) as days of fasting and abstinence in reparation for the sins and outrages committed by members of the clergy and episcopacy and I invite all the faithful to do the same. Some sins, like some demons, can only be driven out by prayer and fasting.

His reference to the Ember Days is great.  The Ember days, still in the traditional liturgical calendar, are days of penance, a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, four times a year, in general at the time of the change of the seasons.  Old mnemonic rhymes place them close to the Feast of St. Lucy in December, during Lent, after Pentecost, and near the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.  For example, “Lenty, Penty, Crucy, Lucy”, or else “Fasting days and Emberings be / Lent, Whitsun, Holyrood, and Lucie.

What most people today don’t know is that in the booklet that convey’s the official liturgical calendar for the newer, post-Conciliar Novus Ordo, and in the GIRM, the Ember Days are mentioned for local churches.  I wrote about Novus Ordo Ember Days HERE.

REPARATION.

REPARATION.

REPARATION.

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in "How To..." - Practical Notes, Clerical Sexual Abuse, Cri de Coeur, Si vis pacem para bellum!, Sin That Cries To Heaven, The Coming Storm, The future and our choices and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

35 Comments

  1. Elizabeth D says:

    I’m on board and I commit to the fasting commitments of my particular vocation of which I think the bishop is aware that intensify on that day, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, until Easter Sunday. I will fast and pray with greater intensity on the Ember Days but I hope someone will explain Ember Days better since I am a poor person who grew up in an age when no one heard of such things. I intend to specially make reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary every day. Above all I will with the aid of the Holy Spirit trust that Jesus, through His suffering, dying and rising can make foul and unholy people pure and holy and wants very much to have mercy on us for love of His Bride the indefectably Holy Church.

  2. monstrance says:

    But….
    Will these excellent bishops from San Fran, Madison, Portland be muzzled and shoved in a corner during the upcoming bishop’s conference ?
    Will these bold statements be made in front of a national audience ?
    Then again, does anybody pay attention to these goofy conferences ?
    If this meeting does not make news, then we’ll know it was business as usual – nothing to see here – move along.

    Side note:
    My bishop did respond to my handwritten letter.
    He stated that he supports the “strong” statements put forth by the USCCB.

    This is what we’re up against.

  3. maternalView says:

    I read the whole letter. Excellent.

    This is what the faithful want to hear.

    The other bishops would do well to follow his example.

  4. Chris Garton-Zavesky says:

    Thanks be to God!

    May I recommend the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart?

  5. TreeOfForgiveness says:

    “They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.” -Edmund Burke

    Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

  6. Fallibilissimo says:

    I don’t know about you guys but after the roller-coaster of emotions of the past few weeks, I feel like a fresh yet ancient wind is blowing on our shores. Yes, I have no doubt things will get worse with many more revelations and persecution from the world etc. But, the People of God are talking differently, more freely and more openly. I think this can be a salutary moment for everyone.
    Maybe God will not let the immense and tortuous sufferance of these poor young victims go “wasted”…surely, He will not. He had to hear their cry, if He didn’t He wouldn’t be God.

    God’s will be done on us all.

  7. joekstl says:

    I would suggest that you seek out the letter of Bishop Frank Caggiano of Albany ( a son of Brooklyn, NY- my home Diocese). It is excellent and closes with s prayer to the great Mother of God to accompany us as we move forward to purify our Church.

  8. bartlep says:

    I’m still waiting to see a letter written by my bishop, Bp. McElroy. Since he totally ignored a letter written to him by A.W. Snipe on the state of priestly celibacy, he may be feeling some heat with the exposure of the McCarrick scandal.
    http://www.awrsipe.com/Correspondence/McElroy-2016-07-28-rev.pdf

    Bp. McElroy is a big supporter of the homosexual agenda and promotes “inclusivity”. He is also pro-Muslim, anti-border control, anti-Trump — in other words, very political, but shepherding his flock ? — not so much.

  9. HvonBlumenthal says:

    In addition to the three points you mention, Father, isn’t this passage also quite striking? Isn’t he in effect rejecting (by implication if not by name) the pastoral Second Vatican Council?

    “For too long we have diminished the reality of sin – we have refused to call a sin a sin – and we have excused sin in the name of a mistaken notion of mercy. In our efforts to be open to the world we have become all too willing to abandon the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In order to avoid causing offense we offer to ourselves and to others niceties and human consolation.

    Why do we do this? Is it out of an earnest desire to display a misguided sense of being “pastoral?” Have we covered over the truth out of fear? Are we afraid of being disliked by people in this world? Or are we afraid of being called hypocrites because we are not striving tirelessly for holiness in our own lives?”

  10. Imrahil says:

    Dear HvonBlumenthal,

    no, he isn’t. This passage simply has nothing to do with Vatican II at all.

  11. Traductora says:

    Wow! Definitely the best statement I’ve read yet, and he gets at the heart of the matter. The homosexual subculture is very dominant in the Church and is responsible for most of these horrifying happenings. But it’s a symptom, not a cause.

    The cause is the wholesale abandonment of Catholic morality, doctrine and traditional practice. And while these things were developing before VII, the foolish John XXIII, a leftist desiring as always to be trendy, gave them the full admittance to the Church by “opening the windows” with VII. As long as they were the positions of “dissidents” (who should never have been tolerated) and not the model of governance, they could be held in check. But once the bizarre and convoluted doctrinal formulations of VII were accepted in all their fuzziness and later “developed,” and once structural changes were made such as diluting the authority of individual bishops with the national bishops’ conferences, and once all of the familiar Catholic landmarks were wiped out by changing the Mass, eliminating the feasts and fasts and devotions, and stripping the churches of their Tabernacles and even statues of saints, there was no barrier against evil.

    Time and again, when a moral, ethical or even political system collapses, homosexuality takes over because this enables men to dominate other men in every way; among the Romans and the Greeks (and today among Muslims) unpunished homosexual rape was always the way for a man to express ultimate power over other, lower status men (such as young men and boys, poor men, captives in war, etc.). In a mostly male group, once the moral controls are gone and there is no philosophical or spiritual barrier that prevents it, homosexuality runs wild, and that’s what we’re seeing in the Church now.

  12. Semper Gumby says:

    The Extraordinary Ordinary wrote:

    “If you’ll permit me, what the Church needs now is more hatred! As I have said previously, St. Thomas Aquinas said that hatred of wickedness actually belongs to the virtue of charity. As the Book of Proverbs says “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate wickedness (Prov. 8:7).” It is an act of love to hate sin and to call others to turn away from sin.”

    The excellent Fulton Sheen wrote (in an excerpt from “Old Errors and New Labels” found at the romancatholicman site):

    “America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance-it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos.

    “Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory.

    “Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”

  13. Sandy says:

    If anyone (bishops) had taken seriously the John Jay report from the exposure of the previous crisis, homosexuality would have been addressed. The report made that rather clear, as I recall. At least it was clear to the truly loyal Catholic writers in the articles that I read.

    God bless this holy and corageous bishop, Father Z! I agree with the comment above about Bp. McElroy. Waiting for him to clean up the diocese. May the Lord strengthen all our holy priests in every diocese. I’m sure Our Mother of Sorrows holds all of you close in your pain. Thank you, Father Z for your “hard” post, and we all pray for you.

  14. Sandy says:

    Oops, courageous. Typo, and I did proof read.

  15. aviva meriam says:

    I read the entire letter from His Eminence… Twice. It was exactly what I needed to see.

    Forwarded it to friends who are lapsed Catholics. They’ve forwarded it to others. I hope it impacted them in a positive way.

    I am on board for penance, fasting and acts of reparation. And I will pray for him.

    I hope his faith, courage and determination inspire other within the hierarchy.

  16. bibi1003 says:

    Now THAT’S a shepherd leading his flock!!!

    Parts of my bishop’s statement hit the mark, but he never addressed what caused the abuse. He only called for revisions to existing policies, as if this was all due to administrative errors.

    Here’s a link to his statement if you care to read it. You have to download it. Hope it works.

    https://cdlex.org/documents/2018/8/Statement%20on%20Abuse-1.pdf

  17. bibi1003 says:

    Now THAT’S a shepherd leading his flock!!!

    Our bishop hit the mark in some areas of his statement, but he never addressed what caused the abuse. He only called for revisions to existing policies, as if the abuse was due to an administrative error.

    Here’s a link to his statement if you care to read it. You have to download it. Hope it works.

    https://cdlex.org/documents/2018/8/Statement%20on%20Abuse-1.pdf

  18. frjim4321 says:

    “Then he goes on to underscores what so obviously lies at the core of this crisis, namely, the influence of homosexuality, not just pedophilia, but homosexuality.”

    This grave error, [Here we go!]specifically described as such by first director of the USCCB’s Office of Child and Youth Protection, on the findings of the John Jay Report, will lead to greater pathology, and not only on the part of gay bishops, priests and seminarians who will be pushed into even further recesses of the ecclesiastical closet, but the entire Church. [B as in B. S as in S. Moreover, you are making the case for the thing to which you object.]

    There is no evidence whatsoever those who are engaged in age-appropriate sexual interactions, whether straight or gay, are any more or less inclined to perpetrating abuse than anyone else. [Is that so.]

    And while a oft heard shibboleth is that “this isn’t about celibacy” is often heard or read, we’re not going to be able to adequately process this matter until we have an honest discussion about the imposition of celibacy on the diocesan priesthood and once and for all dismiss the magical thinking that there is some kind of intrinsic relationship between the discipline and the sacrament.

    Scapegoating gay bishops, priests and seminarian is not going to help, it’s going to hurt. More than it already has. And, terrorizing priests who are in age-appropriate sexual relationships as if this is in anyway causative of abuse, is simple projection. [B AS IN B. S AS IN S.]

    We need to send bishops to prayer and penance. We need to send some of them to jail.

    Cardinal Weurl “had never heard any of this about Cardinal McCarrick.” Really??? Really???

    Let’s stop terrorizing priests and let’s call attention to those who were so intent on policing others that they didn’t both to police themselves.

  19. frjim4321 says:

    = “bother”

  20. FrJim said:

    And, terrorizing priests who are in age-appropriate sexual relationships as if this is in anyway causative of abuse, is simple projection.

    No priest of the Latin Rite — unless he is one of those brought into the Church under special provision and is married — has any business in any “age-appropriate sexual relationship” at all. What is this “terrorizing” you speak of?

  21. Kathleen10 says:

    frjim, you make it really difficult to find common ground. I want to like you and love you, you are a priest, but what you have written here makes me wonder if we are members of the same body.
    You are defending the indefensible. Your concern is that priests will be terrorized. If you can read what has happened to the boys and young men in these situations, and your reflex concern is about priests being terrorized, then something is dreadfully wrong, catastrophically wrong, and I honestly do not believe it is me in this circumstance.
    Speaking as a member of the laity, I don’t want the homosexual priests in the closet any longer, I want them out. Out as in gone, out as in, can’t harm boys and young men while acting in persona Christe. I can’t stop them from harming boys, if I could, I would, but tolerate demonic behavior in the church, on my dime and with my permission, NO. I, and my husband, will not be sponsors of this any longer, not one more time, no matter what any enablers say from this point on. Furthermore, we believe that the Church may be a bit more interested in our feelings on the matter when the spigot of federal resettlement funds dries up, and will be working to that end. Every state needs a grand jury investigation. More things to do.
    You are saying the problem is not homosexual priests, when every bit of evidence is, that is EXACTLY the problem. The John Jay College study is not in question, and never has been, it showed 81% of the victims prior were post-pubescent males, voila, a homosexual predator priest problem, and LifeSite broke down the findings on the PA grand jury, and voila again, 79% of the victims are MALE, with 60% in the teenage years. Please explain for us how this is not a homosexual predator priest problem. I will wait for you to explain that.
    These denials and excuses are absurd, offensive, and shocking, when we are realizing what all these homosexual priests and bishops have been doing. Why is all your compassion with these men? And why have you totally accepted a sexually active priesthood of any kind. To you it seems a given. How can that be? Was that changed and the information not shared? A discussion of celibacy can be had within the church, but homosexual priests and bishops within the church has already had it’s day, and proven to be a categorical disaster in terms of the safety of boys and young men, capability of good spiritual fatherhood, and fidelity to what Catholicism actually teaches. One man’s “gift” is another man’s plague.
    And blast it frjim, I intended this as a sincere thank you to Bishop Morlino, who is going to find himself ostracized within and without thanks to his principled and faithful defense, and I wanted to thank him sincerely. All he gets now is one sentence.

  22. TonyO says:

    Scapegoating gay bishops, priests and seminarian is not going to help, it’s going to hurt. More than it already has. And, terrorizing priests who are in age-appropriate sexual relationships as if this is in anyway causative of abuse, is simple projection. [B AS IN B. S AS IN S.]

    Fr. Z is right to call BS on this bull**** from Fr. Jim.

    Fr. Jim, you need to rediscover Catholicism. I mean this seriously, you need to spend days and weeks if not months and years going back over the 2000 year history of the Latin celibate priesthood to rediscover its deep spiritual meaning. Re-reading the things said by the Apostles and the early Fathers in favor of celibacy, studying and praying for enlightenment by the Church’s great documents that speak about the beauty of priestly celibacy.

    When you say things like “and once and for all dismiss the magical thinking that there is some kind of intrinsic relationship between the discipline and the sacrament” you show that you have not pondered deeply enough the priest’s call to be an “Alter Christus”. Your role is not merely to act in place of Christ in the sacraments (especially, that of the Eucharist), but to BE CHRIST in a qualified sense. To be Christ. To put on Christ in an even more intimate way than all of the faithful are called to do. That’s the special, supernatural (not “magical”) meaning of the sacrament of Orders.

    And to be Christ is to die to this world in order to live in the next. Christ chose to be celibate even though in 1st century Israel, being unmarried meant a serious loss of social / religious status, because he had a higher purpose. The higher purpose required setting aside the lower-order good that is marriage. In order for St. Paul to use the image of “Christ and the Church” to be an image to emulate for married couples, it was necessary that Christ be free of an ordinary marriage to a woman; in order for that image to be relayed down the centuries as visible to us married folk now, we need the continuation of that image before us in the priesthood that is called to be like Christ in that relationship.

    And, terrorizing priests who are in age-appropriate sexual relationships as if this is in anyway causative of abuse, is simple projection.

    What a horrible, horrible thing to say! Priests of the Latin Church in general (excluding the Ordinariate) cannot be in any such thing as “age-appropriate sexual relationships” as if they were or could be approved by God. You need to wash your keyboard off with soap for typing such a sentence. For shame!

    Priests who are in sexual relationships with adult women are abusing those women, for that’s what fornication is. And of course priests who are in sexual relationships with adult men are abusing those men. (Of course, they may be abused themselves, but that doesn’t make any of it better.) Either way, the sexual relationships are ALWAYS damaging to their spiritual and affective well-being, are ALWAYS disordered and harmful, are ALWAYS scandalous and degrading.

    If a priest believes that he was mistaken in becoming a priest and sincerely thinks he would be better off married, he can petition Rome to be laicized and then can lawfully be released from the clerical state and get married. There is no other course by which a priest can come to be in a sexual relationship with a woman and not have it be evil, detrimental, degenerate, disgusting, and scandalous. I know a priest who went through just that process, and he continues to live in communion with the Church because he went through the right steps to get there.

    And lastly, priests who have sexual relationships with women are not the cause of this present scandal! Get over it already. Priests who have a “mistress” are indeed scandalous – but on a one-by-one basis. They do not create a NETWORK of priests to help each other out in their ongoing sins. They do not create cadres of priests who are compromised by each other so that they remain under pressure to ignore the evils of their confreres. They do not undermine whole seminaries. They do not create a contagion of fear among young seminarians. It is homosexuality and its many allied perversities that are the problem, and that’s where the blame lies.

  23. Elizabeth D says:

    There’s no age appropriate sexual activity outside of valid marriage. Priests who consider sexually active celibate priests to be acceptable offend Christ and His Mother and are a danger to the Church and the People of God. Would you join the body of Christ to the body of a consenting, adult prostitute? Would you FrJim4321? Is that ever age appropriate? Repent in true sorrow, go to confession to a holy priest, an upright and chaste priest, and conform your mind to the mind of the Church, your heart to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary, conform your life to that of the saints.

    There is no diocese that needs priests so badly as to need evil ones. Sexually incontinent priests, resign from active ministry!!! Priests who fall repeatedly in offenses against the 6th commandment, resign!!! Priests who defend priest sexual activity, you too repent profoundly or resign!!! Fear God as you should, and love Him as you should! There is a hell, and there is a heaven, and the way is narrow that leads to life and there are few who find it!

  24. frjim4321 says:

    I wasn’t commenting on propriety of such relationships, rather commenting that those will be targeted as if they pertain in any way to the failure of the policers to police themselves.

  25. Supertradmum says:

    Archbishop Scicluna of Malta, who forced the Chilean bishops to resign, as the expert on sexual abuse cases, has been appointed by the Pope to go to the United States and investigate the USCCB and the cardinals in the States. The Pope has now the CDF involved in a serious investigation. News is breaking on this.

  26. Pingback: Letters of Bishops compared. Quite a contrast. | Fr. Z's BlogFr. Z's Blog

  27. Muzhik says:

    If I might offer one simple suggestion?

    There is a movement afoot to somehow compel the USCCB at their next meeting to fulfill Our Mother’s request in the (only local acceptance) apparition of Our Lady of America, which is to have her statue installed in solemn procession in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. I think we DEFINITELY need that now, but given the number of bishops in the US who seem to lack faith in the supernatural, that action will definitely be a miracle of biblical proportions. (Which is why I’m starting to pray to G_D to make it happen.)

    I think a better suggestion, one that might be easier to pass because it has that “feel-good” aura around it, is to require the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel to be said immediately following the end of Mass and before the exit hymn is sung. This prayer, said in every diocese after every Mass, will provide the protection needed to prevent a “flanking maneuver by the enemy” and give us the time we need to marshall our forces and counterattack.

    This suggestion MAY arouse fierce and angry debate, mostly because I think so many bishops have formed “comfortable relationships” with the Evil One, that they will automatically be repelled by this powerful prayer. (By “comfortable relationships”, I mean something on the order of, “You don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you.”)

    Even if we get it so that the prayer isn’t required, but permitted, might be enough to get the laity behind this prayer, regardless of what their local bishop says.

    I would be interested in learning who to contact to see about bringing this up for discussion at the conference. Thanks.

  28. FrJim:

    For the second time, I ask, what is this “terrorizing” you speak of? If you mean blowing up the homes of sinful priests, why, I agree with you, this must not happen.Is this what you meant? Rest easy; I predict it will not, in fact happen. Why are you worried about that?

  29. frjim4321 says:

    Fr Martin Fox:

    As I’ve already seen in a homily of Fr. Kauth, rather than dealing with the real problem (which is the failure of the bishops to police each other) the blame is going to be placed on the priests and they will all be placed under a microscope.

  30. TonyO says:

    in age-appropriate sexual relationships as if this is in anyway causative of abuse, is simple projection.

    Fr. Jim, if a 30-year old priest has sex with a 30-year old person, it is “causative of abuse”. Because the act IS abuse. When you have sex outside of marriage, you abuse the person with whom you have sex. Your “age appropriate” is just smoke and mirrors, it’s not the AGE that’s the primary locus of the problem. It is the failure to put sexuality in its proper “orientation,” i.e. the chaste attitude of putting God before sexual pleasure. Taking it out of that chaste context IS ALWAYS abusive. Heterosexual priests who engage in sex abuse their own sexual faculties, and abuse the woman by having sex with her – but their evil acts do not harbor the perverseness of gay sex. Gay priests who engage in sex abuse their own faculties in a more grave and perverse way. The latter also – in this day and age – engage in multiple other evils, including the intentional corruption of other priests, and indeed attempting to corrupt the whole priesthood in their perversions. Gay priests attempt to spread their evil practices to other priests, which is largely NOT a corruption heterosexual priests do even when they are sexually active.

    rather commenting that those will be targeted as if they pertain in any way to the failure of the policers to police themselves.

    Gay priests HAVE CLEARLY BEEN IMPLICATED in corrupting bishops and other members of the hierarchy who should have been policing the priests, and who have been compromised. The spread of the filth of the degenerate behaviors is indeed part and parcel with the failure of the policers to police themselves and the others.

    You are a priest. If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

  31. Late for heaven says:

    Fr Jim I don’t want to push any homosexual clerics into any closet, ecclesiastical or otherwise. I just want them to leave the Church. A man who has that compulsion is not fit for holy orders. An Honest Man would recognize this himself and resign. I will do my part to push them out if need be. I have cooperated with evil enough in my life. My marriage and my children suffered from my endorsement of the secularization of the Church. And I suffer for my sins as well of course. I am more than willing to don sackcloth and ashes. But the apostasy and heresy must end, now. May God have mercy on us all.

  32. Elizabeth D says:

    Priests or bishops who fear (are “terrorized by”) being found out more than they fear God are rancid.

  33. WVC says:

    I usually try not to be baited by obvious trolls, but to Fr. Jim, the first real problem is homosexual priests abusing parishioners. The second real problem is the bishops failure to end this travesty and, instead, cover for it. To deny this is to completely reject reality. So I’m not going to be surprised if you respond by denying it.

  34. Fr Jim:

    I asked twice for some explanation of the “terrorizing” you warn about. None given. Noted.

  35. Pingback: Bp. Morlino @MadisonDiocese on #TheViganòTestimony - "the criteria for credible allegations are more than fulfilled" | Fr. Z's BlogFr. Z's Blog

Comments are closed.