The Once and Future Catholic Church

Below is an article written by Father Gordon, which is worth reading.  You can find the article here.
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The Book of Daniel and the Gospel of Mark warn of a great tribulation to come. Its early signs are already upon us and require invoking the Patron Saint of Justice.

A strange case has been simmering in the courts of the European Union for several years, and it came to an even stranger close at the end of October. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld a 2011 Austrian court verdict against a seminar presenter, a woman, for “disparaging religious doctrines.” In a 2009 seminar sponsored by the conservative Freedom Party in Austria, the woman recounted an event in the life of Muhammad ibn Abd Allah whose 7th Century proclamations of the Qur’an gave birth to Islam. The event is well documented.

In 620 AD, at the age of 56, soon after the death of his first wife, Muhammad married a young girl named A’isha. At the time of their marriage, A’isha was six years old. Muhammad described her as “very attractive and of a lively mind.” Many of the revelations resulting in the Quran occurred while he was in her company.

One day, when she was left behind during one of Muhammad’s expeditions, she returned to the group accompanied by a young man. This set off a monstrous scandal that threw the girl’s marital fidelity into doubt. Muhammad then dictated what he described as a divine revelation that assured him of her innocence. This story is recounted in the Qur’an (24:11-20).

In 2009, in an Austrian seminar entitled “Basic Information about Islam,” the seminar presenter described the story of the marriage of Muhammad and A’isha’concluding, “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old?… What do we call it if not pedophilia?” In 2011, the Austrian court convicted the woman, imposing a fine for statements that constitute “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam.”

The woman appealed the verdict to the European Court of Human Rights. Last month, the verdict was unanimously upheld by an ECHR panel of seven judges including judges from Ireland, Germany, and France. The ECHR judges reasoned that the marriage between Muhammad and six-year-old Aisha lasted until Muhammad’s death when Aisha was 18-years-old. Thus, according to the court, “the marriage need not be motivated by pedophilia.”

The ECHR further reasoned that the convicted woman’s observations about the marriage could “stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace” and “could only be understood as having been aimed at demonstrating that Muhammad was not worthy of worship.” The ECHR arrived at this conclusion after having “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.”

I could go into a long protracted analysis of a double standard in what constitutes “stirring up prejudice and threatening religious peace” – and how political correctness influences it – but I think you may already get the point. If you contrast the above story with the treatment the Catholic Church has been receiving in the news media and power centers of Western Culture, the duplicity is not at all subtle.

Sometimes you have to stand back a little from scandal in the Catholic Church to see a more panoramic view. The scandals feel less personal then, but also seem more ominous. A view from a little distance will leave you with a sense that there have been, and still are, some nefarious agendas behind the scenes of the Catholic abuse story.

The truth is that the world in which we live is retreating from all the institutions that once gave us meaning and purpose, and, most important of all, identity. “Losing my religion” is not just a 1991 pop culture hit by R.E.M. It is a cultural calamity.

THE STATE OF THE UNION

Without doubt, trust in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has been strained in recent years. There is no denying it, and some of that distrust is justified by inconvenient truths that too many have tried to keep hidden. But look around you. Where DO you place your trust? Our politics are at the brink of civil war. Our news media once respected as the “Fourth Estate,” has hit rock bottom in public trust. Among polls of Americans, Congress is the second lowest source of trust among all institutions and the news media lower even than that.

Fatherhood has retreated into the forests. Families are falling apart. Gender has become confused, and a product of the will instead of the heart of one’s identity. In the Western world, the psyches of the young have become fragile. Universities pamper screaming mobs of students who block points of view that challenge them. Conservatives make them feel “unsafe.”

Colleges hire grief counselors to help 20-something year-old men and women cope with a C-level grade, or the trauma of being exposed to ideals, or of seeing a mouse in their dorm room. The resilience of young people – though still with some courageous exceptions – is under siege.

Politically, we are at each others’ throats in a game of one-upmanship and gotcha. It seemed to reach its most hurtful and horrifying peak in the public spectacle to which we were subjected in the Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, guilty for being accused. That was the point at which I realized that we have reached a new low, and cannot descend much further without dissolving our union in hate.

In October this year, a middle-aged man in Florida mailed pipe bombs to a long list of political figures with whom he disagrees. Then a middle-aged man in Pittsburgh, a Holocaust denier on social media, killed eleven worshippers in a Synagogue after posting a rant about Jews and President Trump. Much of the news media played down the fact that the man despised Trump. Politics, that once honorable favorite pastime of America, has become dangerous.

OUR ONCE AND FUTURE FAITH

The same is true or is fast becoming true, in our Church. Canadian Catholic blogger, Michael Brandon wrote in response to a post on These Stone Walls awhile back: “The Catholic Church has become the safest place in the world for children, and the most dangerous place in the world for Catholic priests.” I wrote of the origin for that conclusion in a controversial post that was shared 25,000 times on social media: “Five Years of Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.”

The news media would have us all believing that the now forty-year-old sexual abuse scandal “could bring down the Catholic Church.” This is nonsense. The Church will survive this, but there is a far more pernicious threat that the news media makes it a point not to cover. I found a scary analysis of it in “The Catholic Crisis,” a fine article in Commentary (May 2018), by Sohrab Ahmari who also has a panoramic view of why Catholicism stands at a precipice and, surprise, the sexual abuse story is but a symptom of it, not the cause.

Sohrab Ahmari is a London editor for The Wall Street Journal and a senior writer at Commentary, a journal of thought and opinion established by the American Jewish Committee. He is completing a memoir on his journey to Catholicism, and, as such, a journey that forms his compelling panoramic view of the Church and its fate in the modern world. His article, “The Catholic Crisis” is a review of a new book by The New York Times’ columnist, Ross Douthat, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.

Both Ahmari and Douthat note that “the principle duty of a Catholic” is not to the pope, but to “the truth the papacy exists to preach, to preserve, and to defend.” Mr. Ahmari wrote:

“There is a reason to worry that lately a spirit of relativism has entered the Roman Church that threatens to undermine its unity and catholicity. That should concern Catholics and non-Catholics because the Church is the living bedrock of the West and one of the last bastions of the principal that moral truth is moral truth yesterday, today, a thousand years from now.”

In Pope Francis, both writers see a papacy that “thrives in ambiguity.” Their evidence is found among a list of perplexing notions including recent comments by Pope Francis calling into question the existence of hell. Defenders of the Pope excused the incident as a misreading of the Pope’s remarks by leftist, atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari. However, as Ahmari points out, this particular faux pas was the fifth interview Pope Francis has granted to this journalist.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis has remained unresponsive to a request for dialogue and clarification on some controversial points in Amoris laetitia. American Cardinal Raymond Burke and other conservative cardinals posed a series of “Dubia” asking whether the prohibition on authorizing communion for those divorced and remarried in a civil, but not sacramental, union still stands. The pope, according to Ahmari, “first ignored, and then ridiculed them.”

Mr. Ahmari also reports on Ross Douthat’s “fascinating speculation” on the future of Catholicism, and it is one in which conservatives should find cause for hope. As I have written in previous posts, the Church and faith will survive this current age of doubt. In the meantime,
fidelity is our only effective response to it. But Ross Douthat offers a more sobering source of hope summarized by Ahmari:

“The liberals simply don’t have the numbers… theological liberalism is in demographic decline, and liberal orders struggle to attract vocations. Church coffers may be full, but the pews are empty. The leading lights of theological liberalism are octogenarians, and there are no successors in the wings.”

“Conservatives and traditionalists, meanwhile, have the numbers, the intellects, the energy. Orders that prize tradition and orthodoxy are thriving worldwide. In population terms, Africa is a beacon of hope for conservatives, a continent where weekly Mass attendance averages 70 percent (compared with just 20 percent in Europe) and where the Church wins nine million new believers each year.”

Quite by accident in the last few weeks, I came across a much more local summation of the state of the Church in North America, and it seems bleak. At least, it did for me until I got to the last few stunning paragraphs.

In a climate in which I thought the faithful had abandoned the notion of the Church as a mirror of justice, a faithful Catholic, a lawyer no less, concluded his stunning take on the state of the Church by profiling what the witch hunt has meant for one wrongly imprisoned priest. Don’t miss “Priests, Good and Bad” by Frank Friday published at American Thinker (October 27, 2018).

THE PATRON SAINT OF JUSTICE

Some extraordinary things can be found in Ordinary Time. It is by no human design that readings assigned long ago for the Sunday liturgy arose just weeks ago at a time of tribulation for the Catholic Church. The readings for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time were anything but ordinary. Their timing seems a divinely inspired gift.

But before I proceed down this path through the labyrinthine ways of Sacred Scripture, I want to share with you a message from a very good priest and a friend, Father Stuart MacDonald. Writing from Ontario, Father Stuart is a canon lawyer and author of the TSW guest post, “Last Rights: Canon Law in a Mirror of Justice Cracked.”

Readers may recall from my posts in recent months that a new GTL tablet allows me to receive messages from those who establish a messaging account at GTL’s mainframe, (www.ConnectNetwork.com). At the time of his guest post, Father Stuart established a messaging connection and, along with a few other readers, has been helping to keep me up to date on matters affecting the Church at this critical time.

His messages have included entire missives from and about Archbishop Carlo Viganò and his challenge to Pope Francis centered on the controversy over former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. This is a time of great tribulation for faithful Catholics, and especially so for priests who feel their loyalties torn and their allegiance under clouds of doubt. I am not shielded behind These Stone Walls from the doubt and pain experienced by so many priests right now.

A few weeks ago, Father Stuart sent a series of messages to me containing Archbishop Viganò’s published response to Cardinal Ouellet. Archbishop Viganò has challenged Pope Francis for his handling of the Cardinal McCarrick affair and other matters. I wrote about this in a series of posts I will link at the end of this one.

Just days before sitting down to type this post, wondering what on earth I could write about without taking a side on the vortex of information and misinformation, Father Stuart sent me this message:

“I have been so shaken by all this that a few weeks ago, I informed my small congregation that henceforth all weekday masses would be ad orientem because the time has come to focus on Christ and not the cult of the priest and his performance. I pray the canon in Latin sotto voce now and we pray the Prayer to St. Michael at the end of every mass. Call me foolish if you want, but it is the only way I am going to survive.”

The world might call him foolish, but I could only call him faithful. And like me, he perhaps had no idea when he wrote that message that the Mass readings for the following Sunday, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, provided a solid basis in Scripture for what he has undertaken. The Book of Daniel (12:1-3) calls upon Michael, the Great Prince, and Guardian of your people,” while the Gospel of Mark (13:24-32) warns of a time of great tribulation. For many, that time has come. I can only add to Father Stuart’s resolve the words of Saint Peter, Bishop of Rome:

“Stay sober and alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, knowing that the same suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world.” (1 Peter 5:8-9)

Understanding Vatican II and Ecclesial Movements

Although the article below is a long one, it is well worth the read. The following article can be found here.
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Newman key to understanding Vatican II and ecclesial movements, expert says

As the world’s leading expert on Cardinal John Henry Newman’s life and thought, Anglican convert and Oxford theology professor Father Ian Ker offers a unique perspective on the relevance of his ideas in today’s world.

In a special interview ahead of Newman's Oct. 13 canonization by Pope Francis, Angelus News spoke to Ker about Newman’s ideas on salvation, how to effectively reach the hearts of the nonreligious in today’s world, the importance of the Second Vatican Council and the charisms that it gave birth to, and bridging the divide between Catholics of goodwill in today’s Church.

In a time marked by division within the Church and a rejection of her values from outside of it, many Catholics seem overwhelmed and even a bit helpless at times. What can Newman say to those people? Is there still hope? Why?

Fr. Ian Ker: Newman always pointed out that corruption was practically a note of the Church. After all, corruption begins right with the apostles, with Judas Iscariot, and will always be there because of original sin and because of lack of faith.

Newman would certainly be appalled by the recent scandals in the Church, especially by the corruption of the clergy.

On the other hand, Newman always maintained that we should “stand still and see the salvation of God.” Newman would certainly say: “Don’t despair.”

Newman compared the Church to a boat and said that the Church has always been buffeted by the waves and storms.

And there have been times of even greater trial for the Church. Think of what happened to the Church after the Reformation.

The Reformation was a terrible thing for the Church, not only because the Church lost half of Europe, but also for the negative consequences it had on Catholic doctrine, for it meant that we exaggerated all things that Protestants downplayed or denied, and everything that the Protestants emphasized we promptly downplayed. 

So Catholics, for instance, would not read the Bible at all! The Fathers of the Church would be appalled by that.

Part of the despair and confusion has to do with what is perhaps the greatest challenge for Christianity today: secularization. It seems that the sense of the supernatural has disappeared from human consciousness. This reality was anticipated with incredible prophetic insight by Newman.

Yes. He predicted this with unbelievable prescience in a sermon in 1874. He taught seminarians at this seminary in Birmingham that they would face a world that has never been known before, a darkness much greater than even that faced by the early Church, something that would make even the likes of St. Athanasius or St. Pope Gregory I tremble.

For while the Church in her history had been accustomed to deal with pagans, the Church had never had experience of dealing with a simply irreligious world, a world in which, to put it in Newman’s words, Catholics are likely to be “regarded as … the enemies … of civil liberty and of national progress.”

With this is mind, in 1975 Pope Paul VI called the Church not so much to the evangelization of pagans or non-Christians, but to the re-evangelization of the secularized post-Christians or post-religious, what Pope John Paul II called the “new evangelization.” Can the theology and spirituality of Newman help the Church in this task?

As I said in my last book, “Newman on Vatican II,” it is very interesting that the heroine of his novel “Callista” is indeed a post-pagan.

The novel is set in the third century and Callista is a young Greek woman who has lost faith in the gods of pagan religion. She is thus very much like a Victorian post-Christian; she talks very much like Matthew Arnold does when he writes about the ‘long, withdrawing roar’ of the “Sea of Faith.”

This novel, in the character of Callista, exemplifies Newman’s view of how to approach the secularized. Callista is not converted through conscience, the philosophical argument that Newman is famous for, but she is converted by the fact that she feels this desire for happiness, this need for fulfillment.

Callista has had a first experience of Christianity through a slave of hers, Chione, who has impressed her as possessing something she does not possess. And the priest, Father Caecilius, in reality St. Cyprian the bishop of Carthage, has this conversation with her, in which he illustrates what Newman thought would be the best apologetic for the “new evangelization,” namely, a response to man’s sense of unfulfillment and desire for happiness. 

He tells her that every man is in the same state in which she is, that we all love things that do not last, while having no love for him who alone lasts.

As Newman would put it, “He alone is sufficient for the heart who made it,” a sentence that reminds us of St. Augustine’s famous words, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in you.” And that is what put Callista into the Church; it is not conscience at all. She exemplifies exactly what Augustine says. It is no good saying, “Repent of your sins!” that cuts no ice at all. The emphasis should be on people’s happiness, on the ability that Christ has of fulfilling the desires of the human heart.

Newman seems to suggest in the novel that Callista’s lack of happiness is particularly connected with her being “shut up within herself.” In her inability to escape the prison of the self, doesn’t Callista resemble the men and women of our time?

She certainly does. And this is how Caecilius describes hell to her. Callista tells him she is rather attracted by Christianity because she had this Christian slave and now she has this Christian boyfriend.

When she adds that she has trouble believing in hell, Caecilius replies by asking her whether she is unhappy. When she replies she is, Caecilius tells her that hell would just be a continuation of her present unhappiness, the self-imprisonment that she is trying to escape from.

Human beings can’t begin to be happy if they have no relationships with other people, but if you live without a relationship with God you are missing out on the essential relationship of life. The other relationships only make you human, but this relationship enables you to transcend yourself. To put it again in the words of one of Newman’s sermons, without God “We are pent up within ourselves, and are therefore miserable.” Only God can free us from the prison of the self.

So the first step in approaching today’s secularized post-religious people would be to show them that there is an answer to their unfulfilled hearts. But what comes next?

In the novel, conscience does eventually kick in, but then, of course, she also reads the Gospels, where she encounters the figure of Christ becoming man. That is what impresses her. The Gospel appeals to her imagination; Newman uses that word.

After hearing about Christ she needs to learn how to love him, she needs to encounter him. And she does in two ways. First by reading the Gospels, and second through the Church, that is, through the Christians she personally meets. 

Newman took all kinds of apologetics, the intellectual apologetic of the “Grammar of Assent,” but he also had an imaginative apologetic, one based not in theories but in providing real, concrete images of one’s ideas. The first thing he wrote as an Anglican was “The Church of the Fathers,” and that was to impress the Anglicans and show them how different the early Church was from the Church of England, and he wanted women in particular to write stories for children; again you see an imaginative apologetic.

“In the words of one of Newman’s sermons, without God ‘We are pent up within ourselves, and are therefore miserable.’ Only God can free us from the prison of the self.”CLICK TO TWEET

Newman seems to suggest that art and literature may, in fact, be more effective than preaching and theology in transmitting important truths.

That is exactly right. If you want to teach your students about religion, it is much better to teach them about literature that involves religion than teaching them theology. And Newman used his novels and poetry as a vehicle for his theological ideas.

You see, Newman never wrote a summa. If you want to know about Newman’s theology of purgatory you have to go through his “Dream of Gerontius,” and if you want to find out how Newman thought we should approach the secularized world, you should go through his novel “Callista.” Newman says in a letter that he is sorry Catholics have not taken the novel more seriously. “Callista” is far more important than Newman’s other novel, the semi-autobiographical “Loss and Gain.” By the way, “Callista” is also a good read; it is quite good for a romantic story.

In what ways did Newman think that the Church can make herself ready for the task of the new evangelization?

Newman was the founder and leader of the Oxford Movement, and in many ways the Oxford Movement is a forerunner of the new ecclesial movements like the Neocatechumenal Way, because it consisted of both laypeople and clergy.

The ecclesial movements and communities offer people a model of how it is possible to live one’s life in real communion with one another and be happy, and this is exactly how Christianity spread. 

Of course, there was the good news that Christ rose from the dead, but it was certainly the sight of these Christian communities in the early Church that impressed people so much. And that is what we have to do again; we have to impress the world by showing them people who are truly happy and love one another, people who are happier than the others.

But this has to be put before their mind and imaginations in concrete ways; it will be no good telling them. There is a great degree of loneliness in the world and a great lack of communion, so it is no surprise that a reality like the Neocatechumenal Way appeals to people because it offers them a formation in the Faith, but also because it provides community.

I think that that is the way for the Church to move forward: the ecclesial movements, these charisms [movements and individuals in the Church inspired by the Holy Spirit] which, as Vatican II says, were given not for the good of the people who are part of them, but for the good of the Church.

In this sense people like Kiko Argüello [co-initiator of the Neocatechumenal Way] respond to the crisis of the society we are in, in the same way that the Jesuits responded to the needs of the Church in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. 

What the Church needed at the time were priests who were solidly formed; they needed missionaries and they needed teachers. But we do not need those things in quite the same way now. There are other needs, and I think the ecclesial movements and communities are precisely an answer to these needs.

“We have to impress the world by showing them people who are truly happy and love one another, people who are happier than the others.”CLICK TO TWEET

You said that an important trait of the ecclesial movements is that they are formed of laypeople as well as clergy.

Yes, that is what is novel. The Church has been for a long time, and still is, very clerical. Even liberal bishops and clergy are very clerical, in that they still like to define the Church as clergy and laity, but this is not what the Church is.

The Church is the baptized. This is what the Second Vatican Council makes very clear in the second chapter of “Lumen Gentium” (“Light of the Nations”). And this vision of the Church, the one outlined in the first two chapters of “Lumen Gentium,” is the one that Newman anticipated most clearly. Those two chapters are, in my view, the most direct response to Pope John XXIII’s reason for calling the council.

The first reason was the need for Christian unity. The first chapter was obviously of appeal to the Orthodox — since the council defines the Church in terms that are much closer to the Orthodox definition of the Church than to the Tridentine model of a hierarchical, militant Church — and the second chapter is an answer to Protestants, showing that the Catholic Church believes in the priesthood of the baptized and not just the ministerial priesthood.

Those two chapters are a blueprint for the renewal of the Church, because the new movements and communities exemplify what those two chapters say.

Some priests and bishops believe that what parishes and dioceses already do is sufficient for the faithful and that any new “movements of the Spirit” are at best unnecessary and at worst divisive. What would Newman’s reaction to this approach be?

It is interesting that in the “Church of the Fathers,” Newman, as an Anglican, understood that the Catholic Church had the ability to support and regulate charisms.

As Vatican II says, the hierarchical dimension has to regulate the charismatic dimension of the Church. Newman recognized that the Catholic Church had that ability, and that the Anglican church did not. Newman speaks about people in the Anglican church whose attitude toward the charisms was that of saying, “Why is this necessary? What is wrong with what we already have?”

And that is exactly the attitude you were describing, still the attitude of many conservative bishops and pastors in the Catholic Church. And that is not just a problem of conservatives. Liberal bishops and clergy do not like the movements either, for they like to control everything, and they can’t control movements.

And this once again finds a counterpart in the documents of the council. One of the big debates of the council was whether or not the charisms should receive a special mention in “Lumen Gentium.”

Well, they are mentioned three times, so the more liberal side, so to say, won the day against the more conservative party. The question was: Does really everything that counts for the Church take place in the churches — in other words, through the sacraments, the clergy, and the ministers? The answer is no. The council said that important charisms are given to individuals. We can hardly imagine a Church without St. Benedict, and he is a much more important figure than bishops and popes even.

Would you go as far as to say that the new movements are as important for the renewal of the Church as St. Benedict and the birth of the monastic movement?

I certainly would, and as I said, the charisms are given by the Holy Spirit and not by the bishops.

The future Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said that there were several charismatic surges in the Church: first monasticism, and then the friars, and then the rise of the active orders like the Jesuits, who were no longer confined to the cloister and the office, and then he mentions the missionaries of the 19th century, particularly women congregations, and finally he refers to the new movements as being the fifth charismatic surge.

There is no doubt that in the Church today the Neocatechumenal Way is the biggest thing going, and it is one of the most effective realities, too. It is effective because we need the evangelization, and that is what they are good at. 

Of course, there will always be resistance, precisely as there was resistance to the Jesuits after the Council of Trent. [G.K.] Chesterton, too, writes something similar in one of his books. He notes that new spiritual movements have always been opposed by the local church. That was quite prophetic, don’t you think?

How can Newman help the Church navigate today’s divide between conservatives and progressives?

Newman was a great advocate of the idea of reform in continuity, exactly what Benedict maintained in his famous address to the Roman Curia in 2005.

I do not know whether Benedict had Newman in mind when he wrote those words, but they are remarkably like what Newman says in the “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.”

In that sermon, Benedict distinguishes between two rival interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture, and a hermeneutic of reform and renewal in continuity, according to which the Church “increases in time and develops, yet always remains the same.” This is remarkably similar to what Newman argued in his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” where he states that Christianity “changes … in order to remain the same.”

Particularly helpful is another image used by Newman when he writes, “It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring,” but this “does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full.”

This quotation comes immediately before one of Newman’s most quoted and most misunderstood sentences, the one in which he affirms that “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

This is typically interpreted as supporting a hermeneutic of rupture, but what Newman means here is that the Church needs to change to stay the same. And Newman’s idea that a philosophy or a belief becomes “more equable, and purer, and stronger” as it develops and moves away from its original context, can be applied to the ideas of the Second Vatican Council. The vision of the Church outlined in the second chapter of “Lumen Gentium” — the idea of the Church as not distinguished between laity and clergy, but consisting in the communion of the baptized — whose importance was not fully realized at the beginning, is now realized by the ecclesial movements and communities.

One last thing, Father Ker. Is there one thing you would recommend in Newman’s spirituality that can help us in our personal conversion?

I suppose is what I talk about in my book “Healing the Wound of Humanity”: the personal encounter with Christ. It is what Benedict said: Christianity is not about doctrine; it is about persons. This is what another important charism in the Church, Communion and Liberation, is all about. Christianity is an encounter with persons, it is not a theory. As Pope Pius XII said: There is no such a thing as Christianity, there is only Christ.

The Sins of Youth are Eternal

What caught my attention in the article below is that a 63 year old priest was accused of child sexual abuse when the priest was a minor himself.  Is the Archdiocese of Philadelphia going to be sued over a 45 year old allegation in which the priest did not even enter the seminary at the time? Does the Archdiocese of Philadelphia have the common sense to realize that such allegations are ridiculous? You can find the following article by Father Gordon here. 
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The Archdiocese of Philadelphia expelled a 63-year-old priest in the wake of a 45-year-old claim of sexual contact with a minor when the accused was himself a minor.

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  “Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.” (Psalm 27:12)

When I wrote “St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Salvation” recently, I included a sampling of warnings in Sacred Scripture about the grave sin of false witness. My list included the above quote from Psalm 27, verse 12. I am not certain how many readers caught it, but I inserted a comment to precede the entry: “This is one for which any number of priests could implore their bishops.”

Ryan A. MacDonald presented the most recent example of that verse from Psalm 27 in a guest post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.” Since then, he has been invited to submit an article for the Center for Prosecutorial Integrity (CPI) based in Rockville, Maryland. The Center is a recognized leader in the national effort to restore the presumption of innocence, affirm due process rights, and end wrongful convictions.

Ryan’s submissions will focus on how these Constitutional efforts are reflected in the current climate. The Center for Prosecutorial Integrity has engaged hundreds of thousands of persons – criminal justice officials, legislators, researchers, and members of the public – through conference presentations, mass and social media, legislative advocacy and other means.

A central focus of the agency is described on its official site as a “Cornerstone of Justice” based on this citation from Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

• “Everyone charged with a penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which they have had all the guarantees necessary for their defense.”

The Center has recently published some alarming facts about the perversions of justice that take place when the protection of these rights erodes. This should also raise alarms for how these rights are reflected in the Catholic Church in America. Consider these findings from the CPI:

• Since 1989, there have been over 2,400 documented cases of persons who have been convicted by either trial or plea bargain who were later exonerated of the crimes. Many spent years or decades in wrongful imprisonment.
• An estimated 43 percent of wrongful convictions arise from misconduct by prosecutors, police, investigators, and other officials according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
• More than 90 percent of criminal cases in America are adjudicated during closed-door plea bargain negotiations. These cases have little or no public accountability.
• The most common types of ethical violations committed by prosecutors include:
  • Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence (Brady violation).
  • Use of inadmissible or false evidence and lack of candor to the court.
  • Plea bargain offenses.
  • Inflammatory statements and witness tampering.
  • Mischaracterizing evidence.
  • Vouching for claimants and witnesses.

At my own trial, I had firsthand experience with these same ethical violations but not all were by prosecutors and police:

• My diocese, in the throes of risk aversion, issued a pretrial press release declaring me guilty.
• Prosecutors withheld evidence in the form of tape recordings of interviews with witnesses and failed to disclose the identity of an accusing witness who recanted claiming that he was offered money to join the case.
• The constant threat of a life sentence was hanging over my head if I did not accept a proffered plea bargain for a one-year sentence in prison.
• The police detective investigating (choreographing) the case badgered and threatened witnesses in attempts to change their testimony and is alleged to have bribed at least one witness.
• The prosecutor compared me to Adolf Hitler in the presence of the jury.
• The presiding judge instructed the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in the ‘victim’s’ testimony.”

“TO PROMOTE JUSTICE, NOT HINDER IT”

Just when you thought the moral panic could not possibly descend any deeper into the justice of Salem, Massachusetts circa 1692, a story like this comes along to shake us from complacency. I had no plan to write about this story, and in fact had decided not to. But then a well known priest and canon lawyer sent me the details with a comment “If you don’t write about this, no one will.

This story begins in 2002. Wave upon wave of lawsuits and other demands for cash began to be heaped upon virtually every diocese in the United States promoted by contingency lawyers enticed by the prospect of 40-percent cuts from Church settlements that to date have exceeded $3.5 billion. At that time, Archbishop Charles Chaput, then Archbishop of Denver, penned a 2004 article for First Things magazine entitled “Suing the Church.”

Archbishop Chaput’s article was excellent. Its intent was to present the injustice of so-called “window legislation” – a suspension of civil statutes of limitation in some states that created a one-year window to file lawsuits in expired sex abuse claims. I could not agree more with Archbishop Chaput’s argument and conclusion.

• “Statutes of limitation exist in justice systems to promote justice, not hinder it.”

Meanwhile in Boston, The Boston Globe Spotlight Team treated every mere allegation as demonstrably true. The resultant media wave spread across the land, and accusations and demands for money intensified. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice was asked by the bishops to study causes and contexts of the crisis.

Among the findings was the fact that the newer claims, many of which were decades old, constituted 70-percent of the total number of claims settled by bishops and dioceses. David F. Pierre, Jr. of TheMediaReport.com, in “Special Report – Los Angeles Attorney Declares Rampant Fraud” (Jan. 2, 2011) reported the findings of a Los Angeles F.B.I. investigator, who determined that a full fifty percent of the total claims were entirely false. In “Fleecing the Shepherd,” a 2004 Boston Phoenix article, noted author and Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate cautioned:

• “There is considerable doubt about the veracity of many of the newer claims, many of which were made after it became apparent that the Church was willing to settle sex abuse claims for big bucks.”

At the same time Archbishop Chaput wrote in First Things that “statutes of limitation exist in justice systems to promote justice, not hinder it,” the U.S. Bishops were lobbying the Holy See to dispense them from observing the statutes of limitation in Church law. As a result, Bishops can now remove accused priests from ministry in cases that are decades old and for which guilt could never be established. They replaced “Guilty” with “Credible.” Priests are now guilty for being accused.

For wave after wave, the claims came, were declared by the bishops and their lawyer-handlers to be “credible,” and were settled. Hundreds of priests were expelled from ministry and from the priesthood based on uninvestigated and uncorroborated claims. But few cases have been as unjust and unfair as the one that follows.

THE CAIAPHAS SYNDROME: PRO BONO ECCLESIAE

In the fall of 2018, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia received an allegation that Father Christopher D. Lucas, 63 years of age, had engaged in sexual contact with a minor. It was the first and only such allegation ever raised in the more than 40 years of his priesthood and seminary formation.

At first glance, it seemed a mirror image of the hundreds of claims that have been the ruin of priests and their priesthood across the land. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, over which Archbishop Charles Chaput now presides, declared the allegation to be “credible” and Father Lucas “unsuitable for ministry.”

The press release from the Archdiocese then went on to publish the long list of this priest’s assignments and the years he spent in them. This is a capitulation to lawyers and activists among victim groups and the news media. The practice has a singular unstated goal: to promote and facilitate additional accusations against the same priest by those who want to commit fraud while getting their facts straight. I exposed several examples in “A Weapon of Mass Destruction Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.”

But with just a little closer examination, the story of Father Christopher Lucas became a lot more alarming. The allegation of sexual misconduct with a minor is more than 45 years old. It comes from a time before Father Lucas was ordained, before he was in seminary, before he was even in college. The claim is alleged to have taken place – and never followed by another – when this 63 year-old priest was a teenager in high school.

As is now protocol for every allegation against a priest in the United States, the story was turned over to Philadelphia law enforcement for investigation as soon as it was received. No criminal charges would ever be filed. It is unclear whether the allegations constituted a crime, and, even if so, the statute of limitations for prosecuting it had long ago expired.

We have to be clear on this. As for every U.S. citizen, no crime was committed until a judge or jury pronounces the defendant “guilty,” and, as you know, sometimes not even then.

The persecution of Father Lucas should have ended there, but it didn’t. After law enforcement declined to file any charge, the Archdiocesan Office of Investigations (AOI) launched its own prosecution led by its chairperson, the former First Assistant District Attorney for the City and County of Philadelphia.

This former prosecutor acts as the liaison between the Archbishop and his Archdiocesan Professional Responsibilities Review Board (APRRB). For some, all these acronyms are a result of the bishops’ ongoing abdication of responsibility for their decisions in these matters. As the late Father Richard John Neuhaus pointed out in “Scandal Time,” his 2002-2004 pointed rebuke of the U.S. Bishops, they went from making egregiously poor judgments in their handling of accused priests to exercising no judgment at all.

In the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, according to their website, the Professional Responsibilities Review Board is composed of “12 men and women, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who possess extensive experience in investigation, prosecution, child abuse prevention, victim services, and the treatment of offenders.”

In the case of Father Christopher Lucas, prosecutors who did not get to condemn him using the rule of law had a second chance to do so in the name of the Archbishop. The board reported back to Archbishop Chaput that the claim against Father Lucas renders him “unsuitable for ministry” because it violates “The Standards of Ministerial Behavior and Boundaries established by the Archdiocese.” We are left to sort out for ourselves the bizarre logic through which a 63-year-old priest is retroactively held to the standards of ministerial behavior as a 17-year-old teenager long before he became a priest, or a seminarian, or even thought about it.

In a 2004 First Things op-ed, “In the Aftermath of Scandal,” Father Richard John Neuhaus reported on a remark made to him by a Cardinal Archbishop after the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People was enacted in spite of objections by Cardinal Avery Dulles and a few brave others.

• “The niceties of canon law, due process, and elementary decency have in many cases taken a beating. As one Cardinal Archbishop said after Dallas (2002), it may be necessary for some priests to suffer injustice for the good of the Church.”

Though not named in the op-ed, the remark was made by one of the architects of the Charter, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Added Father Neuhaus, “In the course of history, Caiaphas has not been without his defenders.”