December 27, 2002 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) –

The scandal of widespread homosexuality and sexual abuse within the Catholic priesthood is growing. It reaches to the highest levels of leadership.

Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law resigned this month because of his involvement in a longstanding cover-up of immoral priests.

Auxiliary Bishop Reginald Cawcutt of South Africa resigned in July 2002 after his participation in a pornographic web site became public knowledge.

Bishop Kendrick Williams resigned in June 2002 after lawsuits were filed against him alleging sexual abuse.

Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, resigned in May 2002 when it was publicized that he had paid $450,000 to keep a homosexual relationship quiet.

Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Wexford, Ireland, resigned in April 2002 after being accused of protecting an immoral priest.

Bishop Daniel Ryan of Springfield, Illinois, resigned in October 1999 because of homosexual liaisons with priests and male teenage prostitutes.

Bishop Joseph Keith Symons of Palm Beach, Florida, resigned in 1998 after admitting that he had sexually abused five teenage boys.

Bishop Anthony O’Connell, who took Symons’ place, resigned in 2001 after admitting to a homosexual experience many years earlier. Four men claimed that O’Connell had sexually abused them in their youth.

Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, California, resigned in the 1990s after admitting to a homosexual affair with a priest from Costa Rica.

Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, New Mexico, resigned in the 1990s because of illicit affairs with at least five women. He was also charged by many with covering up the sexual abuse of priests under his care.

These are merely a few of the higher ranking Catholic priests who have been involved with immorality themselves or have covered up the immorality of those under their charge.

The conservative Catholic organization ROMAN CATHOLIC FAITHFUL documented this wretched business in the Fall/Winter 2002 issue of their magazine AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM. This issue is titled “The Bishops’ Fall from Grace.”

They observe: “… the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church--about 90%--involve homosexual priests preying on teenage boys. The major media the U.S. culture at large want to deny or spin the homosexual factor out of the scandal. They and militant homosexuals have invested decades--and billions of dollars in media and cultural propaganda--to portray homosexuality as just another lifestyle, a sexual practice on the same moral level as heterosexuality.” They document roughly 100 cases that have arisen since 1999, and this is just the tip of the iceberg, because there are “…somewhere between 2,500 and 6,500 priests and an estimated 100,000 victims.” In fact, “the total numbers will likely never be known because about 75% of sexual abuse victims never come forward.”

The Roman Catholic Faithful also document the cover-up of the homosexual problem by high-ranking Catholic leaders. “At the June meeting in Dallas, Bishop Gregory was asked if he and the bishops would address the homosexual problem. He said: ‘That is not our focus. Dallas is about the protection of children.’ Bishop Joseph Galante, who had shielded Fr. Garner and his participation in a homosexual web site, said at the meeting: ‘Sexual orientation is not a factor in abuse.’ … As the major media have spun the scandal away from homosexuality, the bishops seem to have done the same thing.”

Several books have documented this scandal in the last few years.

LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: CATHOLIC PRIESTS AND THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN by Jason Berry first appeared in 1992 and was republished in 2000. The foreword is by Catholic priest Andrew Greeley. The author documented 400 priests who were accused of sexual abuse and $400 million paid out by various Catholic dioceses in legal and medical expenses. He observed that “sexual secrecy is honeycombed through the rungs of ecclesiastical governance.”

A GOSPEL OF SHAME: CHILDREN, SEXUAL ABUSE, AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH by Frank Bruni and Elinor Brukett first appeared in 1993 and was republished in 2002. The authors observed that “the conspiracy of silence and misplaced trust” allowed abusive priests “to hurt so many children was … endemic to a Catholic culture” (p. 6). In the 2002 “Afterword,” they report: “By one of the most recent counts, more than 1,400 priest molesters have come to the attention of the courts or lawyers. Long before Bernard Cardinal Law became a household name, two things seemed abundantly clear: the crisis was far from over and Father Doyle’s 1985 prediction that it would cost the Church $1 billion by 1996--dismissed by many Catholic leaders at the time as a gross overstatement--may actually have been modest” (p. 259).

PEDOPHILES AND PRIESTS: ANATOMY OF A CONTEMPORARY CRISIS by Philip Jenkins appeared in 1996. It was largely an attempt to whitewash the problem from a Catholic perspective. Jenkins attempts to blame a spirit of anti-Catholicism for much of the problem!

BETRAYAL: THE CRISIS IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH by the Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe appeared in 2002. The Introduction notes: “Betrayal is the story of a large number of Catholic priests who abused both the trust given them and the children in their care. It is the story of the bishops and cardinals who hired, promoted, protected, and thanked those priests, despite overwhelming evidence of their abusive behavior” (p. 3).

The most recent of these books, AMCHURCH COMES OUT by Paul Likoudis, was published in May of this year. The author is a longstanding editor of Catholic publications, including the Catholic Commentator of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the Catholic Register of Canada, and The Wanderer, the oldest independent Catholic newspaper in the United States. He pulls no punches. Note the following quotes:

“What also happened between 1957 and 1966, I believe, was that homosexuals, pedophiles and other perverse persons in the priesthood rose to prominence in the Church, certainly in the United States and Canada, and began carefully plotting and promoting a sexual liberation agenda that would take Catholics by surprise… The evidence is now irrefutable that an influential and very powerful coterie within the Catholic Church … is successfully advancing a sexual liberation agenda that will not end until every social stigma attached to any sexual activity, no matter how bizarre, has been erased.” (pp. xv, xxiv)

“[Between 1989 and 1993] it became obvious to this reporter that a clique of homosexual pedophiles and pederasts had control of the episcopal appointment process, and that clerical pedophilia was endemic, deep-rooted and multi-generational.” (p. 1)

“There was an extensive system set up by the NCCB [National Conference of Catholic Bishops] to cover-up the fact that Catholic priests were abusing children. … The bishops had this network of ‘safe houses’--so-called treatment centers--where they could place these perpetrators until an assignment was available.” (quoting attorney Sylvia Demarest, p. 27)

“If the problem of a homosexual network in the Church is viewed in this larger perspective, one can understand more fully the remarkable role of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in creating an “American Church’ that has become a trusted ally of all those various social, political and cultural forces promoting sexual libertinism. … No one disputes his influence: as creator of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and United States Catholic Conference; as a bishop-makere who, working with former Archbishop Jean Jadot, gave the American hierarchy its pronounced pro-gay orientation … His closest friend from his South Carolina days, Monsignor Frederick Hopwood, had been accused of abusing hundreds of boys dating back to the early 1950s, when he and Bernardin shared a residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Charleston--where some of the alleged abuse took place. … In the two years leading up to his death--even as he orchestrated brutal assaults against clerical sexual abuse victims of clerical sexual abuse and their parents in Chicago--one after another of Bernardin’s closest clerical friends from his native Diocese of Charleston made the newspapers--all for charges of pedophilia: Fr. Eugene Condon, Fr. Justin Goodwin, Fr. James Robert Owens-Howard, Fr. Paul F.X. Seitz, in addition to continuing allegations against Hopwood. … As his friends back in Charleston continued buggering little boys, [Cardinal Joseph] Bernardin used his influence, starting in 1968, as General Secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference, to select bishops (many of whom are still ordinaries) who would, to put it charitably, condone and promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle and tolerate the sexual abuse of children by priests.” (pp. 137, 138, 139, 140)

“Under Bernardin’s influence, the national episcopal bureaucracy became honeycombed with homosexuals and radical feminists.” (p. 145)

“In January 2000, the Kansas City Star published the results of a four-year investigation into homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood, a book-size series of a dozen articles over three days announcing the fact that the Catholic priesthood in the United States has suffered a disproportionately large number of deaths from AIDS. … The investigative report by Judy Thomas, under the direction of Star editor and vice-president Mark Zieman, who identified himself as a Catholic, showed that Catholic seminaries in the 1960s joined in the sexual liberation frenzy of the decade; that many seminarians and priests embraced an active homosexual lifestyle in and out of the seminary; that many of these homosexual seminarians went on to ordination and were groomed for and entrusted to high positions by their superiors; and in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the onset of AIDS served as a means to bring these facts to public attention.” (p. 183)

“One wishes for a reprieve, but the homosexual propaganda machine shows no sign of slowing down…” (p. 213)

“In late March, 2001, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Vatican had ‘banned’ a recent book by Australian Christian Brother Dr. Barry Coldrey, an historian, that attempts to give a broad overview of clerical sexual abuse scandals in the English-speaking world. That book, Religious Life Without Integrity: The Sexual Abuse Crisis Within the Catholic Church, offers detailed and abundant documentation on the ‘sexual underworlds’ that have grown up in dioceses and religious orders in Australia, England, Oreland, Canada and the United States and the complicity on the part of religious superiors, including bishops, who have nurtured them and enabled them to flourish.” (p. 215)

Well does the Bible describe Rome as an immoral harlot in Revelation 17!