Secular Sabotage

by William A. Donohue

  By 2007, it was evident that VOTF was spent. The same organization that lectured the Catholic Church on financial accountability was running a deficit of $100,000 with no end in sight. To top it off, only 1 to 5 percent of its members even bothered to provide input on proposals when asked to do so in 2007. 76 The old-timers gave it their best shot and failed. Indeed, in VOTF’s “Strategic Plan for 2008–2010,” they confessed to “general apathy and discontent among leadership, which continues to hinder our fundraising ability.” 77 Yes, it isn’t easy to raise funds when the leaders are in a state of depression.

  Once the Church made necessary reforms, VOTF became increasingly irrelevant. So it was left with two choices: either pack up and go home or go off the deep end. It did the latter. In 2008, it sponsored a dissident Australian bishop, Geoffrey Robinson, in a tour of the United States. Robinson was censured by his own bishops for calling into question “Catholic teaching on, among other things, the nature of tradition, the inspiration of the holy scripture, the infallibility of the councils and the pope, the authority of the creed, the nature of the ministerial priesthood and central elements of the church’s moral teaching.” 78 For good measure, he also questioned the teachings on adultery and homosexuality. His views were so far off the charts that Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony told him he wasn’t welcome to speak in his archdiocese. 79 But he was right at home with VOTF—their beliefs were one and the same. In the fall of 2008, VOTF formally broke from its mission of fostering “structural change”: it issued a statement calling for an end to priestly celibacy. 80

  Church dissidents, with the same profile, showed up in Philadelphia in July 2008 to attend a meeting convened by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and NETWORK. They were there to support Obama for president, though they billed the event as nonpartisan. According to one of the attendees, “Almost everyone was over 60; out of 700 only about 30 were any younger.” Another observer opined, “In looking over the registration list, I would estimate that 25% or more of the attendees were sisters. If many of the older women there were religious, you would not have known it by their dress.” 81 So fitting.

  In 2009, it looked like the old timers at VOTF had won: two Connecticut lawmakers angry at the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage introduced legislation authorizing the state to reorganize the Catholic Church. Under the bill, all priests and bishops would lose their administrative and fiscal power: Parishioners would be granted that right. And we know which kind of parishioners they would be—they most certainly would not be Catholic League types. We know this because the legislation was right out of the VOTF playbook. Moreover, Tom Gallagher, who proposed the legislation, was also a contributor (not surprisingly) to the National Catholic Reporter.

  As it turned out, all of them were caught off-guard. Connecticut bishops, led by Bridgeport Bishop William Lori, the Connecticut Catholic Conference, the Catholic League (which called for the legislators to be expelled), and thousands of Catholics across the state, erupted in protest. The fascist power grab died quickly and the bill was withdrawn. 82 But that didn’t stop 5,000 Catholics from showing up the next day to voice their outrage. 83 The results were conclusive: the Catholic left went down in defeat.

  After their loss, one of VOTF’s champions, Paul Lakeland, said the bill was justified because the bishops, while stripped of their right to run their dioceses, still had control over doctrinal matters. His defense of the failed coup underscores the thesis of this book: he is chairman of the Catholic studies department at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution. 84

  Rebels Cry Uncle

  It is one of the great myths of our day that the Catholic Church is an oppressive institution that brooks no dissent. Quite frankly, there are few institutions that tolerate more of it. For several decades, rebellious nuns and priests have carried on in a way that would have gotten them fired had they worked for any major newspaper in the nation. Without doubt, there is more tolerance for contrarian views in the Catholic Church than exists on the typical college campus, and this is doubly true of the elite institutions. But reality doesn’t count for Catholic dissidents—they are convinced that the Church is the great oppressor. One of the more recent examples they cite is the fate of Father Roger Haight, a Jesuit whom the Vatican has prohibited from teaching theology, at least temporarily.

  Father Haight is not just a priest. He has spent years teaching seminarians and instructing the faithful through his writings. In the name of teaching what the Catholic Church believes, he taught what he believes, and what he believes is not what the Catholic Church believes. At issue is not something like priestly celibacy, a discipline the Church requires but is not part of Church dogma. Haight’s problem with the Catholic Church is much deeper: he rejects, among other teachings, the divinity of Jesus, the Holy Trinity, the saving value of Jesus’ death, and the Resurrection. 85

  Now, if a geography teacher were to teach that the earth is flat, or a math teacher were to insist that two plus two equals five, he would be terminated. Moreover, no one would rise to his defense, not even the teachers’ unions, and cries of oppression would be laughed at universally. But Father Haight was not bounced out of the priesthood. All he was told to do was stop teaching theology. If he ever comes around to accepting the Church’s teachings, he can return to the classroom. This sanction, which is typical of the way the Vatican treats theologians who entertain heretical views, was not imposed until a five-year investigation was completed. In the meantime, Haight, who had been suspended by the Jesuit-run Weston School of Theology, continued to teach theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, home to radical Protestants.

  Not surprisingly, his ideological friends at the Catholic Theological Society of America, an organization with a long track record of dissent, raced to his side. Ten members of the board of directors, all professors, issued a statement expressing their “profound distress” at the Vatican’s decision. 86 They issued no statement of regret regarding Haight’s insubordination or his corrupting effect on the faithful.

  In 2009, the Vatican asked Father Haight not to teach Christology at any university. And how was this slap on the wrist accepted by the Jesuits? As a slap in the face. Father Giuseppe Bellucci, spokesman for the Jesuits, quickly pronounced Haight to be “an excellent Jesuit” and said that the decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not “definitive”; he added that a committee of Jesuits would “study” Haight’s positions. 87 What exactly there was to study—did Haight really mean that Jesus wasn’t divine when he said He wasn’t?—he did not say.

  When not complaining about oppression, the dissidents complain that they are the true representatives of the laity and should therefore be treated as their spokesmen. They point to public opinion polls that appear to show that a large segment of the Catholic laity would have no problem with either married priests or women priests and are prepared to accept some changes in Church teachings on human sexuality. Call to Action, for example, which is a small organization, says it represents 70 percent of American Catholics. 88 The evidence shows, however, that such projections are not simply wrong, they are delusional.

  On Ash Wednesday, 1990, Call to Action ran a New York Times ad calling for reform in the Catholic Church. It was signed by more than 4,500 dissidents, and a pledge was made to garner 100,000. A half-year later, James Carroll, the angry ex-priest, predicted, “I’ll be surprised if they don’t make it.” 89 Over a year later, and after more than a year and a half of collecting signatures, the final tally was in: 21,000. At that time, Call to Action had 9,000 members, and considering that they started with 4,500 signatures and could only get an additional 16,500, it suggests that they were living in a cocoon. 90 They still are.

  Sister Maureen Fiedler thinks most Catholics agree with her. In April 1996, she launched a petition drive aimed at getting one million Catholics to sign a statement calling for radical changes in the Church’s teachings on women and sexuality. The campaign was dubbed We Are
Church and was richly funded by the establishment: the Ford Foundation laundered millions to Sister Maureen by way of Kissling’s Catholics for Choice. “We were blessed with substantial grants,” she said. “We had organizing kits, we had grass-roots [efforts]; we did full-page ads [in newspapers]; we had massive mailings; we did public collections in front of cathedrals, like St. Patrick’s in New York,” she added. She forgot to mention that she even bribed kids by giving them a dollar for every signature they snatched. 91

  After a year was up, the results were so disappointing that Sister Maureen was generous enough to give her group an extension of six months. The final tally: 37,000. Which means she was off by over 96 percent. She actually did worse than this given that one-third of the signatures came from non-Catholics. The good sister addressed her utter failure at a Call to Action meeting in Detroit in 1997, blowing up at lay Catholics: she agreed with one conference coordinator who said that progressives “overestimated Catholic theological maturity, and underestimated the pietism of the Catholic laity.” 92 In other words, the rank-and-file simpletons just didn’t get it. That’s what the Marxists have always said about the proletariat’s refusal to rebel—they haven’t matured enough to understand their own oppression.

  The 1960s

  Sociologically, it made sense that Vatican II would occur in the 1960s. If the reins were too tight in the 1950s, it made sense that Vatican II would be the corrective. But when institutions change, they need to be careful that an easy stride doesn’t turn into a raging gallop. This is what happened to the Catholic Church.

  Pope John XXIII is famous for saying that the Catholic Church needed “to open its windows to the modern world.” But as George Weigel has observed, the Church “opened its windows just as the modern, western world was barreling into a dark tunnel full of poisonous fumes.” Indeed, “By the time the Church got its windows open in the mid-1960s, there were all sorts of toxins in the air.” 93 Those toxins included radical individualism and a celebration of narcissism. Critical distinctions between authoritativeness and authoritarianism were lost, undermining the rights and responsibilities of parents, teachers, coaches, policemen, priests, ministers, rabbis, and others. Some in the Catholic Church, like the Sisters of Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in Los Angeles, welcomed these assaults on hierarchy and discipline and openly participated in a revolt against them.

  In 1965, humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers sought to apply his ideas of self-actualization—each person is the arbiter of his own truth, and only by acting on our feelings can we truly be human—to any institution that sought to challenge authority. Interest was expressed by the IHM and soon Rogers was at work, assisted by William Coulson, in a two-year experiment designed to free them from their “artificially induced psychological shackles.” It didn’t take long before every aspect of their life was put under a microscope and found wanting. By participating in encounter groups, the sisters liberated themselves from all the norms they had committed themselves to and proclaimed themselves emancipated. In actual fact, they collapsed: the result of this grand “opening up” was the destruction of the IHM community. Some of the nuns began to experiment sexually—many became lesbians—and most left the order. The only good news is that Bill Coulson saw the truth, dropped his Rogerian connections, and went on to become a distinguished Catholic psychologist. But not before more damage was done. 94

  When priests from St. Anthony’s Franciscan Seminary in Santa Barbara approached Rogers to employ his madness, they also paid a big price: a quarter century after being liberated—seminarians were told they could visit friars’ rooms whenever they wanted to—the priestly order was making headlines around the world for its notorious pedophilia ring.

  Liberals, of course, would have us believe that those nuns, seminarians, and priests who became sexually reckless did so because of the Church’s “repressive” ideas about sexuality. Thus do they buy into the very Rogerian view that gave rise to the problem in the first place. In fact, it was the wholesale rejection of restraint, and the total celebration of hedonism, that created the problem of predatory priests. Had the priests acted on their vows, instead of their id, there would have been no victims.

  Weigel is correct to note that “the Sixties” did not cause the sexual abuse scandal. Nor, it should be added, did the media, as some in Rome have said. The blame rightly belongs to the Catholic Church. As Weigel observes, “a culture of dissent took root in the Catholic Church in the United States,” one where “fidelity” was flouted. 95 It is beyond question that no priest could behave badly if he practiced fidelity to his vows and to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Weigel and Father Richard John Neuhaus made this point many times. It cannot be made too often.

  Father Greeley and other dissidents like to blame Humanae Vitae for creating all the divisiveness in the Church. Weigel agrees, but not for the usual reasons. The 1968 encyclical that reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to artificial contraception may have been ignored by the laity, but they did not engage in open rebellion. That was left to nuns and priests. In the aftermath of the rebellion, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of the Archdiocese of Washington disciplined 19 Washington priests for what any other organization would call insubordination. But the rebels appealed to Rome and they won: the Vatican ordered O’Boyle to lift his sanctions. What drove the decision was fear of schism. The pope believed that it was better to risk dissent than to see the Church break apart, and it was his hope that when things calmed down, the Church could get back to normalcy. Thus does Weigel dub this the “Truce of 1968.” 96

  In reality, the truce was a ruse: radical dissent, publicly expressed, continues to this day. Moreover, the Church has been in de facto schism ever since. Pope Paul VI knew there was something rotten going on when he said in 1972 that “the smoke of Satan” had entered the Catholic Church. It was in this climate that the sexual abuse scandal flourished.

  Sexual Abuse Scandal

  Once the dissenters saw they could push their agenda with impunity, they sought to conquer the parishes, schools, seminaries, and the various offices of the bishops. For example, under the auspices of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Reverend Anthony Kosnick’s book Human Sexuality was introduced to seminarians. The 1977 book is riddled with moral relativism, taking a radically nonjudgmental position on contraception, cohabitation, homosexuality, swinging, adultery, and even bestiality. The Catholic Church teaches that there is an objective moral nature to sexual acts, something Kosnick, in terms that can only be described as postmodern, rejects. 97

  Although the book was quickly criticized by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States bishops’ conference and was censured by the Vatican in 1979, the most influential association of theologians stood by it. More important, legions of seminarians used it as an assigned text. There is simply no way any priest could swallow Kosnick’s moonshine and practice fidelity. But it wasn’t just Kosnick’s sick book that was used in the seminaries.

  In 1990, I appeared on the Phil Donahue Show debating the propriety of some human sexuality classes on college campuses, especially those courses that assigned the text Our Sexuality by Robert Crooks and Karla Bauer. The authors positively reject the idea that there is any such thing as “deviant sex.” Whether the subject is sex with the dead (necrophilia), incest, bestiality, or a fetish like smelling someone’s dirty underwear, all of this can be understood as merely “atypical sex.” Little did I know that this book was required reading for some seminarians at the time. 98

  These books, and instructional material like them, do not impel otherwise psychologically healthy seminarians to engage in sexually deviant behavior. But they do provide a rationale—a green light, so to speak—to those who are already disturbed, or inclined that way. That’s where the real damage is done.

  One priest who embodied everything that people like Kosnick, Crooks, and Bauer taught was Reverend Paul Shanley, the infamous pervert from the Boston Archdiocese accused of having sex with everyone ranging from
those who just got off their tricycle to those who are ready for a nursing home. There was one proviso—they had to be male.

  As theologian Father Matthew L. Lamb has noted, in the same year that the bishops’ conference criticized Kosnick’s book, Father Shanley was maintaining that “homosexuality is a gift of God and should be celebrated.” Moreover, Shanley gave a speech in October 1977 saying there was no sexual activity that caused psychic damage, “not even incest or bestiality.” 99 It is indisputable that Shanley had been advocating pedophilia, homosexuality, incest, and bestiality for decades. We know this because the information comes straight from the files kept on him by the Archdiocese of Boston. After this was known, and after Shanley publicly advocated sex between men and boys (he was at the formative meeting of the North American Man/Boy Love Association in 1978), he was promoted to pastor. 100

  The person who got Shanley going was Humberto Cardinal Medeiros. In 1970, three years after accusations of sexual abuse by Shanley were reported to the archdiocese, Cardinal Medeiros appointed him as his “representative for sexual minorities.” To be sure, Shanley was not selected at random for this bizarre position. He was selected because he could be trusted to do the job. And he performed with distinction: he lectured around the country on the merits of man-boy sex, incest, and bestiality. When the bishop of Dallas, Thomas Tschoepe, heard Shanley promote pedophilia, he roared laughing, and he did so in front of third- and fourth-year seminarians. We know this from the testimony of Father Joseph Wilson, a courageous priest from Queens, New York. 101

  Thanks to Peggy Moer of the Wanderer, we know that Shanley believed there were 34 sexual minorities. No doubt those who exercised their sexual preference by fornicating with corpses were among those whom he ministered to in an official capacity. While this was happening, Shanley served as a chaplain with Dignity, a homosexual group that claims to be Catholic notwithstanding the fact that its members totally reject every Church teaching on sexuality. He was also selected by the United States Catholic Conference (which was the civil arm of the bishops) to serve on the Youth Adult Ministry Board. His role was to educate young people about the plight of sexual minorities (all 34 of them).