Why we need the Church

I read the story beneath the title with trepidation but, truth be told, with more than a little resignation. A Montreal deacon had been charged with producing child pornography, a pre-Christmas headline told us. The crime is horrendous. But he is a Catholic—was it another gift, seasonal at that, given to the Catholic-bashers, the media, the atheists, and the rest of them to attack us? Yes, it was.

I’ve no idea if sixty-five-year-old William Kokesch is guilty or not, and for this column it hardly matters. He was, however, a communications director for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and had helped coordinate World Youth Day conferences in Toronto, Rome, and Paris. But then, Raymond Lahey was a bishop!

Lahey, by the way, serves as a test case for the abuse crisis. This old devil was caught at an airport with child pornography on his laptop, and it’s now known that he had had several homosexual one-night stands. At his trial he made it clear that he was in a ten-year relationship with another man and intended to continue that partnership when he left prison.

I can believe all sorts of things, but I simply cannot believe that a man can rise through the Church to the episcopacy while an active homosexual and be part of a long-term homosexual relationship while a bishop, and his perversion and sheer contempt for Church teaching and local Catholics not be known by some of those around him.

Which brings us to the quintessence of what this is all about. It is not about priestly celibacy or an all-male clergy. At the risk of sounding crass, abuse rates are as high and often higher in denominations that ordain women and married men, are frequently worse within schools, within sports teams, and everywhere there is a power dynamic between adults and young people.

The Church cannot ordain women because it does not have the authority to contradict Scripture. It could ordain married men, and some Catholic rites do, but this would make no difference. It’s sin that is the problem, not making up a new, non-Biblical theology. It’s also about who was allowed, sometimes encouraged, to enter the priesthood at a particularly bad time in Church history.

Normal men who embrace chastity are not suddenly tempted by teenage boys; yet more than 85% of the victims of Catholic priests were exactly that. Let’s be candid here. This was a gay issue, with the overwhelming majority of the abusers being homosexual and most also involved in affairs with adult men. Of course, most gay men do not act thus, but that does not obscure the fact that this was not actually pedophilia, nor men having flings with grown women, but homosexual men seducing and raping teenage boys.

Most of this is in the past, but enormous pain was caused and damage done, and it still continues. The Church generally acted as best it could, but for decades nobody even in expert medical circles really knew what to do. Yet it also has to be said that sometimes there were cover-ups and even cases of like protecting like. Tragically, while that flame of sin is incredibly rare today, it is not completely extinguished.

When, as part of the response to this grimy catastrophe, the Church explained that future candidates for the priesthood would be asked about their sexuality and that even homosexual desires were likely an obstacle, it was accused of— wait for it—homophobia. So, damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Not surprising though, in that many of the harshest critics of Catholic abuse seemed more concerned with using the phenomenon to attack the Church than in trying to help the actual victims.

It’s not about Catholicism or celibacy or Church teaching but about sexual sin, pride, and the refusal to admit that darkness does exist and is always looking for more corners to fill and possess. It’s why we need the Church, not why we need to destroy it. And how ironic and hypocritical that a culture that so sexualizes children and so cheapens sex pretends to even care about all this in the first place. It cares about condemning goodness, and it does it horribly well.

Carney’s Amoral Majority

After five defections – euphemistically described as ‘crossing the floor’ – and three by-elections, Mark Carney and his Liberals how have their coveted majority. One wonders what bowls of pottage were offered in back-room deals. In the archaic monarchical system that is the Dominion of Canada, this majority allows the newly-minted Prime Minister to rule[…]Continue reading→

A Tale of Two Benedicts

A grace-filled Holy Week to all our readers! As we await and prepare for the Resurrection about to dawn upon us, we might keep in mind two Benedicts: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, requiescat in pace, elected on this day in 2005; and today’s commemoration of the mystic pilgrim, Benedict Joseph Labre, who died on this[…]Continue reading→

Saint Lydwina of Schiedam and Suffering Joyfully

Saint Lydwina of Schiedam (1380 – 1433) was one of the countless and glorious ‘victim souls’ in the history of the Church, those whose lives are filled with suffering, often of an unimaginable intensity, but who suffer joyfully. She was a fifteen-year old Dutch girl, out skating one day, when she fell and broke one[…]Continue reading→

The Glorious Martyrdoms of Martin and Maximus

As we enter into Eastertide, we recall on this 13th of April Pope Saint Martin I (+655), one of the noblest, if most tragic, of the successors of Saint Peter. Born in Umbria, Italy, he was of noble lineage, with great intelligence combined with charity and love of the poor and the Church. While still[…]Continue reading→

Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów

We celebrate Saint Stanislaus today (+ April 11, 1079), in light of this Easter Octave, a bishop and martyr who accepted the episcopacy only at the direct order of Pope Alexander II. He proved a wise and courageous leader of his flock, put to death by his own king, Boleslaus, for rebuking the monarch’s ‘immoral[…]Continue reading→

Saint Gemma Galgani

On this April 11th, in 1903 – the same year that the Italian Guiseppe Sarto was elected Pope later that summer as Pius X – a lovely, young Italian woman died, by the name of Gemma Galgani. She lived a brief life of 24 years, as did a number of other young saints, including Pier[…]Continue reading→

An Ideological and Improper Translation

I noticed something odd with the psalm reading at Mass the other day. Our bishops’ conference here in Canada has decreed that the Mass in English – Novus Ordo – use the ‘NRSV’, the ‘New Revised Standard Version’, an ‘updated’ translation of the original RSV, first published in 1952. This ‘new translation’ has the tendency[…]Continue reading→

Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle: A Teacher for Teachers

Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651 – 1719), a French nobleman, ordained a priest, founded the first order in the Church’s history entirely without priests, and this came about almost by accident. I say ‘almost’, for, of course, there are no accidents with God. Destined for ordination from an early age, Jean-Baptiste never looked back, even[…]Continue reading→

Three Easter Musical Gems: Bach, Palestrina and Byrd

A very blessed and glorious Easter! Christus surrexit vere, alleluia! As we begin this Easter Octave with the great Solemnity of Easter, music to lift the soul would be one of Bach’s Easter cantatas, composed during his time at Leipzig in the early 1700’s, for the six Sundays of this festive season, leading up to[…]Continue reading→

Good Friday and Suffering

Evil and pain is always a mystery, that whole mysterium iniquitatis, of which Saint Paul writes (2 Thess 2:7). In 1984, Pope Saint John Paul II penned an Apostolic Letter on the nature and purpose of human suffering, Salvifici Doloris (curiously, now looking back, the same year he made his first apostolic journey to Canada).[…]Continue reading→