The Catholic Church’s Homosexual Sex Abuse Crisis: Is Clericalism its Final Cause?

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I was impressed by the insightful and inspiring speeches I heard Tuesday at the prayer and protest meeting Church Militant organized across from the site where the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is holding its conference in Baltimore. All the speakers addressed the ongoing crisis brought on by reports and investigations of (mostly homosexual) sex abuse by Catholic clergy. Those reports and investigations indicate that the crisis is more deeply rooted than most Catholics suspected. They confirm that the vow-breaking, deeply scandalizing behavior mostly involved homosexual acts.

The speakers at the meeting also decried the high clerics who knew and covered up the soul-killing scandal involved and thereby cooperated in the activities of what was tantamount to a secret society within the Church working to elevate perpetrators to seats the highest level of authority in the Church and keep them there. Thanks to the scandalous character of the transgressions involved, people understandably focus on the crisis of mostly homosexual sex abuse against young boys, the very ones from whose ranks the Holy Spirit inspires vocations, to recruit the strength of the clergy from generation to generation.

Pope Francis and those who parrot his doctrinal confusions have tried to keep the focus on what they call "pedophilia." They pretend that it is a species of "clericalism," which they unaccountably identify assert to be the cause of the crisis. But the facts prove beyond doubt that homosexuality is the proximate cause of the crisis. Refusing to admit that fact may cleverly distract from the question of its final cause. For to answer that question, one has to ponder the possibly significant fact that the present crisis coincides with the ever more successful assertion of totalitarian, dictatorial power by secular Marxists in the Catholic Church. Are they, in reality, Catholic clerics in maschera implementing, in the Church, Antonio Gramsci's strategic plan to march God-despising socialists into universal power over all authoritative human institutions?

Thanks to its universalist economic premises, aggressive Marxist socialism has, from the beginning, envisaged a global totalitarian dictatorship, encompassing all means of production. As its name implies, the Catholic Church represents a competing and equally universal purpose. The Church is supposed to act as the living body of Christ. It is supposed to reach throughout the world, preaching the Gospel of Christ. It is supposed to teach, by word and deed, the meaning of Christ's name, imparting the knowledge of God and His forgiving power to those who have the heart to walk in His way — respecting, loving and serving God with all their heart, in all they do.

When truly reflected in their words and deeds, Christ's authority over those who profess His name inevitably poses an obstacle to the ambition of speciously "populist" demagogues. Those in whom Christ dwells care for no power on Earth but that of God, exemplified in Jesus of Nazareth, in and through whom God dwelt among us. For our sake, he suffered torturous humiliation, even unto death by crucifixion.

But by His resurrection, in and through God's Holy Spirit, He returned to life. By that same spirit, He returns to life among us still. In all those who receive and heartily choose to follow Him, He is restored to life and continues to pursue the ministry of His Father God: To seek out, revive and nourish all who willingly receive Him — setting them free of every bond but their wholeheartedly, loving service to the Lord.

Given the liberal (meaning, in this context, Marxist, socialist) leanings of the above-mentioned time servers for papal confusion, their pose of anticlericalism is striking. That pose is a common feature of rabidly anti-Catholic secularism, e.g., in Mexico and other countries historically inclined to fall prey to socialist demagogues. As part of their schemes to achieve dictatorial, totalitarian power over the people as a whole, such demagogues strike a populist pose. Their bywords, slogans and promises exploit the resentments of the majority of people, rousing them against the oligarchs who abuse them.

The train of thought advanced in the preceding paragraphs suggests a hypothesis about the nature and purpose of the crisis currently besetting the Catholic hierarchy. It provided elements for a view of the facts now available that suggests a hypothesis based on the following suppositions:

• The cultivation of cliquish homosexual abuse was not just scandalizing, vow-breaking activity impelled by sexual lust. It was an instrument of coldly calculated ideological ambition, wielded to establish and exert control over individuals would then be promoted lifted into positions of authority in the Church.
• Hence, the crisis currently threatening the unity and doctrinal coherence of the Catholic Church is not just about sexual lust. It's about the lust for power.
• It's about how a Marxist socialist cell within the Church exploited the existence of a homosexualist clique in some Catholic seminaries manipulated its existence to compromise and control promising clerics.
• Some such clerics shared their ideological ambitions and, therefore, willingly advanced them. These ideological fellow travelers not only involved themselves in the illicit, scandalizing sexual activities, unbeknownst to others, they collected evidence against the non-ideological transgressors. The latter probably had no inkling of the trap that ensnared them until it was sprung.

• The ideological clerics also set about recruiting promising boys to become seminarians, weeding out and otherwise silencing those who rejected or threatened to expose their advances.
• The ideologues thus created a pool of ordained clergy whom they brought up in their way of thinking. They recommended individuals from this pool to the good graces of fellow members of the homosexual clique. Thinking they were simply new fodder for their sexual appetite, the latter obliged.
• Thus, up to a point, the ruthless ideologues supported and exploited other members of the homosexual clique who did not share their ideological ambitions. But when key opportunities arose, they deployed the caches of evidence they had developed to blackmail highly placed members of the homosexual clique into advancing the interests and authority of trusted members of their ideological cell. (Was this the means by which ex-Cdl. McCarrick rose so high?) In any case, fearfully isolated by the blackmail threats of their colleagues in dereliction, the blackmailed hierarchs did what they were asked to do.

With good reason, public furor focuses on the scandalizing homosexual transgressions involved in the clerical sex abuse crisis. But the ideological clerics may have developed fodder for blackmail about other scandalous activities (particularly regarding financial irregularities).

A hypothesis is, in some respects, simply a guess that seeks to take accurate account of available facts to posit a cause that reliably explains them. It sometimes points to possible facts, not yet in evidence, but worth seeking by further investigation. In this respect, it may be helpful to ponder the seemingly incongruous assertion mentioned above (and continually reiterated by Cdl. Cupich and other close associates of Pope Francis) that the sex abuse crisis is about clericalism, not homosexuality.

When it comes to Catholic clergy, so-called "clericalism" is the perversion of clerical identity that pursues the prideful satisfaction of worldly appetites — for pleasure, material things and privileged power. It substitutes these things for the humble satisfaction of communing with God in Jesus Christ and of representing to others the ministry of salvation offered to all who are willing to be reformed through that communion, by the power of God's Holy Spirit.

The idolization of sexual pleasure could be construed as an instance of clericalism. But the apologists for clerical silence pretend that homosexuality should not be the focus of concern. However, what if homosexual delicts are being exploited to advance the power of an ideology exalted above God's truth, indeed in strenuous opposition to it? Wouldn't this be clericalism of the worst sort:

• The sort that declares war on God and Christ;
• The sort that elevates clerics to sit in judgment of God;
• The sort that leads them to reject His ministry of salvation and seek instead to confuse, confound and destroy the Church He founded upon the rock of apostolic good faith, to which He gave the name of Peter?

Could it be in this sense that these ideological clerics slyly insist that the problem is clericalism — knowing that they are themselves responsible for it? Thus, as it were, hiding in plain sight would be their self-damning admission that the cause of the Church's crisis is in the very clerics who claim that the crisis is long over. This sly and continual admission goes to prove that they think they are Satan's triumphant vanguard, successfully come to power over the institution that is supposed to be the living testament that Christ lives, and will come again, to defeat, once and for all, the devil's prideful resentment against all of God's creation.

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