Heading for a Bad End

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Each of us is a sinner. The Season of Lent, which begins in less than two days now, is given to us to help us intensify our own daily acts of prayer, penance, mortification, and almsgiving so as to undo the damage that our sins have done to our souls. Each one of our sins darkens the intellect, making us less able to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and more prideful in our refusal to submit to the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church, especially on matters pertaining to the necessity of our avoiding as much contact as possible with what passes today for "popular culture." Each one of our sins weakens our wills, inclining us all the more to sin and to become slothful in our interior lives. Lent, therefore, gives us an opportunity over the course of a little over six weeks to root out the weeds of spiritual sloth in order to once again focus in a sustained matter on scaling the heights of sanctity with every beat of our hearts, consecrated as those hearts must be to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, her Divine Son.

Lent is a great mercy that Our Lord extends to us in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. A good, well-lived Lent can result in the adoption of solid spiritual practices that can last for the rest of our lives. None of us knows whether this will be the last Lent of our lives. None of us knows whether we will live to see Easter Sunday on April 16, 2006. Thus, we must implore Our Lady to help us make this coming Lent the best of our lives, thus disposing us to be better prepared for a happy, holy death. A well-lived Lent means being willing to take up our crosses and to walk in imitation of Our Lord's Way of the Cross, which will be the subject of an article to be posted on Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2006.

Lent offers us a chance to show God how much we love Him and how much we grieve for the horrors our sins imposed upon Him during His fearful Passion and Death. Our detachment from the legitimate pleasures this passing world for a brief period of time shows God that want to possess His Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for all eternity, that we are ready and willing to cast aside anything and everything that is an impediment to our return to Him safely in a state of sanctifying grace at the moment of our Particular Judgments. Our Lord wants us to seek out His Divine Mercy in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and He wants us to be administrators of mercy to others, freely forgiving those who have offended us, those who perhaps may never speak to us again until we are, please God and by His ineffable grace, reunited with them in an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Heaven.

It is one thing to sin and to be sorry, to seek out the Mercy of the Divine Redeemer in the confessional at the hands and the lips of an alter Christus. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly and/or to be oblivious about its harm in our own lives or the lives of others. It is still worse to make excuses for our own sins and/or those of others. Those who are persist in sin, who are oblivious to its harm, who make excuses for their sins and those of others are heading for a bad end. God does indeed withdraw His graces from unrepentant sinners. As one traditional priest (who is living under an assumed name in a foreign country which has no extradition treaty with the United States) noted to us recently, "God casts a blindness upon the unrepentant sinner after He withdraws His graces, permitting them to think that they are having Heaven on earth when the fact is that they are heading straight for Hell." Such is the case with many of the bishops of the United States at present, men who have no regard for the seriousness of sin and who actually go to great lengths to protect those who are steeped in it unrepentantly and to make excuses for sinful behavior. Many of our bishops are heading, barring a miracle of God's grace, for a very bad end.

Consider, for example, the fact that a number of bishops, including the Bishop of San Jose, California, Patrick McGrath, criticized The Passion of the Christ when it was released just about two years ago now. McGrath went so far as to say that the Gospel accounts of Our Lord's Passion and Death are not "historically accurate" narratives of the events that they narrate, prompting Father Daniel Cooper of the Society of Saint Pius X to accuse McGrath publicly of heresy. McGrath, as it turns out, has no intention of giving the heavily loopholed "Instruction" about the admission of men afflicted with perverted inclinations to the priesthood even the slightest bit of attention. He is not alone. Many other bishops in California have gone on record in stating that they will continue their homosexual-friendly policies with respect to the admission of men who suffer from the grave spiritual and mental disorder of being attracted to other men.

A report, written by Christopher Zehnder and published in the San Francisco Faith newspaper (All the Bishops' Boys),  reveals that each of the northern California bishops contacted for the story about the Vatican "Instruction" had no intention of enforcing the loopholed document whatsoever. One of the bishops interviewed, Bishop Sylvester Ryan of the Diocese of Monterey, has a long and ignoble track record as a friend of pro-abortion politicians and as a friend of actual baby-killers (see: Stonewalling from Another Bishop Ryan). It comes as no surprise at all that men who have consistently aborted the Catholic Faith by their support of "religious education" programs that have deformed countless numbers of souls and who have presided over monstrous liturgical abominations would have any desire at all to keep out of the priesthood the men whose perverse inclinations have cost the faithful into the billions of dollars and have scandalized Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

A believing Catholic realizes that nothing but nothing can shake his Faith, recognizing that the Church is divinely founded and maintained, that she will last until the end of time. Thus, to state the actual facts of our situation without fear of offending the insidious culprits who wear mitres and who are oblivious to the effects of their promotion of sin on the souls of the sheep whose pastoral care has been entrusted to them unto eternity is not meant to do anything than to explain how important it is for us to resist these wolves in shepherds' clothing while we take refuge in the Catholic catacombs during this tate of emergency. The plain fact is this: there is a homosexual network, analogous to the Mafia itself, within the hierarchy of the United States of America that propagates itself and has friends in the highest reaches of the Vatican curia itself. There is no other explanation for how men such as George Niederauer get appointed to major archdiocesan sees and for how men such as Joseph Imesch are kept in their sees for twenty-seven years (thirty-nine years now in the case of Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard) to deform souls as they promote perversity and theological dissent.

A small, but very well-documented, bit of this vast network of spiritual perversion and death was exposed in Roman Catholic Faithful. Inc.'s Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam Spring/Summer 2000 issue (The Homosexual Network's Death-Grip on the Roman Catholic Church). One of the important links in this network is the Diocese of Joliet, Illinois, in which the corrupt and now thoroughly disgraced former Bishop of Springfield in Illinois, Daniel Ryan, was ordained a priest and served as an auxiliary bishop before being named as Bishop of Springfield by Pope John Paul II in 1983. Bishop Ryan was consecrated as an auxiliary bishop of Joliet by Bishop Joseph Imesch, who was consecrated a bishop by the notorious supporter of Call to Action, the late John Cardinal Dearden, on February 8, 1973, and co-consecrated by none other than that legendary supporter of the homosexualist agenda, the now retired auxiliary bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gumbleton, who was consecrated a bishop by Dearden in 1968 when he was but thirty-eight years of age. This wicked line of spiritual corruption that has devastated souls and scandalized the faithful presented itself in full view a few days ago when a columnist for the Daily Southtown, a newspaper in the Chicago, area published the following story, written by a man who was abused by a priest of the Diocese of Joliet. Leaving out some of the very graphic parts of columnist Tim Placher's story, the following passages speak for themselves:

The sentence was buried deep within the 247 pages of the recently released deposition given by Joliet Bishop Joseph Imesch as part of a priest-abuse lawsuit pending against him and the Joliet Roman Catholic Diocese. In the glare of the deposition's sensational revelations about priests hot-tubbing and playing "games" in the nude with young boys, the five simple words on page 201 went unnoticed by nearly everyone.

Everyone but me.

At one point in his deposition, Imesch was asked by the victim's counsel to list the Joliet priests he believed had been credibly accused of sexual abuse. After the bishop rattled off 17 names, the attorney inquired about a priest he hadn't mentioned.

"Ruffalo," he said. "What about Ruffalo?"

"I'm not sure of that," Imesch answered.

"Not sure," Imesch said, despite the fact the Joliet Diocese previously had paid a settlement to a man who claimed he'd been abused by Rev. Richard Ruffalo when the priest was pastor at St. Mary's Parish in Park Forest in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Perhaps I can clear up Imesch's uncertainty about Father Ruffalo.

I hadn't wanted to go to Las Vegas with Ruffalo during the summer of 1979. I was 17 years old and had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the priest's advances toward me. He had been far too attentive to me for years, ever since he'd first met me as a fifth-grade choirboy and altar server at the Cathedral of St. Raymond in Joliet. . . .

But the repercussions of that abuse are far more involved than that.

Father Ruffalo carried out a great deal of his manipulation and courtship of me at St. Raymond's.

St. Ray's is not a mere footnote in my life. It's the parish where my grandmother attended school beginning in 1917. It's the parish where my mother, my sisters, I, and a half-dozen of my best friends in the world went to school. It is the parish where my own son goes to school, the fourth generation of my family to walk its halls.

St. Ray's is the church where my parents were married, where I was confirmed, and where I was handed my grade school and high school diplomas.

It is the church where the caskets of my mother, father and grandmother were wheeled down the center aisle.

Nearly all the major events of my life are connected to St. Ray's in some way. And today, every single time I walk through those church doors and look at the priests and servers on the altar, I am confronted with the memory of Ruffalo's sickening place in my history.

That's the reality of priest abuse in my life.

But in the end, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I was a smart kid. I was strong. I was able to finally extricate myself from Ruffalo's advances and get on with my life. So many other boys were not as lucky.

Ruffalo died in 1997. But he served in active ministry for 18 more years after that Vegas trip. And all that time, I kept my mouth shut, telling no one other than a few very close friends in recent years. And not even they were told the specifics. I remained too embarrassed to tell them
the truth.

But when I read Imesch's deposition and learned of his supposed uncertainty about Father Ruffalo, I wasn't embarrassed anymore. I was just mad.

Ruffalo was notorious around the diocese for his Vegas trips. He was also well-known for having "special" friends. In fact, the lawsuit filed by the man from St. Mary's in Park Forest involved stories of Las Vegas trips depressingly similar to mine. For Imesch to claim he's "not sure" about Ruffalo is laughable.

Perhaps the leader of the Joliet diocese is not a bad man, as many angry members of the faithful would like to believe. Maybe, he's just truly that naïve. Either way, his handling of Joliet's priest abuse problem has done damage to the local church that might not be healed until the sixth generation of my family is carrying schoolbooks into St. Ray's.

In the meantime, I'm fully aware of the Joliet Diocese's process for reporting claims of abuse. Well, be assured, I won't be partaking in it. I don't want them to offer me counseling. I don't want to file a lawsuit. I don't want their money. I don't want an apology from anyone.

I simply want the guy who's been running the Joliet Diocese for the last 25 years to admit the problems that occurred under his leadership are so extensive, they won't begin to go away until he "goes away" — by resignation, revolt, or most likely, retirement.

And until the day you do, Bishop, perhaps you ought to move Father Ruffalo over to the "Yes" column on your list.

Sorry to say for Mr. Placher that there is no guarantee that anyone better will be appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to replace Imesch when he submits his retirement letter after turning seventy-five years of age on June 21, 2006. Look at this very partial and incomplete review of the track record in the past ten months:

 

• Archbishop William Levada, a known protector of predator priests, was appointed to succeed Pope Benedict as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and will be elevated to the College of Cardinals on March 24, 2006.
• Levada's successor, George Niederauer, the former Bishop of Salt Lake City, Utah, has a long track-record of supporting the homosexualist agenda, including praising a motion picture that promotes perverted relationships.
• The rector of the Cathedral (the Stephansdom) in Vienna, Austria, Father Anton Faber, "blessed" perverted "couples" on Saint Valentine's Day, without a word of protest from a close friend of the Holy Father's, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn.
• Monsignor Kevin Vann of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois has been appointed to be the Coadjutor Bishop of Fort Worth, Texas. This prompted the courageous Stephen G. Brady, President of Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc., to note that he had "contacted Msgr. Vann, acting Vicar for Priests in the Diocese of Springfield, in the past to report incidents of clergy misconduct - only to receive no constructive response or action. I guess it pays to cooperate, keep your mouth shut and turn a blind eye to the immorality."
• The aforementioned "Instruction" about the admission of homosexual men to the priesthood has so many flaws and loopholes as to have aroused the ire of non-traditionalists as Dale Vree, the editor of New Oxford Review.
• Archbishop Sean O'Malley, who is selling churches to pay off the debt incurred by his predecessor's protection of perverted priests, including the founder of a organization so vile that even to use its acronym is scandalous, will receive a cardinal's red hat on the same day as William Levada, ignoring the scandal of his refusal to disicpline pro-abortion politicians such as Edward Moore Kennedy and John F. Kerry, among others, and ignoring the fact that adoptions of children by perverted "couples" arranged by Catholic Charities in his archdiocese took place and that the priest who justified this surrender to an unjust law, Father Bryan Hehir, is still in power.

• Archbishop Gauderico Rosales of Manila, The Philippines, is receiving a red hat on March 24, 2006, just a short time after he had offered a Mass to commemorate the  fortieth anniversary of the "presence" of the "ecumenical" Focolare group in The Philippines. As is documented in Cornelia Ferreira's and John Vennari's excellent World Youth Day: From Catholicism to Counter-Church (Canisius Press, 2005), Focolare was founded by Chiara Lubich, who controls every aspect of her groups's members. "Chiara Lubich herself is accorded near-divine status, not least because Focolare's founding, doctrine and actions, are based on her many private 'revelations.' These revelations have binding authority as they are seen as the product of 'Jesus in the midst.' Hence, focolarini are told belief in God is not needed if one believes in Chiara Lubich. Practicing collective spirituality means all must think and act in unison with Lubich, forming 'one soul' of which she is the centre. In short, the Focolare Movement seeks a One World Religion based on the Masonic principles of brotherhood, equality and religious indifferentism." One commentator said that "it is incongruous that a Cardinal-designate would give his public support to the Focolare Sect." Actually, it is not so incongruous. Pope John Paul II sent a note of "congratulations" to Chiara Lubich on December 9, 2003, on the occasion of the group's sixtieth anniversary. Cardinal-designate Rosales is merely following the example of the Pontiff.  And Pope Benedict XVI convoked on his own initiative a "Pentecost 2006" meeting with the "lay movements," including the indifferentist Focolare group.  The corruption starts, I am afraid, at the very top.

No, there will be no help coming to the people of Joliet from the Vatican. This is because of the undeniable fact that a pervert-friendly environment (liturgically, doctrinally, architecturally, pastorally, educationally), extending into the Vatican itself, has been created throughout the Church in her human elements in the past forty years. A synthetic Faith, having nothing to do with the Faith of our fathers, has been imposed upon unsuspecting Catholics. Preaching and catechesis have reaffirmed people in their sins while making war about the actual Received Teaching of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Those who are responsible for this relentless warfare against the Holy Faith and thus against the welfare of the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood must reckon with the following plain words of Our Lord Himself:

And whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea.And if thy hand scandalize thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life, maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into unquenchable fire: Where there worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished. And if thy foot scandalize thee, cut it off. It is better for thee to enter lame into life everlasting, than having two feet, to be cast into the hell of unquenchable fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.

And if thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out. It is better for thee with one eye to enter into the kingdom of God, than having two eyes to be cast into the hell of fire: Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished. For every one shall be salted with fire: and every victim shall be salted with salt. Salt is good. But if the salt became unsavoury; wherewith will you season it? Have salt in you, and have peace among you. (Mk. 9:41-49)

As Saint Paul noted in his Epistle to the Hebrews, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). This is true for each of us. The standard of God's judgment on the soul of a bishop is very severe, however, as he has been entrusted with the eternal welfare of the souls entrusted to his pastoral care. Those who lead souls into perdition for their blasphemous liturgies and heterodox statements and perverted actions are not going to hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant" (Mt. 25: 21). They are going to hear, "depart from me, you that work iniquity." (Mt. 7:23)

Mindful of the fact that we must pray each day that we do not come to a bad end, we must pray in reparation for the scandalous words and actions of those pervert-friendly cardinals and bishops who seek to propagate doctrinal and moral and liturgical perversity with all of the strength that the diabolical forces with which they are in league can give them. They will indeed have a bad end if they do not repent of their words and actions. May our own prayers and sacrifices this Lent, offered to God through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, help them to return to the bosom of the Church's authentic Tradition before they wind up in the place where the worm dieth not, the place where Saint John Chrysostom said was littered at his time (347-407 A.D.) with the skulls of dead bishops.

In the meantime, we cleave to Tradition without compromise and continue to resist spiritual and liturgical and doctrinal malpractitioners of the first order.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John Chrysostom, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us

Saint Peter Damian, pray for us.

Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.

Saint Simon Stock, pray for us.

Saint Dominic, pray for us.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Saint Alphonsus Liguori, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.

Sister Lucia, pray for us.

 

 

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