Understanding a Cesspool of Corruption
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
The descent of the clergy into the abyss of moral perversion is, sadly, not a new phenomenon in the history of the Catholic Church. Our Lord has promised us that the jaws of Hell would never prevail against the Church. This does not mean, however, that the devil is not going to win a few battles in our own lives and in the lives of bishops and priests. Indeed, the devil attacks bishops and priests with particular fury, hoping that he can cause many to fall into his snares, thus scandalizing the faithful and causing some of those who are weak in their Faith to leave the true means of salvation, the Catholic Church.
Randy Engel's massive book, The Rite of Sodomy, is an exhaustive examination of the history of the devil's infiltration into the ranks of the Church's hierarchy and clergy. Saint Peter Damian was particularly unstinting in his condemnation of the vile crimes against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments committed by bishops and priests in his own day. His prescriptions for dealing with the problem were very severe, causing a great deal of controversy. Pope Leo IX more or less confirmed the prescriptions, starting the process of weeding out the offenders and exhorting clerics to strive for the heights of personal sanctity. Clerical corruption remained, of course, for some time thereafter. The remnants of the pestilence were not fully eradicated, at least for a time, until the great saint of Assisi, Giovanni di Bernadone, otherwise known as Francis, helped to bring about a reform of the entire Church by his life of austere poverty, Eucharistic piety and deep devotion to the Mother of God, aided in no small measure by his learned contemporary, Father Dominic de Guzman.
We are living in a time very much different than that of Saint Peter Damian. How many priests are there in the conciliar structures calling for severe punishments of clergy steeped in the vice of unnatural perversion against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments? How many bishops in the conciliar structures are doing so. The recent popes? One, Paul VI, as Mrs. Engel documents in her concluding chapter, was a practicing homosexual who put his fellow perverts in positions of authority throughout the conciliar structures. Another, John Paul II, enabled the perverts and their enablers at every turn, appointing them, promoting them, protecting them. Who is the Archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore? Bernard Cardinal Law, who enabled one sodomite priest after another. Who is the Bishop of Rockville Centre, New York? William F. Murphy, who did Law's bidding as an enabler of the perverts. Who is the recently appointed Bishop of Cleveland, Ohio? Richard Lennon, who participated in the sordid mess of the Boston priest perverts.
To wit, this author, who did the initial reporting for The Wanderer in 1997 and 1998 in the case of the perversion of Bishop Daniel Ryan, knows first-hand that a well-known priest, the late Father John A. Hardon, S.J., went to Rome in early 1997 with a priest who had been molested by Ryan. Father Hardon and the priest met in the private residence of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Dario Cardinal Castrillion Hoyos. Ryan was kept in power for yet another two and one-half years. His successor, Bishop George Lucas, as the courageous Stephen G. Brady, the founder and President of Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc., has kept the Ryan team in place. One of Ryan's chief enablers, Father Kevin Vann, was appointed recently by Benedict XVI to be the bishop of Fort Worth, Texas! Whatever disagreements Pope Leo IX had with the severe prescriptions recommended by Saint Peter Damian, it can be said that Pope Leo IX recognized he had a problem in his hands and he had to find some way to discipline, not to reward, bishops and priests steeped in lives of unnatural vice.
As can be seen in the case of the episcopal appointment of Father Kevin Vann, Benedict XVI has played his own role in all of this, albeit with this typical inconsistency and contradictions. As the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger sometimes warned diocesan bishops about the problems of priest perverts. On the other hand, he refused to act against the corrupt founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Father Marcel Maciel Dellogado, sitting on the case for years, telling ABC-TV news at one point that "it is best not to dishearten the faithful." It was only recently that a "compromise" in Father Marcel's case, which is handled very thoroughly in Mrs. Engel's book, has permitted him to "retire" without any finding of fact against him.
Nevertheless, as has been pointed out on this site in the past seventeen months, Benedict has appointed homosexual-friendly bishops (William Levada and George Niederauer) to key positions. Much unlike the days of Pope Leo IX and Saint Peter Damian, we live in a day when the perverts hold most of the key levers of ecclesiastical power. Is it any wonder that there is such hostility to the Faith of our fathers emanating from our chancery offices and parish pulpits and schools and universities and colleges and seminaries and convents? Is it any wonder that the average lay Catholic is so totally bereft of the sensus Catholicus, being bombarded with the propagandizing efforts in behalf of immorality all throughout the popular culture and hearing endless justifications for such immorality in "Catholic" institutions, which themselves are the prisoners of the anti-Catholic conciliarist paradigm?
With a very few exceptions prior to the explosion of these scandals in the secular media in early 2002 (after years of reporting by The Wanderer and nearly twenty years after Father Enrique Rueda's groundbreaking The Homosexual Network), bishops and priests who have been caught up in lives of unnatural vice were affirmed and enabled by the Vatican. At least one pope and numerous cardinals and bishops and priests have been subject to blackmail from the enemies of the Catholic Faith as a result. The souls of ordinary Catholics, already lost in the fog of the novelties of conciliarism, have been deformed as a result.
No one, least of all those who are the ostensible stewards of ecclesiastical power, can ignore the gravity of this situation and claim to be a friend of souls, starting with the souls of those who are steeped in lives of gross perversion. Immersion in an unrepentant life of perversion leads one all too naturally to a more deadly perversion, that of the Faith itself, eerily imitating in perverse matters Martin Luther's own immersion in natural vice that was to a very large extent responsible for his creation of a "Christian theology and ecclesiology" that is from the devil and has been designed from its outset to lead souls to Hell for all eternity.
A Concern for the Sinner
Mrs. Engel prefaces her massive book, which is certainly not light "bedtime" reading, with a deep and an abiding concern for the welfare of those who have been caught up in the ravages of unnatural vice:
As for the individual homosexual caught up in this vice, I love him more than ever. For I now have a greater understanding and appreciation of the terrible all-embracing hold that this vice can have on a man and an even greater conviction that one should move heaven and earth to prevent any souls from being sucked into the homosexual vortex. (pp. xxiii-xxiv)
Mrs. Engel also expressed that her book is not for the faint of heart. Indeed, it is not. This book must be kept out of the reach of children and young adolescents. Anyone of any age who is easily scandalized should not read it. And some of the book's more graphic chapters dealing with the specifics of the vice of sodomy are not of themselves are not absolutely necessary for one to read in order to appreciate the enormity of the problem and the cleverness of what Mrs. Engel terms quite rightly "The Homosexual Collective."
Indeed, the ideal audience for The Rite of Sodomy is to be found in the ranks of priests in the conciliar structures. Perhaps one or two priests might come to understand the he simply cannot participated any more in the undermining of the Catholic Faith, submitting himself to the dictates of ecclesiastical tyrants who hate the Faith and who have gone the extra mile to prove themselves to be friends of the devil himself. Perhaps some wealthy individual who reads this article might see to it that a bulk purchase of The Rite of Sodomy is made and then distributed to every priest in the United States of America. and Canada.
Mrs. Engel addressed the need for care in reading her book. This is what she wrote in the book's Introduction:
By any standard, this book is not for the faint of heart. The subject of homosexuality is understandably distasteful. Its connections to the priesthood and the Catholic Church make it doubly so.
To these difficulties one can add the presence of explicit sexual language used to describe certain types of homosexual acts and practices. On this point I can assure the reader that out of a sheer sense of decency I have fought to keep these explicit references to a minimum.
However, I believe that it is not crude language but the horrendous issues raised in this book that will make it difficult reading for any faithful Roman Catholic.
In his Epistle to the Romans, Saint Paul said that God permits disorders of the flesh, including homosexuality, not only in payment for personal sins but as a recompense for errors within society and within the Church. The invasion, colonization and metastasization of the priesthood and religious life by the Homosexual Collective must be viewed within the larger context of a Church under enemy siege from all sides. As such, homosexuality within the priesthood is at once a cause and symptom of corruption with the Church today. (p. xxiv)
Mrs. Engel's closed her Introduction with an explanation that she hopes that her book, which contains over 1,500 chapter notes and an extensive bibliography, will move the Holy See to "take whatever actions are necessary to restore sanctity and sanity to the priesthood and religious life."
Mrs. Engel's efforts in this regard are offered as a daughter of the Catholic Church that she has served so well in her efforts to oppose sex-instruction and to expose those, such as the late Bishop James T. McHugh, responsible for cooperating with the enemies of the Faith, such as Mary Calderone, the founder of the Sex Information Caucus of the United States, to underline the innocence of young Catholics. Putting aside for a moment the questions that have been raised on this site recently concerning the legitimacy of the conciliar officials, there is little evidence, at least humanly speaking, that there will be any reaction from the Vatican concerning Mrs. Engel's work of love for the Church other than an attempt of silence, which will be followed by condemnation in short order if silence is not successful in burying the facts that she has unearthed.
The Early Church Speaks: The Fathers Condemn Sodomy
After reviewing the practice of unnatural vice and attitudes about it in the pagan world of antiquity, Mrs. Engel provides a cogent summary of the Church's consistent condemnation of all unnatural vice. Mrs. Engel quotes from Saint Augustine's commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans (verses 26-32) dealing with unnatural vice:
"Still thou dost punish these sins which men commit against themselves because, even when they sin against thee, they are also committing impiety against their own souls. Iniquity gives itself the lie, either by corrupting or by perverting that nature which thou hast made and ordained. And they do this by an immoderate use of lawful things; or by the lustful desire for things forbidden, as 'against nature'; or when they are guilty of sin by raging with heart and voice against thee, rebelling against thee, 'kicking against the pricks'; or when they cast aside respect for human society and take audacious delight in conspiracies and feuds according to their private likes and dislikes."
Mrs. Engel then examined the commentaries of Saint Basil and Pope Saint Siricius on "homosexuality in the religious life:"
With an all-male clergy, it is not surprising that the issue of homosexuality and pederasty in the religious life should have been a matter of serious consideration and deliberation by early Church Fathers. Then as now, the problem of predatory homosexuality in clerical circles was more of a reflection of the general moral corruption of the day rather than the specific failing of clerics and monks.
However, if the instructions of Saint Basil were the norm, we can surmise that where the accused cleric was found guilty of engaging in or attempting to engage in same-sex activities, the consequences were swift and painful.
Saint Basil of Cesarea, the 4th century Patriarch of Eastern monks and one of the four great Doctors of the East held that:
"The cleric or monk who molests youths or boys or is caught kissing or committing some turpitude, let him be whipped in public, deprived of his crown (tonsure) and, after having his head shaved, let his face be covered with spittle; and [let him be] bound in chains, condemned to six months in prison...after which let him live in a separate cell under the custody of a wise elder with great spiritual experience...let him be subject to prayers, vigils, and manual work always under the guard of two spiritual brothers, without being allowed to have any relationship ... with young people."
It should be noted that the exposition of a public flogging which exposed the offending cleric or monk to open ridicule would virtually insure that the offender would never rise to hold an office in the Church.
On the questions of whether or not a layman who had committed acts of pederasty or sodomy could apply for and receive Holy Orders, we can refer to the directives on the norms for priestly ordination issued by Pope Saint Siricius (384-399) on 10 February, 385:
"We deem it advisable that, just as not everyone should be allowed to do a penance reserved for clerics, so also a layman should never be allowed to ascend to clerical honor after penance and reconciliation. Because although they have been purified of the contagion of all sins, those who formerly indulged in a multitude of vices should not receive the instruments to administer the sacraments."
Thus, any layman having been caught up in the vice of sodomy in any form, even though he had served out his penance, by implication, would not be permitted to enter the clerical state.
The text of Pope Siricius's decree on key aspects of church discipline and clerical celibacy is of special importance because it is the oldest completely preserved papal deceretal (edict for the authoritative decision of questions of disciple and canon law). and reflects the pope speaking with the consciousness of his supreme ecclesiastical authority and of his pastoral care over all the churches. (pp. 41-42)
Mrs. Engel also documented Pope Saint Gregory the Great's admonition that the civil state has a responsibility to punish clerical sodomites
:
Pope Gregory I began his 14-year reign as supreme pontiff in 590 (the first monk to become pope), with his Liber pastoralis curae on the role of the bishop as the pre-eminent physician of souls entrusted by God to his care and supervision, a doctrine he practiced as well as preached. His sermons, based largely on Holy Scripture drew immense crowds and set the pattern for the future pattern of many famous preachers of the Middle Ages. His indelible influence in the areas of Church doctrine, organization and discipline make him one of the most remarkable figures in ecclesiastical history.
Pope Gregory held a distinctive view of Church-State relations. He saw the Imperial government centered at Constantinople together with the Church as forming a united whole. At the same time each had its own sphere of control--one ecclesiastical and the other secular. Still, the pope did not hesitate to call upon the Crown, as protector of the Church and keeper of the peace, to not only suppress schism, heresy, or idolatry, but also to enforce discipline among monks and clergy.
Pope Gregory's teaching on sodomy did not break new ground, but rather reflected the summing up of the teachings of the earlier Fathers of the East and West at the beginning of the Middle Ages on the nature of the crime. Using the Old Testament text from Genesis 19:1-25 describing the terrible fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, the pope declared:
"Brimstone calls to mind the foul orders of the flesh, as Sacred Scripture itself confirms when it speaks of the rain of fire and brimstone poured by the Lord upon Sodom. He had decided to punish in it the crimes of the flesh, and the very type of punishment emphasized the shame of that crime, since brimstone exhales stench and fire burns. It was, therefore, just that the sodomites, burning with perverse desires that originated from the foul odor of the flesh, should perish at the same time by fire and brimstone, so that through the just chastisement they must realize the evil perpetrated under the impulse of a perverse desire."
The reader will note that Pope Gregory not only condemned the act of sodomy as a "crime," but also denounce the desires of the sodomites as "perverse." Thus, lustful homosexual thoughts and desires, willfully entertained, are not only sinful (even where the act is not carried out), but they are unnatural and perverse as well. (pp. 46-47)
This is very important to note as Catholics have been bombarded for over twenty years now with propaganda from the "official" institutions of the conciliar church into accepting the lie that it is indeed perfectly "natural" for people of the same gender to "love" each other, that such "attractions" should never prohibit a man from being ordained to the priesthood, that a "gay priest" who is celibate is just as capable as a "straight priest" who is celibate of discharging his priestly duties admirably.
Pope Saint Gregory the Great put the lie to these assertions, made repeatedly by so many bishops in our own day, including the notorious Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington. D.C., who came out of the nest of vice that was fostered during the twenty-eight year reign (1939-1967) of Francis Cardinal Spellman in the Archdiocese of New York. McCarrick, who invoked the name of the false god "Allah" in the presence of King Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in September of 2005 at The Catholic University of America, said in 2002 that "gay" men should not be barred from the priesthood. McCarrick, who once forbade a mere "indult" Mass in the Crypt Church at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., also was in favor of distributing Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians. There is a direct connection between participation in, support of and/or indifference to sodomy and a denial of the truths of the Holy Faith.
Saint Peter Damian and Pope Leo IX on the Problem of Unnatural Vice in the Clergy
Reprising her two-part series that Catholic Family News in June and July of 2003, Mrs. Engel outlines, as noted at the beginning of this review, the approach of Saint Peter Damian (1007-1072) and Pope Leo IX (who reigned between 1049 and 1054) to the problem of unnatural vice in the clergy. Quite unlike the conciliar popes, Pope Leo IX took the matter very seriously and sought to implement real reforms, not cosmetic tricks designed to appease a "conservative" constituency while maintaining the status quo (as occurred last year when William Cardinal Levada issued a document requiring men inclined to perversity to demonstrate an abstinence from perverse acts for three years prior to be ordained to the priesthood; that such men can be admitted to the priesthood at all is a scandal, compounded by the fact that the actual decisions are still left up to the ordaining bishop and/or to the superiors of religious communities, an absolute farce of what the word "discipline" means).
Mrs. Engel noted the following:
According to Damian, the vice of sodomy "surpasses the enormity of all others," because:
"Without fail, it brings death to the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust. It leads to error, totally removes truth from the deluded mind ... It opens up hell and closes the gates of paradise ... It is this vice that violates temperance, slays modesty, strangles chastity, and slaughters virginity ... It defiles all things, sullies all things, pollutes all things ... This vice excludes a man from the assembled choir of the Church ... it separates the soul from God to associate it with demons. This utterly diseased queen of Sodom renders him who obeys the laws of her tyranny infamous to men and odious to God... She strips her knights of the armor of virtue, exposing them to be pierced by the spears of every vice ... She humiliates her slave in the church and condemns him in court; she defiles him in secret and dishonors him in public; she gnaws at his conscience like a worm and consumes his flesh like fire. ... this unfortunate man (he) is deprived of all moral sense, his memory fails, and the mind's vision is darkened. Unmindful of God, he also forgets his own identity. This disease erodes the foundation of faith, saps the vitality of hope, dissolves the bond of love. It makes way with justice, demolishes fortitude, removes temperance, and blunts the edge of prudence. Shall I say more?"
No, dearest St. Peter Damian, I think not.
Like every saint before him, and every saint that will ever come after him, St. Peter Damian exhorts the cleric caught in the vice of sodomy to repent and reform his life and in the words of the Blessed Apostle Paul, "Wake up from your sleep and rise from the dead, and Christ will revive (enlighten) you." (Eph 5:14) In a remarkable affirmation of the Gospel message, he warns against the ultimate sin of despairing of God's mercy and the necessity of fasting and prayer to subdue the passions:
"... beware of drowning in the depths of despondency. Your heart should beat with confidence in God's love and not grow hard and impenitent, in the face of your great crime. It is not sinners, but the wicked who should despair; it is not the magnitude of one's crime, but contempt of God that dashes one's hopes."
Then, in one of the most beautiful elocutions on the grandeur of priestly celibacy and chastity ever written, Damian reminds the wayward cleric or monk of the special place reserved in Heaven for those faithful priests and monks who have willingly forsaken all and made themselves eunuchs for Christ's sake. Their names shall be remembered forever because they have given up all for the love of God, he says.
One of the very interesting historical sidebars to Damian's treatise is that he made no preference to the popular practice of distinguishing "notorious" from "non-notorious" cases of clerical immorality--a policy which can be traced back to the 9th century and the canonical reforms on ecclesiastical and clerical discipline by the great German Benedictine scholar and Archbishop of Mainz, Blessed Maurus Magnentius Rabanus (776?-856). Under this policy, the removal of clerics found guilty of criminal acts including sodomy, depended on whether or not his offense was publicly known, or was carried out and confessed in secret.
In cases that had become "notorious," the offending cleric was defrocked and/or handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. But if his crime was known only to a few persons such as his confessor or religious superior, the offending cleric was privately reprimanded, served a penance and then was permitted to continue at his post, or transferred to a similar post in a different diocese. Given the aggressive and predatory nature of the vice of sodomy, it is highly likely that such a policy contributed to, rather than inhibited, sodomical practices among clerics and religious between the mid-800s and the early 1000s. In any case, it was unlikely that Damian, who openly expressed his condemnation of too lenient canonical regulations related to the punishment of clerical sodomites and was so judicious in preserving the integrity of the priesthood and religious life, would have approved such a policy.
Saints are realists, which is no doubt why St. Peter Damian anticipated that his "small book" which exposes and denounces homosexual practices in all ranks of the clergy including the hierarchy, would cause a great commotion in the Church. And it did.
In anticipation of harsh criticism, the holy monk puts forth his own defense as a 'whistle-blower'. He states that his would-be critics will accuse him of "being an informer and a delator of my brother's crimes," but, he says, he has no fear of either "the hatred of evil men or the tongues of detractors."
Hear, dear reader, the words of St. Peter Damian that come thundering down to us through the centuries at a time in the Church when many shepherds are silent while clerical wolves, some disguised in miters and brocade robes, devour its lambs and commit sacrilege against their own spiritual sons:
"... I would surely prefer to be thrown into the well like Joseph who informed his father of his brothers' foul crime, than to suffer the penalty of God's fury, like Eli, who saw the wickedness of his sons and remained silent. (Sam 2:4) ... Who am I, when I see this pestilential practice flourishing in the priesthood to become the murderer of another's soul by daring to repress my criticism in expectation of the reckoning of God's judgement? ... How, indeed, am I to love my neighbor as myself if I negligently allow the wound, of which I am sure he will brutally die, to fester in his heart? ... "So let no man condemn me as I argue against this deadly vice, for I seek not to dishonor, but rather to promote the advantage of my brother's well-being. "Take care not to appear partial to the delinquent while you persecute him who sets him straight. If I may be pardoned in using Moses' words, 'Whoever is for the Lord, let him stand with me.' (Ezek 32:26)"
As he draws his case against the vice of clerical sodomy to a close, St. Peter Damian pleads with another future saint, Pope Leo IX, urging the Vicar of Christ to use his office to reform and strengthen the decrees of the sacred canons with regard to the disposition of clerical sodomites including religious superiors and bishops who sexually violate their spiritual sons.
Damian asks the Holy Father to "diligently" investigate the four forms of the vice of sodomy cited at the beginning of his treatise and then provides him (Damian) with definitive answers to the following questions by which the "darkness of uncertainty" might be dispelled and an "indecisive conscience" freed from error:
1) Is one who is guilty of these crimes to be expelled irrevocably from holy orders?
2) Whether at a prelate's discretion, moreover, one might mercifully be allowed to function in office?
3) To what extent, both in respect to the methods mentioned above and to the number of lapses, is it permissible to retain a man in the dignity of ecclesiastical office?
4) Also, if one is guilty, what degree and what frequency of guilt should compel him under the circumstances to retire?
Damian closes his famous letter by asking Almighty God to use Pope Leo IX's pontificate "to utterly destroy this monstrous vice" that a prostrate Church may everywhere rise to vigorous stature." (pp. 53-55)
A very thoughtful reader of this site expressed a concern to me that Catholics might come away with the impression that our day, therefore, is little different than previous days, including those in Christendom. Well, human nature is flawed. The devil wants to tempt men into sins, especially those of a perverse nature from which it is impossible to escape without the help of Our Lady's graces and a desire to embrace personal penances and mortifications to help to undo the effects of these sins of one's immortal soul, purchased at the cost of the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Thus, yes, there was corruption of this sort in the Middle Ages. This is documented. It is incontestable. The difference between then and now, however, is demonstrated quite amply by Mrs. Engel, who discusses how Pope Leo IX intervened to correct matters with the full weight of the papacy:
The approximate date that Damian delivered the Book of Gomorrah to Pope Leo IX is generally held to be the second half of the first year of the pontiff's reign, i.e., mid-1049, although some writers put the date as late as 1051. We do know, absolutely, that the Pope did respond to Damian's concerns, as that response in the form of a lengthy letter (JL 4311; ItPont 4.94f., no.2) is generally attached to manuscripts of the work.
Pope Leo IX opens his letter to "his beloved son in Christ, Peter the hermit," with warm salutations and a recognition of Damian's pure, upright and zealous character. He agrees with Damian that clerics, caught up in the "execrable vice" of sodomy "Ö verily and most assuredly will have no share in his inheritance, from which by their voluptuous pleasures they have withdrawn. Ö Such clerics, indeed profess, if not in words, at least by the evidence of their actions, that they are not what they are thought to be," he declares.
Reiterating the category of the four forms of sodomy that Damian lists, [59] the Holy Father declares that it is proper that by "our apostolic authority" we intervene in the matter so that "all anxiety and doubt be removed from the minds of your readers".
"So let it be certain and evident to all that we are in agreement with everything your book contains, opposed as it is like water to the fire of the devil," the Pope continues. "Therefore, lest the wantonness of this foul impurity be allowed to spread unpunished, it must be repelled by proper repressive action of apostolic severity, and yet some moderation must be placed on its harshness," he states.
Next, Pope Leo IX gives a detailed explanation of the Holy See's authoritative ruling on the matter.
In light of divine mercy, the Holy Father commands, without contradiction, that those who, of their own free will, have practiced solitary or mutual masturbation or defiled themselves by interfemoral coitus, but who have not done so for any length of time, nor with many others, shall retain their status, after having "curbed their desires" and "atoned for their infamous deeds with proper repentance".
However, the Holy See removes all hope for retaining their clerical status from those who alone or with others for a long time, or even a short period with many, "have defiled themselves by either of the two kinds of filthiness which you have described, or, which is horrible to hear or speak of, have sunk to the level of anal intercourse."
He warns potential critics, that those who dare to criticize or attack the apostolic ruling stand in danger of losing their rank. And so as to make it clear to whom this warning is directed, the Pope immediately adds, "For he who does not attack vice, but deals with it lightly, is rightly judged to be guilty of his death, along with the one who dies in sin."
Pope Leo IX praises Damian for teaching by example and not mere words, and concludes his letter with the beautiful hope that when, with God's help, the monk reaches his heavenly abode, he may reap his rewards and be crowned, "Ö in a sense, with all those who were snatched by you from the snares of the devil."
Clearly, on the objective immorality of sodomical acts, both Damian and Pope Leo IX were in perfect accord with one another. However, in terms of Church discipline, the pope appears to have taken exception with Damian's appeal for the wholesale deposition of all clerics who commit sodomical acts. I say, appears, because I believe that even in the matter of punishing known clerical offenders, both men were more in agreement than not.
Certainly, Damian, who was renown for his exemplary spiritual direction of the novitiates and monks entrusted to his care, was not unaware of certain mitigating circumstances that would diminish if not totally remove the culpability of individuals charged with the crime of sodomy.
For example, as with certain clerical sex abuse cases that have come to light today involving the Society of St. John and the Legionaries of Christ, which the Holy See has yet to investigate, some novices or monks may have been forced or pressured by their superiors to commit such acts. No doubt, it is circumstances such as these that prompted Pope Leo IX to use the term, "who of his own free will" in describing a cleric guilty of sodomy. Also among the four varieties of sodomy Damian discusses in his treatise, he states that interfemoral and anal coitus are to be judged more serious than solitary or mutual masturbation.
All in all, what this writer found to be most remarkable about the pope's letter to Damian, was the absolutist position Pope Leo IX took concerning the ultimate responsibility of the offending cleric's bishop or religious superior. If the latter criticized or attacked this apostolic decree, he risked losing his rank! Prelates who fail to "attack vice, but deal lightly with it," share the guilt and sentence of the one who dies in sin, the pope declared. (pp. 57-58)
Pope Leo IX understood that the salvation of his own immortal soul depended upon attacking vice and not dealing lightly with it. How can there be any talk at all of canonizing the late John Paul II, who refused to attack vice and consistently promoted and rewarded men who were caught up in it themselves and/or who were indifferent, at best, about it in the lives of their brother bishops and priests, men who attacked the integrity of the Faith, both in matters of worship and doctrine, with a savage fury? As a former colleague and, it appears, a former friend of mine noted shortly after the death of the not-so-great pontiff, "I just hope that he was wearing his Brown Scapular when he died. Our Lady did say, 'Whosoever shall be clothed' in it shall not know eternal hellfire."
Mrs. Engel demonstrates that the contemporaries of Saint Peter Damian, including three future popes, one of whom, Stephen X (1057-1058), made him the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, sought him out for his advice and counsel. She discussed the fact that none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury (England was a Catholic country, as you know, for the better part of a thousand years), Saint Anselm, himself was among many Catholics who attested to the prevalence of unnatural vice in the Church and in the world in the Eleventh Century:
Also, the probability that Damian was, in fact, speaking the full truth concerning the extent of this plague in the Church can be discerned from a number of subsequent events including the condemnation of clerical immorality including sodomy at the Synod of Florence attended by Damian in June, 1055, under the pontificate of Pope Victor II (1055-1057). Almost 50 years after Damian's death, the Council of Nabus assembled in 1120 under the direction of Garmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem and Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, continued to issue edicts and penalties against the vice and crime of sodomy.
We also know that Saint Anselm (1033-1109) as the Archbishop of Canterbury, England, confirmed Damian's thesis of the wide-spread practice of sodomy not only among clergy, but commoner and courtier as well, when he started that " ...this sin (sodomy) has been publicly committed to such an extent that it scarcely makes anyone blush, and that many have fallen into it in ignorance of its gravity." (p. 59)
From Christendom to the Rise of the Secular State
Mrs. Engel provides a comprehensive historical review of the influence of sodomy in the Renaissance and the subsequent rise of the modern secular state that encompasses two riveting chapters in The Rite of Sodomy. Much as we would like to assure ourselves that the unchecked spread of this vice has occurred only in our own day as a result of "activist judges" and a few activist organizations, the truth is that devil took full advantage of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King during the Protestant Revolt and thereafter to spread all manner of poisons abroad in one nation after another. While some of those poisons would only come to the surface at the end of the Nineteenth Century and become quite in their boldness for all to see at the end of the Twentieth Century, as the conciliar church was enveloped from the top down in adapting itself to some of these poisons, the poisons had been lurking underground for about half of a millennium.
Mrs. Engel devotes another chapter to the contributions made by sodomite behavior in the case of the Cambridge Spies in the British intelligence service, men whose lives of perversity were used against them by the Soviet Union into becoming its own double-agents. She makes a very interesting comparison between men who are willing to sell out the land of their birth and those who are willing to sell out their true Mother, Holy Mother Church, by persisting in vice to the detriment of their souls and those of others (and, ultimately, to the common good of society itself):
Was the official cover-up by the British Establishment of the horrendous deeds of the Cambridge spies so very different from the American bishops' cover-up of the criminal deeds of its pederast and homosexual clergy and religious? Is not the Catholic clerical Homintern as capable of inflicting as great a harm to the Church and the faithful as that inflicted on the people and government of Britain by the Cambridge spies under the direction of the Communist Comintern [Communist International]? (p. 342)
Mrs. Engel continued a few paragraphs later to note:
There is a similarity between a secular traitor's hatred of the Social Order and nation that nurtured him, and the homosexual priest's hatred of the Roman Catholic Church with its moral absolutes and restrictions and authority figures. Once the homosexual priest or religious is absorbed into the Homintern, his allegiance and subservience to it supercedes all other former loyalties. His devotion to his family and his faith is atrophied.
As Father [Enrique] Rueda [the author of The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy, 1982] has charged, this new allegiance is capable of functionally dissolving the normally stronger bonds of religious affiliation. Homosexual priests and religious not only foster dissension within the Church in matters of sexual morality, they also use the Church and its resources to spread the teaching and propaganda of the Homintern.
Neither the State nor the Church can afford to ignore the presence of vice in its midst. Britain's upper-class winked at the violation of the moral law with regard to homosexuality and paid a heavy price for its folly. Likewise the Church cannot be indifferent to vice within its priestly ranks and expect to escape unscathed from the consequences of its actions.
The treacherous exploits of the Cambridge spies resulted in the massive hemorrhaging of intelligence to the Soviets and untold damage to Britain's national interests. The treacherous exploits of clerical pederasts and homosexuals in the Church has resulted in the massive hemorrhaging of confidence in the Church and a feeling of betrayal in the hearts of every loyal Catholic layman and priest. (p. 343).
As Mrs. Engel notes in two chapters at the end of her book, the betrayal of the Faith by the contemporary sodomites is but part and parcel of the larger agenda of Revolution in the very structures of conciliarism that began with the pontificate of Angelo Roncalli, John XXIII. Indeed, as will be seen later, Mrs. Engel relies upon Mary Ball Martinez's The Undermining of the Catholic Church that was cited on this site four months ago in an initial review of the words and the work of a priest who had helped to plan the Revolution's agenda, one Father Joseph Ratzinger.
The Methods of the Homosexual Collective
Section II of The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church contains three chapters that deal with some pretty graphic material on the nature of the vice under review. A great deal of scientific data is presented here. As noted at the beginning of this review, this section might be useful to help a relative or a friend caught up in the grip of unnatural vice to see the objective evidence about its inherent degeneracy and the harm that it does to his own body, no less his immortal soul. Ultimately, though, it is not this sort of graphic material that is going to convert anyone out of a life of persistence in vice, whether natural or unnatural. One must come to love God as He has revealed Himself exclusively through His Catholic Church and resolve never to offend Him again by falling into Mortal Sins of any kind, relying upon the supernatural helps He has left us by means of the sacraments to leave a world of vice and perversion and corruption and to scale the heights of personal sanctity.
Admittedly, of course, this is all the more difficult to stress as Benedict XVI wrote in Principles of Catholic Theology that the sacraments are not to be viewed in an "individualistic" way, a total denial of the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent on the nature of the sacraments, which were instituted precisely to bestow and to increase the life of Sanctifying Grace in the souls of individual men. How can those steeped in sin today be inspired to quit their sins for the right reason, that is for love of God and by a fervent cooperation with the graces that flow to us from Our Lady's hands in the sacraments, when many, although certainly all, bishops and priests in the conciliar structures believe that it is not truly necessary to reform one's life by the rooting out of sin, that we should take comfort in the abject lie that God loves us "just as we are." He does not. He wants us to be saints.
The devil wants us with him in Hell for all eternity. He hates God. He hates each one of us because our souls are made in the image and likeness of God. The devil will seek to use all manner of tricks to keep us from going to Heaven, sparing no efforts, along with his other fallen angels, to lead us to the point of despair as we take our dying breaths. The adversary, who prowls about the world like a roaring lion seeking the ruin of souls, has used all different guises to promote evil in all of its various forms, including unnatural vice. The methods, therefore, used by the Homosexual Collective, as Mrs. Engel terms it, are just part and parcel of the adversary's plan for the ruin of souls for all eternity and the downfall of men and nations in this passing world.
Mrs. Engel describes the basic organizational goals of the Homosexual Collective as follows:
The Homosexual Collective's overall political base is constructed on a refinement of Hegelian and Marxist-Leninist theories and practices. It is first and foremost through this political prism that all of its pronouncements, actions, and institutions must be viewed if one hopes to gain a true understanding of the movement.
Much of the Collective's success thus far in advancing its revolutionary agenda has been due to its continued ability to:
The "vanguard" or shock troops of the Gay Liberation Movement are drawn from the hundreds of international, national, state and local organizations and coalitions that form the Homosexual Collective. Their main task is the total infiltration, colonization, and subversion of all social institutions that are deemed useful in moving the revolution forward.
As these mass organizations are brought under the control or influence of the Collective, they are transformed into "fronts" that can be readily manipulated by a relatively few members of the vanguard. In addition to expanding the Collective's sphere of influence, these front organizations provide numerous fellow travelers and useful idiots that are so essential to advancing the primary objectives of the sexual revolution. They also swell the Collective's political and financial power base, provide an unlimited source of potential recruits, and serve as a transmission belt for "gay" propaganda. (pp. 473-474)
Mrs. Engel demonstrates that the Homosexual Collective is very much allied with the occult and so-called Eastern"mysticism."
For homosexual men and women who prefer a more serene, meditative mystical/magical approach to spirituality, occult sects that Theosophy and its modern-day progeny, the New Age Movement, offer homosexuals still other alternatives to Christianity.
Since the late 19th century, theosophy, as proclaimed by its most famous proponent Helen Petrovna "Madame" Blavatsky (1831-1891) has attracted a number of spiritual and moral renegades from Christianity.
Theosophists proclaim the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex (or sexual orientation), caste or color and embrace an ecumenical spirit of indifferentism with regard to specific religions or philosophical movements.
The theoretical framework for theosophy incorporates all of the ancient heretical occult systems including Pantheism, Gnosticism, Jewish Kabalism and European Neoplatonist Hermeticism as well as elements of the Eastern mysticism of Hinduism, Buddhism, Yogaism and Brahmanism, overlaid with a heavy mantle of good-old-fashioned Spiritualism. (p. 486)
Where I have read about Catholics praising Neoplatonist Hermeticism and citing Catholic Judaizing Kabalists favorably? Hmmm. Oh, never mind. Back to Mrs. Engel.
Mrs. Engel explained the reason for her providing this background for her readers:
My brief reference to theosophy most likely would have ended here were it not for the appearance on the English Theosophical scene at about the time of another famous convert to theosophy, one Charles Webster Leadbeater, who in a relatively short period of time managed to draw the society into a major pederast scandal. Consider the facts that at least two Catholic religious orders, the Legionaries of Christ and the Society of St. John, have been accused of harboring clerical pederasts whose modus operandi bear an uncanny resemblance to that of Master Leadbeater, I think it is a story worth telling. (p. 487)
Mrs. Engel's description of Theosophy could pass as well for a description of Judeo-Masonry. Birds of a feather do flock together. Charles Webster Leadbeater, who had been "ordained" to the Anglican "priesthood" in 1879 but joined the Theosophical Society in 1883, was initiated into a Masonic lodge in June of 1915, becoming a thirty-third degree Mason in short order. She went on to describe how the case of Leadbeater, who was a pederast, teaches us lessons today about the infiltration of sodomites of what she so aptly names as Am-Church, a phrase that I believed was coined first by Paul Likoudis of The Wanderer, which is in reality just arm, as some of us see it, of the counterfeit conciliar church that has taken the Faith of our fathers away from us and replaced it with one that has the temerity to contradict a good deal of the authentic patrimony of the Catholic Church, thereby confusing and bewildering many good, believing Catholics in the process.(Please understand, however, that this view is not expressed in Mrs. Engel's book.)
Here are the parallels that Mrs. Engel draws between the case of Charles Leadbeater and the recently exposed scandals of the pederasts in the conciliar structures:
First, yesteryear, as today, young male victims of clerical sex abuse rarely report the crime against them. Second, for the homosexual pederast, the priesthood is an ideal cover. Third, clerical pederasts, like all perverts, lie about their activities. Fourth, young boys with religious vocations are likely to believe anything that their religious superiors tell them; Fifth, parents of clerical sex-abuse victims are wont to recognize, much less admit, the existence of the crime. And, finally, the Homosexual Collective, then as now, is quite capable of colonizing and exploiting the religious life for its own ends.
By the time Leadbeater and Wedgwood and Company were through with the Liberal Catholic Church [schismatic and heretical sect based in England] it was on the verge of total disintegration. Interestingly, the program of "liturgical renewal" introduced by Leadbeater and his associates into the Church's rites and rituals that included occult doctrine, has remained a permanent feature of many Liberal Catholic Churches up to the present day. (p. 492)
Although Mrs. Engel does not draw the conclusion at this point in her book, the parallel here is glaringly obvious: the whole thrust of the Liturgical Movement, after it had been co-opted by the Modernists in the early Twentieth Century, that is, within the Catholic Church was to eliminate all reference to man's sinfulness and to the possibility of the loss of his immortal soul for all eternity. As I demonstrate in G.I.R.M. Warfare, the whole ethos of the liturgical revolutionaries was to reaffirm man in his essential "goodness," one of the chief ideological underpinnings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and thus of the French Revolution (as I quoted from Father Fahey in From His Mother's Knee a few days ago). Consider this telling--and, yes, oft-quoted on this site, passage from Paragraph 15 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal:
The same awareness of the present state of the world also influenced the use of texts from very ancient tradition. It seemed that this cherished treasure would not be harmed if some phrases were changed so that the style of language would be more in accord with the language of modern theology and would faithfully reflect the actual state of the Church's discipline. Thus there have been changes of some expressions bearing on the evaluation and use of the good things of the earth and of allusions to a particular form of outward penance belonging to another age in the history of the Church.
Modern theology? A particular form of outward penance belonging to another age in the history of the Church? Who believes such things except those who are themselves steeped, objectively speaking, in states of Mortal Sin and who want to create a false religion and a false liturgy to reaffirm themselves in their self-justified states of moral degradation? Penance belongs to every age in Church history, whose theology needs no "building stones" to "unify" it with the beliefs of those outside of the ranks of the true Church, a belief that implies that Holy Mother Church does not have everything in her Divine Constitution, including the entirety of the Deposit of Faith, to know the truth of the Divine Redeemer and to proclaim it infallibly without "outside" assistance from heretics.
Saint John Marie Vianney feared that he had not done enough for souls, that he had not done enough penance for his sins and to save the souls of his beloved parishioners from Ars, from whom he tried to flee on three separate occasions in order to live a more penitential life as a hermit. God willed for him, however, to continue his life of penance as a priest. It is precisely the exorcising of penance and penitentially-laden prayers in the Novus Ordo Missae that is both a sign of the moral corruption at its very foundation and an expression of its desire to eradicate penance in blitzkrieg from the lives of ordinary Catholics. This was and remains nothing less than diabolical.
Oh, yes, there is, as will be pointed out at the conclusion of this review, it mattered quite a bit that the man who personally approved the work of the Consilium and foisted the liturgical revolution upon Catholics, Paul VI, was himself a practicing homosexual. The liturgical "renewal" in the conciliar church had everything to do with reaffirming men in their sins.
Mrs. Engel also details the work of a very important cog in the Homosexual Collective, the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches ((UFMCC):
The most prominent and politically active homosexual alternative church is the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) founded by Reverend Troy Perry, an avowed homosexual, in Los Angeles in 1968. The UFMCC currently boasts a membership of 43,000 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christians in 300 congregations worldwide.
The UFMCC teaches that homosexuality is "not a sin and not a sickness," and that homosexual relationships should be celebrated and affirmed! It depends heavily upon the questionable research findings of the so-called "social sciences" to validate what it calls its "elastic theology."
According to Perry, the UFMCC is committed to confronting "the injustice of poverty, sexism, racism and homophobia through Christian social action. On the other hand, [Father Enrique] Rueda states that the primary function of the UFMCC is to subvert Catholic, Protestant and non-Christian religious institutions and transform them into political and ideological allies.
The UFMCC has acted as a battering ram against the Roman Catholic Church and more traditional Protestant denominations and evangelical sects. In this venture, the UFMCC's Department of Ecumenical Relations, headed by R. Adam DeBaugh, has proven to be demonstrably effective in establishing "gay" cooperative political networks within these churches. An examination of DeBaugh's extensive memberships in a wide-range of "ecumenical" organizations and enterprises amply demonstrates how the system works.
Prior to his joining the UFMCC in Washington, D.C., in 1973, DeBaugh served as the director of the Center for the Study of Power and Peace, and was Administrative Assistant to Congressman Bob Edgar, who later became the head of the National Council of Churches. In June 1975, DeBaugh co-founded the UFMCC Washington Field Office on Capitol Hill and became a full-time lobbyist for "gay rights." He served on the Board of Directors of the Gay Rights National Lobby, which had its offices at the UFMCC Field Office. Later the same year he was named Director of the UFMCC Department of Christian Social Action. He served on the Board of Directors of The Washington Blade and on the Board of Directors of the UFMCC Emmaus House of Prayer. He was named co-director of the new Department of Ecumenical Relations and in 1981 he wrote the UFMCC's original application for membership in the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S. In October, 1983, DeBaugh was elected District Coordinator of the Mid-Atlantic of the UFMCC District, and served on the General Council. He has served on the Board of Trustees of the Fund for Overcoming Racism, and Board of Directors of Among Friends, Inc., a "gay" crisis center. He is currently the Director of Rho Press, another UFMCC non-profit spin-off.
According to Rueda, during his employment at the UFMCC Washington Field Office, DeBaugh worked closely with the little known but powerful Washington Interreligious Council on Human Rights and helped found the Interfaith Council on Human Rights. He maintained close contact with the National Council of Churches (NCC), the National Council of Community Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Ecumenism Research Agency, the NCC Commission on Women in Ministry, the NCC Joint Strategy and Action Coalition and the Washington Interreligious Staff Council, reported Rueda.
DeBaugh had a particularly close working relationship with New Ways Ministry, formerly headed by Sister Jeannine Grammick of the Catholic School Sisters of Notre Dame and Rev. Robert Nugent, a Catholic priest of the Society of the Divine Savior. In the spring of 1980, Nugent assist DeBaugh in putting together a series of "Denomination Statements" that the UFMCC used to lobby for a Congressional National Gay Rights Bill.
Rueda noted that one of the lesser known activities of DeBaugh's ecumenical office was the infiltration of seminaries and schools of theology across the United States in order to scout out lesbian and gay seminarians, staff and faculty. the UFMCC helped form homosexual caucuses within these facilities and also established an ongoing network of homosexual clergy from all denominations, charged Rueda. (pp. 484-485)
[In light of Mrs. Randy Engel's The Rite of Sodomy and the material she included about the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Churches, I thought it appropriate to post No to Father Zigrang, Yes to Eric Law (2003) as sidebar material.
[This article was published on The Remnant website in July of 2003, a few weeks after Bishop Joseph Fiorenza had threatened to suspend Father Stephen P. Zigrang for offering the Immemorial Mass of Tradition at Saint Andrew's Church in Channelview Texas on June 28 and 29, 2003. Bishop Fiorenza, who was later promoted to the rank of Archbishop when his diocese of Galveston-Houston was elevated to the rank of an archdiocese, had told Father Zigrang that he had to go on a sixty day leave of absence and seek psychological counseling. Fiorenza recommended that Father Zigrang make a retreat, which he did--at Saint Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota. As is well-known, Father Zigrang associated with the Society of Saint Pius X and was later suspended by Fiorenza, who has since been succeeded by a protégé of Archbishop Donald Wuerl, Archbishop Daniel DiNardo.
[News came to me a few weeks after Father Zigrang had been placed on an involuntary leave of absence by Bishop Fiorena, who was part of the Joseph Bernardin axis of power in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference, that Fiorena was permitting an Episcopalian "priest" of Eric Law to speak at a conference being promoted by his diocese that was to take place in Houston, Texas. Eric Law, it turned out, spoke regularly at conferences sponsored by the Homosexual Collective chronicled so well by Mrs. Engel in The Rite of Sodomy. Thus, Bishop Fiorenza was saying no to Father Zigrang and yes to Eric Law, which became the basis for the following article that appeared on The Remnant website and, in truncated form, in the August 31, 2003, issue of The Remnant newspaper.
[Readers can judge the relevance of the article to the facts in Mrs. Engel's The Rite of Sodomy.]
The final part of Mrs. Engel's section dealing with the Homosexual Collective deals with how the sodomites have used blasphemies about Our Lord to advance their agenda, citing the case of the now former Jesuit priest, Father John McNeill, among others, to illustrate her point:
In the Spring of 1981, New York Native, a homosexual bi-weekly (now defunct), carried an interview with Jesuit priest John McNeill, an openly homosexual priest and co-founder of Dignity [which supports Catholics who lead lives of active homosexual behavior--TAD], and Dr. Lawrence Mass who helped establish the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
In 1976, Pedro Arrupe, Father General of the Jesuits, gave McNeill's book, The Church and the Homosexual, a nihil obstat and permission to publish, even though the book clearly dissented from Church teaching on homosexuality and even though McNeill had made it perfectly clear that he had committed himself to the Homosexual Collective--both publicly and privately.
The following is a portion of the New York Native interview with McNeill:
"Interviewer: You are a practicing psychotherapist as well as a Jesuit scholar. Are you a Jungian?"
"McNeill: My psychotherapeutic orientation, at least for now, is in the object relations school--more Sullivanian. But Jung had much to say. Each of the special qualities he attributes to the homo-sexual community is usually considered a striking characteristic of Christ himself, like the extraordinary ability to meet an individual's unique person free of stereotypes, or the refusal to accomplish goals by violence. The point I'm trying to make here is not, of course, that Christ was a homosexual any more than he was a heterosexual. His example clearly transcends our current homosexual-heterosexual dialectic. My point is that Christ was an extraordinarily free and fulfilled human being."
"Interviewer: What bout the many scholarly observations (including Bosewell's) that Christ's most deeply intimate human relationship was with Saint John?
McNeill: "I think what I see in Jesus, is the total freedom to love, to relate to any human being. Many priests have succeeded in incarnating these positive qualities of Christ. And, as we've said, many priests in many denominations are homosexually oriented. The gay community, if it were allowed to be itself, to develop its special qualities, has a major role to fulfill to bring about the ideal that Christ represented."
The statement by McNeill that Jesus was neither heterosexual or homosexual is an obvious denial of the Incarnation, that Jesus is True God and True Man, not some kind of sexual hermaphrodite male. Further, instead of an outright denial to the suggestion that Saint John's relationship with Our Lord was a pederastic one, McNeill left the door open to the blasphemy.
Ironically, it took ten years before McNeill's superiors and the Vatican Congregation for Religious officially dismissed him from the Jesuits and deprived him of his priestly faculties after determining that his public dissent from the Church's moral teachings on homosexuality caused "grave scandal," was "injurious to the teaching authority of the Church," and was "potentially as injurious to the salvation of souls." When they did, it was with the greatest reluctance on their part. Indeed, it was McNeill who made the final choice to remain with Collective and leave the Catholic priesthood. (p. 496)
Ten years to act against Father McNeill? Ten years? How long did it take Paul VI to act against Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre when he publicly offered the Immemorial Mass of Tradition thirty years ago this year, that is, in 1976? Instantaneously. And for good reason. A practicing homosexual could not abide the return of "that" Mass that reminded him of his own sinfulness and of the possibility of going to Hell for all eternity. "That" Mass had to be suppressed. The corruption of religious communities and the spread of sodomite propaganda throughout the Catholic Church during the pontificate of Paul VI and throughout that of John Paul II continued while warfare against the Church's authentic patrimony was waged relentlessly.
There is an interesting story to tell about Father McNeill, who was quite the media darling in the 1980s.
Father McNeill appeared on Cable News Network's Larry King Live in 1989, debating my late-friend, Father Vincent Miceli, who had been a Jesuit for many years before being forced to leave the Society of Jesus in the wake of the publication of his book, The Antichrist, in 1981. Father Miceli was a masterful debater. Although he was ordained for the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus he was a boy of Sicilian ancestry from the South Bronx to the day he died at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York, June 2, 1991. After listening to McNeill's blasphemies and distortions of Catholic truth, Father Miceli simply said, "Father, Father. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" Father Miceli just shook his head from side to side with a Cheshire-cat smile on his wrinkled face.
Yes, blasphemy is par for the course for the Homosexual Collective. It is also par for the course for conciliarism and its apologists, which have derived so much inspiration from the heresy of Americanism, critiqued so thoroughly and irrefutably by Mrs. Engel in her book.
Paving the Way for AmChurch and the Conciliar Church: The Potomac Flows into the Tiber
Mrs. Engel's section on Americanism must be read by every serious traditional Catholic. There are far too many traditional Catholics, priests and laity alike, who have convinced themselves that the false foundations of the United States of America are not harmful to the life of the Church and thus not injurious to the salvation of souls. Although my own Christ in the Voting Booth has a chapter that reviews briefly the history of opposition to authentic Catholicism on the part of many American bishops, Mrs. Engel's two chapters on the subject are detailed and riveting.
No one can read these chapters and contend thereafter that the framework of the American constitutional regime, to which Baltimore Archbishop John Carroll, the first bishop and archbishop of the United States of America, sought to accommodate the Catholic Church. No one can read these chapters and not be convinced of the fact that, as Pope Leo XIII noted clearly in Testem Benevolentiae, January 22, 1899, that the American ethos of religious indifferentism and cultural pluralism helped to teach Catholics to view the events of the world and of the Church naturalistically, coming to believe that the Faith had no relationship at all to the conduct of national life. In other words, Catholics were prepared in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries to accept the Protestant/Judeo-Masonic notion of the separation of Church and State as natural, normal, and virtuous, indeed, a necessity for the right ordering of the State and for the protection of the Church. No one can read these chapters and not see how the Americanist paradigm that is so praised by Benedict XVI is responsible in large measure for the latter's oxymoronic support of "healthy secularism."
Indeed, the "AmChurch" desired by John Carroll and the Americanists who populated a good portion of the hierarchy was a model for the counterfeit church created by conciliarism. It was the Americanists among the bishops and clergy in this country in the Nineteenth Century who paved the way for the conciliarist notions of ecumenism and religious liberty. The moral corruption of the clergy that has come into full view in the past few years (but had been reported for a long time in some Catholic publications) was in large measure, although certainly not entirely, the result of the gradual corruption of the Faith in the United States of America as its holy tenets were surrendered little by little to the exigencies of pluralism and religious indifferentism.
Especially important for the Americanist bishops was the desire for Catholics to "fit in" with Protestants and others, convincing Catholics that it was perfectly acceptable to be immersed in the anti-Catholic culture (an uncritical acceptance Calvinist capitalism its resulting consumerist materialism, the belief that partisan politics, especially by means of a slavish attachment to the Democrat Party, would "save" the country and help Catholics "achieve success," the desire to let others "live and let live" in their false religions) during the week while assisting at Mass on Sundays. While individual converts were won for the Faith in the Nineteenth Century, most of the bishops and priests believed that that there was no need to Catholicize the country. Indeed, the reverse was true. Catholics had to be "Americanized," and we can see the devastation of souls that has taken place as a result of this Americanization.
Here are some salient passages from Mrs. Engel's work concerning the early influences of Americanism on Catholics in the United States of America:
The American hierarchy came into being with the creation of the primal See of Baltimore on November 16, 1789 by Pope Pius VI, the first and only Catholic diocese in the infant nation, followed by the consecration of American Jesuit John Carroll as Catholic bishop-elect of Baltimore at Lulworth Castle, Dorset, England on August 15, 1790. Bishop Carroll enjoyed full centralized powers over all the territories, properties, parishes and priests in the United States.
Contrary to popular opinion, any revolution worth its salt always begins at the top.
Since the Roman Catholic Church is, for better or worse, a hierarchical church, its structure was well suited for John Carroll’s vision of a new American Church (AmChurch) of which he was to be a prime architect - a Church made in the likeness of the New Republic – unfettered by Roman chains. His first salvo against the Roman Church was launched at his consecration when he deleted the ritual oath to “extirpate heretics” so as not to offend Protestants. . . .
On March 12, 1788, the priests of the Baltimore area sent a request to the Holy Father asking for permission to elect their own bishop from their number so as to render “as free as possible from suspicion and odium, to their countrymen.”
On May 12, 1788, after implicitly rejecting the concept of a democratically elected bishop, Pope Pius VI gave the Baltimore group a one-time only dispensation to elect their ordinary. Father John Lewis was their first choice for Bishop of Baltimore, but he was too advanced in years, so the honor fell to Father Carroll. He was selected on May 1789 and his appointment was promptly approved by the Holy See.
According to Catholic historian Hugh J. Nolan, “Politically, he (Carroll) was most acceptable to the Founding Fathers.” He also had the imprimatur of Freemason occultist Benjamin Franklin who had connections to all the Masonic Lodges in England and Europe and with whom Carroll maintained a warm relationship,” confirms [Solange] Hertz [in her Star Spangled Heresy].
According to Hertz, Carroll never concealed his unbridled enthusiasm for the American principles of “the separation of Church and state, sovereignty of the people, freedom of conscience, universal equality…” and for the application of those same democratic principles to ecclesiastical administration including the popular election of bishops by diocesan priests rather than by the Holy See.
Archbishop Carroll envisioned the American Church as a “private corporation,” not as an “institution-in-law” which was the European view. “In a sense, the whole history of the Church in the United States has been the gracious accepting of that change, a constant adaptation to that life in a new and secular environment,” wrote Carroll.
“Adaptation” to the dominant Protestant secular culture meant the end of an unsightly and unwashed ghetto Catholicism in favor of a more refined gentile homogenized and secularized population despite the fact that non-assimilation was the Catholic immigrant’s strongest guarantee of the continuance of his strong faith.
Carroll held great stock in the virtue of religious tolerance. Unfortunately, religious tolerance is not a Catholic virtue. There are the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the cardinal virtues fortitude, justice, prudence, and temperance, but tolerance as a virtue is not to be found among them.
As the German church historian, Johann J. Ignaz von Döllinger wrote:
"The Apostles knew no tolerance, no leniency towards heresies. Paul inflicted formal excommunication on Hymenæus and Alexander. And such an expulsion from the Church was always to be inflicted. The Apostles considered false doctrine destructive as a wicked example. With weighty emphasis Paul declares (Gal., i., 8): ‘But though we or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.’ Even the gentle John forbids the community to offer hospitality to heretics coming to it, or even to salute them."
Among Bishop Carroll’s many efforts to accommodate Catholicism to the American “spirit,” something akin to putting a square peg in a round hole, was his petition to the Holy See for certain dispensations from the canonical norm including the use of the vernacular in public worship rather than traditional Latin.
None other than one of Carroll's Americanist successors, John Cardinal Gibbons, confirmed Mrs. Hertz's analysis of Carroll's deep admiration of the principles of the American founding, including separation of Church and State. A quotation contained in James Cardinal Gibbons, A Retrospective of Fifty Years, which is cited in Christ in the Voting Booth, is very revealing:
The dominant idea in the mind of Bishop Carroll, who was as great a statesman as he was a churchman, an idea that has remained the inspiration of the Church, and has dictated all her policy in the last century. . . . was absolute loyalty to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution of the United States. . . . Bishop Carroll did not wish to see the Church vegetate as delicate as a delicate exotic plant. He wished it to become a sturdy tree, deep rooted in the soil, to grow with and bloom with the development of the country, inured to its climate, braving its storms, invigorated by them, and yielding abundantly the fruits of sanctification. His aim was that the clergy and the people should be so thoroughly identified with the land in which their lot is cast; that they should study its laws and political constitution, and be in harmony with its spirit. (Gibbons, pp. 248-249)
In harmony in the spirit of the separation of Church and State. In harmony with the spirit of pluralism. In harmony with the spirit of the belief that it was not necessary to convert the nation to the true Faith so that it became confessionally Catholic. No, Mrs. Hertz or other anti-Americanists, including me, are not engaged in "special pleading" (tailoring the facts to fit preconceived conclusions). Cardinal Gibbons's own words prove the validity of the claim that the Americanist bishops did indeed want to foster an American Catholic Church, something that Pope Leo XIII himself noted in Testem Benevolentiae, January 22, 1899:
But if [Americanism] is to be used not only to signify, but even to commend the above doctrines, there can be no doubt but that our Venerable Brethren the bishops of the America would be the first to repudiate and condemn it, as being especially unjust to them and to the entire nation as well. For it [Americanism] raises the suspicion that there are some among you who conceive of and desire a church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world.
Mrs. Engel provides a very good summary of the battles between the Americanist bishops and the anti-Americanist bishops. The open opposition of the Americanist bishops to papal documents, such as Pope Gregory XVI's Mirari Vos, 1832, condemning liberalism in all of its forms, including the separation of the Church and State, was quite blunt. Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, and Bishop John Hughes of the Diocese of New York, claimed that Mirari Vos did not apply to the United States. In like manner, Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors, 1864, was openly opposed by several American bishops, including Archbishop Martin John Spalding, the Archbishop of Baltimore (and a relative of the equally rabid Americanist, Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria, whose days ended in disgrace), who, anticipating Joseph Ratzinger's own opposition to the Syllabus a century later, said that it did not apply to the United States.
Mrs. Engel's narrative on this matter shows the parallel between the spirit of Americanism in the Nineteenth Century and conciliarism in our own day:
Shortly after the publication of the Syllabus, that was 12 years in the making, Archbishop Spalding issued a Pastoral Letter in which he claimed that Pius IX’s Syllabus did not apply to the United States under its free Constitution, but to a form of European “false liberalism” of “radicals” and hence there were no incompatibilities between the Syllabus and the American way.
Spalding said he believed that the Founding Fathers, America’s own aristocracy, acted correctly when they adopted the First Amendment to the Constitution separating Church and State and that such a policy was not contrary to Catholic principles. He asserted that the American Revolution had been inaugurated in the name of God, and went on to explain that “we can, indeed, form an idea of a government more or less free when society is virtuous, moral, and religious” without insisting that it necessarily embrace the true religion, in other words, a nation can be indifferent to Christ the King and still reap the benefits of a graceless morality. Spalding sent a copy of his pastoral to Rome and requested a clarification, but reportedly received neither a clarification nor a rebuke for his widely disseminated statement.
Spalding was joined in his opinion that the Syllabus didn’t mean what it plainly stated by Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley of Newark, an Episcopalian convert and nephew of (Mother) Elizabeth Bayley Seton founder of the Sisters of Charity. Consistent with the new “party line” of the bishops with Americanist tendencies, Bishop Bayley suggested that to take the papal bull literally was to “misinterpret” it!
Unfortunately, wishful thinking never changes reality, and the unpalatable reality for the opponents of the Syllabus was that the papal bull was a universally promulgated document binding on all Catholics throughout the world, bishops included, and that the separation of Church from State and State from Church was explicitly condemned without exception by Pius IX in proposition 55 of the Syllabus. Indeed the Syllabus was exactly what the Church’s enemies said it was - a blanket condemnation and anathematization of religious liberty, civil supremacy, and modern culture.
Separation of Church and State not contrary to Catholic principles? Pope Leo XIII made sure that the Americanist bishops understood that the American Constitution's separation of Church and State was indeed opposed to Catholic teaching, something he made abundantly clear in a passage from Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1894, that is curiously admitted by reflexive Catholic defenders of the American way:
"For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority."
Pope Saint Pius X reiterated this in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, commenting on the chief goals of the Modernists in the secular realm:
But it is not only within her own household that the Church must come to terms. Besides her relations with those within, she has others with those who are outside. The Church does not occupy the world all by herself; there are other societies in the world., with which she must necessarily have dealings and contact. The rights and duties of the Church towards civil societies must, therefore, be determined, and determined, of course, by her own nature, that, to wit, which the Modernists have already described to us. The rules to be applied in this matter are clearly those that have been laid down for science and faith, though in the latter case the question turned upon the object, while in the present case we have one of ends. In the same way, then, as faith and science are alien to each other by reason of the diversity of their objects, Church and State are strangers by reason of the diversity of their ends, that of the Church being spiritual while that of the State is temporal. Formerly it was possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual and to speak of some questions as mixed, conceding to the Church the position of queen and mistress in all such, because the Church was then regarded as having been instituted immediately by God as the author of the supernatural order. But this doctrine is today repudiated alike by philosophers and historians. The state must, therefore, be separated from the Church, and the Catholic from the citizen. Every Catholic, from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed to its wishes, its counsels, its orders -- nay, even in spite of its rebukes. For the Church to trace out and prescribe for the citizen any line of action, on any pretext whatsoever, is to be guilty of an abuse of authority, against which one is bound to protest with all one's might. Venerable Brethren, the principles from which these doctrines spring have been solemnly condemned by Our predecessor, Pius VI, in his Apostolic Constitution Auctorem fidei.
How can any traditional Catholic, including men ordained to the priesthood for the Society of Saint Pius X, fail to recognize that the sainted pontiff whose feast day is this coming Sunday condemned the very foundation of the American constitutional regime? Why be opposed to conciliarism at all if one embraces its very Americanist roots? Mrs. Engel, therefore, does Catholics a great service by providing the factual evidence concerning Americanism's anticipation of the errors that have infected so many Catholics, including so many traditional Catholics, as a result of the ethos of conciliarism in the past forty years.
Praising the Work of Revolutionaries and Consorting with the Enemies of Our Lord and His Holy Church
Mrs. Engel pointed out that one of the chief Americanists, Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, Minnesota, a man who once praised public schooling in an address to the National Education Association, provided an unabashed panegyric to the joys of the American way that have so devastate Catholics in this country--and which were foisted upon Catholics in Cuba and Puerto Rico and The Philippines following the Spanish-American War in 1898. Lost on the defenders of Americanism in our own day is this reality: the full might of the United States of America was used to conquer Catholic lands and to send into those lands Protestant "missionaries" and Masons, both of whom proceeded to take souls out of the Catholic Church. Ah, yes, the American way.
Here is the context Mrs. Engel gave for Ireland's elegy to the American way, delivered at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884:
With 14 archbishops and 61 bishops in attendance at the Third Plenary Council, Archbishop Ireland delivered a stunning opening address on the virtues of Americanism:
"Republic of America, receive from me the tribute of my love and of my loyalty. I am proud to do thee homage, and I pray from my heart that thy glory never be dimmed. Esto perpetua!
"Thou bearest in thy hands the brightest hopes of the human race. God’s mission to thee is to show to nations that man is capable of the highest liberty. Oh! Be ever free and prosperous that liberty triumph over the earth from the rising to the setting sun. Esto perpetua!
"Believe me, no hearts love thee more ardently than Catholic hearts …no tongues speak more honestly thy praises than Catholic tongues; no hands will be lifted up stronger and more willing to defend, in war and peace, thy laws and institutions than Catholic hands. Esto perpetua!"
Christ the King had been publicly dethroned by Archbishop Ireland with the blessing of Archbishop Gibbons in front of the entire American hierarchy.
Well, if anything, the dethroning of Christ the King was merely ratified by the American bishops. Our Lord's Social Kingship was first overthrown by Martin Luther, followed in rapid order by potentates eager to take advantage of his heresies in order to aggrandize themselves. The Constitution of the United States of America, as I have demonstrated consistently in my writing on this subject in the past decade, makes no room for Christ the King and for Mary our Immaculate Queen.
Mrs. Engel also documents that Cardinal Gibbons was not averse to giving scandal to the faithful by consorting publicly with theosophists and Protestants and Jews, saying not a word about the necessity of their converting to the true Faith to save their immortal souls:
In April 20, 1884 Pope Leo XIII issued Humanum Genus, the last in a long line of papal encyclicals condemning Freemasonry and secret societies that began with Clement XII in 1738 and continued under Benedict XIV, Pius VII, Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI and Pius IX.
Despite this clear teaching of the Church for almost 150 years, Gibbons promoted the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, a highly secretive and ritualized fraternal lodge that attracted a wide-assortment of Marxists, anarchists, and free thinkers and all around revolutionary and anti-clerical workers. The Knights of Labor was the precursor of the American Federation of Labor that attracted many Catholic workers and became a hotbed of Communism during the 1930s and 40s.
As a young man, Gibbons had become totally absorbed in the preaching and teachings of Father Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Order in the United States and a precursor of Catholic “Pentecostalism.” Father Hecker preached in an “ecumenical” and “nonjudgmental” contemporary idiom, and his sermons on Catholicism were notorious for their novelty and defense of Americanism.
After his ordination, Gibbons also committed himself to ecumenicalism. As Archbishop of Baltimore he repeatedly scandalized the Catholic faithful by preaching from Protestant pulpits, using a Protestant Bible, and intoning Protestant prayers.
On September 11,1893, Cardinal Gibbons gave the opening and closing prayers at the World Parliament of Religions, a pre-Assisi happening held at the Chicago World’s Fair. Gibbons shared the “sacred space” with Theosophist Annie Besant, Swami Vivekananda, and representatives of Judaism Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a gaggle of pagan witches.
One can see that William Cardinal Keeler, the current Archbishop of Baltimore, is simply carrying on the Americanist/Modernist legacy of John Carroll and Martin Spalding and James Gibbons. The groundwork had been established for aping the power of the Federal government itself within the Church: the creation of a national episcopal body that would come to be dominated by Modernist theologians of a decidedly leftist, if not Communist, political bent. This national organization of bishops, first called the National Catholic War Council and then the National Catholic Welfare Council before it was reorganized in 1966 as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference (now called the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), became the principal voice of perverts within the Church in the United States of America.
The Bishops' Bureaucracy and Its Agenda of Modernism
Although, as Mrs. Engel points out in The Rite of Sodomy, the creation of the National Catholic War Council, established to demonstrate the "patriotism" of Catholics in support Woodrow Wilson's unjust involvement of the United States of America in World War I, provided a vehicle whereby unseen, faceless bureaucrats would come to dominate the life of the Catholic Church in this nation, a mirror of what happened in the Federal government of the United States, especially during and after the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (March 4, 1933-April 12, 1945).
Yes, the National Catholic Welfare Council did oppose birth control and took efforts to support family life and to oppose indecency in the motion pictures. Nevertheless, the general thrust of the bishops' bureaucracy, which was unprecedented in the history of the Church, was to support leftist policies of the Federal government. After all, various Americanist bishops of the Nineteenth Century said that Mirari Vos and The Syllabus of Errors did not apply in our "enlightened" land of religious liberty and cultural pluralism and religious indifferentism. Why should the American bishops consider themselves bound by Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno, 1931, which stressed the principle of subsidiarity (as opposed to massive government intervention in peoples' lives) and his Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937, which opposed Communism and forbade the provision of all assistance of whatever kind to governments run by Communists? Isn't the "American Church" an exception to all of this?
Mrs. Engel traced the immediate pre-Vatican II history of the National Catholic Welfare Council:
From the late 1950s until 1965 when the NCWC closed its door to make room for the newly-structured and expanded National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference (NCCB/USCC), the NCWC refocused its attention on domestic issues including the growing dangers of secularism to the family and society and the issue of birth control as a private practice and population control as a tax-subsidized program of government.
Conspicuously absent from the majority of these statements were references directly related to the practice of the Catholic faith, specifically the Mass, the Sacraments, Scripture, vocations, the priesthood, converts, dangers of secret societies including Freemasonry, the missions, Mary, the Mother of God, the Saints, and traditional Catholic devotions such as Forty Hours Devotion and the Rosary.
That the heresy of Americanism was alive and flourishing within the American Church during this “Golden Age of Catholicism,” was evident in the statement “Religion: Our Most Vital Asset” released by the NCWC Board in the name of all the bishops of the United States on November 16, 1952.
It is instructive that the drafters of the statement chose President Abraham Lincoln as the prototype of a religious man that personified our nation’s historic attachment to religion, especially since Lincoln was a deist, subscribed to no creed, and believed in no personal God.
The statement reaffirmed the American hierarchy’s belief in the “necessity” of the separation of Church and State in a pluralistic society – a principle that was the cornerstone of all NCWC policies and programs. However, the document also noted that the Constitution prohibited the federal government from “interfering in any way with any religious institution or with the freedom of the individual in the practice of the religion of his conscientious choice.”
The problem, of course, was that the Leviathan Secular State did not keep its part of the bargain. It was intent on seeking a monopoly in the field of education. It advanced a secular morality apart from religion.
State-sanctioned divorce had increased family disintegration.
And the federal government, beginning with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, had declared itself to be the final arbitrator of sexual morality by using tax-funds to promote and finance domestic and foreign birth control programs and condom distribution in the military.
On November 16, 1958, in a “Statement on the Teaching Mission of the Catholic Church,” the American bishops restated their concerns in these areas of American life.
One year later, they followed up with “Explosion or Backfire,” that outlined the American bishops’ opposition to contraception, abortion and sterilization as methods of family limitation and as means of domestic and foreign population control programs.
In the strongly worded statement the hierarchy said that they were in favor of positive programs of social and economic development, immigration, and increased food production to alleviate demographic imbalances. However, they denounced the movement to “stampede or terrorize the United States into a national or international policy inimical to human dignity. …For the adoption of the morally objectionable means advocated to forestall the so-called ‘population explosion’ may backfire on the human race.”
The bottom line of their 1959 statement, the last of its kind, was that United States Catholics would not support “any public assistance, either at home or abroad, to promote artificial birth prevention, abortion, or sterilization whether through direct aid or by means of international organizations.”
Up until the late 1950s, the NCWC held the line on birth control and population control. However, by the mid-1960s this opposition had been severely eroded as is evidenced by the official attendance of Murder, Inc., (i.e., Planned Parenthood-World Population) at NCWC Family Life functions, and the start of unofficial negotiations on population control issues between the NCWC staff and the anti-people Council on Foreign Relations. Msgr. John Knott, Director of the Family Life Bureau also went on record as endorsing an expanded federally funded program of research in the field of “reproductive physiology.”
This tragic breakdown within the NCWC on family life issues and sexual morality mirrored the breakdown in opposition to birth control and population control among key American prelates including Cardinals Spellman of New York, Cushing of Boston, Meyer of Chicago, Dearden of Detroit and Krol of Philadelphia, each of who made their own private “arrangements” to accommodate State-sponsored birth control programs.
Spellman and Cushing and many other American prelates were greatly influenced on the matter of birth prevention as public policy by John Courtney Murray, SJ, who had become the principle architect of Church-State affairs for the NCWC and who later attended the Second Vatican Council as Cardinal Spellman’s personal peritus where he (Murray) championed the cause of “religious freedom.”
Father Murray publicly attacked the Comstock Law which prohibited the distribution of contraceptives, (thereby preventing Planned Parenthood and Company from opening up birth control centers), saying such laws made “a public crime out of a private sin,” confused “morality with legality,” and were “unenforceable without a police invasion of the bedroom.” Murray’s reasoning eventually paved the way for the “constitutional right to privacy” and the Supreme Court decisions of Griswold v. Conn. (1965) on birth control and the later Roe v. Wade (1973) on abortion.
Another factor in the weakening of the NCWC on the matter of birth control and population control was the pressure from major Catholic institutions of higher learning such as the University of Notre Dame, Catholic University of America and Georgetown University that had received massive infusions of money from the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations and were seduced into promoting Malthusian policies and programs at home and abroad.
It was the ill-fated “Beasley Affair” of 1965 that finally brought the issue of government birth control programs to a head at the NCWC.
Dr. Joseph Beasley of Tulane University in New Orleans, a birth control zealot with international ambitions wanted to start a birth control program for black welfare recipients in the northern counties of Louisiana. He was stymied, however, by State laws prohibiting the distribution of contraceptive information. He also had to contend with the powerful Catholic Church in Louisiana and the explosive charge of “black genocide” by black leaders.
However, much to Beasley’s relief, within weeks, he was able to negotiate a deal with Church officials and New Orleans Family Life officials that would permit him to begin tax-financed birth control services to low-income residents of the state – programs that were almost totally dependent on the abortifacient IUD and the “Pill.”
The negotiations took place at the swank Petroleum Club in Shreveport where Beasley hammered out conditions under which he would conduct his birth control program with Msgr. Marvin Bordelon, who had been authorized by Cardinal John Cody of Chicago to cut the deal for the bishops of the Catholic dioceses of Louisiana. Beasley was not seeking the Church’s blessings for his birth prevention program – just the promise of “non-interference.”
In June 1967, Bordelon left the Louisiana Archdiocese to head the USCC’s new Department of International Affairs where he used his influence to convince the American hierarchy and the U.S. Congress that the concept of national sovereignty was an antiquated idea and a hindrance to world peace. In 1972, Bordelon left the priesthood.
As for Beasley, in less than ten years, he had pyramided his Family Health Foundation (FHF) into a $62 million empire with over 100 federally funded birth control clinics statewide. The FHF received accolades from every imaginable quarter as “the No.1 success story” of the birth control movement, including the praise of National Catholic Family Life Director, Father James T. McHugh.
In 1973, however, a General Accounting Office audit and a lengthy government investigation of the FHF confirmed Beasley’s alarming record of political corruption. In the spring of the following year, federal marshals surrounded the FHF headquarters in New Orleans and the foundation was placed in federal receivership.
Federal charges against Beasley included multiple counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, mail fraud, together with misappropriation of many thousands of dollars of federal “family planning” funds that included illegal payments for liquor bills, private plane junkets, and political campaign contributions. Eugene Wallace, an FHF official who turned states evidence, testified that Beasley had threatened to kill him with a shotgun if he (Wallace) took the stand against him! And while the Anti-Life Establishment deserted Beasley like rats fleeing a sinking ship, volunteer lawyers from “Catholic” Loyola’s New Orleans School of Law handled his appeal.
Thanks to Cardinal Cody, all of the American bishops were dragged into the Beasley quagmire.
All were treated to a double whammy when Beasley joined John D. Rockefeller III, Chairman of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, at a press conference in 1972 where Beasley called for universal, tax-subsidized abortion.
Beasley later acknowledged that his “deal” with Church officials was part of his threefold strategy of getting so-called “family planning” in first, and then following it up with sterilization and abortion.
By the end of the 19th century the American bishops had already lost their first great moral battle in the United States against civil divorce and remarriage.
By the time the Second Vatican Council opened in 1962, the American bishops’ collective resistance to contraception, abortion, sterilization and government-funded population control had significantly weakened. But it was not until the post-Vatican II era with the establishment of canonically-sanctioned episcopal conferences that Catholics witnessed the total capitulation of the American bishops as defenders of Catholic faith and morals to the anti-God, anti-life and anti-family forces of the emerging totalitarian State – the ultimate fruit of Americanism.
The acceleration of the NCCB/USCC, the successor of the NCWC, into a power-base for ecclesiastical revolutionaries is chronicled in Chapter 11 of The Rite of Sodomy. Just a brief review of Mrs. Engel's material will help to illustrate the extent of the problems that existed in its massive bureaucratic corridors in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council:
The two key positions within the newly established NCCB/USCC went to Archbishop John Dearden (later Cardinal) of Detroit, the leader of the powerful liberal wing of the nascent AmChurch, who was elected the NCCB’s first President, and to the newly consecrated Bishop Joseph Bernardin who was selected by Dearden to be the first General Secretary of the USCC.
The young Bernardin was the bright, ambitious protégé of Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta. He was also, to quote Bernardin’s future nemesis, Dominican Father Charles Fiore, “a flaming homosexual.”
Of the two positions, the latter was the most critical since the General Secretary oversaw the day to day operations of the USCC and coordinated the affairs between the NCCB and USCC.
The NCCB/USCC became an ideal haven for many ambitious clerics, including homosexuals like Bernardin, who preferred a career as an administrator/bureaucrat to that of the vocation of parish priest.
Of the ten presidents of the NCCB who served between 1966 and 1998, only three, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop John May of St. Louis and William Cardinal Keeler ever served as pastors, and even these served only for a very brief time. Among the Presidents of the NCCB, three were seminary rectors - John Cardinal Dearden, Archbishop John R. Quinn and Archbishop John R. Roach.
For many career-orientated priests the NCCB/USCC became the stepping stone to power in AmChurch. Among the key NCCB/USCC staffers who were raised to the episcopacy were Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, William Cardinal Baum, Bernard Cardinal Law, Archbishop Francis Hurley, Bishop Raymond Lucker, Bishop William McManus and Bishop James T. McHugh.
Also, the NCCB Standing Committee on the Selection of Bishops prepared an annual list of suitable candidates for the American bishopric that the Holy See could select from.
The Politics of the New Progressivism
Spurred on by its inherited Americanist tendencies and invigorated by the new Progressivism of Vatican II, the NCCB/USCC quickly became the seat of power and the administrative hub for the emerging AmChurch
In the realm of politics, it represented a quantum shift to radical liberalism and a new world-view of the Church and of Society. It rejected the Thomistic social teachings of the past and embraced a new political-theology that held salvation and sin to be a collective rather than a personal reality.
Dearden and Bernardin personally selected their top aides with this new post-Vatican II vision of the Church in mind – priests and laymen who abhorred the theological “rigidity” of Trent and who sought to take an activist role in “updating” the Church along the lines of Gaudium et Spes The Church in the Modern World.
As political historian Michael Warner wrote in Changing Witness - Catholic Bishops and Public Policy, 1917-1994, the leadership of the NCCB/USCC formed an elite corps of liberal bureaucrats inspired by “radical rhetoric” and “pragmatic” secular policies. Their primary goal was directed at the leveling of social equalities rather than the establishment of a “just order,” said Warner.”
The policies and programs of the NCCB/USCC represented a major paradigm shift from those of the old NCWC in all areas of national and international affairs.
Warner noted for example, that in the area of national defense, the NCCB/USCC eroded the just war theory and adopted a consistently pacifist orientation. The NCCB/USCC also lobbied for unilateral arms control with no detectable concern about the Soviet Union’s anti-treaty actions. This paradigm shift was also evident in the USCC’s policy agenda that centered almost exclusively on liberal-Democratic political issues such as “women’s rights,” environmental issues, welfare reform, and universal health coverage. Critics dubbed the USCC, “the Democratic Party at Prayer.”
Mrs. Engel uses the rest of her compelling chapter to demonstrate, in remarkably understated tones, the fact that the NCCB/USCC/USCCB has been part and parcel of the problem of promoting perversion with the life of Catholics in the conciliar era. The history she provides is nothing new to those of us who have followed these issues and have reported on them over the years. However, most Catholics have not followed these matters closely and/or need to be reminded how thoroughly corrupt the official structures of the conciliar church in this country have been for so long. The story of how the Archbishop of Washington in 1987, the late James Cardinal Hickey, rewarded a homosexual priest, Father Michael Peterson, who died of AIDS, with a public celebration of his life at the Cathedral of Saint Matthew, attended by none other than the Papal
