Why do we report so much about Catholic Church developments?
What is a significant factor causing the current weakness in the Church’s moral and spiritual leadership?
Much of the world looks to the Catholic Church, the largest religious denomination in the world, to provide leadership in the struggle to defend innocent human life increasingly endangered by an advancing culture of death. They also look to the Church to provide strong leadership to defend the natural family from a dictatorial and vicious movement to force acceptance of alternative sexual lifestyles.
That is why LifeSiteNews reports so much on Catholic news developments. But there are serious problems that remain unresolved in the Church before it can once again be the force for social and other good that it has been at various times in the past.
Before I continue from here, let me emphasize that there are more good priests being formed and ordained, and courageous and faithful bishops being selected in the Church today. This has been in large part due to the cleaning up of many seminaries and much greater attention being giving in Rome to the appointment of faithful bishops.
Not all the appointments are good for sure, but the batting average of solid bishops being appointed seems to have gone way up. Many dramatic changes for good in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are also worth praising, as are many other trends.
Pope Benedict has taken many actions to decrease the influence of the powerful distorters of the Second Vatican Council who have ravaged and weakened the Church in so many ways.
But serious problems remain. Some have been partially dealt with since the explosion of the sex abuse scandals, but the work needed to eliminate this cancer within the Church is far from finished.
The cancer I’m referring to is the presence within the Church of numerous active homosexuals among the clergy at all levels, within many of the orders and among the laity in many Catholic institutions. It also includes a rebellious acceptance of homosexuality by many non-homosexual Catholics in positions of influence within the Church. This has been, and still is, a much greater problem than the vast majority of Catholics realize.
LifeSiteNews recognized this very difficult to discuss reality long ago. It is ugly, disturbing, and not something that most people want to hear about. It involves tales of infiltration, seduction, rape and other abuses, rampant use of porn, sordid encounters, frequent blackmail, and brutal reprisals against whistle-blower seminarians and priests and intimidation of bishops. It is nasty stuff, not for the faint of heart, and holds the potential to threaten faith.
The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus also wrote about this sordid situation in the Church. He was blunt that homosexuality among the clergy was a grave problem that was in many ways being ignored and not being acted upon as it should. He wrote a series of articles in First Things in 2002 (Part I, Part II, Part III) documenting some of the shameful lack of action by the bishops to acknowledge and rid the Church of this crippling sickness within the clerical ranks. He saw it as the primary cause of the sex abuses.
Several thoroughly documented and lengthy books have been written over the past few decades about the ugly scandal, perhaps one of the worst, if not the worst in Church history, beginning with Fr. Enrique T. Rueda’s . . . The Homosexual Network. These books all include reams of documented evidence . . . interviews, and naming of names and places and specific incidents.
They were written in the main by courageous and faithful Catholics who experienced all their work being deliberately ignored and not appreciated by Church authorities. They were also subjected to vicious personal attacks on their character and credibility, the same as many victims of clergy sex abuse experienced when they told Church authorities about their abusers. These authors suffered for their fidelity.
The books that these whistleblowers wrote are excruciatingly difficult to read. I have a few in my office. I have tried, but I can’t read most of them. I did manage to get through Goodbye, Good Men by Michael Rose. Even for me, most of these books are too disturbing, such as Sacrilege by Leon Podles. And yet, I don’t doubt the validity of much, if not all, that is revealed in them and other documents that have been sent to us by persons determined to publicly expose terrible things that Church authorities have refused to deal with.
LifeSiteNews began a feature page on the clergy sexual abuse scandals in 2002. After two years of continuously adding updates to the pages in the section, we stopped the updating. There was just too much.
To emphasize again, there have been many positive changes in recent years, but as Michael Voris of Church Militant TV relates in a recent broadcast, the influence of networks of homosexual clergy within the Church is still very strong. They are still an obstacle to strengthening of the Church for the great spiritual and cultural war which is building.
Steve Jalsevac is one of the two cofounders of LifeSiteNews. He has been the managing director, as well as a journalist and jack-of-all-trades, for the news service since its founding. A former business owner, Steve first became involved in pro-life activism with Canada’s national pro-life organization, Campaign Life Coalition, in the late 1970s. He has been involved in pro-life work full time since the early 1980s and, along with John-Henry Westen, oversaw the expansion of LifeSiteNews into an international news service incorporated in both the U.S. and Canada with offices and staff in both nations. He and his wife, Bonnie, are the parents of eight children.
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