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Editor’s Note: The point being made in this excellent article, by Gene Gomulka, is not something the readers of FromRome.Info are unfamiliar with, even though the topic of clerical abuse is only peripherally reported on its pages.
But I can add personal testimony to his argument. In minor Seminary, with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, back in 1987, the Cardinal Bishop of Boston made it quite clear to our superiors that to be ordained a priest, each deacon would be required to do a ministry in a hospital for aids patients, and if we refused to hold hands and hug sodomites we would never be ordained. Father Stravinkas, in 1990, if I remember correctly the year, told me that if I became a diocesan clergy in the United States, I would have to expect that in my first assignment as deacon the pastor would grope me from behind, as I ascended any staircase, and that if I complained, I would never be ordained. While a student at the Angelicum University, here at Rome, back in 2011, one seminarian from an Eastern Diocese in the U.S.A., would follow me to be bathroom and make lewd facial expressions. — So I totally believe the statistics in the above article, which Gene cites, along with his assertion that the problem is much bigger than anyone is willing to admit.
From my personal experience as a Franciscan brother and seminarian, and from my training as a Cultural Anthropologist, I hold that the principal cause of the problem of sodomy among the Catholic Clergy is that all the good straight psychologically normal men who would be inspired by the preaching of the True Catholic Faith were rejected or expelled or driven out, since World War II, and only those willing to go along with Vatican II, that CIA psyop, were allowed to remain and be ordained. — I remain convinced that 75% or more of the men who are in the Sacred Hierarchy and/or priesthood today were never called by God to be our sacred pastors, but are men who joined for base human motives. And that is why I consistently counsel all who seek my counsel to pay little attention to what they preach and take caution with them in what they do.
And the solution to the problem is not only dumping Vatican II completely and thoroughly as any norm for anything, but returning to the true Catholic Faith, which required the clergy and religious to live penitential lives and who preached the four last things, namely, that at an hour we each do not know, there will come Death, Judgment, Heaven or Hell. — Only this kind of religion is going to attract sober chaste men to the priesthood and religious life. What we have, now, instead, are clubs of sodomites, whether the club house looks like a diocesan seminary, a monastery of monks, or the Vatican.
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The Book on the Trinity, every faithful Catholic priest would love as his next present
This is Br. Bugnolo's English Translation, of Saint Bonaventure's encylopedic book of theology on the Trinity: With this book, your priest will always have something intelligent and awesomely inspiring to preach to you about
God the Father, God the Son & God the Holy Spirit!
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The horror of these realities is an isolating ……truth. Small wonder that so many remain trapped in denial .
What to do where to go as denial gives way to demonic reality .
I agree. The fake narrative is the mantra of the apostate so termed “Catholic” Church since V2 .. we were and are being psychologised into modernism, apostasy, and materialism with” emotion” as the weapon of mass spiritual destruction. This was also the weapon of Luther, Henry 8th, and Cranmer etc in the 1500s in England usurping the Catholic Church in that country while St Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, etc fought for Rome and the Papal authority. That contest played out in the newly discovered America in a Constitution that guaranteed the 5 freedoms, one of which was freedom of religion . This Freedom also seems to guarantee the right to be wrong.
Gomulka suggests that this is a problem of clergy celibacy going back 1000 years. Therefore, he implies the Roman Church was wrong and celibacy is too difficult as if no grace occurs. So I don’t know what to think of him.
The Church does not teach that celibacy is a cause of grace, but a discipline which is proper to Sacred Orders, the latter of which is the cause of grace as a Sacrament. The problem some men might have with chastity is simply a personal moral problem, which they have to have the honesty to admit, confront and correct. Yes, there are many even among the clergy, who hold the opinion that clerical celibacy “does not work”, but they have a superficial understanding of the moral life, the spiritual life, and the ascetical life. Christ Jesus shows us the way, in the Gospels, by showing that even He as a man guarded his eyes, ate meagerly, fasted, prayed, etc.. Christ’s virginity and chastity are a tremendous source of grace for all men, even clergy, but they need to ask for this grace if they have lost the graces of chastity which we all receive in Baptism.
However, the Church has never censured the opinion that married men could or should be ordained, since they are ordained in the Byzantine rites, which however also have a place for the ordination of unmarried men, who alone can be monks or Bishops.
Thanks for clarification. I did not mean to imply that celibacy is source of grace. I simply meant God surely helps clergy (or anybody) who strives for chaste life. And I am aware eastern Churches ordain married men. Still if he thinks Church made an error lasting 1000 years and causing or perhaps creating incentive for big part of clergy to commit sin that calls to heaven for vengeance I find it hard to reconcile such fundamental error with Catholic Church being the one true Church. Esp. when EOs never committed such error and Protestants correcting. In this light I find his opinion outrageous and more in line with progressive currents in Church.
IF men promise celibacy and do not observe it, how could it ever be the fault of the Church. However, I think Gene’s argument is that many men will seek to be priests who do not have the grace to keep celibacy. We could suppose that at the First Council of Nicea many Bishops held the same opinion, when they allowed there the ordination of married men.