What Is Going On With Our Church ?

 Normally I would be writing about one of the daily readings in this space.  Today, however, the OT reading does not inspire me and the Gospel reading, well, I've said all I can think of on how a prophet is not respected in his hometown and I am very disturbed with the news coming out about our Church and I just have to vent about it. 

When the sex scandal broke our Church took an amazing amount of well-deserved flack.  Now, you are going to have bad eggs in every organization.  But moving a rotten egg from one space in the carton to another does not make it any less rotten. When the sex scandal hit, priests, a small number of them to be sure, were found to be perverted either preferring sex with pre-pubescent boys, these were the smallest class of perverted priests or priests that pursued homosexual relationships with teenage boys and young men.  Either class of priest is reprehensible.  They have sinned gravely against God and His Church and God's people. These men were not fit to be priests and should never have been ordained.  But they were and for some years I would imagine they resisted their fleshly desires until one day it became too much for them to bear and they gave in to the lust in their hearts. They needed to be pruned from the tree as diseased branches.  Instead, their supervisors, our bishops, our and Cardinals moved them to different parishes where they had fresh targets so that they could offend again. Then they covered up their deeds as best that they could.  Hush money was paid, money was taken from the pockets of parishioners in the vain hope that the scandal could be quelched by cash.  As we know, it was not quelched.  Now we have prelates of the Church who have been convicted in open court for covering up this scandal.  And now we find that cancer has spread much farther up the hiarchy than we could imagine.  One of the Church's most powerful Cardinals,  Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been found to have engaged in sexual liaisons with seminarians and is also accused of having contact with a boy of eleven years old, which he says he cannot recollect. (Please Eminence, don't add lies to the list of your crimes.) 

We were to have a commission that was to oversee this issue.  And we did have the commission but it was given no power, no right to review records except those that a diocese under investigation wanted them to see. What a crock of green cheese!  All the while, I,  a layman, because I once or twice a year sing with youngsters as part of the choir have to pass a yearly security check while all the time some members of the magisterium are engaging in their favorite brand of perversion in violation of the commandments and of the vows of celibacy that they voluntarily took when they were ordained. 

The time for this to stop is now.  An independent auditor has to be brought into Vatican City to investigate the principals of the Church.  They must have the power of subpoena and the right to see all records, to ask any person, even the Pontiff, any question, and to receive an answer that binds under the pain of perjury.  We need to make a clean sweep to those that have betrayed Christ, His Church, and His people.  Those that have given in to perverted practices must repent and they must be discharged from their office and where evidence supports it, they must be turned over to the civil authorities and be made to pay for the civil crimes that they have committed.  What about forgiveness?  Forgiveness is there for any sin that is confessed in the confessional.  We only need to confess and promise to try to avoid the sin in the future.  Sacramental confession will save their soul but their commitment to Christ and His Church was never taken seriously by these men. They need to go for both the peace of the Church and for their own peace.  They need to quit hiding under a cassock and Roman collar and address life under life's terms.  If some of them need to do so after time in prison then so be it.  

Pope Francis, you are a good man, but you need to wake up and see what you refuse to see.  You make pronouncements that shake the foundations of faith of the faithful but you do nothing to make the Church a place where faith overcomes sin.  It is as if you wear tinted glasses.  You are Peter, you are the Rock, let your voice be heard in this matter and let your voice make those that have done these things weep and throw them out where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!  

The time for action is now.  Be a leader for your flock for we are becoming like sheep without a shepherd.