Chapter # 9 Honest Criticism of Christianity

[Billy Rojas]

 

 

 

 

Chapter # 9

Honest Criticism of Christianity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catholic Catastrophe

The mess the Catholic Church is now in is the direct product of official policy,

decade after decade, not to take the issue of sodomy seriously. After all, so the

reasoning apparently went  -in tandem with political views in America that

homosexuality isn't all that important and is only a "wedge issue"-  sordid sex

can be ignored with impunity. There are more important things to think about.

We can now see, with painful clarity, just how dysfunctional that approach was.

Billions of dollars in compensation to sex abuse victims later, hundreds of

church closings later, the reputation of the Church in ruins, we now know

how ill-advised its policies really were.

This said, and there is more to add, sex abuse was far from the only kind of corruption

operating within the Catholic Church during the past 40 or 50 years. The rot was

pervasive and deeply entrenched.

One place to start by way of analysis of the troubles of the Church is with a Rod Dreher

article published at The American Conservative website on September 25, 2018,

entitled "Could The Catholic Church Collapse?" Dreher's thesis is that the problems

are just about intractable, they are not about to go away, and it is especially unlikely

under the pontificate of Pope Francis.  But he is hardly the only pope who deserves

blame. It goes all that way back to the early years of John Paul II.

Dreher cited Grady Means at length in the article, a business consultant and someone

who has spent considerable time researching the worsening crisis within the Vatican

and many other places around the world. In as few words as possible, the basic problem

is that the Church "made a classic bureaucratic mistake of losing sight of its mission,

and coming to believe that its purpose is to maintain itself. "  That is, in its higher echelons

Christian faith itself was being abandoned. But this did not stop there; in the course of time

disbelief became increasingly common across the board

In the United States the problem could be shrugged off because of the fact that millions

of illegal immigrants were inside the country, millions more on the way if past trends

continued, and most losses of white Catholics could be offset. But who was kidding whom?

Serious political backlash was responsible for slowing the influx from Latin America,

and then there are the children. They grew up American and, for most, it did not matter

all that much if their last name was Sanchez or Valdez. Half self-identified as white and

looked as white as any Swede or Norwegian you can think of, and almost all were

culturally American.  Like many other Catholics, they, too, were more and more

disenchanted with the Church.

However, the basic demographic misunderstanding of the Catholic leadership

was symptomatic of many other kinds of misunderstanding. A moment of crisis

had arrived by some time in the first decade of the 21st century and nobody

comprehended what was, in fact, happening.

"In my view," said Dreher," it [was and] is unreasonable to expect the institutional Church

to understand the moment, because understanding the moment requires most of its bishops

and pastors to regard the world in a way they find deeply disagreeable, and to change

their policies and behavior in kind. They would much, much prefer to manage decline

than to repent." Indeed, "if you are waiting for the institutional leaders to get their act together,

you are going to go down with them."

Its that bad.

As Grady Means also said, in comments made before the worst of the mess had entered

the public domain:

"The important point is that the corruption appears to be systemic and may go far beyond

sexual abuse. Where there is this much smoke, there is often hellfire. It is hard to believe

that the corrupt culture of cynicism, arrogance, and lack of leadership and judgment

was limited to sexual abuse. It would be a miracle if a secretive and tightly controlled

organization with a $170 billion operating budget did not have other hidden scandals."

As Dreher commented while wondering how far things could go:

"Much depends on the feeding-frenzy behavior of the media. If reporters smell blood

in the water    — that is, signs that the same kind of corruption that caused the sex abuse

scandal plays out criminally in other areas —   there is a good chance that

they will pounce on them."

So far, the worst has not happened, but that is not saying very much. The "next worse"

is bad enough, in fact, it is horrific.

Dreher discussed a scandal in Chicago that dates to 1997, which the media pretty much

let slide. After all, the media, in the Clinton years, had become a wholly owned subsidiary

of homosexual interests. It would take several more years before even the press and

TV news could no longer ignore the terrible truth. But what was to come was prefigured

in vivid detail in 1997. Here is how Dreher reported the story:

"The Church Militant website — which, fair warning, has a reputation for being sensational

— wrote the other day:"

Montalbano was close friends with Cdl. Joseph Bernardin, who presided over

Resurrection parish’s 1991 inaugural Mass, the rainbow flag draped over

the crucifix in the sanctuary. Montalbano was a known homosexual,

holding gay parties in the parish basement. He died an untimely death at age 50,

his body found in his rectory bedroom hooked up to a sex machine.

A parish staff member who was eyewitness to the event spoke with Church Militant

and confirmed the account. After Montalbano failed to respond to knocking on

his bedroom door, staff broke down the door to find Montalbano naked and

still attached to the contraption. The archdiocese covered up the incident,

reporting that Montalbano had died from a “heart attack,” offering him a

priest’s funeral shortly afterward.

"If you find that to be so lurid as to be unbelievable, let me suggest that you have

not spent enough time researching the files of clerical sex scandals. This is entirely

believable. That does not mean that it is true, but let me tell you, you have no idea

how perverse people can be until you have gone through the files of cases like this."

As Dreher continued:

"The main thing that protects the Church from exposure of these non-abuse sex scandals

has been the unwillingness of the media to report on them. Some media may have held back

out of an admirable sense of editorial restraint, while others may have held back because

they don’t want to give aid and comfort to people they regard as homophobes."

To translate this into plain English, the news media protects homosexual colleagues, of which,

since the New York Times opened its doors to degenerates starting in 1993,  there now are many.

Hence the best explanation seems to be that journalists are loathe to even report news about

homosexual scandals and will only do so when the situation is so bad and so obvious

that there is no choice.

Unfortunately, Catholic officialdom shares some of the same attitude with journalists.

Dreher pointed this out and this fact was confirmed in a July 29, 2011 story published

by Catholic World News entitled:  "Report claims wide homosexual network

in Miami archdiocese."

Here is the text of the Catholic news story:

"An extensive homosexual network within the Archdiocese of Miami, Florida, has been

exposed by a New York-based magazine that ordinarily specializes in gossip about celebrities.

Gawker bases its report on a detailed dossier that was compiled by a loyal Catholic group,

Christifidelis, reporting a widespread and longstanding pattern of homosexual conduct

among Miami archdiocesan leaders, including former Archbishop John Favalora.

Christifidelis had compiled the information quietly, and intended to show the evidence

only to Vatican officials; but Gawker obtained a copy of the report, entitled Miami Vice,

and has made the entire dossier available online.

The Christifidelis dossier captured the Vatican’s attention, Gawker reports, and led to

the resignation of Archbishop Favalora, who stepped down last year at the age of 74.

He was replaced by Archbishop Thomas Wenski—who was, according to Gawker,

sent by the Vatican to uproot the homosexual culture in the Miami clergy.

The report from Miami provides accounts of homosexual activity at the archdiocesan

seminary and among leading priests of the archdiocese. This activity was condoned,

if not actively encouraged, by archdiocesan officials........"

We now know that there are other nests of homosexuals within the Catholic church,

with the situation in Pennsylvania only the most recent and most spectacular.

Said Dreher: "I believe...that the most dangerous story," speaking of the Church itself,

is the "sexual corruption of the clergy." And things keep on getting worse. "The point is,

the Catholic faithful should prepare for many more stories like the ones they’ve been

[already] hit with.....The rot is being exposed, and will continue to be exposed."

The argument to make is that there is a moral lesson in all of this, namely, that as soon

as an organization   -any organization-   opens its doors to sodomites, what happens next

is that the institution becomes infected with homosexual values and undermined by

homosexuals relentlessly promoting their self interest. You would have to really be

stupid to expect some other outcome.

Let me repeat this in boldface so that there is no misunderstanding:

As soon as an organization   -any organization-   opens its doors to sodomites,

what happens next is that the institution becomes infected with homosexual values

and undermined by homosexuals relentlessly promoting their self interest.

The viewpoint of libertarians on the Right and Cultural Marxists on the Left,

in American terms the leadership of the Republican Party and the leadership

of the Democratic Party, is totally dysfunctional in dealing with the serious problem

of homosexuality.  This isn't a question of individual freedom, it isn't a question

of civil rights, and from a religious perspective it isn't a question of a presumed

need for more prayer.  Those views are all false. It is all about horrible evil

that entrenches itself within the very institutions we all depend upon for our

well being. Yet this gross evil isn't even recognized for what is is, a mental illness,

a totally corrupted social morality, because:

*Libertarians reduce all issues to the ridiculous view that if only everyone

was totally free then all of our problems would be solved;

*Cultural Marxists reduce all issues to the absurd view that if only all groups

were regarded as equal then all of our problems would be solved; or

*Religious believers, in their immaculate ignorance, reduce all issues to the view

that if only everyone would pray a lot, no need to study anything or make yourself

genuinely informed on any issue, all of our problems would be over.

To focus on the problems within the Catholic Church, let us return to Dreher's article.

He cited Grady Means another time to say that "Francis’s method of refusing to address

the charges forthrightly, and instead to rely on thundering about how the devil is

persecuting him, is a losing strategy." More: "The problem is that the pope is a product

of the socialist, revolutionary theology, Latin American wing of the church. He is

under extreme pressure from the sex abuse scandal and internecine warfare with

church conservatives. As a socialist cleric, his tools are controlling communications,

silencing dissent, spending other people’s money and, under pressure, cloaking himself

as “God’s voice on earth.”

Pope Francis "has adopted the favorite strategy of authoritarian socialist leaders when the heat

is turned up: resorting to extreme nationalism and creating external “threats.”

The scandals keep on coming anyway.

Dreher also noted the open charges made by Archbishop Vigano to the effect

that there has been a "cover-up in the Vatican, and that a number of the most senior cardinals

and archbishops around Pope Francis are part of a gay mafia."

What has been the response?

"Francis has refused to speak to these charges. The pope’s defenders are trying to maintain

the fiction that the Vigano allegations have been disproven."

But what can anyone expect?  As Dreher observed:  

"The pope has walled himself off from reality, and will only listen to advisers who

tell him what he wants to hear: that he is the victim of conservative conspirators,

mostly yanquís."

And what can anyone expect given the pope's history? For example, his 2013

role in hushing up a sex scandal in Germany involving Cardinal Gerhard Müller.

The scandals keep on coming and coming.

"If  Francis thinks he can ride this out, he’s dreaming," said Dreher. "As of this writing,

eight US states have announced investigations into the way the Catholic Church

in their jurisdictions have handled claims of priest sex abuse. The devastating effect

of the Pennsylvania revelations is going to be repeated, over and over."

Dreher continued: "The pope and all the pontiff’s men seem to believe that this is

only an American thing. They could not be more wrong." Now there is news

from Argentina "critical of the way Papa Bergoglio handled these matters as

cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires." There is also this:  "The leading Dutch newspaper

NRC Handelsblad revealed that over half the Dutch bishops from the postwar period

until the present either covered up clerical sexual abuse of children, or were involved

in molesting children themselves."  Almost all the cases concern boys being abused.

And the German Catholic Bishops, on their own initiative, have investigated

other boy victims of homosexuals in that country.

What are the results generally from all of these cases?  As Dreher explained, he spoke with

Cardinal Friedrich Wetter in 2014. The cardinal gave this assessment:

“The faith has evaporated.”

Such is the cost of toleration of homosexuals.

Some Catholic leaders do understand what is happening

An example is Bishop Voderholzer, of the diocese of Regensburg, who preached a sermon

that received some attention not long ago. Said the bishop:

“Again and again, we’re sold the idea that there is a universal solution for reversing

these trends and maintaining social relevance. We’re told that we must – I quote –

‘further open up and dismiss conservative dogmas’.

Which is a recipe for complete disaster. And disaster is nearly everywhere now.

Dreher concluded:

"This is not alarmism; this is realism."

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Andrew Brown's article in the September 5, 2018, issue of Foreign Policy,

"The Catholic Church is a Dysfunctional Workplace," takes the story further.

There is a good deal of background to the open letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria

Viganò, for instance, which has the added weight that not only is he a ranking prelate,

he had been the Vatican ambassador in Washington, DC.

Not that the Vigano expose was an iron-clad indictment, it isn't, but it certainly is plausible

and it certainly upsets just about everyone in positions of authority in the Church.

And there is this to consider:

"What gives the Viganò letter its force is the enormous tension in the U.S. Catholic Church

that started under Pope John Paul II and has widened ever since."  Which is to say that the

sainted (literally) John Paul II was guilty of irresponsibility of the lowest order, he was

in charge as the homosexual scandal erupted and yet did just about nothing about it.

Brown's article confirms what many people realized when the scandal broke that

John Paul II had been a failure at least as much as he had done virtuous things

during his pontificate.

As Brown summed it up:

"But John Paul had a very poor record on sexual abuse, as has become apparent

in recent years.  He protected and indeed encouraged the charismatic Mexican priest

Marcial Maciel, who was a brilliant fundraiser. In the United States, he promoted

another charismatic fundraiser and promoter of vocations, “Uncle Ted” McCarrick,

to be a cardinal and archbishop of Washington. We learned from Viganò’s letter that

the then-nuncio had warned Rome against promoting him in 2000 but was overruled.

It now seems that McCarrick was widely known to be gay and believed to be only

intermittently celibate once he had been promoted, any public punishment would

have been an occasion of scandal and a huge blow to the reputation of the pope

who had promoted him."

Hypocrisy is very much part of the equation which is the now decidedly mixed

and blemished reputation of John Paul II. Much  -maybe most- of the blemish

could have been avoided if only the pope had resigned when it first became

clear that his illness was incurable and would increasingly turn him

into a vegetable.  For which he must take 100% of the responsibility.

He put his stubborn ego ahead of the good of his Church.

There really is no excuse for that kind of poor judgment.

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Additional details about the Archbishop Viganò letter can be examined in a

David Gardner and Hannah Roberts article in the Financial Times for August 31, 2018,

entitled: "The civil war in the Catholic Church."

There is a good deal of useful information in this report, for example, the completely

justifiable  -and long overdue-  association of homosexuality with pedophilia, a connection

that has long been known and just as long has been denied by homosexuals and their dupes.

Viganò was forthright about it when no-one else dared tell the truth.

The open letter also was scathing in its denunciation of "a homosexual current

in favour of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality” operating virtually openly

in the Vatican. Hence Viganò's demand that the pope resign. Especially since he has

been protecting the undeserved reputations of 32 ranking Catholic clerics who

just happen to be Leftist-in-outlook allies of Francis."

Some people call all of this a "new descent into the mud" but what else can you call it?

As the David Gardner and Hannah Roberts essay says, Francis "has called for an

inclusive, non-judgemental tolerance towards homosexuality." Which is in the same

category of mortal sin as calling for "non-judgemental tolerance towards homicide."

This is the pope who did say:

“If someone is gay and is looking for the Lord, who am I to judge him?”

So much for the Apostle Paul, so much for Jesus' condemnations of sodomy

in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Matthew, so much for the other 28 passages in

the Bible that unequivocally characterize homosexuality as approximately

the worst possible sin.

Is this pope as ignorant of the condemnations of sodomy in the Bible as his predecessors?

What else is there to think?

____________________________

What is long overdue in the Catholic Church, in all Protestant Churches, in all of

Christianity, is an all-out war against sodomy, not so much a "new reformation,"

although that too, but a New Crusade  -to rid the world of homosexuality forever.

Homosexuals are the enemies of Christians, that is the clinical truth, and

it is time enough to recognize this fact for what it is and act accordingly.

Continued toleration of homosexuality, continued nonsense about "hate the sin,

but love the sinner," guarantees one thing only: The suicide of Christianity.

My sincere belief is that most of today's "Christians" won't do much at all

about any of this. Which is said with profound regret. Which is one reason

why the time has come to reconstruct Christianity from the ground up

and start over again.

For those Christians who do decide to fight the good fight, any help that I might

give them is theirs for the asking. As for myself, it is up to me to do whatever

is open to me to do, to try and organize a New Christianity for the coming era

in human history. Obviously I may fail. But I will actually try.

I will give it my best.

No compromise about any of this, none whatsoever.

Billy Rojas

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