Catholic Grief and Faithful Shepherds in Death and Exile

2023 began in sorrow with the death of two beloved and faithful Catholic shepherds. It ended in sorrow with the exile of two beloved and faithful Catholic shepherds.

December 27, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” King Henry II (1133-1189) referring to Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who opposed the King’s effort to subject priests to trials under English law instead of Church law. Four of King Henry’s knights took the words as a directive. They murdered Thomas Becket as he offered Mass in the Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170.

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Of the 54 posts published here in 2023, fully half of them were consumed with the painful internal affairs of the Catholic Church — affairs in which both priests and faithful Catholics always seem to come out on the losing end of things. My second post of 2023 was “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

Its title speaks for itself. The results of CUA’s broad study demonstrated a huge chasm between the perspective of bishops and that of priests in the trenches. The consensus among priests was that their bishops are largely oblivious and unresponsive to the pressures and challenges of their ministry. The consensus among bishops was the opposite, that they are right on top of things and are supportive of their priests in challenging times.

Perhaps the most glaring result of the study was the perception among priests that they can be “canceled” by their bishops for any reason or no reason at all. It is a grave irony, as we will explore later in this post, that the year began with an in-depth review of this study and ended with the removal of a faithful bishop from his ministry with no clear canonical crime or reason other than his fidelity.

Many Catholic laity also spent much of 2023 in a state of high anxiety about their lived experience of Catholic faith. As I began typing this post, I received a letter from a reader who revealed that she and her family have been spiritually enriched from weekly participation in the Traditional Latin Mass. “Please pray that this is not taken from us,” she pleaded. It gripped my heart to realize that the Catholic version of “cancel culture” is a source of torment for traditional Catholics.

This year began as the previous year ended — with breaking news of the December 31, 2022 death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. His longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, revealed that Benedict was alarmed and saddened by the new restrictions placed by decree on any celebration of the Latin Mass, a practice that Benedict himself had restored to the faithful by Motu Proprio, the same means by which Pope Francis restricted it. The “optics,” as politicians often say, were terrible.

Much of the last year of Benedict’s Earthly life was spent fending off the exploitation and unjust smearing of his good name while the liberal secular news media feasted on the spoils. Much of the mud thrown at him seemed to emanate from the heart of the German synodal path. I wrote of this story and its fallout in 2022 in “Benedict XVI Faces the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.”

The matter at hand was the elderly Benedict’s failure to instantly recall accurately, and without consulting notes, a meeting he attended forty years earlier in which an accused priest was discussed. Benedict was thus accused of obfuscating, minimizing, and covering up the truth. The real agenda, according to Archbishop Gänswein, was to undermine Benedict’s reputation as a bulwark of Catholic Truth and orthodoxy, and to drive a wedge between faithful Catholics and his papacy. I addressed this again in early 2023 in “Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell.”

George Cardinal Pell v. Vatican Corruption

Just ten days after the death of Benedict XVI, Cardinal George Pell died during routine surgery in a Rome hospital on January 10, 2023. Between 2020 and 2023, I wrote twelve posts about the plight of Cardinal Pell. I wrote them perhaps because I can most identify with all that he endured from explosive accusations and charges, a trial by media, exploitation by enemies of the Church from without and within, false imprisonment, and suspected corruption from both secular and ecclesiastical sources.

Among my posts about Cardinal Pell in 2023, one of them, the last one, drew a huge readership from around the globe. It was “Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod.”

In the trials of my own life, I have not yet been able to attain the reversal of injustice that ultimately set Cardinal Pell free, but only because U.S. courts function with a different standard than Australia’s courts. In the U.S., finality in a case is given more weight than other considerations and it is difficult to overcome. When I started this post, I found a letter written to me by Cardinal Pell in Rome after his exhoneration. He wrote that I had been on his mind since his release from prison. He spoke of his plan to raise my case during various meetings in and around Rome, but he never got that chance.

While Cardinal Pell was in prison, I wrote an article about something I had researched heavily. The article is entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Well, it turned out that he was. My article was sent to him in prison, and it became an entry in his celebrated Prison Journal, which was published after his release. He wrote the entry in his prison cell after reading my post.

Four of my dozen posts about the injustices that befell Cardinal Pell were written in 2023. One of them became recommended reading by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It tied together, though unintentionally, several stories that are now prominent in the news. That post was “Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell.”

Readers may have seen recent news of the trial and conviction of Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu charged with embezzlement in a Vatican Court. Vatican magistrates alleged that Becciu had embezzled more than $100,000 through a non-profit group run by his brother. Cardinal Becciu has been on trial since 2020 and was the first cardinal in history to face trial in the Vatican criminal court. On December 13, 2023, just a few days before the verdict of guilty, The Wall Street Journal’s Vatican correspondent, Francis X. Rocca, ran an extended story analyzing the case in “A Cardinal Once Seen as Future Pope Now Faces Prison.” Here is an excerpt:

“The Secretariat of State managed around $700 million in financial assets, including the investment that later engulfed Becciu and other Vatican officials in scandal.... Around that time, Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm. Pell considered Becciu his main opponent in the secretariat. Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes. The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was canceled.... Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died this year.”

In an October 15 commentary on this account in The Wall Street Journal, I added some further context to this story:

“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of Pope Francis to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms after [the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances. Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court. This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison. There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances and these false charges in Australia. Pell himself suspected this.”

While researching this, I discovered yet another similarity between the Pell case and my own. In both of our legal matters, police misconduct and government corruption played a substantial role. It is a little known fact in the Cardinal Pell case that a 2014 email reveals an exchange between a media assistant in the Victoria, Australia Police Department and the Deputy Commissioner of Police suggesting that promoting these charges in the media could deflect from public exposure of a burgeoning scandal within the Police Department.

Bishop Joseph Strickland and Raymond Cardinal Burke

Then, seemingly dwarfing all of the above in shock value, Pope Francis swiftly and mysteriously removed Bishop Joseph Strickland from his role as shepherd of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas in November 2023. Then, in rapid succession he ordered Cardinal Raymond Burke to vacate his Vatican apartment and reportedly left this faithful shepherd without income or position. Lots of ink has been spilled over both stories, especially in the United States. I covered the Bishop Strickland story a week ago in the first segment of “Christmas for Those Bowed Down by the Fatigue of this World,” my Christmas post this year.

Both stories have been heavily covered by so many Catholic writers and commentators that there is nothing left for me to add except sorrow. These are faithful shepherds. Perhaps in time, the hidden truth of both matters will emerge. Absent that, I am sad to write, the buck stops only at the top.

In a stunning article in the January 2024 edition of Newsmax magazine (Pope Pushes Radical Agenda that Shocks Faithful) the National Catholic Register’s Vatican correspondent, Edward Pentin, commented on both stories:

“This past November, Francis removed [Bishop Joseph] Strickland from heading the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, citing his criticism of the Pope’s liberal social agenda and allowing the faithful to partake in the Latin Mass.... But the biggest surprise was his late November targeting of Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of Saint Louis and one of the Vatican’s most influential prelates.

“Burke has been an open critic of Francis for some time, alleging that the Holy Father has been discarding some of the most basic church teachings on communion, sexuality, and marriage. In a private meeting in Rome, Francis reportedly declared that Burke was ‘my enemy’ and he would strip him of his Vatican salary and even his apartment residence in Rome.”

Early in his pontificate, I wrote several posts in defense of Pope Francis. However, what Edward Pentin describes above seems more reminiscent of the court of Caligula than the Vicar of Christ.

Scandal and sorrow were not the only news items dominating this blog in 2023. There were other major events. We took a break from all the bad news of the Church to launch “A Personal Holy Week Retreat at Beyond These Stone Walls” in March. It was composed of most of our past special Holy Week posts and the invitation had many takers. In a Church wandering in the desert mired in political controversy it was encouraging to see this vast lay interest in the events of Holy Week.

In June, documentary film producer Frank X. Panico unveiled his project about my trial and imprisonment in a 45-minute video production, “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam.”

As I marked the beginning of a 30th year in prison on the Feast of Saint Padre Pio in April, our friend Pornchai Moontri moved the world to tears with his deeply moving post that left me and many others speechless. It was, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Not wanting to leave justice dangling, Los Angeles documentary researcher, Claire Best, caused a New Hampshire earthquake with her bombshell post, “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

That led us finally into December with the much needed shining light of the year, “The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope.”

And on that note, this is where I leave you until 2024. Keep the faith. Keep it close to your heart. And may the Lord Bless you and keep you in the New Year ahead.

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. You may like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod

Christ the Good Shepherd

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Shaming Benedict XVI, Catholic Schism, Cardinal Zen Arrested

Benedict XVI and a Threat of Catholic Schism — 92 Bold Bishops — Communist China Arrests Cardinal Zen

May 18, 2022

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This is an unusual post. I set out to revisit a few topics of the last several months that have had new and important developments. I ended up writing three short posts which I invite you to read either all at once or over the next few days. There is a lot going on, not least of which is some breaking news. Our friend, Catholic League President Bill Donohue has just received a Doctorate of Laws Honoris Causa and offered the Commencement Address at Florida’s Ave Maria University School of Law on May 14. This underscores the importance of Religious Liberty which is Dr. Donohue’s field of expertise. If you are not yet a member of the Catholic League, remember that it is on the front lines protecting our Religious Freedom.

Pope Benedict XVI and That German Inquisition

In early March, 2022, I posted “Benedict XVI Faces the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.” Armed with partisan agendas and an ideological bias, a commission of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising where Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger served as Archbishop in 1980 has accused him of deceit and a sexual abuse cover-up.

This was solely because the elderly Pope Emeritus could not readily recall a 1980 meeting in which an accused priest was reportedly discussed. The progressive and partisan news media capitalized on this to embarrass the elderly Benedict whose painful response spoke volumes about his effort to satisfy the pernicious detractors. Here is an excerpt of his response:

“In addition to responding to the questions posed ... this also demanded reading and analyzing almost 8,000 pages of documents ... and almost 2,000 pages of expert opinion. Amid the massive work, an oversight occurred regarding my participation in the chancery meeting of 15 January 1980. This error was not intentionally willed. To me it has proved deeply hurtful that this oversight was used to cast doubt on my truthfulness and even to label me a liar.”

Statement of Pope Emeritus Benedict, 8 February 2022

Even if the allegations had substance (they do not), this decades-old expedition and revisionist history had the tone and substance of a witch hunt demanding answers out of context for the apparent purpose of isolating and demeaning Pope Benedict.

So why did this inquisition stop there? If it dug back just another forty years it would have faced a reckoning with the Germany of 1942 when vast-atrocities visited upon the Children of Yahweh were amply documented and are globally known. With what moral authority does Germany now point a finger of blame at Benedict for being unable to recall a decades-old meeting?

It turns out, however, that the claims were not true. In a follow-up statement, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, longtime personal secretary to Pope Benedict, addressed the political, moral and spiritual depravity of those pointing these fingers of blame. Here is an excerpt of Archbishop Gänswein’s Statement:

“Benedict denied personally mishandling abuse cases ... in a letter compiled by-four lawyers acting on Benedict’s behalf. The three canonists and one attorney said that all four charges made against him were false. Benedict’s enemies nevertheless used the error to launch attacks on the Pope Emeritus with theologians and others accusing him of lying and perjury.”

Pope Benedict added to his response that, “I have come to increasingly appreciate the repugnance and fear that Christ felt on the Mount of Olives when he saw all the dreadful things that he would have to endure inwardly.”

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Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas

A Push-Back from 92 Bold Bishops

In this shameful debacle, Benedict was the only one talking about Christ. None of these accusers ever even mention God, or Jesus, or fidelity to the Church as they prop up their own progressive agenda.

It did not take long for the true agenda to be unmasked. In the same week as this condemnation of Benedict, a meeting of Germany’s “Synodal Path” declared its support for same-sex unions, sweeping revisions in Church teaching on homosexuality and priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, lay involvement in the selection of bishops, and other signs of a post-Catholic “woke” agenda.

After I first wrote about this story in March, 2022, several Catholic clergy from Germany shared my post with other German clergy and on social media. I had already been banned from Facebook for another post about events in Germany entitled, “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

Some of the German clergy bravely disseminated that post as well. On April 11, 2022, a group of 92 bold bishops from the United States, Canada, and around the world signed “A Fraternal Open Letter to Our Brother Bishops in Germany.” I recommend reading the letter. Here is an important excerpt:

“Events in Germany compel us to express our growing concern about the nature of the entire German Synodal Path process and the content of its various documents ... The urgency of our joint remarks is rooted in Romans 12 and especially St. Paul’s caution: ‘Do not be conformed to this world.’ And their seriousness flows from the confusion that the Synodal Path has already caused and continues to cause, and the potential for schism in the life of the Church that will inevitably result.”

The letter briefly lays out seven areas of specific concern. In his weekly podcast carried by LifeSiteNews, Tyler, Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland explained why he was one of the bishops to sign that letter:

“It should be every bishop, in my opinion, and it’s because we are being bishops. Bishops are to guard the deposit of faith. It’s a promise we made. And frankly, the Synodal Path of Germany is doing the opposite. It is eroding the deposit of faith, saying, ‘It’s all up for grabs.’”

It is encouraging that 92 brave and faithful bishops signed that open letter. Some of our readers have penned letters to their own bishops asking for a reason why they did not sign the letter. To date, none have reported receiving any reply.

From my perspective, the bishops of Germany — and too many in the United States and other nations — are failing to read and interpret the writing on the wall. The agenda of the bishops of Germany is barely distinguishable from the one being imposed on our culture by “woke” politicians. I wrote of that agenda in “The Woke Have Commenced our Totalitarian Re-Education.”

I would say that it’s all very scary except that voters across the land, in the United States at least, are amassing to trounce that trend and vote its political proponents out of office. One of the demands of the German bishops is more lay involvement in the selection of bishops. If recent polls are any predictor, the bishops of Germany should be careful what they ask for.

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The Chinese Communist Imprisonment of Joseph Cardinal Zen

Having suppressed pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party arrested 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen for loyalty to his faith even when Rome did not reciprocate.

As an unjustly imprisoned Catholic priest, I simply could not let this story go. Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, has been arrested on a charge of conspiracy to engage with foreign powers. To date, Pope Francis has said nothing in support of him other than a vague statement of “concern” and “monitoring the situation.” The rest of the Roman Curia is also keeping its distance. Cardinal Zen was released on bail pending a one-sided trial on the charges. Based solely on the fact that he is a faithful Catholic priest and prelate, he is widely expected to be easily convicted and imprisoned for life. He is facing martyrdom.

In early 2020 I published at my blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, “Catholics, Communist China, and Hope for Hong Kong,” by my friend, James W. Harris. James is a former resident of China where he taught English at the Hua Mao Foreign Language School. His post is a well written eye-opener from someone with firsthand experience of life as a Catholic under a repressive Communist regime.

In 2018, as that post describes, the Vatican signed a concordat with the Chinese Communist Government. The terms of the agreement are still not made public, but the most well known concession hands over the selection of Catholic bishops to the Communist regime instead of the Holy See. Bishops are thus chosen from the state sanctioned church under the authority of Beijing instead of the underground Church that remains loyal to Rome even when Rome has not remained loyal to it.

After the James Harris post was published, much of what it predicted would happen did happen. Once the Vatican concessions were in place, the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China launched a wave of suppression including disappearances of priests, destruction of churches, and forced removal of crosses and other Catholic symbols.

In follow-up comments on social media regarding that post, I wrote (with the help of third parties, of course) about Beijing’s newest demand. Beginning in March 2020, Catholics in China must profess that ultimate authority rests not with God or the Church, but with the Chinese Communist Party.

The Vatican-China deal stands in stark contrast to the papacy of Saint John Paul II who boldly confronted communism in Western Europe. He is widely believed today to have been an essential force in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sticking my own neck out perhaps a bit too far, I can only conclude that the concordat signed by Pope Francis is reminiscent of the Chief Priest's response to Pilate (John 19:15), “We have no king but Xi Jinping.”

In the February 18, 2020 edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of my favorite columnists, William McGurn, wrote “The Vatican’s Unholy China Deal.” You may not be able to view it without a subscription so I will mention its major points. It begins with a pointed statement of Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong from his September 2019 appeal to the world’s 223 cardinals:

“The Catholic Church in China is being murdered while the Vatican stands idly by.”

In 2020 Cardinal Zen was invited to Washington, DC where he was presented with the Chinese Democracy Champion Prize. It was much deserved. Bill McGurn had an opportunity to interview him and asked about his “murder” remark. Cardinal Zen’s reply was that of a courageous man, a prelate worthy of the Church’s history of pushing back against oppression and violations of human rights:

“You can never compromise with a totalitarian regime because they want everything. Would you have encouraged St. Joseph to have negotiated with Herod?”

WSJ columnist Bill McGurn points out that the Vatican-China agreement was exclusively the work of European bureaucrats to the almost complete exclusion of Chinese Catholics — including Cardinal Zen. He likened it to the 1933 concordat that Germany struck with the Vatican when Hitler came to power. Both Cardinal Zen and Bill McGurn omit any mention that the groundwork for this deal was laid for the Vatican by then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sent by Pope Francis as an emissary to China.

In 1933, Church authorities questioned the Third Reich’s post-concordat abuses. In response, the Nazi Party launched a deadly campaign of persecution. I wrote of this in “Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz.” Under Xi Jinping in China, increased persecution also followed the current agreement. The Vatican may be trying to protect lives by being silent, but the True Church of China will not be silent — as evident in the courage of Cardinal Zen. For him, the price extracted from all this has been high: “the pope’s silence.” But Bill McGurn is more pointed:

“Yet the leader of the world’s largest religious denomination — a pope who rails against everything from air conditioning to Donald Trump — utters not a peep of protest against what is arguably the world’s largest persecutor of religion.”

I have a close friend in Shanghai, China, a city of 25 million that has recently been subjected to a severe and extended lockdown. My friend was well on his way to a Catholic conversion. After several years of ongoing contact in our friendship, my calls to him are now diverted to some unknown third party. My letters never arrive. My publications are blocked. My friend had never even heard of the 1989 slaughter of pro-Democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, nor had he ever seen the famous photo of the protester known only as “Tank Man.”

The much feared pro-democracy protests that spread from Hong Kong to mainland China have now completely stopped. The once international city of Hong Kong has been brought to heel. The Catholic Church has been subjugated to the will of the Chinese Communist Party. The arrest and persecution of his Eminence Joseph Cardinal Zen is but the latest trophy for Communism resurgence in the world.

Let us pray for Cardinal Zen. Saint Pope John Paul II, please pray for the rest of us.

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ADDENDUM MAY 19, 2022:

NEWS ALERT ON CARDINAL ZEN FROM LIFESITENEWS

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Another note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this collection of short takes from Beyond These Stone Walls. Remember that our Special Events page remains active until the Solemnity of Pentecost. You may also like these related posts:

Benedict XVI Faces the Cruelty of a German Inquisition

The “Woke” Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education

Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition

Jesus was mocked by the devil in the Gospel of Luke (4:1-13). Before his death, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was mocked by a commission of progressive German Catholics.

March 2, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

“Aaron shall lay his hands upon the goat and confer upon it all the sins of the people ... The scapegoat shall bear their iniquities upon him into the wilderness ... to Azazel.”

— Leviticus 10:10,22

In the Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent (Luke 4:1-13), Jesus is tested by a devil in the desert. I wrote of the significance of this Gospel passage on Ash Wednesday. That important post is “To Azazel: The Fate of a Church That Wanders in the Desert.” Ironically, Pope Benedict XVI wrote of this same Gospel passage in his acclaimed book Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 2007). His analysis of the demonic testing of Jesus seems now to be an omen of Catholic division:

“[The Devil’s] temptations of Jesus ... address the question as to what really matters in human life. At the heart of all temptation is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material while setting God aside is an illusion.”

— Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 28

In the Gospel account from St. Luke above, Jesus thwarts the devil at every turn. We cannot thwart the devil at all without Him. In the end, the devil departs to wait for a more “opportune time.” For some of the Catholic leadership of Germany, it seems that opportune time is now. Fifteen years after writing the above reflection on the testing of Jesus in the desert, Pope Emeritus Benedict became a target of the very forces he cautioned the Church against.

Built entirely on a political agenda with obvious bias and ideological goals, a commission of lawyers launched by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising where Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger served as Archbishop 43 years ago accused him of dishonesty and a cover-up. It was because he could not immediately recall being present at a meeting 42 years earlier in which a specific priest was reportedly discussed. The equally progressive and partisan news media capitalized on this to embarrass the elderly Benedict whose painful response spoke volumes about his effort to satisfy his pernicious detractors. Here is an excerpt of Benedict’s response:

“In addition to responding to the questions posed ... this also demanded reading and analyzing almost 8,000 pages of documents ... and almost 2,000 pages of expert opinion. Amid the massive work, an oversight occurred regarding my participation in the chancery meeting of 15 January 1980. This error was not intentionally willed ... To me it has proved deeply hurtful that this oversight was used to cast doubt on my truthfulness and even to label me a liar.”

— Excerpt of Statement of Benedict XVI, 8 February 2022

The Moral Authority of a German Inquisition

In another post, “Stones for Pope Benedict and the Rusty Wheels of Justice,” I raised what I know to be an important historical context in defense of Benedict. Even if the allegations had substance, which they do not, I can only conclude that this archeological expedition was one-sided and deeply unjust. In my post linked above, I raised a pair of highly relevant but controversial questions. Germany’s historical inquiry into the protection of minors, which had taken on the tone and substance of a witch hunt, ventured back more than forty years to demand answers entirely out of context for the sole apparent purpose of isolating and demeaning Pope Benedict.

This is by no means the first time that Germany has launched such a destructive moral panic. I wrote of a very similar inquisition in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.” Why should this inquisition go back only to 1980? Go back just another forty years and you will find yourself in the Germany of 1940 when the vast atrocities visited upon the Children of Yahweh were amply documented and globally known. With what moral authority did Germany point a finger of blame at Joseph Ratzinger for being unable to recall a 42-year-old meeting?

It turned out, however, that the claims were not even true, but they were nonetheless nefarious. Pope Benedict added to his letter quoted above, “I have come to increasingly appreciate the repugnance and fear that Christ felt on the Mount of Olives when he saw all the dreadful things that he would have to endure inwardly.” A follow-up statement from Archbishop Georg Gänswein, longtime personal secretary of Pope Benedict, addressed the political, moral and spiritual depravity of those pointing fingers of blame. Here is an excerpt of Edward Pentin’s blog report, “Archbishop Gänswein: Movement Wants to Destroy Benedict XVI’s Life and Work”:

“Benedict denied personally mishandling abuse cases, each detailed in an appendix to [his] letter compiled by four lawyers acting on Benedict’s behalf. The three canonists and one attorney said that all four charges made against him ... were false. Benedict’s enemies nevertheless used the error to launch attacks on the Pope Emeritus with theologians and others accusing him of lying and perjury.”

— Statement of Archbishop Georg Gänswein

In all of this shameful debacle, Benedict was the only one talking about Jesus. None of these purportedly Catholic accusers ever even mention God, or Jesus, or fidelity to the Church as they prop up their own progressive agenda. It did not take long for the real agenda to become unmasked. These attacks on Benedict coincided with a plenary meeting of Germany’s “Synodal Path” which voted in the same weekend as the condemnation of Benedict to call for same-sex unions and blessings, sweeping revisions of Church teaching on homosexuality and priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, and lay involvement in the nomination and selection of bishops.

Constructing a World by Our Own Lights

In other words, while reviling Benedict, the German Synod demanded a transformation of German Catholicism into the 21st Century Episcopal church which had long since been torn from the Anglican Communion by these same demands. This is exactly what Benedict XVI cautioned against in his citation from Jesus of Nazareth above:

“Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material while setting God aside is an illusion.”

— Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 28

True to form, on February 4, 2022, the German Synod participants voted 163 to 42 to call on Pope Francis to loosen Church rules on priestly celibacy and to permit the ordination of women deacons two years after Francis declined to do either. This is evidence of something that I have witnessed and cautioned against. Elements in and outside the Church use a climate of fear and revilement around the topic of sexual abuse, not to protect the vulnerable, but as a cudgel to force an entirely secular path toward moral relativism.

The synod participants in Germany argued that obligatory celibacy for priests has impacted the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. This blindly ignores the setting in which the crisis emerged, the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s which now impacts all of Western Culture. One of its tentacles has been a push far beyond mere societal acceptance of homosexuality to promote and normalize it as a societal good. This requires a denial of any connection between homosexuality and the sex abuse crisis in the Church.

As a result, the crisis is blamed on sexual repression and the practice of obligatory priestly celibacy. It is a testament to the power of reaction formation that an entire institution would come to prefer the term “pedophile scandal” to “homosexual scandal” even when the facts say otherwise. And the facts do say otherwise. This is not a political statement. It is a factual one, amply documented. I defended this point in “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix.”

In the place where I live, there are over 1,200 men convicted of sexual offenses who must complete a sexual offender program to be considered for parole. In the wider state there are thousands already in the community on parole or as registered criminal sex offenders. Only one of them is a Catholic priest, and he is widely considered to be innocent. The vast majority were married men at the time of their offenses. None were driven to predation by the practice of celibacy, though most strive to practice it now.

The Schismatic Agenda

What is really going on in the German Catholic church is very different from its stated agenda of inclusiveness. Each step in this inquiry is a subtle effort to drag the Church away from the Gospel and into a politically correct arena of moral relativism. The next step in the sexual revolution will tear the Church apart.

I have come to appreciate the candor and spiritual integrity of prison writing from the ranks of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fr. Walter Ciszek, Fr. Alfred Delp, and more recently, Cardinal George Pell. Writing from prison with very limited opportunities for dialog and in-depth research means writing almost entirely from one’s own mind, heart and soul. The Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell has been a goldmine of unfiltered candor and spiritual integrity.

While reading his Prison Journal Volume Two (in which, for full disclosure, my own writing occupies several pages) Cardinal Pell wrote candidly of his concerns for the direction of the Church in Germany. In an entry from his prison cell on August 9, 2019, he wrote of Edith Stein, now known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross who, like St. Maximilian Kolbe, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazi regime of 1940s Germany.

Cardinal Pell wrote that Edith Stein was German by birth, and he asked readers to pray for her intercession for the Catholic Church in Germany. He quoted German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position once held by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger:

“The Catholic Church in Germany is going down. Leaders there are not aware of the real problems. They are self-centered and concerned primarily with sexual morality, celibacy, and women priests. They do not speak about God, Jesus Christ, grace, the Sacraments, faith, hope, or love.”

— Cardinal Gerhard Müller quoted in Prison Journal Vol. II, p. 75

It gets much worse. Later in Prison Journal Volume II, Cardinal Pell wrote of Vatican concerns about the growing possibility of a German Catholic schism over the very issues identified by Cardinal Müller. If such a progressive-driven schism were to occur, it would sweep much of the European Union where Catholic Mass attendance is at its historically lowest point. Cardinal Pell cited a September 17, 2019 Catholic Culture article by Phillip Lawler, “Who Benefits from All This Talk of Schism?”

Lawler argued that the prospect of a schism is remote, but becoming less so. He cited that Pope Francis has spoken calmly about such a prospect saying that he is not frightened by it, something that Lawler found to be frightening in and of itself.

Cardinal Pell added that The New York Times has been writing about the prospect of a German Catholic schism by “the John Paul and Benedict followers in the United States, the Gospel Catholics.” He observed that Lawler’s diagnosis is correct in pointing out that,

“The most aggressive online defenders of Pope Francis realize they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving progressives free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.”

— Prison Journal Vol. II. p. 214-215

In light of this, it comes as no surprise that progressive bishops have pushed Pope Francis into divisive restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass and other suppression of traditional expressions of the faith. These efforts, and the German Catholic steps taken to demean the late Pope Benedict, a stalwart of Catholic orthodoxy, should come as no surprise to faithful Catholics. Embracing and promoting fidelity at this juncture has never been more urgent. Faithful Catholics must never accede to the desired end that German progressives seek.

Handing the Church over to them would leave “Satan at the Last Supper” while Jesus is removed from the room.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this most important post. You may also be interested in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic

To Azazel: The Fate of a Church That Wanders in the Desert

Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light