Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

While some high-profile priests are maligned from both in and beyond the Church, The Catholic University of America published its National Study of Catholic Priests.

“You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?”

— Matthew 7:16

January 11, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In 2005, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was interviewed on the NBC Today show about accusations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests — some sadly true, but some also sadly false. Citing the case against me as an example, he said, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

Catholic priests in the United States have long been under assault from the news media, from activist groups, and at times even from within the Church. As most readers know, I have been the subject of many published articles, but not because I have been accused. It is because I strenuously refute the accusations as false. Much evidence has amassed in support of that. For some reason, this poses a threat to some nefarious agendas built around the sex abuse crisis in the Church.

When accused priests defend themselves in online media, seeding articles with vile comments using fake screen names had long been a tactic of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an organization that sought not so much to support legitimate victims, but to maximize monetary awards and media condemnation. Its representatives terrorized Church officials with media manipulation whenever any accused priest is defended in the court of public opinion.

Despite all that, some standout news media have bravely produced articles and commentary against the tide of public vitriol about accused priests. The Wall Street Journal recently published its fourth such article about the case against me. The most recent was by Boston Attorney Harvey Silverglate entitled “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.” This generated some excellent analysis by David F. Pierre, Jr. moderator of The Media Report. Those and other articles appear in our featured section, The Wall Street Journal.

I have much gratitude for Dorothy Rabinowitz, Harvey Silverglate, Ryan MacDonald, Bill Donohue, and David F. Pierre, Jr. for their valiant efforts to correct the public record. Without their truthful courage, I was at the mercy of nefarious means driven mostly by progressive political agendas and litigious greed. Most recently, however, even some bold Catholic writers have taken up the subject of Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.

The National Study of Catholic Priests

When I was first accused, my bishop and diocese published a press release declaring, without evidence, that I victimized not only my accusers, but the entire Catholic Church. That bishop’s successor later went on record to state his informed belief that I am innocent and should never have been in prison. Then his successor chose only to shun me, and to release my name on a public list of the “credibly” accused. He did this, he stated, for “transparency,” but that transparency has been highly selective.

My own experience leaves me with no trust at all that my bishop could, or would even try, to discern guilt from false witness in defense of me or any accused priest. Trust and distrust as the fallout from the scandal are now central issues in a recently published survey of 10,000 U.S. priests sponsored by The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. I highly recommend reviewing a report on the study results entitled, “The National Study of Catholic Priests: A Time of Crisis.” It was the largest study on the state of the priesthood in fifty years. Here is an overview of its parameters:

“Over the last two decades, the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has significantly eroded the trust between laity and clergy... Since the earliest days of the Dallas Charter there have been concerns that the bishops’ understandable eagerness to crack down on abusive priests was coming at the expense of due process protections for the accused: a de facto policy of ‘guilty until proven innocent.’ These concerns have been exacerbated by an expansion in the scope of the Church’s anti-abuse policies coupled with a perceived double standard in the way allegations against bishops have been handled in comparison to priests.”

Father Roger Landry, a columnist for the National Catholic Register, has an excellent analysis of The Catholic University of America study entitled, “Repairing the Relationship Between Priests and Bishops.”

The findings of the study are based on the responses of the thousands of U.S. priests who participated and submitted completed surveys. Given the difficult period of the last 20 years since the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter was enacted, some of these responses are surprising, and point to the depth of commitment, spiritual life, optimism and resiliency of most priests. Most priests reported a high level of satisfaction in their ministry. A stunning 77% of priests self-reported that they are flourishing in their vocation.

Among the results, however, are some big red flags: 82% of priests report living with a fear of being falsely accused and left with no defense; 45% of priests report that they experience at least one symptom of ministry burnout, while 9% described their level of burnout as severe, and characterized by high levels of stress and emotional and physical exhaustion. Reports of high stress came particularly from younger priests. (I will get back to this later) .

The biggest concern among priests is related to the toll and fallout of the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the sex abuse crisis in the Church. The sense of vulnerability among priests and their trust level for their bishops are the two most significant areas of negative fallout from the crisis.

In his NC Register column linked above, Father Roger Landry points to what I have called a disaster in the relationship between bishops and priests: the drafting and enactment of the 2002 “Dallas Charter” which imposed a draconian standard of “zero tolerance” and one-strike-and-you’re-out in response to any “credible” accusation against a priest. For an analysis of this standard of evidence, see my post, “The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests.”

Father Landry reports that the drafting of these policies in 2002 was done “hurriedly and under enormous pressure from the press, lawsuits and furious faithful.” Priests in the current study actually appreciated the efforts to respond to the crisis openly and with transparency. “But the priests surveyed gave stark testimony to the harms that have come from what the bishops in Dallas left out of balance.”

Guilty for Being Accused

The Vatican and Catholic hierarchy were unfairly maligned throughout publicity on “The Scandal.” At one point, SNAP partnered with the far-left, New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights to bring a crimes-against-humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Some of the false claims against me were employed to shame Pope Benedict on a global scale. The scheme was nothing more than a publicity stunt to embarrass the Church into maximizing financial settlements. Many of its claims, including those against me were exposed as a fraud. Journalist Joann Wypijewski exposed this story in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

Only in the Catholic Church is the highest echelon of governance blamed for the lowest level of misbehavior. Even in his later years, Benedict was demonized by German Catholics and others eager for any reason to blame him for the abuses of the past. Of interest, in the State of New Hampshire where I live more than 900 men between the ages of 20 and 50 have open lawsuits alleging systemic sexual abuse by State agents in the State’s juvenile detention facilities. Not one media outlet, not one victim group, not one of the victims themselves has blamed any of this on any present or former governor. This State carried out a witch-hunt in 2002 when the accused were Catholic priests. It is now confirmed that simultaneous to the witch-hunt was an active cover-up of the malfeasance of State agents.

As stated above, 82% of priests now report that they feel vulnerable to false accusations of sexual abuse that under existing policy will summarily end their ministry without due process. Compounding this fear, many report that they would be treated as guilty and left without support unless they could prove their innocence. Sixty-four percent said they would be left without support or resources to mount a defense, and almost half, 49%, think they would not be supported by their bishop. Father Landry added a sobering understanding of the reality:

“In most dioceses, when a priest is accused, he loses his home, his job, his good name — all within hours. He is removed immediately from his rectory and parish assignment, prevented from public ministry for the length of what is often an inexcusably glacial investigation, and required to dress like a layman. A press release is published in which the priest’s reputation is injured, if not ruined. He needs to exhaust his meager savings or beg and borrow money to hire a lawyer. Most excruciatingly, he has to linger for months or years under suspicion of being a sadistic pervert as well as a hypocrite to the faith for which he has given his life.”

Given the reality that most claims against priests are many years or decades old, establishing clear evidence is difficult if not impossible. So the bishops adopted what they called the “credible” standard. It means only that if a priest and an accuser lived in the same parish or community 20, 30, or 40 years ago, the accusation is “credible” on its face. No one in America but a Catholic priest could lose his livelihood, his reputation, sometimes even his freedom, under such a standard. I exposed one such case in “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”

I am most appreciative to Father Roger Landry and the National Catholic Register for their bold and transparent analysis of what actually happens to an accused priest. By taking all the steps a diocese or bishop imposes above, such a priest is effectually silenced and unable to defend himself at all.

Stress along the fault lines between bishops and priests that these policies have caused is also clear in the survey. There is a wide disparity between how bishops view themselves and how they are viewed by their priests. Seventy-three percent of bishops reported viewing priests as their brothers. Only 28% of priests reported that their bishops treat them that way.

The disconnect revealed itself in several other ways as well: 70% of bishops reported that they are spiritual fathers to their priests while only 28% of priests thought the same. Father Landry reported that the biggest disconnect relates to a priest who is struggling. Ninety-percent of bishops reported that they would be present to and supportive of a struggling priest while only 36% of priests thought that this is true.

The Double Standard

Also evident in both the survey and Father Landry’s analysis of it is the double standard created when bishops failed to hold themselves accountable to the same standards imposed on their priests. In 2002, as the Charter was being debated during the U.S. Bishops Conference at Dallas, Cardinal Avery Dulles published a landmark article in America magazine entitled “The Rights of Accused Priests.”

The article was cheered by priests but largely ignored by bishops. Cardinal Dulles cited a 2000 pastoral initiative of the U.S. bishops entitled “Responsibility and Rehabilitation.” It criticized the U.S. justice system for the establishment of one-size-fits-all norms such as “zero tolerance” and “one strike and you’re out.” Then the same bishops, in a media panic, imposed those same standards on their priests.

But none of it ever applied to accusations against bishops, a reality that Father Landry described as “a double standard that profoundly affected their relationship [with priests].” While deliberating adoption of the Dallas Charter, the bishops removed the word “cleric,” which could have included bishops, and replaced it with “priests and deacons.” Now 51% of priests report that they do not have confidence in their bishop while 70% report a lack of confidence in bishops in general.

In a 2019 apostolic letter, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis addressed some of the disparities with mixed results. Father Landry points out that investigations of bishops, even in allegations of past sexual abuse, “seldom involve the draconian measures experienced by priests.”

I have written of a glaring example in my own diocese. Citing a desire for “transparency,” and with no one pressuring him to do so, my bishop proactively published in 2019 a list of the names and status of 73 priests of this diocese who had been “credibly” accused over fifty years. Most are deceased. Weeks later, a New Hampshire Superior Court judge barred publication of information from a grand jury investigation which was the source for most of the Bishop’s list. Ryan MacDonald wrote of the reasons for that in “Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm On the Priesthood.”

Months after publishing his list, my bishop was himself accused in a civil lawsuit in the Diocese of Rockville Center, New York. He was unjustly caught up in the political fallout of former New york Governor Andrew Cuomo who generated the claims when he signed into law an exemption window in which old time-barred accusations can be brought forward after the statute of limitations had run. I defended my bishop in a widely read post, “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Conservative Priests Face Greater Scrutiny

I mentioned above that I would revisit one finding of this report — that younger priests experience more stress than older priests. A separate research report on Catholic priests by the Austin Institute has documented that younger priests tend to be more conservative and traditional than older priests. That bears out from observations of our readers who find this distinction to be a positive development. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Vatican Correspondent Francis X. Rocca reported on this in “Catholic Ideological Split Widens” (Dec.19, 2022):

“U.S. Catholic bishops elected conservative leaders last month, continuing to resist a push from Pope Francis to put issues such as climate change and poverty on par with the bishops’ declared priority of opposing abortion.”

The bishops appointed by Pope Francis tend to mirror his priorities. His recent elevation of San Diego Archbishop Robert McElroy, a leading liberal among U.S. bishops, to the College of Cardinals is an example. There is thus a growing disparity in liberal vs. conservative views as newly appointed bishops are more liberal while priests newly emerging from U.S. seminaries are more conservative and traditional.

Since the 1980s, successive annual ordinations have grown more conservative. Each successive 10-year grouping in the ordained priesthood supports Church teaching on moral and theological issues more strongly than the one before it. Those ordained after 2010, as a whole, are most conservative. When seminarians and younger priests do not have their views of the Church and Catholic practice affirmed, stress develops and increases. Younger U.S. priests represent a generation disillusioned with ideas of progress and religious pluralism, and the abandonment of the Church’s prolife charism in favor of topics like climate change.

This leaves a widening chasm between Pope Francis, his Episcopal appointments, and younger priests in the United States. The Catholic Project study also reveals that almost 80% of priests ordained before 1980 approve strongly of Pope Francis while only 20% of those ordained after 2010 share that view. Is their priestly interest in respect for tradition a plague upon the Church?

Or is it the whispering of the Holy Spirit?

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This brief essay from American Thinker by Attorney Franklin Friday is perhaps the best commentary on the future Church after the death of Pope Benedict XVI, and not only because I am in it. Please read and share this timely article: No Easy Road for Men of God.

You may also be interested in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm On the Priesthood

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Pope Francis, Fr. Frank Pavone and the End of Roe v. Wade

Catholics were shocked by news that Pope Francis signed a decree dismissing Fr. Frank Pavone from the priesthood just months after the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

January 4, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

As most readers of this post already know, I write as a priest in prison where I have spent the last 29 years in unjust confinement. In more recent years, much evidence has surfaced that I was wrongfully convicted, and that evidence has been repeatedly covered by a secular global media venue, The Wall Street Journal. Because I write for a blog with a global readership, others both here in my prison and beyond have come to see that faith is a better path to true freedom than any other. Priesthood, even in confinement, is meant to be lived in a state of sacrificial fatherhood.

Now I wonder how my stubborn clinging to something under such public assault as Catholic priesthood might be seen in the light of recent revelations about Pope Francis and the ever-growing reality of “cancelled priests” to which he seems to have lent the power of his pen. News of the dismissal from the priesthood of Father Frank Pavone, the most respected, outspoken, and visible prolife priest in North America, cast a good part of the Catholic prolife world back into the land of gloom just before Christmas. That drama continues with lots of finger-pointing.

As I ponder this troubling development, my own finger keeps turning like a compass needle to a possible causal connection. Midway through 2022 I wrote, “After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul.” The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights sent that post to all its thousands of members asking them to read and share it. The U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade cast much of this nation into political turmoil. It generated on the political left waves of threatened reprisals against Catholic churches, prolife Catholics, and the entire prolife movement. Did reprisals come from within the Church as well?

My internal compass cannot help but notice that only five months later, the most visibly prolife Catholic priest in America was removed from the priesthood ostensibly for behaviors that ordinarily would not have resulted in such a penalty. Fr. Pavone and others with internal knowledge of this bombshell have insinuated that activist progressive bishops brought pressure to bear. If this is true, and evidence surfaces to support this claim, it would be a scandal of immense proportions for the prolife cause and for the Church.

There are some that would readily imagine political payback as the true heart of this decision. Others see it as an unjust punishment imposed for reasons more secular and political than ecclesial. In his homily to priests on his apostolic visit to the United States in Philadelphia in 1979, Pope John Paul II articulated the indelible character of the priestly vocation: “It cannot be that God who gave the impulse to say ‘yes’ now wishes to hear ‘no.’”

We are not owed explanations of the Pope’s deliberations so we may never have an adequate explanation of this. But I cannot forget the last words published by Father Richard John Neuhaus about my own situation. The late Father Neuhaus was one of the premier theologians and observers of Catholic culture in the Church in North America. In “A Kafkaesque Tale” in First Things magazine (August-September 2008) he wrote of my imprisonment:

“You may want to pray for Father MacRae and for a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

We must now pray as well for Father Frank Pavone and all who were involved in bringing about his separation from priesthood. The Church must not seem indifferent to justice. The timing of this matter could not have been worse for prolife Catholics who sacrificed much over many years working toward a conscience-driven judicial reversal of Roe v. Wade even as many in the Catholic hierarchy set it aside in favor of other moral priorities such as climate change.

Absent any other explanation for Father Pavone’s dismissal, many are left to conclude something nefarious. There is no shortage of demonic attack on the champions of the Catholic prolife movement. I alluded to this in a paragraph in my recent post, “Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah”:

“Our culture’s turning away from life is also a turning away from God. The fact that many nominally Catholic politicians lend their voices and votes to that turning away is a betrayal of Biblical proportions. In the Story of God and human beings, we have been here before. Planned Parenthood is our culture’s Temple to Baal.”

Double Standards

I have, in the past, expressed concerns about the fervent witness of high-profile outspoken priests like Fr. Frank Pavone and Fr. James Altman. I have written of my belief that their message might be more effective with some toning down of their rhetoric. Some readers reminded me that Jesus Himself did not seem to think so when he drove the money-changers out of the Temple (Mark 11:15). So, to borrow a phrase from Pope Francis himself, “Who am I to judge?”

Still, I have witnessed Father Pavone react to this latest news with an aura of both written and verbal apparent disrespect for Church authority. His anger is suspect, but the absence of any anger would be much more suspect. Would priesthood mean so little to him that being discarded should be met with calm acquiescence?

I recently received a letter from a priest in which he wrote, “I understand that you have a problem with Pope Francis. Perhaps you just don’t understand him.” I asked the priest what gave him that impression. In response, he referred to a post of mine entitled, “Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.” It is but one of many posts I have written about Pope Francis. None were disrespectful.

However, the priest who wrote to me had not read anything beyond the title before concluding that I have a problem with Pope Francis and therefore use this blog to rebel. That could not be further from the truth. The “heresy” described in that post was not that of Pope Francis at all. It rather challenged the many self-described traditional and conservative Catholics who openly charged that any question of divorce, remarriage, and Communion cheapens the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony and undermines it.

True or not, those same Catholics had little or nothing to say when it was the Sacrament of Holy Orders that came under assault in 2002 and remains so. The “heresy” post ended up holding the record for being shared on social media (over 25,000 times on Facebook alone) only because many who thought it accused Pope Francis of heresy never actually read it.

After news of Father Pavone’s dismissal from priesthood, one of our readers referred to Pope Francis in a comment as “the fake pope.” Like Elon Musk (but with none of his resources) I much prefer to let people speak their minds, but I asked to have the word “fake” removed before posting that comment. Francis is the legitimate successor of the Chair of Peter. As priests, both Father Pavone and I owe allegiance and fidelity to his office. Sometimes exercising that fidelity means also writing and speaking the truth. I am committed to doing so without anger or insult.

However, many readers of this blog have commented that a clear double standard exists in the discipline of priests. It is widely believed that conservative and traditional priests are treated with more oversight and disdain from hierarchy than so-called progressive clerics. Many cite Fr. James Martin who openly challenges and even disregards Catholic moral teaching on sexual and gender issues, and some of the German bishops who defied Pope Francis by the blessing of same-sex unions.

None have received any penalty, much less the nuclear bomb dropped on Father Pavone and Priests for Life. The U.S. Bishops Conference had an opportunity, supported by many bishops, to address with pro-abortion Catholic politicians the dichotomy between what they profess as Catholics and what they practice in regard to the right to life. A few bishops took a courageous stance. Most voted against it, and the matter was left to dangle unaddressed. I wrote of this double standard in “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.”

Because the subject, and that post, surfaced just months before a presidential election in 2020, the topic was largely suppressed in the media, a trend that now has a familiar ring. Suppressed as well is the fact that Pope Francis has himself made many bold statements in support of the prolife cause while his climate change statements are widely disseminated in the media. Given this, one would hope that he would be conscious of double standards and their effect on clergy and laity alike.

A Bombshell for So Many Catholics

As I was preparing to write this post, a reader sent me a recording from the popular radio show, “Catholic Drive Time with Joe McClane.” The episode was devoted to news of Fr. Frank Pavone’s dismissal, and Pavone himself was a call-in guest of the show. Joe McClane referred to the dismissal as “a bombshell for so many Catholics.”

Father Pavone was asked to respond to the matter, and said with some sarcasm, “What took them so long?” I expect him to be angry and disappointed, but I do not think sarcasm serves his cause. One concerned priest and canon lawyer observed this as well, and told me that Father Pavone may not be entirely innocent in all this. I recall a similar discussion with a reader who defended former police officer Derek Chauvin who brought about the death of George Floyd in 2020. He stated that Floyd tried to pass a fake $20 bill. True or not, no one in America is executed over a fake $20 bill.

Also appearing on the same show was Father Gerald Murray, JCD, a well-known canon lawyer in the Archdiocese of New York who appears frequently as part of “The Papal Posse” on EWTN’s The World Over with Raymond Arroyo. I have much respect for Father Murray and his canonical expertise. He pointed out that the charges against Father Pavone are two-fold: blasphemy in Internet postings and persistent disobedience to his bishop.

The charges were adjudicated by the Vatican Congregation for Clergy at the behest of the Bishop of Amarillo, Texas, Father Pavone’s bishop. Father Pavone was then judged to be guilty of both offenses. However, neither of those offenses, even if found to be true, generally result in a canonical dismissal from the clerical state according to Father Murray who added that punishment for those offenses went beyond what is prescribed in Canon Law. Father Pavone’s bishop may have requested removal. Until a formal decree is issued, no one seems to know how this dismissal came about, according to Father Murray.

To his credit, Father Pavone went on to explain that he has laid out his defense against the charges on his personal website, FrFrankPavone.com. I am told that there is a lot there to read, and I encourage readers with concerns about this matter to peruse that site.

In his Catholic Drive Time radio interview, Father Pavone concluded, “I urge everyone to respect authority in the Church, but I do not respect abuse of authority.” He did not place blame directly with Pope Francis for his dismissal, but with “certain bishops” who “lie, block and obstruct to control the kind of prolife message” the Church will hear.” He cited as an example of the abuse of process that he learned of his dismissal from Catholic News Agency instead of from his own bishop.

Priests for Life

The high-profile case of Father Pavone has now resulted in a high-profile reaction, some of it marked by obvious anger. The Coalition for Canceled Priests issued a statement from Sister Dede Byrne who found national prominence when she was invited to address the Republic National Convention before the 2020 presidential election where she advocated strongly for rights and protections for the unborn. Here is a segment of her public response to the laicization of Father Frank Pavone:

“The most vocal prolife priest has been laicized! What crime has he done to warrant such a harsh punishment? In the wake of this travesty, we still have the most pro-death, anti-nuclear family president in our nation’s history who professes to be a Catholic in good standing ... with no real guidance from our bishops or the Vatican ... What appears to many Catholics who love our Church is selective mercy from the Pope of Mercy. I ask myself, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on Earth?” (Luke 18:7)

Sister Dede Byrne touched upon what should be a grave concern for every priest. What happened to Father Pavone likely would not have happened just a decade ago. Another canon lawyer explained to me that under a 21st-Century papal decree, bishops obtained the authority to seek a priest’s removal from ministry and even formal dismissal from the clerical state without a penal process. Some have come to see this as the Church’s own version of capital punishment. More frequent use of this development should cause concern for every priest and lay Catholic. Such a process invites abuse and the application of bias against what a bishop might perceive as ideologically undesirable clergy.

The message sent by Pope Francis is that he is on board with such a cause. I wonder if he fully knows the deep sadness and disillusionment now thrust upon priests, the faithful, and especially the prolife cause in this dichotomy. The Pope who assumed the Chair of Peter and launched the Year of Mercy in his papacy appears to have abandoned all mercy for priests.

I have not been dismissed from priesthood. I hope and pray that such an injustice never befalls me. Father Frank Pavone and I have only the grace of fortitude. I never knew I had it until recently. It is defined as “Strength of mind that allows one to endure pain or adversity with courage.” We could both simply abandon the Church and be free of all scrutiny and betrayal, but the grace of fortitude stands in the way. I thank God for that.

An appeal of this dismal is not possible because the outcome already bears the signature of the highest authority in the Church. In 2002, however, Saint John Paul II reminded bishops that they should not lose sight of the power of prayer and conversion in the life of a priest. The Pope is also a priest and he can reconsider his own conclusions. Pope Francis and Father Frank Pavone are both priests for life. Please pray for them in these difficult days for the priesthood. Above all, pray for justice. The Church and priesthood are much diminished without it.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Writing for The Catholic Thing, Fr. Peter M. J. Stravinskas, Ph.D, STD, has written perhaps the most pointed analysis in print on this matter: “Fr. Pavone and “The Spirit of Vatican I.”

Thank you for reading and sharing this week’s post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Duty of a Priest: Father Frank Pavone and Priests for Life

Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy

Will Pope Francis Stand Against Catholic Schism?

Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

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Photo courtesy of Vatican Media

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. Today the Chapel has a real-time live feed for a most beautiful adoration chapel where people around the world can spend time in Eucharistic Adoration. We invite you to come and spend some quiet time adoring our Lord.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Pope Francis promulgated Vos estis, a law applicable to bishops. Previously, if a bishop was accused of a canonical offense, only the Pope could bring him to task.

Recently, behind the scenes at Beyond These Stone Walls, people have been working to restore and update Father Gordon MacRae’s older posts and save them in multiple categories in the Library at BTSW. One of the categories is Catholic Priesthood where this post, I expect, will find its permanent home. One such article was “Goodbye, Good Priest!” It was an updated reflection on the story of Father John Corapi, posted anew without any notice or fanfare. Nonetheless, it received more than 6,000 visits and 3,700 shares on social media in the first 24 hours after it was posted. This happened even before Fr John Zuhlsdorf — the famous Fr Z — posted a link to another blog informing readers that Fr Corapi, thanks be to God, had reconciled with his religious order several years ago and has been living a quiet life of prayer in one of its community houses. Fr Z’s post was “If you do not forgive men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

We had not heard about Fr Corapi for many years. His, we thought, was one of the many forgotten tales about priests, guilty, or even merely accused, of horrendous sins, whose cases often were treated with little regard for human, civil or canonical rights or due process. Fr Gordon and I were commenting that, being reminded of Fr Corapi, we realize that we have not progressed very far in the last twenty years. What Fr Gordon and I see now is that Father Corapi’s case was a small seed planted in our collective psyche that has germinated, now affecting all priests.

When the sexual abuse scandal exploded in the American press in 2002, many bishops were faced with the reality that their predecessors had known about sexual abuse of minors by priests and handled it in a way that was seen as pastoral at the time but which failed to meet today’s expectations. Back then, accused priests were shuffled off for psychological treatment, reassigned on the advice of the medical professionals to new parishes for a fresh start; sometimes they reoffended, or quietly retired to live in peace with their consciences. Even though the Vatican quietly had promulgated new laws in 2001 to deal with the crime of sexual abuse of a minor among some other of the more serious offenses in the Church, in the wake of the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposé, bishops threw up their hands and said to the Vatican, “My predecessor did this; you have to help me get out of this mess!”

And so dawned the era of the Dallas Charter. In the face of unrelenting public pressure and criticism, the Church, beginning in the United States but soon almost everywhere, began to treat allegations as proven crimes, to treat priests like chattel, to put money over preaching the Gospel. The Dallas Charter ushered in an era that means one strike and you’re out, and, in fact you don’t even have to prove that it was a strike: credibly accused quickly became the operative expression. In effect, the first decade of the 21st century witnessed the Church take on the notion that the priesthood was more disposable than it ever had been before. It was a reaction of fear.

Soon after, file upon file was sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) as bishops scoured their personnel files for any priest previously accused of sexual abuse. Even though the case had been dealt with already, according to the pastoral plan mentioned above, current bishops were looking for Rome to revisit the case and, it was expected, remove the priest permanently from ministry if not the clerical state itself. The caseload became so heavy that the CDF had to notify bishops that a deadline was being set after which no historical cases could be submitted. Apparently, someone had forgotten to inform everyone involved that law, especially penal law, cannot, in justice, be applied retroactively.

So far, we have only been talking about accusation of sexual abuse of minors. Fr John Corapi was never accused of that. He was accused of sexual misconduct, perhaps even concubinage, with an adult woman among supected financial misdeeds. In the heat of the abuse scandal, his case was being treated as if the Dallas Charter applied, which it did not. Father Corapi realized that he would never be treated according to the canon law of the Church. He knew he was considered guilty; nothing was going to change that, so he walked away. It is a sad commentary on the Church that such a gifted man was driven to near despair, that Church officials could be so indifferent to basic tenets of justice and due process. But that’s where we were.

Jump forward several years. In 2019, Pope Francis promulgated Vos estis, a set of laws applicable to bishops. Prior to those laws, bishops were directly responsible to the Pope alone. If a bishop was accused of a crime, like sexual abuse of a minor, only the Pope could bring him to task. Canon law assumes that people with authority in the Church, like bishops, are not saints, but at least God-fearing men seeking virtue. In fact, canon law only really works when that’s the case. People like Theodore McCarrick, the former Cardinal and Archbishop, got away with his misconduct for so long because a lot of bishops are not God-fearing men. McCarrick was relieved of his clerical obligations in 2019 and is now a layman.

With everything the Pope has to do, he certainly does not have time to micro-manage the lives of 5,000 bishops. The problem, becoming apparent, was that not only priests were being accused. The ravenous press and hysterical crowd were not satisfied. Bishops were next on the hit list. Hence, Pope Francis set up a system whereby bishops are now accountable for their own misconduct, even historical accusations from when they were yet priests. They are accountable, as well, for how they handle, as bishops, accusations of sexual abuse of minors by priests subject to them. With Pope Francis’ new legislation, the Congregation for Bishops is authorized to investigate accusations made about bishops in much the same way that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was authorized in 2001 to do the same regarding priests. This is new territory and bishops are clearly anxious.

Guilty Merely for Being Accused?

Since the promulgation of Vos estis, several bishops have been removed from office or disciplined in some way: Bishop Richard Malone, emeritus of Buffalo; Bishop Michael Bransfield, emeritus of Wheeling-Charleston; Archbishop Henryk Gulbinowicz, emeritus of Wroclaw, Poland; Bishop Michael Hoeppner, emeritus of Crookston to name just a few. It’s a new world out there since 2019. What bishops have done to priests since 2002 is now being done to them.

“ The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

— Matthew 7:2

Pope Francis, in Vos estis, expressed his wish that bishops conferences set up confidential reporting mechanisms such that people who know of misconduct committed by a bishop could safely report it knowing that action would be taken to investigate. The Canadian bishops conference announced a few weeks ago just such a mechanism. Anyone can now call a confidential line, or submit an online report, to a third-party agency which will receive the information and, in turn, pass on a report to the appropriate bishop. That bishop, in receipt of the report, will consult the Congregation for Bishops on how to proceed. Whatever else it is, and it is many things, this move is a lot of virtue signaling. Nothing guarantees that the report will be taken seriously. The only certainty is that a secular third party is being paid to receive and pass on information.

There is no real transparency to the procedures that are used to investigate a bishop — and I’m not arguing there should be, in this or any investigation of a priest — it is not evident that such things belong to the realm of public knowledge. Instead, we must trust that what is being done is just and legal — there’s no sense having a code of law in the Church if it means nothing or is not going to be used. Unfortunately, the Church’s track record in this regard leaves us with very little trust. With these new initiatives, nothing says that the bishop reporting to Rome about his brother bishop will not convince the Vatican that the allegation is unfounded or exaggerated. And, to be fair, understand that the Vatican has to trust the bishop consulting them. If they can’t, how is the Vatican to know and what is it supposed to do? We’re back to the headline: “Needed: God-fearing men trying to live lives of virtue.”

Now that bishops are being held to the same standards, or lack thereof, they have become hypervigilant of their priests, or, rather, of their own reputations. Virtue signaling abounds: bishops are tough on clerical misconduct. Now, not only accusation of sexual abuse of a minor leads a bishop to remove a priest from ministry, but, indeed, any misconduct whatsoever. That was the seed planted by Father Corapi’s case. Anything done by a priest that is going to cause publicity, or a lawsuit, is now treated in the same way as an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor. A priest is put on so-called administrative leave, his faculties are removed, he is not allowed to perform any priestly ministry except the celebration of Mass in private, which means alone.

This is all done, they say, just like they did in the early 2000’s, pro bono ecclesiae — for the good of the Church. This is being done by bending the law to the point of breaking. What priest, especially if he is guilty of something, is going to challenge his bishop’s abuse of the law. Priests who have been accused of misconduct, not involving minors, are now being removed from ministry under the guise that they are not suitable for assignment because of their misconduct, even though that misconduct may have been adjudicated and punished already — justly or not is another question. Bishops go so far as to encourage the priest to petition for laicization. The bishop can’t force a priest out of the priesthood because whatever he is alleged to have done doesn’t warrant such a punishment. But the bishop doesn’t want to be responsible for the ‘unassignable’ priest for the rest of his life, nor does he want to continue paying the priest.

Check any “Policy for Cases of Misconduct” published by a diocese. Many of them have clauses that say a priest found guilty of misconduct will never minister in the diocese again. Of course, such clauses are not allowed by canon law. No one questions what procedures will be used to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused priest. But what looks good is the policy itself. The Church has gone tough, not just on abusing minors, but on any misdeed. Try to find a definition of misconduct, or a list of behaviors that is classified as misconduct — you won’t. Vague is good: it allows those in authority to cite the law while interpreting it as they wish. Those are the parameters we are operating within today.

Fear and panic, there’s the problem. Instead of turning to Christ, we look to the world for our sense of self-worth as a Church. Are we held to impossible standards by the world? Yes. Does the world despise us because the Gospel preaches something counter-cultural? Yes. Are they going to sue us for every penny we own? Probably. Jesus told us, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). The Church certainly has made mistakes in the last half-century or more. One of the biggest ones was turning a blind eye to immorality, especially sexual immorality among clergy and the faithful. In its zeal to be pastoral as a way of opening up to the world — a mantra of Vatican II — she failed to enforce her laws, or use her laws to bring justice and transparency to cases of crime and misconduct. The way out of this mess is not more laws, not more father turning on son and brother on brother tactics reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The answer is to read and heed the Gospel.

“For They Do Not Practice What They Preach” (Matthew 23:3)

In July 2013, Pope Francis was questioned about a Monsignor whom the Holy Father had appointed to a Vatican office. The Monsignor, according to reports, engaged in homosexual activity several times. The press wanted to know from the Pope how this person could be assigned given his past. Pope Francis came out with his now infamous line, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” The press, to this day, wildly misinterprets what the Holy Father said, namely, that someone who was seeking the Lord with good will, i.e., repenting of past sin and seeking the right path, ought not to be judged by us. The rationale behind that is nothing other than the whole Christian message: Christ died so that all of us sinners could be redeemed. The Pope was saying, in essence, that someone could be a very sinful person, but repentance is always possible. Furthermore, he was pointing out that someone’s sinful past does not necessarily disqualify one from working in the Church — to be sure, sometimes it does, but not always. How would any of the apostles survive as priests or bishops in today’s climate?

In our Lord’s day, the religious leaders were worried about the popularity of Jesus. They didn’t want the people, the mob, to turn against them. In the end, it was they who, in the midst of the mob, told Pilate that they had no King but Caesar. It was they who instigated the mob’s choice of Barabbas over Jesus. The mob can be a frightening place when we have lost sight of Heaven. Jesus Himself was confronted with a mob. When they brought to Him the woman caught in adultery, the mob was after Him, not so much the woman who had been caught flagrantly in sin. They wanted to trip Him up about the law. Jesus was uncowed by their bullying. He didn’t lash out at the mob; rather, he showed them mercy by His retort, “Let anyone who is without sin, cast the first stone.” He gave the mob room to see its error. The Gospel of John (8:3-11) points out the seemingly insignificant detail that Jesus looked down so that they could walk away while saving face.

At the same time, Jesus healed the woman, wounded by her own sinfulness and maltreated as a pawn by the mob. He sends her off, with the consolation of “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (John 8:11). Our Lord showed that the mob, the world, CAN learn the truth about sin and redemption. He showed her that compunction was enough to receive mercy and the need to learn from one’s sins. He did not tell her not to pay attention to the Pharisees — in fact, in another place Jesus warned the people, “Obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach” (Matthew 23:3). He didn’t say they were not qualified for the job as Pharisees because they were sinful. He also told her to learn from the mercy she received and to put aside her sinfulness. All of that is an important meditation for us because little mercy is being shown priests.

When I think of Father Gordon MacRae and the injustice he is enduring with such equanimity and grace, I am reminded that God’s grace is still active in this messy world. Beyond These Stone Walls is a visible sign of grace, allowing Father Gordon to preach from his pulpit, his unjust imprisonment, to make so many aware of the reality of injustice even in the Church. He and this blog are a sign of grace, a sign that such corruption is not a reason to turn against God or His Church but to work even harder to bring about a community of God-fearing men trying to live lives of virtue.

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Fr. Stuart MacDonald is a priest of the Diocese of St Catharines, Canada. Ordained in 1997, he is a graduate of McGill University, St. Augustine’s Seminary and the Pontifical Gregorian University where he earned a licentiate in Canon Law. In addition to being pastor of various parishes, he has worked as a judge and defender of the bond for the Toronto Regional Marriage Tribunal and as an official for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Holy See. He is the author of several published articles on Canon Law and the priesthood. His most recent post for BTSW was “On Our Battle-Weary Priesthood.”

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Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and The Sins of the Times

There is a difference between the signs of the times and the sins of the times. It is required that priests are vigilant of the former but resistant of the latter.

Just days before sitting down to write this post, I was bestowed with the honor of membership in The Catholic Writers Guild. One of my first thoughts as I plugged in my typewriter today is that this might be the post that gets me kicked out. We are in one of the strangest times in the life of the Church and in the ministry of bishops and priests that we have seen in many centuries.

There have been times almost as strange, but the difference is that you were kept from knowing about them.

My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982 at St. John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. It did not start off well. There was another candidate for ordination that year, but he fled just days before. Someone then scrambled to revise and reprint the program for the Mass of Ordination. It was presided over by The Most Reverend Odore Gendron, Bishop of Manchester. That was four bishops ago.

Like most Catholic priests in America, I was ordained on a Saturday afternoon. Unlike most, I was ordained alone. Such a thing became a more prevalent phenomenon, however, as the signs of the times began to reflect the sins of the times. In the 1970s and 1980s, fewer men found the courage for such a counter-cultural commitment as the Catholic priesthood, a response I wrote of in a Pentecost Post, “Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God.”

That post described the story behind the story of the gathering of the Apostles at Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles (1:13) reports that the Eleven — Judas had come to ruin — came to Jerusalem in the company of Mary, Mother of the Resurrected Jesus, to mark the Pilgrimage Feast of Weeks fifty days after the spring celebration described in the Book of Leviticus (23:15-16). Among the Greek-speaking Jews of the New Testament, it came to be called Pentecost for “fiftieth day.”

Pentecost became a Christian feast when the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles in Jerusalem in the form of a mighty wind and tongues of fire. Then almost immediately, the newborn Church saw its first scandal as Peter rose to defend the Apostles against a false accusation that they were all drunk at 9:00 in the morning (Acts 2:15). I took a part of my title, “Inherit the Wind,” for that Pentecost post from a cryptic passage in the Book of Proverbs (11:29): “Those who trouble their household will inherit the wind, and the fool will become a servant to the wise.”

Seminary studies throughout the 1970s and priesthood ordination in 1982 were both such counter-cultural endeavors that I troubled my household greatly when I became a priest. The Proverb came true. Ever since that day, I have been a fool by the standards of this world, and a servant to the wise. Whether I have inherited the wind that so moved the Apostles to evangelize even in the face of martyrdom remains to be seen. I am still here writing.

Though my ordination was 38 years ago, I remember every moment as though it were yesterday. As I lay alone and prostrate on the floor before the altar, the Litany of the Saints was intoned. I had a fleeting thought that my sister, from a pew just 12 feet away, was mentally urging me, “Get up, you fool! Flee!” Later when I asked her about it she confirmed it. “Yes, that was me.”

Thirty-one years later in 2013 Dorothy Rabinowitz was writing “The Trials of Father MacRae,” her third in a series for The Wall Street Journal. She interviewed my sister who spoke candidly with a comment that never made its way into the articles. “The Catholic Church took my brother,” my sister said, “And now look what they have done to him.”

I have written of this in past Ordination Day posts, but many people have since asked me The Big Question. If I knew then what I know now, would I have joined John, the man who was to be ordained with me, in flight from this fate? I answer the question in one of the links at the end.

The Signs of the Times

Back in 2012, Anne Hendershott penned a research study for The Catholic World Report entitled, “Called by Name.” There were some interesting statistics analyzed in the study. In 2010 in the Diocese of El Paso, Texas, a region that is 79-percent Catholic, there were no priesthood ordinations.

In the same year in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, a region that is only 17-percent Catholic, there were seven ordinations to the priesthood. In Portland, Oregon, the population of which is only 16-percent Catholic, there were nine ordinations in 2010. Researchers suggested that areas with large Latino populations may have fewer candidates for priesthood.

That turned out to be untrue. In the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas in 2010 there were seven priesthood ordinations and most were Latino. But across the nation in 2010, the number of priesthood ordinations and their ratio to the Catholic population varied greatly. Something less obvious was driving this.

In 1996, then Omaha, Nebraska Archbishop Elden Curtis penned an article entitled “Crisis in Vocations? What Crisis?” He theorized with some compelling data to back it up, that the attitudes and strength of fidelity in Church leadership is the number one causal factor in reduced numbers of viable candidates for priesthood. Archbishop Curtis wrote:

“When dioceses and religious communities are unambiguous about the ordained priesthood and vowed religious life as the Church defines these calls; when there is strong support for vocations, and a minimum of dissent about the male celibate priesthood and religious life; when there is loyalty to the Magisterium; when the bishops, priests, religious and lay people are united in vocation ministry — then there are documented increases in vocations. Young people do not want to commit themselves to dioceses or communities that permit or simply ignore dissent from Church doctrine”

— Archbishop Elden Curtis

In her article for The Catholic World Report cited above, Anne Hendershott analyzed a study by Andrew Yuengert, a Pepperdine University sociologist, who tried to quantify the observations of Archbishop Curtis about the connection between priesthood vocations and the attitudes and fidelity of Church leaders. He discovered some fascinating corollaries.

Andrew Yuengert found that dioceses with bishops ordained in the 1970s had significantly lower numbers of priesthood vocations than those with bishops ordained before or later. He found that corollary to be most prominent in the ordination statistics of bishops who were characterized as orthodox or progressive. Of interest, he discovered that bishops who regularly published articles in America magazine — considered to be more liberal — fostered fewer vocations than bishops who were more likely to publish articles in The Catholic Answer, considered to be more orthodox.

There was another interesting corollary in the Yuengert study. You may remember the great controversy at the University of Notre Dame in 2009 when then President Barack Obama was invited to give the Commencement Address and was bestowed with an honorary degree.

At the time, eighty-three U.S. bishops signed a formal statement disapproving of the University administration’s decision to bestow an honorary degree on the openly pro-abortion President Obama who worked to expand access to abortion throughout the U.S. and the world. Yuengert discovered in this another unexpected corollary: Many of the 83 bishops who signed that statement led dioceses with the highest percentages of priesthood ordinations in the country.

The Sins of the Times

I have heard many horror stories from priests ordained in the 1970s and 1980s that the seminaries they were sent to were anything but loyal to the Magisterium and supportive of priestly vocations. I have a horror story of my own that I wrote about a decade ago. It is worth repeating because it was typical of the sins of the times in the 1970s and 1980s, the era in which the decline of priesthood was set in motion.

I had requested to go to St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, MA, but was sent instead to Baltimore. This story took place in the fall of 1979 in my second year of theological studies at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore. St. Mary’s was at the time considered to be the most academically challenging and most theologically liberal of U.S. seminaries. It was called “The Harvard of seminaries,” but it also had a reputation for fostering — even demanding — dissent.

There were about 160 seminarians from some 40 U.S. dioceses studying for priesthood at St. Mary’s then. It had a capacity for more than twice that number, a reality that created an atmosphere of competition among national seminaries (as opposed to local seminaries like St. John’s in Boston). Though St. Mary’s has undergone a complete revision of its direction since then, in the 1970s and 1980s it was known as a birthplace of theological dissent among priests.

The atmosphere reflected that. Seminarians never wore any form of clerical attire, and would have been laughed out the door if they did. The beautiful main chapel was used for Mass only once per week — on Wednesday nights where a weekly seminary-wide liturgy took place, often hosting clown masses, experimental music (“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas was once the Communion hymn).

There were many liturgical abuses, and any refutation earned the commenter a notation of “theologically rigid” in his file. Other weekday masses were held in small groups in faculty quarters. On Sundays, seminarians were on their own, encouraged to attend Mass at one of several Baltimore parishes. Some rarely ever attended Mass at all.

In 1979, a rift of sorts formed between the seminary rector and those planning for a U.S. visit by Pope John Paul II at the end of the first year of his pontificate. In October, 1979, Pope John Paul II spent six eventful days in the United States, visiting Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Iowa, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

One of the highlights of the visit was Pope John Paul’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on October 2, 1979. He stressed the theme of human rights and the dignity of the person, deploring violations of religious freedoms. However, most of the 67 addresses given by the pope during his visit were directed to Catholics and stressed their responsibilities as believing members of the Church.

The messages were conservative in tone and contained unqualified condemnations of abortion, artificial birth control, homosexual practice, and premarital and extramarital sex. The pope reminded priests of the permanency of their ordination vows and also ruled out the possibility of ordination for women, bringing protests from a number of Catholic feminists.

Little of Pope John Paul’s vision for the Church in the modern world was received with any enthusiasm by the administration and faculty of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. It was in the weeks before this momentous visit that all hell broke loose at St. Mary’s. The seminary rector, now deceased, was a priest of my diocese and a member of the Order of St. Sulpice — aka The Sulpicians — which ran the nation’s oldest seminary since its founding some 200 years earlier.

Just weeks before Pope John Paul’s planned visit, it was somehow learned that all seminarians from several major seminaries in the region were invited by the Holy Father to take part in a Mass for seminarians on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Upwards of a thousand seminarians were to have special seating with an expected crowd of 100,000.

Seminarians at St. Mary’s, however, were never told of the invitation, nor were we told that the Seminary Rector had declined it on our behalf for reasons that he refused to divulge. The resultant furor was shocking; not only for the majority liberal seminarians, but for the administration and faculty who just assumed that we would disdain the theology and vision of Pope John Paul II just as much as they did. A line had been crossed that threatened to sever our identity as future priests.

A letter of protest was quickly drafted and signed by more than half of the 160 seminarians representing some forty dioceses across the land. I was one of the signatories of that letter, a fact that the Rector took very personally because we represented the same diocese. As a result, I was labeled a disobedient rebel.

A seminary-wide meeting was held, and the Rector doubled down on his rejection of the papal invitation. He warned that anyone who attempted to attend the Pope’s Mass one hour away in Washington would not receive permission to do so, and would receive failing grades for any course work assigned for that day. He also said that several crucial exams would be held that day and failing grades would be reported back to the diocese of each seminarian along with a report of disobedience to his legitimate authority.

Needless to say, we went anyway. No one has a vocation to the seminary.

The Priest Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The graphic above is not a real book, so please don’t try to order it on Amazon. It was created by the TSW publisher in response to a post of mine that stirred an uproar when first posted in November, 2013. It was “Stay of Execution: Catholic Conscience and the Death Penalty.”

That post publicly refuted another priest who published a letter in Our Sunday Visitor calling for expanded use of the death penalty in the United States. As a prisoner-priest, I wrote in favor of mercy. But it was I, and not he, who kicked the hornet’s nest.

Back to the seminary: One factor that struck me at St. Mary’s in the 1970s was the unwillingness of some bishops to become involved in — or even aware of — the training of their future priests. Formal complaints from seminarians about the blatant disregard for Pope John Paul II by seminary administration were ignored by most of the bishops who received them.

Some of the more traditional seminarians survived only because they were academically brilliant. They became the priests who kicked the hornets’ nest merely for refusing to either bend in their fidelity or be driven out as candidates for priesthood.

In the years since my ordination, I have heard many stories from priests whose priestly spirits were wounded in a kind of spiritual abuse that characterized their seminary years. Perhaps some will comment here.

But the last word on this goes to Father James Altman, whose recorded homily has mesmerized those Catholics who still value religious freedom, the hardest won of our freedoms, and the most fragile under any hint of a totalitarian regime. Father Altman has kicked the hornet’s nest, too, in a prophetic and much-needed plea to our bishops who have allowed Caesar to rule in the place of Christ. Here is Father James Altman whose brilliant and moving homily has moved many Catholics with the authority of truth. Don’t miss this “Memo to the Bishops of the World.”

“The faithful do not need you to look after their bodies. They need you to follow the Supreme Law of the Church and look after their souls.”

— Father James Altman

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From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

Seven judges of the Australia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Cardinal George Pell was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. He and we deserve to know how and why.

Strange things had been happening in the weeks leading up to Holy Week 2020. For the first time in our lifetimes, Catholic churches were inaccessible to most Catholics observing Holy Week and Easter as a community of believers.

Then, in the midst of all the church closures due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, Cyrus Habib, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Washington State, announced that he is leaving politics to study for the Catholic priesthood. This was not the sort of hopeful news the news media likes to hype in Holy Week so it was barely noticed. Then the Supreme Court of Australia announced that, on Tuesday of Holy Week, it would release its decision on the final hope for appeal in the case of Cardinal George Pell.

I did not greet this news with a sense of hope. Far back in April of 2010, I wrote a post with the controversial title, “Breaking News: I Got Stoned with the Pope.” It was about how some consistently anti-Catholic news outlets have a tradition of exploiting Catholic scandal during or just prior to Holy Week.

The pope in question back then was Benedict XVI. For full disclosure, neither he nor I inhaled anything illicit. That was not what I meant by getting stoned with the pope. It was meant in the Biblical sense, the same sense found in one of the most popular posts on These Stone Walls, “Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand.”

The type of stoning that brutally took a person’s life in Biblical times is carried out today in another way. Instead of taking a life, a person’s reputation is destroyed. False witness and sensational headlines are now the stones of choice. We have all seen the “gotcha” media at work. You cannot sit through a White House press conference without witnessing firsthand how some in the news media insinuate, inflame, and then exploit the interpretations that too often today pass for real journalism.

A vivid example came during the 2016 Presidential election cycle. A group of 200 noisy white supremacists demonstrated in Virginia using slogans such as “Make America Great Again.” For much of the far left mainstream news media, this was evidence enough to link them with Donald Trump implying falsely that he must support racism because some racists support him.

The real scandal is the news media itself. By giving these marginal racists a spotlight, the news media took their tiny microphone and turned it into a national megaphone. The news media does not even try to justify its viral coverage of 200 white supremacists while turning a blind eye to 200,000 prolife advocates at the annual March for Life in Washington DC.

I admit that I was cynical and suspicious when I learned that the High Court of Australia chose Tuesday of Holy Week to announce its long awaited final verdict on Cardinal Pell. As soon as the decision was announced, victim groups and some in the media went into high gear to denounce the finding and declare that it is not an exoneration or acquittal.

This is nonsense. The unanimous finding that Cardinal Pell’s charges were fatally flawed, his trial unjust, his convictions unsupported by evidence, are in fact an exoneration. He stands convicted of no crime. It exposed for all the world to see the harsh reality that — as for so many other priests facing the cruel tyranny of false witness in the current age — Cardinal Pell was considered guilty merely for being accused.

The Integrity of Justice Itself Is at Stake

Four hundred and five days! That is how long 78-year-old George Cardinal Pell spent in prison before Australian justice woke up. On the day of his exoneration, I marked 9,350 days of wrongful imprisonment. I do not write that as a comparison, but rather as an expression of deepest empathy for what Cardinal Pell endured.

Throughout his ordeal, I believed in his innocence; I supported him with my prayers, and I offered some of my own unjust imprisonment in spiritual alliance with him. I hope this was evident in my series of widely-read posts about his plight that I will link at the end of this one. When I say that those end posts were widely read, the truth is that they were widely read everywhere but in Australia.

The first of these posts was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.” Its focus was on the fact that the whole world was watching these charges as they proceeded to trial with no real evidence and much media exploitation. In the end, it is Australia’s justice system that now seems indicted and facing trial in the court of public opinion.

I hope this exoneration brings some much-needed soul searching to the people of Australia, the Australian courts, and the police and prosecutors who ignored much exculpatory evidence to bring these charges. However, evidence for that soul-searching was not reflected in the public statement of Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria State where Cardinal Pell was convicted.

After the unanimous Supreme Court exoneration, the public statement of the Victoria State Premier addressed none of what the Court covered or decided. He instead addressed himself to what the media calls victims and survivors but what the legal system must treat as accusers. His statement to them was: “I see you. I hear you. I believe you.”

On its face, that seems benign, but it isn’t. It is perhaps the most dangerous affront to justice in a case like this. It is grotesquely irresponsible to reduce the application of justice to a set of hashtags instead of evidence. Why have courts and trials at all if the personal beliefs of police, prosecutors and state officials are all that is needed to convict and condemn?

In the United States, the Center for Prosecutor Integrity has joined over 100 legal scholars in a petition to the department of Justice to cease its support for #BelieveSurvivors and guilt-presuming investigations. It is one of the most prolific causes of wrongful convictions and other injustices. When police and prosecutors — and the governments on whose behalf they operate — launch “Victim-Centered Investigations” they begin with a faulty assumption that crimes did occur and that the accused is guilty.

The Prosecutor Integrity website lists hundreds of scholarly articles by legal experts about how innocent defendants like Cardinal Pell are victimized by investigators wearing blinders. Police and prosecutor misconduct were central factors in 42-percent of wrongful convictions. One article at the Wrongful Convictions site is “The Intersection Between Innocence, Expert Witness and Religion: The Case of Rev. Gordon MacRae.”

Victim-Centered instead of fact-centered investigations result in a failure of the justice system to look honestly at itself. The Australian police and prosecutors — and the two judges who upheld a guilty verdict against Cardinal Pell in his first appeal — have some explaining to do.

I know only too well what the trashing of Cardinal Pell’s good name has cost him, but the other damage is to the integrity of the criminal justice system. I also know well the treachery of those — both inside and outside the Church — who disregard a lack of evidence or substantiation, mindlessly poised to believe any lurid tale regarding any priest so accused.

On social media after this exoneration, some in Australia suggested that, innocent or not, Cardinal Pell should have remained in prison in reparation for the sins of other priests. This is nothing more than evidence of the moral panic this story set in motion. It is easy to offer up someone else’s good name and freedom for a politically correct cause.

Minds should not be made up because the media celebrates the fall of Catholic priests and prelates. Minds should be made up by clear and compelling evidence, and there was none. Anything less is to surrender our own personal integrity to the news media and to reduce justice to a lynch mob.

Priestly Scandal: A Pandemic of Trophy Justice

Accusations against a high profile cardinal and member of the curia too easily result in “Trophy Justice,” a term that also has grave implications for the integrity of the justice system. Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in prison because those empowered to impart justice were too reluctant to give up their trophy.

Since his exoneration there has been no shortage of biased treatment in the news. The much needed voice of Bill Donohue at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has been, as usual, on the front lines exposing this.  Annual membership in the Catholic League is the best $30 investment I have ever made.

Ironically, in the wake of this exoneration, editorials in The New York Times and The Boston Globe have criticized a lack of transparency in the Australian justice system. Bill Donohue rightly pointed out that neither newspaper ever questioned its transparency when Cardinal Pell was found guilty without evidence, or when he was sentenced to prison, or when a lower court disregarded the shoddy work of prosecutors to uphold an unjust verdict. That was all perfectly transparent.

And it was all front page news. The exoneration did not at all receive anything even close to equal treatment. I am thankful to Bill Donohue for informing us that The Boston Globe  reported Cardinal Pell’s exoneration on page 19. Why any thinking, reasonable Catholic is still reading The New York Times  or The Boston Globe  is a mystery. There are alternatives. In ten years of writing behind These Stone Walls, I have never seen anti-Catholic bias and media distortion in The Wall Street Journal.

I am ashamed to add to the above that some Catholic media have fared little better. After Cardinal Pell’s first appeal to a lower court failed in a two-to-one decision, Our Sunday Visitor  reported in its news section that his conviction was upheld by a three-judge panel. In a letter of protest to the editors, I pointed out that this was inaccurate and misleading.

Judge Weinberg the most experienced judge on that Australian three-judge panel, published a blistering dissent against the conclusions of the other two, but Our Sunday Visitor  did not publish my letter clarifying this. After Cardinal Pell spent another six months unjustly in prison, the seven judges of Australia’s Supreme Court agreed with Judge Weinberg’s dissent.

Why should we support obviously biased or agenda-driven news outlets? When we know the truth behind a mishandled story, logic requires that we ask how many other stories are misrepresented in the news without our awareness. The Catholic League has never retreated from reporting on the crisis in the Church without sacrificing the rights of priests. In the March 2020 issue of Catalyst, just weeks before the exoneration of Cardinal Pell, Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote of both our cases:

“Cardinal George Pell, who is in an Australian prison for alleged sexual abuse (awaiting a final appeal) was accused as far back as 1962. The case was dismissed because nothing could be substantiated. His accuser had been convicted 39 times for offenses ranging from assault to drug use. He was a violent drug addict…. There is another priest, Father Gordon MacRae, who is still in prison in New Hampshire for crimes he vehemently denies, and whose accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. Even his former wife and stepson call him a compulsive liar and manipulator.”

— Catalyst, Accused Priests Deserve Better

Pope John Paul II once cautioned that the Church must be a mirror of justice to the world. The mirror of justice has since cracked, however, when the American bishops adopted merely “credible” as sufficient evidence to discredit and discard a priest, and then pressed Rome to apply that standard throughout the Church. The result is the treatment that we have just witnessed in the case of Cardinal Pell.

Too many in the media — sadly including some in the Catholic media — simply presumed his guilt just as they presume the guilt of most priests so accused. But there were other, even darker agendas at work in the case of Cardinal Pell, and real transparency will require getting to the bottom of them.

Some in Rome, convinced of his innocence, remained silent while others may have been complicit with getting Cardinal Pell and his financial reforms out of the way. It has been suggested recently by Paul Kelly, an Australian political commentator for The Australian, that “State power had been recruited in an effort to destroy Pell.”

Cardinal Pell was a scapegoat who was targeted by enemies of the Church — enemies perhaps both foreign and domestic. Pope Francis had been careful to withhold any public statement until the Cardinal Pell case had exhausted all appeals. On Tuesday of Holy Week, just hours after Cardinal Pell’s release from prison, Pope Francis released this remarkable statement via Twitter:

“In these days of Lent, we have been witnessing the persecution that Jesus underwent and how He was judged ferociously, even though He was innocent. Let us pray together today for all those persons who suffer due to an unjust sentence because someone had it in for them.”

— Pope Francis

Someone had it in for Cardinal Pell. He and we deserve to know who and why. And as for Pope Francis, his summation sure sounds like an exoneration to me.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please pray for Cardinal Pell, for his restoration from this years-long ordeal, and for a just and honest reckoning about the process that brought it about. You may also wish to read this related post:

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?