So, this afternoon I’m wandering through the Barnes and Ignoble store while Mrs. Gelding makes a raid on T J Max, and I wander across this book–Goodbye, Good Men; How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church by Michael S. Rose, (Regency Pub., Inc., 2002). The back dust jacket shows glowing endorsement by some professors at St. Louis University, Notre Dame, and some guy from The American Enterprise Institute. It’s news to me that the AEI has taken an interest in theology so I take it that its interest is in general liberal bashing wherever it might be found.
Looking at the reviews on the B&N webcite I get the idea that Mr. Rose in his capacity as investigative journalist has determined that homosexuals, and liberal ones at that, have seized control of all but the most reactionary of Catholic seminaries and are sending deviant priests out into the world to undermine the faithful. Mr. Rose might have an agenda since another book of his in the B&N catalogs is “Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We Can Win Them Back Again.” There are a handful of volunteer reviews of the book, for the most part anonymous, except one by a Fr. John Trigilio who might be a major collaborator in the book.
Now, I don’t know anything about the internal politics of the RC Church, or who Fr. Trigilio might be or who Mr. Rose is, but I know there has been some screaming in the PIT about the tendency of some church officials to equate child molestation with homosexuality. Rose seems to point to bad theology, departure from orthodoxy and sloppy chanting as well as homosexuality, all foisted on the seminaries by “liberals” as the root of the RC church’s present problems with the revelation of sexual abuse of children by priests (some of which has been going on for decades).
Somebody tell me what this s all about, please. Is it just another case of the moss-backs blaming everything that goes wrong on Vatican II or does the guy know what he is talking about?
That Liberal homosexuals, presumably Catholic liberal homosexuals, have taken over the Catholic seminaries, and are deliberately sending deviant pedophile priests out into the world in order to “undermine” the Catholic church.
Question: If they all succeed in “undermining” the Catholic church–if the current pedophilia scandal succeeds in driving good Catholic folks into the arms of the Southern Baptists–aren’t both the deviant priests and the liberal homosexuals in the Catholic hierarchy then out of a job?
So they would seem to be shooting themselves in the foot.
Or is that part of the “deviant” kinkiness of it all?
It’s another of whine and cheese party of the sort that Malachi Martin popularized at the end of the 1970s–updated with more misinformation.
One can argue whether or not Vatican II did or did not set off some sort of decline in the church. (Two opposing views are that Vatican II arrived just too late to prevent the inevitable decline that had begun in the 50s or that Vatican II simply caused the church to shed some of the dead wood that was filling up the pews as underbrush before a crown fire. I do not particularly subscribe to either of those thoughts, but they are as valid as the thesis that this book promotes.)
Where this book truly stands out as being out of touch with reality is in the way that it messes up actual chronology. The overwhelming number of the priests who have recently been accused of pedophilia were ordained prior to 1970, meaning that they entered the seminary at least two years prior to Vatican II. A quick survey of my friends who are in contact with actual, working seminaries over the last five years indicates that the conservatives “took back” the seminaries years ago. It is possible that most of the seminaries are not as entrenched in the schismatic Pius X movement as the author would like to see, but many of the faculties are generally regarded by most Catholic liberals as bastions of conservatism in the church. (For that matter, most of the seminaries that were considered “liberal” at the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s were still in the hands of conservative faculty, but the students, following the student movements across the country, tended to be more liberal.)
In answer to the question of who is Fr John Trigilio, he is a priest from Harrisburg, PA. You can see him on EWTN (the Catholic cable channel) on the programs Web of Faith and Council of Fatih. He is involved in Opus Dei, a conservative organization within the church, and he recently founded a priestly fraternal organization, the Fraternity of Mary.
I periodically listen to Catholic radio, and there are at least a couple shows which whine about the atmosphere of seminaries in recent decades. They (the hosts of these shows) disparage timidity and would like to encourage an environment where strong masculine “manly men” (my term) do not feel uncomfortable at seminaries.
I am amused by the dichotomy of that ethic and Fr Trigilio. Although he is well-regarded by this movement within the church, he is soft-spoken, giggles like a girl, and has a weakness for dramatic staging which can be seen in the Council show (wearing a cape, standing resolutely while camera angles are changed). Notwithstanding all of this, he is clearly well versed in his subject matter, and his approach seems fairly reasonable on most of the issues raised on Web of Faith.
In the case of Fr Trigilio, at least, I give the movement to masculinize the seminaries credit for judging the individual based on his ideas, rather than on the stereotypes they’ve voiced.
This statement lends itself to two different interpretations. I don’t know whether you’re saying these people want to discourage the presense of gay seminarians or encourage the open admission of gayness in seminaries.
I think that on that bit he is ripping off the late Bishop Fulton Sheen.
But insofar as the whole issue of whether there’s a “liberal” takeover of the Church, when I was in Catholic HS in the late 70s there were some granola-ish vibes in the air (as in, the vibe was not of effeminacy but of sincere but overexerted attempts at sensitivity and grokking the new culture), but when JohnPaul-2 became Pope in 1978 he promptly slammed the brakes and has since repeatedly shown himself to be anything but a Flower Child (cough[sub]Ratzinger[/sub]cough). Now, some conservatives will feel even JP2 is not hardcore enough, but that’s inevitable, I guess.
Tom~ thanks for bringing this up:
Even if they weren’t perpetuating the utter BS argument that gay=pedo, it’s irritating to hear people on the TV interview shows spouting about how terrible it is that today’s seminary environment is so “unmanly”, when the problem is with the people who have been IN the priesthood and episcopacy since BEFORE this may have been the case.