Recently, I wrote that the blame for the recent American SCOTUS decision changing the legal definition of marriage lay with the bishops and priests who for a half-century have failed to properly teach and admonish the faithful in the Truth of the Catholic faith, the Truth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
As an aside, and perhaps some of my many and loyal American readers can comment. It seems to me that the 10th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America is the model of Catholic subsidiarity. It states that "The powers not delegated to the United States
by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively, or to the people." Since the Constitution is silent on the whole issue of marriage, how can the SCOTUS force a State to go along with its redefinition of marriage? Has this been interfered with before without States' objections leading to a de facto abrogation?
Getting back to the matter of bishops, my good friend ELA at ContraDiction has posted a column an article of July 8, 1996 by Joseph K. Woodword in Alberta Report, which ceased publication in 2003.
It is worth reading today to understand how our bishops in Canada failed us too. The red text is my commentary to update the article, the bolding is mine for emphasis.
Treason Of The Clerics
Subtitled: Gay Apostasy Subverts And Paralyzes
The Canadian Catholic Church
By Joseph K. Woodard
w/ permission
Alberta Report, July 8, 1996
One of the mysteries surrounding the speedy
passage of Bill C-33, the "sexual orientation" clause to the Canada
Human Rights Act, is the near-silence of the Canadian Catholic Church in the
debate. The Vatican defines homosexual behaviour as an "objective moral
disorder" and has opposed repeatedly the very idea of "gay rights."
The Church's silence in 1996 was a marked change from 1994, when the robust
opposition of Ontario bishops was instrumental in defeating the NDP provincial
government's own homosexual rights bill. (The NDP stands for New Democratic Party a democratic socialist and labour party at the federal and provincial levels in Canada. It is radically pro-abortion and one cannot run nor be a member of one subscribes to an "anti-choice" position.) Now a possible and
shocking explanation has surfaced. It is now known that the Canadian Catholic
hierarchy made its own peace with the radical homosexual agenda in 1992, when
in a settlement of sexual abuse claims made against Ontario monks, it
recognised homosexual "spousal benefits."
Despite Justice Minister Allan Rock's assurances
to the contrary, C-33 will soon result in the complete elimination of legal
distinctions heterosexual marriages and homosexual liaisons. (Rock was then Minister of Justice in the government at the time under Prime Minister Jean Chretien; both Rock and Chretien were Roman Catholics. So-called, same-sex "marriage" was approved by the Parliament of Canada on July 20, 2005 put forward by the minority government under Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, also a Roman Catholic.) And so the
relative uninterest of the Canadian bishops in this crippling blow to the
legitimacy of the traditional family has not gone unnoticed. Indeed, Bishop
James Wingle of Yarmouth, a C-33 opponent, has condemned the "false
impression" that his colleagues had actually supported the legislation. (The Diocese of Yarmouth no longer exists having been folded into the new Halifax Yarmouth Archdiocese. Wingle later became the Bishop of St. Catharines in Ontario and disappeared suspiciously and without explanation resigning in April 2010.)
It is true that no Canadian bishop actually
endorsed C-33. But of the more than 50 Anglophone bishops, only a handful stood
firmly against the bill. And when representatives of the Canadian Conference of
Catholic Bishops (CCCB)--the church bureaucracy, appeared before the House
Justice Committee on May 2, they effectively sabotaged what little opposition
Canada's prelates had mustered.
When C-33 was announced, Vancouver Archbishop
Adam Exner issued a statement demanding the law continue to protect "the
conscience rights of Canadians morally opposed to homosexual behaviour,"
and "allow employers to make non-practice of homosexual activity a bona
fide occupational qualification." Yet on May 2, when homosexual MP Svend
Robinson questioned CCCB general-secretary Doug Crosby about that statement,
the priest could only stammer an incoherent denial of Bishop Exner's position. (Bishop Douglas Crosby is now the Bishop of the Diocese of Hamilton, in Ontario. Next year, he will become the President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops). The CCCB delegation also repudiated the Vatican's 1992 statement on
homosexuality.
"It was pathetic," objects Sylvia
MacEachern, of Ottawa's traditionalist St. Brigid's Association. (named after the sad state of the parish and the Oratorian Affair made known in the book The Last Roman Catholic by the late James Demers. I had the honour as a parishioner there of suffering along with them) "Here was
Canada's most infamous gay MP, the only one quoting the Church's teaching, and
when he asked the representatives of the Canadian Church whether they agreed
with it, they were tongue-tied." In her response to Mr. Robinson, Father
Crosby's colleague, Jennifer Leddy, could only beg him, as a "serious
advocate for human rights," to "give us a chance to participate
constructively," since "we want to participate."
Apologists for the Canadian Catholic hierarchy
say the speed with which C-33 was rammed through Parliament made any strong
resistance impossible. (This is true, it was rammed through. Canadians could barely organise against it and had no say as we were bombarded by the dictatorship of a minority parliament dancing to an evil agenda and we're too damn polite!) But the capitulation of the Catholic bureaucracy to the
gay rights agenda was in April, when New Brunswick Senator Noel Kinsella
introduced his "sexual orientation" Bill S-2. The CCCB was offered
the opportunity to make a submission against it to the Senate but declined.
Furthermore, the Liberal government has been
promising to bring in such legislation since 1993, and renewed its promise last
winter. Yet the national church office did nothing.
National bishops' conferences are a modern
innovation. In 1964, when episcopal collegiality was discussed at the Second
Vatican Council, the venerable Cardinal Oddi quipped that he could find only
one biblical citation for the notion, the time during Christ's passion when
"they all fled." By 1985, Vatican theology watchdog Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger was warning of the "burdensome bureaucratic structures" of
the national offices. They have "no theological basis" and "do
not belong to the structure of the church," he insisted. Each bishop has
complete authority in his diocese and is subject only to the pope. But the
national conferences, however, allow the majority of the bishops to hide in
anonymity.
The CCCB's General Secretariat employs just
under 100 people in a half-dozen commissions, with a budget of roughly $4.5
million. Its functionaries deal directly with their opposite numbers in the
local dioceses, and thus they control information flow in the Canadian Church.
The secretariat is under the nominal governance of an executive committee--this
year led by Kingston Archbishop Francis Spence. But the election of full-time
directors falls to its periodic "plenary sessions," dependent on the
"guidance" of the existing directors.
"Individual bishops have great difficulty
in freeing themselves from the national conference," says MonsignorVincent Foy, a Toronto canon lawyer. "They're afraid their authority can
be undercut at any moment. It's a great burden on the Church. But the Holy See
is now preparing a document on the problem." (On June 7, 2014 a Solemn Mass according to the Roman Missal of 1962 was offered in the presence of Cardinal Collins to celebrate the 75th anniversary of ordination of Msgr. Vincent Foy. He turns 100 on August 14, 2015.)
While lack of accountability is the "iron
rule" of bureaucracy, the CCCB's "gay-friendliness" is the
result of personalities. In the 1980s, Father Doug Crosby, (now the Bishop of Hamilton and Pastor there when the whole "Oratorian Affair" occurred and from where the main antagonists came) who was appointed
CCCB general-secretary, was pastor of Ottawa's St. Joseph's Church. This parish
was jocularly referred to "St. Joe's by the Whirlpool," because of
the party tub in its rectory. St. Joseph's became home to the Ottawa chapter of
Dignity, the homosexual fifth column within the Catholic Church. Special pews
were reserved for Dignity members at the church's noon masses. (To this day, St. Joseph's in Ottawa under the OMI priests is still a parish of liturgical, ministerial and catechetical dissent.
Gay or gay-sympathetic priests tend to form a
solid, cohesive block within the church, observes Michael McCarthy, a retired
priest from the diocese of Saskatoon. "They have such an enormous
potential to create embarrassment with their dirty little secrets, the bishops
won't stand up to them."
While the number of homosexuals in the Canadian
Catholic priesthood is unknown, it is known they have a particular interest in
seminaries, where new priests are formed. On the eve of Pope John Paul II's
visit to Canada in 1984, Emmett Cardinal Carter, then-archbishop of Toronto,
ordered a clean-up of his St. Augustine's Seminary. "Students in the residence
could hear other seminarians padding up and down the halls at night, and
everybody knew what was going on," says one Toronto-area priest, who
wishes to remain anonymous. The obvious theological dissidents were fired, but
the previous graduates were already worming their way through the Canadian
hierarchy. (The Dean of Studies at the time was notorious. and known by all to be gay. The Rector at the time, Father Brian Clough whose first Mass I attended as a boy around 1968 as my parents were friends of his and its a darn good thing I didn't end up in Seminary at the worst possible time; was fired by Carter for a leaked paper encouraging "tolerance for the heterosexual seminarians." It is documented in the book, The Desolate City by Anne Roche Muggeridge but being pre-Internet days, that document has never been able to surface. Father Clough went on to become the Judicial Vicar for the Archdiocese of Toronto.)
An investigation into St. Augustine's found no
evidence of homosexual behaviour. That investigation, however, was led by the
then-bishop of London, Ont., Marcel Gervais. Bishop Gervais subsequent career
has revealed him to be one of Canada's foremost gay-friendly clerics. He has
since become Archbishop of Ottawa, sometime president of the CCCB, grand
chancellor of Ottawa's dissident St. Peter's Seminary, (this may be an error in the author's original piece. St. Peter's Seminary in in London, Ontario, Ottawa no longer has one though there is a school of philosophy and theology at St. Paul's University within the once Catholic University of Ottawa on whose campus St. Joseph's parish sits. As for the dissidence of St. Peter's Seminary in London, I know four fine priests that came from there and that is all I will say about that!) and the ultimate
superior--and protector--of its heterodox sexual ethicist, Fr. Andre Guindon. (whose work was condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then Cardinal Ratzinger!)
A just-published book, Who's in the Seminary,
suggests that Canadian seminaries are still hothouses of homosexuality. St.
Paul University professor Martin Rovers sent out 455 questionnaires to students
at Canada's three major seminaries (St. Augustine's, London's St. Peter's, and
Edmonton's St. Joseph's). Fully 25% of the 203 respondents claimed they were
either gay, bisexual or unsure of their orientation. As with most self-reported
surveys, the accuracy of Prof. Rovers data is open to question, yet it is
certain that homosexual representation in Canadian seminaries is many times
higher than the now-accepted figure of 1.5% to 3% for the population at large.
"The Catholic Church had a major problem
with the retention of priests through the 1970s," says Pennsylvania State
University sociologist Philip Jenkins, author of the major new study,
Pedophiles and Priests. "So they let in a lot of guys they ought not to
have." Many thousands of priests had left the North American churches
after the tumultuous changes ushered in by the Second Vatican Council.
Desperate for new vocations, seminaries relaxed intellectual and moral
standards. According to Prof. Jenkins, many homosexuals have been ordained since
then, resulting in "the gay movement becoming solidly entrenched in the
Canadian hierarchy." He cautions, however, not to confuse the issues of
homosexuality and pedophilia. "If you look dispassionately at the figures,
priestly pedophiles run maybe two per thousand, about the same as the rest of
the population," says Prof. Jenkins, an Episcopalian.
The perception of a pedophilia crisis was
created both by a hostile media and by the division between conservative and
liberal Catholics, says Prof. Jenkins. The former blamed homosexuality, and the
latter, celibacy. "In fact, the figures indicate that there is no Catholic
pedophilia problem, so it's not caused by celibacy." Most of the recent
school and choir scandals have not been pedophilia, with prepubescent victims.
Rather, they've involved 14-or 15-year-old boys--which is classic
homosexuality. That problem, Prof. Jenkins repeats, arose from poor recruiting
and later, subversive networking among gay priests. (This is what most of us have been saying all along. Homosexual men came into the priesthood and raped post-pubescent boys. They used the priesthood as their cover.)
Ironically, it is the worst homosexual scandal
in Canadian history that has cemented the power of gay network within the
Church. The Christian Brothers, a lay Catholic order, was for decades under
contract to the government of Ontario to run reform schools at Alfred, near
Ottawa, and Uxbridge, near Toronto. These schools may have seen some 500 to
1000 cases of physical and sexual abuse, from the 1960s through the early
1980s. When this abuse became public in 1990, a victim's group, Helpline, hired
Toronto lawyer Roger Tucker to pursue their claims. Mr. Tucker approached
long-time liberal-Catholic functionary Doug Roche, to mediate. Mr. Roche, a
powerful Church fixer for three decades, was the founding editor of the Western
Catholic Reporter, and a former MP and Canadian disarmament ambassador. He was
then also Mr. Tucker's father-in-law. His mediation proved agreeable to the
Ottawa Christian Brothers and the Toronto and Ottawa archdioceses. (The Toronto
Christian Brothers have refused to endorse Mr. Tucker's efforts. They are
pursuing a separate compensation arrangement with abuse survivors).
By 1992, Mr. Roche had completed an agreement
whereby validated abuse claimants would receive some $20,000 each and keep
silent about their abusers' identities. Yet by 1996, says negotiator Mike
Watters, the claimants had received an average of only $12,000 each, Mr. Tucker
had pocketed $750,000, and more than $10 million had been spent in
administrative costs. Mr. Roche's fee remained secret. Even more interesting,
Mr. Roche or one of his colleagues slipped a curious little clause into the
agreement, one that was not noticed until years later.
"If you want to know why the bishops
didn't fight Bill C-33 and argue the case against gay marriages, check out the
reform school agreement," says journalist Michael Harris, author of Unholy
Orders, an account of the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal. The agreement with
the Christian Brothers' victims provides for dental, medical, educational, and
counselling benefits to victims, their family members, and those "in a close
personal relationship that others recognize is of primary importance in both
persons' lives." This, claims Mr. Harris, constitutes the Canadian
Catholic Church's recognition of gay spousal benefits.
It is unclear whether (then) Ottawa's Bishop Gervais
or Toronto's Bishop Ambrozic knew about the "personal relationship"
clause in 1994, when both vocally opposed the Ontario gay rights bill. But by
1996, "I think the bishops knew it was there, and Svend [Robinson] knew it
was there," suggests Mr. Harris. Bishop Gervais remained silent during the
C-33 debate, and Bishop Ambrozic, normally the "pit bull" of the
conservative Canadian bishops, merely distributed a summary of the lacklustre
CCCB statement.
For whatever reason, dissident former priest
and theologian Gregory Baum (Baum was interviewed by Father Thomas J. Rosica of Salt + Light Television, the transcript of that fascinating interview includes, "You remain a faithful, deeply devoted Catholic,
you love Jesus, the Church, the Eucharist.") is glad the Canadian bishops ducked Bill C-33.
"I don't think the Church has any business saying this is okay or this
isn't okay." he says. "This was not a church wedding the government
was debating, but a human right."
While Canada's Catholic heretics are pleased
with the C-33 resolution, the orthodox are appalled. "The Catholic Church
isn't a foreign institution," says Toronto lawyer David Brown, (then) vice-president of the Catholic Civil Rights League. "Canada is founded
upon a vision of the human being, grounded in religion. And if the country
loses that vision, it risks self-destruction."
