Phil Brennan
Wednesday, March 20, 2002

A lot of people are assuming that the current pedophile priest scandal is thrusting a dagger into the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. Obviously, they don't know much about history. Over the last 2,000 years, the Church has endured far worse upheavals and it's still around and thriving, just as Christ promised his apostles it would be.

When I was a youngster in parochial school, I was often reminded that the Church is never stronger than it is when it's under attack. In times of persecution, the Church grows muscular and thrives.

Catholics under relentless attack and persecution retreat into the holiness Christ demands from all of us. And the Church emerges strengthened in its spirituality and more fully aware that the Kingdom is not of this world.

Conversely, when things appear to be going smoothly and the Church is largely free of persecution and attacks from outside, its muscles tend to atrophy and it loses much of its missionary fervor.

This is especially true in secular societies such as the United States where the temptation to avoid rocking the boat proves stronger than the obligation to defend truth and justice and the Faith.

This is one of those times. A Church which has always seen itself divided into the Church here on earth – the Church Militant – and the Church beyond the world – the Church Triumphant – has abandoned its militancy, lost its muscle and become a timid version of the Church that withstood centuries of violent persecution under the Roman empire.

The Church that stood in heroic opposition to the evil empire in Moscow and does so now in the face of vicious persecution in China and elsewhere has, in this nation, given in to a host of malcontents, perverts, heretics and radical feminists.

The motto of the Catholic hierarchy in America seems to be "go along to get along," even if it means kowtowing to militant homosexuals, toning down the Church's opposition to abortion, and accepting Caesar's coin at the price of its independence.

At a time when the Church needs warriors to carry the fight against a virulent form of out-of-control paganism, it has produced a confederation of ecclesiastical wimps willing to stand mute in the face of the rampant depravity sapping the nation's moral strength.

What is behind the inexcusable silence and failure to act in the face of what appears to be decades of sexual misconduct among the clergy by many members of the American hierarchy is fear of exposure of the fact that the Church of sinners actually has sinners in its midst. And fear is Satan's best weapon.

Rather than act as shepherds guarding their flocks against the wolves, they have sheltered the predators – and, as result, turned them loose among the sheep.

Rather than face the demonstrable fact that by allowing a coven of radical feminists to occupy positions that gave them the right to accept or reject candidates for entry into some seminaries – a practice so abused that homosexuals were actually given preference – bishops allowed the practice to continue out of fear of offending militant homosexual pressure groups both inside and outside the priesthood.

The result: a priesthood with an unknown number of sexually active homosexuals, many of them attracted to the youngsters among their congregations and unable to resist the temptation to seek them out for their sexual pleasure.

Moreover, the hierarchy is reluctant to offend the militant homosexual lobby by admitting what is patently obvious – that the pedophile priest problem is a homosexual problem: Without the presence of homosexuals in the priesthood there would be no pedophile priest problem.

For years the American hierarchy continued to support liturgical translators who were distorting liturgical texts to curry favor of the tiny minority of women wedded to the unnatural tenets of radical feminism.

Time after time the Holy See rejected these deliberate mistranslations, which in many cases changed the very meaning of the texts, and time after time the bishops continued to submit the faulty work of these revisionists back to Rome.

For two thousand years it has been an article of our faith that the destiny of the Roman Catholic faith is in the hands of the Holy Spirit. That being so, it is hard to dismiss the idea that a violent shakeup within the Church is not only needed, but overdue.

If the media are to be believed, Catholics are "reeling" "in trauma" and fleeing the Church in disillusionment. They are not. As a beloved friend, a deacon, once said to me, "The Church is in the pews."

That Church is rock solid. Those few who abandon the Church in the face of the scandal were merely looking for an excuse to flee a discipline they could not accept. Without their diluting presence, the Church will be stronger.

The scandal has opened the Church to bitter criticism and a mounting number of assaults, many of them launched by paganistic media that despise the Roman Catholic Church and all that it stands for. Mainstream media dominated by homosexuals, pro-abortion fanatics, atheists and disciples of Karl Marx are now wallowing in the mud and mire of the pedophile priest scandal. They will not let up.

Great. Bring them on. It may not be fun to endure what lies in store for Catholics as a result of the scandal, but when it's all over Roman Catholicism in America will emerge from the darkness and be stronger and more vibrant, once again, undeterred by fear of offending the offenders, a courageous force for truth in a world dominated, as it has always been, by the lie.

Emitte Lucem!

He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.