Phil Brennan
Wednesday, May 1, 2002

Watching the scandal now plaguing the Roman Catholic Church play out can be both amusing and infuriating: amusing when viewing the spectacle of journalists discussing the Church when they haven't got the vaguest idea of what the Church is all about, and infuriating when, out of their pitiful ignorance, they proceed to inform the Church about what it must do to fall in line with our largely pagan society.

I was vastly amused when I watched a TV reporter standing in front of St. Peter's Square exclaim in tones of amazement that the cardinals meeting solely to decide how to meet the challenges posed by priests who molest the young had failed to discuss the ordination of women. They also failed to discuss next year's football season and lots of other matters, being, it appears, fixated on the problem at hand.

From the moment the pope summoned their eminences to Rome, the media began to speculate about the agenda and the certainty that the cardinals would be talking about women's ordination and an end to priestly celibacy, and, hopefully, maybe even the legitimizing of homosexuality in the priesthood, none of which had the slightest bearing on the subject about which they were called to the Vatican to discuss.

They pounced on such liberals as Los Angeles Cardinal Archbishop Mahony and managed to get him to comment that celibacy should be on the agenda. That set off a hue and cry among the media who wanted the meeting in Rome to address their agenda, not the pope's. The pope's prevailed.

Back home, both during the Vatican conference and afterward, talk shows and news broadcasts made it a point to trot out every heretical dissident they could get their hands on.

Tim Russert, for example, featured the Rev. Richard McBrien, Notre Dame's resident heretical dissident, and sought his advice on what kind of reforms the church needed to adopt. Asking Fr. McBrien for such advice is akin to asking John Gotti for advice on how to reform the Justice Department's approach to organized crime.

A number of TV news broadcasts featured the likes of Francis Kissling of Catholics for Free Choice, a tiny pro-baby killing organization funded by the abortion industry.

Various dissident nuns also made the rounds. On one show, at the conclusion of a Catholic bashing orgy conducted by two of these so-called Catholic women, host Alan Keyes went slightly ballistic and told the harpies that the Church would never recover until it got rid of the likes of them. Get thee out of the nunnery, he told them, in effect. God Bless Alan Keyes.

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the coverage has been the constant use of the word "pedophilia" to describe priestly molestation and "children" to describe the victims. Despite the fact that the media have been repeatedly chided for using these deceptive terms, they blithely continued to employ them.

After a while it became obvious that no matter how many times the ladies and gentlemen of the media were told that the molestation of teenage boys is homosexuality, not pedophilia; that their molesters are homosexuals, not pedophiles; and that teenage boys are not children, they were going to continue to deceive their listeners and their readers.

To do otherwise would be to admit the obvious – that the Church's problem is the presence of homosexuals in the priesthood. And that, in a media elite as infested with homosexuals as the Church, or even more so, would be inexcusable.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the media about the possibility of admitting homosexuals to seminaries if they have never had homosexual experiences. It's the newest mantra. It has become another favorite ploy – raise the subject every time the matter of homosexuality in the priesthood comes up. "Father, why shouldn't a homosexual who has never acted out his homosexuality be barred from the priesthood?" is the standard media query.

Unfortunately, those fielding the question inevitably fail to respond that a man who has never participated in homosexual relations is not homosexual. If he's a homosexual, he has engaged in sodomy. If he hasn't, he's obviously not homosexual. It's sodomy that makes a homosexual a homosexual. No sodomy, no homosexuality.

Go ahead, throw stones at me, accuse me of gay bashing, but homosexuals are made, not born. Sure, all men are born with certain feminine characteristics, and some men have more of them than others – we call them effeminate. That, however, does not make them homosexual. Only sodomy does that.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the scandal arrived none too soon. It's a blessing in disguise in that it exposed far more than a sexual outrage. In realizing how badly served we have been by the hierarchy in the United States in the matter of priestly sexual misbehavior, the faithful have become increasingly aware that they have been badly served, indeed misled, in doctrinal matters and those involving the traditional discipline required of Catholics faithful to the Church and its Magisterium.

All across the nation, pastors and bishops have concentrated on social work and largely ignored their obligations as spiritual guides. They have failed utterly as the shepherds they are charged with being.

Age-old doctrines handed down for 2,000 years, the very heart of the Church, have been treated as if they were open to dispute at the drop of a bishop's mitre.

New Age heresies abound in many dioceses across America, with some parishes practicing rituals that have nothing whatsoever to do with Roman Catholic liturgical norms and everything to do with juju.

Thanks to the scandal, all of this is out in the open, and that's the first step in reforming the Church in America. That's great news for Catholics faithful to Rome.

It's bad news for McBrien and his ilk, and all those cafeteria Catholics who want a permissive church that lets them pick and choose what to believe and tells its followers that just about anything goes – you know, stuff like sodomy. It might drive them out of the Church.

Too bad.

Eamus!

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.

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