The Mitered Mafia, Impeachment, and the Savior

Jesus, the Christ, the man completely consecrated by the Holy Spirit of God, the eternal Word incarnate—He was rejected, and suffered, and died, and rose again on the third day, in order to redeem us and become our…

Savior.

We need a Savior. The human race, the world, needs her divine Savior. The one and only Christ, Jesus, founder and sanctifier of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

Everybody remembers the Pennsylvania Grand-Jury report of thirteen months ago. A couple weeks ago, the Missouri Attorney-General released his report on clergy sex abuse, the first of many more that will come this fall and winter.

The Missouri report makes a lot of thoughtful points. One of them is: Why did the current bishops let all the cases which had gone unresolved in the 80s and 90s sit around unaddressed? They had files full of information about those cases. Yet they did nothing. And now we find ourselves in this situation, with attorneys general and grand juries having to do it instead.

Everyone remembers the Theodore McCarrick case. A year ago, we all wondered: For God’s sake, what happened? How did this man manage to wind up running the Church in the US during the last sex-abuse scandal, while he himself was guilty?

We have no answers.

Some have accused the bishops and pope of being a homosexual mafia. Maybe. But the obvious fact is that they are a mafia of obtuse narcissists.

Over the course of the past forty years, most Catholic priests in the US have exercised our ministry in a basically steady manner. Yes, our parishes have had their ups and downs about “liberal/conservative” issues. But catastrophic pastoral mistakes, leading to moral and financial bankruptcies? Hasn’t happened very often, on the parish level in the US.

Nonetheless, the reputation of the Catholic clergy lies in an utter shambles. So catastrophically damaged that most people find it difficult to imagine that they should go seeking their Savior in a Catholic church.

We parish priests didn’t do this. Yes, a large number of us did wrong—but the numbers show: it’s not a larger proportion than among high-school teachers or gymnastics coaches. Just like most high-school teachers and most gymnastics coaches have shambled along all these years, trying to do right, without sexually abusing anyone–same goes for the overwhelming majority of Catholic parish priests.

The priests didn’t destroy the reputation of the Catholic Church. The bishops, governed by the pope, did, over the course of a generation. By making catastrophic pastoral mistakes, over and over again. Now we face widespread diocesan bankruptcies, and the total moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. That’s where we are now.

Congress wants to impeach the crooked president. May they have at it.

But the greater crisis involves mankind’s access to its Savior. The Church has no impeachment process for bishops or popes. But they are supposed to be Christian men who care about the salvation of souls. Why haven’t they resigned? I ask honestly. For well over a year, it has been obvious that they should allow themselves to be replaced by a random selection of parish priests, and step aside. So we can start over.

But we just keep going in circles. And Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, lies hidden behind the organizational catastrophe that the mitered Mafia of Obtuse Narcissists has wrought.