John Paul II, Second Father and Cover-upper

(Audio version of the post)

Hope you had a happy St. Patrick’s day on Friday. The late Pope John Paul II regarded Poles and Irish as spiritual cousins. That’s why he made a trip to Ireland during the first year of his papacy, 1979, along with a trip to Poland. (And he came to Mexico and the US that year also, as some of us remember.)

Recently a documentary aired in Poland. It was the work of Marcin Gutowski, who has spent years trying to understand how his countryman Karol Wojtyla dealt with the crime of sexual abuse of minors.

Gutowski has a book called Blindness (Bielmo), about what John Paul II knew and when. Also, Ekke Overbeek has just published Maxima Culpa, on the same topic (both books currently available only in Polish).

Gutowski’s documentary, which has caused a national uproar in Poland since its airing earlier this month, reviews the cases of three criminal priests with whom Wojtyla had dealings, while he was Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, prior to his election as pope.

The documentary uses the Polish language, of course, which I don’t know. And you can’t watch it in full in the US right now anyway. (The internet is not licensed to show it here.) But I have done a fair amount of digging around to try to understand what exactly the documentary asserts.

It asserts that Karol Wojtyla did what he could to cover-up the criminal acts of sexually abusive priests.

Not only do many Poles not want to think this, but a lot of us now-older American Catholics do not want to think of Pope John Paul II as a sex-abuse cover-upper, either. When I was first starting out in life, JP II inspired me to enter the Church and become a priest. I read everything he ever wrote. Throughout my twenties (the 1990’s), I revered Pope John Paul II as the wisest and best man living.

The fact is, though, that we have reason to credit the portrait of Wojtyla that Gutowski and Overbeek have painted. They have given us: Cardinal Wojtyla, sex-abuse cover-upper archbishop. We already had the picture of the same man as: sex-abuse cover-upper pope. We had that picture clearly before us, if only we took the time to look.

John Paul II in Washington, D.C., 1979

In the spring of 2011, sex-abuse survivor Peter Isely published an essay about his experiences with the late Polish pope.

Isely chronicled the hundreds, if not thousands, of personal appeals by sex-abuse survivors to JP II, all of which went unanswered.

On the centenary of JP II’s birth, I compiled a little bit of the evidence of the pope’s cover-up of the crimes of Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionnaires of Christ.

Then the Vatican’s “McCarrick Report” came out in late 2020. It contains a decisive nugget of information about Pope John Paul II’s role in McCarrick’s career, a nugget of information that I have mediated on long and hard.

It was the year 2000…

The pope was considering who should become the new Archbishop of Washington. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York had denounced McCarrick to the pope, warning him in the strongest terms not to promote the then-archbishop of Newark to the nation’s capital.

McCarrick wrote to Rome, denying that he was a sexual predator. But he admitted that he had made seminarians sleep in his bed. McCarrick knew that he could not deny that particular fact, since too many churchmen knew it to be true. He risked being dismissed as a liar if he tried to deny it.

So McCarrick told the pope a story about the “family life” he shared with his seminarians. As if we were still living in the 1800’s, when non-married adults did sometimes sleep in the same bed for purely practical reasons. Like to keep warm, or because there weren’t enough beds.

Since no adults in the western world had shared beds for those reasons in many decades (except in emergencies), McCarrick’s explanation rang colossally hollow, to be sure. But, actually, that didn’t matter, when it came to the decision that JP II had to make.

The simple, undisputed fact–that the Archbishop made seminarians sleep in his bed–that was itself a clear firing offense.

From the point-of-view of any reasonable boss of a boss, if you learn that your subordinate forced his subordinates get into bed with him, and there’s no dispute about the fact, then the culprit is done. Fired. Out. In this case, with defrocking procedures to begin immediately.

Remember, we’re not talking about the year 1900. We’re talking about the year 2000. In the year 2000, there would have been no controversy about this in any well-run company. You force a subordinate to sleep in the same bed as you, you’re fired.

But JP II did not fire McCarrick. He made McCarrick the Archbishop of Washington and a Cardinal. I was there.

McC went on to participate in the conclave that elected Benedict XVI. He went on to preach a beatification Mass. He stood right behind Pope Francis when the pope came to Washington to do a canonization. He had a high school named after him.

McCarrick went on to do many, many other things that a cruel villain like himself never should have been doing in Christ’s Church. Including ordaining me a priest on May 24, 2003.

JP II could have, and should have–by any reasonable estimation–stopped it all from happening. He did not.

I think the pope fuzzily imagined in his mind some kind of rug that all this hard-hearted nonsense would somehow fit under. Because, by then, he had been imagining the existence of a such a rug for decades.

JP II’s apologists refer to this decision about McCarrick, made in AD 2000, as an “administrative error.” Administrative error? If the pope had accidentally sold Michelangelo’s Pieta to Bono for 15,000 euros, that would have been an administrative error. This was something else altogether.

This leaves us, then, with plenty of reason to believe Gutowski and Overbeek, plenty of reason to credit the extensive evidence they present. That said, their portrait of the cover-upper Archbishop of Krakow has been criticized in two ways:

1. The Polish bishops have argued that JP II’s pontificate provides evidence of his “decisive measures against cases of sexual abuse in the Church.”

The bishops point to a number of examples, especially JP II’s decision, in 2001, to reserve to the Holy See all canonical trials of criminal sex-abuser clergymen. Starting in 2001, Rome began to handle the ecclesiastical punishment of this particular crime. This change, the Polish bishops write, “proved to be a turning point in the Church’s fight against sexual crimes within its own ranks.”

In point of fact, it has proved to be a turning point in the Church’s cover-up of sexual crimes within its own ranks. This centralization of sex-abuse cases has had this result: A huge mountain of information about these crimes now resides permanently behind the Vatican walls, totally inaccessible to any secular law-enforcement agency on earth. Many of those crimes have become actionable in secular courts of law. But the affected parties do not have access to the documented information held by the Vatican.

Which means this 2001 change has now become the most massive Church cover-up yet. Initiated by Pope John Paul II.

2. A more-trenchant criticism of Gutowski’s and Overbeek’s portrait of Wojtyla comes from scholars of Polish history who question the reliability of some of the documents that the journalists relied on to form their narrative. These scholars raise legitimate questions. Certainly the memos of Communist secret policemen, their spies, and counter-spies within the Church–none of these can be taken at face value.

This criticism does not in the end, though, amount to very much. For one thing, both Gutowski and Overbeek sought access to diocesan archives, and Church officials denied their requests. More importantly, however: The journalists’ narrative does not rely decisively on Communist-archive material. Both Gutowksi and Overbeek personally interviewed sex-abuse survivors who had been victimized when Wojtyla was Archbishop. Gutowski interviewed a survivor who personally told Wojtyla, at the time, about the abuse. The Archbishop said: Keep it quiet.

Poland is in an uproar right now not because Gutowski and Overbeek have produced the first evidence that Wojtyla covered-up crimes. Poland is in an uproar because these journalists have now produced the decisive evidence. We could say the same about the Catholic Church in the USA in 2002: That year, the Boston Globe did not produce the first evidence that the bishops of our country had operated as a mafia of criminal cover-uppers. The Globe produced the decisive evidence of that fact.

In 2009, they held a series of meetings in the Vatican that resulted in a declaration that Karol Wojtyla had lived a life of “heroic virtue.” The first step towards sainthood.

Very little information about those meetings is available to the public. The official documentation provided on the website of the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints describes as heroic JP II’s forgiveness of his unsuccessful assassin and his struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

Did anyone involved in those meetings consider the point-of-view of the victims of crimes that Wojtyla had almost certainly covered up during his tenure as Archbishop of Krakow? Did anyone think about the families of those victims?

By 2009, the Church had supposedly “learned its lesson” about covering-up sex abuse. In an interview recorded earlier this month, Pope Francis claimed that ‘everything changed’ in the Church after 2002, after the ‘Boston scandal.’ (You can watch the interview below.)

Did the Cardinals assembled in 2009, then, discuss the point-of-view of Polish sex-abuse survivors, and their families? Did Benedict XVI consider it, before he signed the decree, declaring to the world that the cover-upper archbishop and pope lived a life of “heroic virtue?”

We have no way of knowing the answer to these questions.

But we do know, because a credible Vatican insider has revealed it, that someone said to Pope Francis, shortly before he canonized JP II in 2014: “Holy Father, there certainly must be sex-abuse survivors, and their families, still living in Poland–people who will remember Wojtyla telling them to keep quiet about the crimes committed against them. And someday, that fact will come out. Someday soon. Maybe you shouldn’t go through with this canonization?”

We know that this conversation took place. Pope Francis canonized JP II anyway.

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In the interview above, Pope Francis explains it all away with this argument:

We cannot judge people in history by our own standards. We have to apply the standards they followed at the time. For the Church, everything changed in 2002, because of the Boston scandal. Before then, it was all cover-up. In families now, in neighborhoods, it’s still all cover-up. You have to judge people according to the standards of their time and place.

I, for one, find this argument utterly unconvincing. After all, it is contradicted by practically every fact of the actual case. The law of the land in Poland held, at the time, that sexually abusing a minor constituted a crime. Wojtyla knowingly covered up crimes. He told people to keep quiet who themselves recognized at the time that crimes had been committed against them, or against their children.

Now, was this all part of a political game Wojtyla had to play, to try to outwit  the Communists? If that idea can explain away the cover-ups, then why didn’t Wojtyla do anything about those very crimes, and those very victims, when he could have? Namely, when he became the Bishop of Rome, the pope, in 1978?

No, we can find a better explanation in Peter Isely’s essay:

John Paul II’s advocacy for human rights around the world clearly and decisively ended at the front door of the church.

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The Polish bishops claim that:

The root cause of the communications media assault on John Paul II is the attitude of the media toward his teaching which does not correspond to contemporary ideologies promoting hedonism, relativism, and moral nihilism.

The irony here is enormous.

First, how about this question: Who is the moral nihilist? The victim who denounces a crime, or the one who tries to shame the victim into silence?

Here’s another question: Who exactly has compromised the authority of the Church here? Gutowski and Overbeek? A historical debate about what exactly happened in the Krakow chancery in the late 1960’s and early 70’s does not touch on the question of whether the then-Archbishop is in purgatory or in heaven.

The choir of Yes men who went along with a rushed canonization: they are the ones who have compromised the authority of the Church. Not the survivors who have spoken. The papal cult-of-personality cultivators: they have compromised the authority of the Church. Not the survivors who have spoken.

I still admire the man I looked up to, in many ways. He gave us many genuinely profound reflections on how to live as a Christian in our times. He was certainly a master showman and an expert in making impressive gestures. Who can really doubt that he loved God and His Christ, and that he prayed hard his whole life?

But he was also a careerist bureaucrat, an equivocator, a stubborn bastard, and an obtuse narcissist.

I pray for my flawed, dead blood father, that he may get to heaven sooner rather than later. I pray likewise for Karol Wojtyla, a kind-of second father for this bookish goofball who became a priest. May the pope of my youth rest in peace. May the good Lord be merciful to him.

But I know this much: The victims of the crimes Wojtyla helped to cover up: They deserve to get to heaven before he does. And I figure that, from where Wojtyla sits now, he knows that, too.

The Scottish McCarrick

Brian Devlin could have called his book Ordained by a Predator, Scottish Version. Except that Devlin was not, in fact, ordained by the predator. The predator became Archbishop a few weeks after Devlin’s ordination.

Devlin was, though, preyed-upon by the predator. He was preyed upon by a priest who, like McCarrick, went on to become both a Cardinal and the most-prominent churchman in the land. In the case of Keith Card. O”Brien, the land was Scotland.

Devlin narrates what happened one evening in O’Brien’s room in the seminary. The two of them had just prayed Night Prayer.

Devlin was a 20-year-old seminarian at the time. He lived in fear of being expelled and having to explain it to his Irish mama. Devlin writes:

I was highly tuned into the reality of the power O’Brien had over me. I knew that if I displeased or challenged him, I would be a casualty at the next student-review meeting… The thoughts of the review meeting induced panic in me. Have I offended any of the faculty? …Will I be kicked-out?

Many students were sent packing. There was no appeal. No process of scrutinizing the scrutinizers. Their power is final, and it’s ruthless. And inherent within it is its ability to be manipulated into a sexual predator’s playground.

[NB. This quotation is actually a combination of a passage in Devlin’s book and a passage in a magazine article he wrote summarizing his book.]

Keith O’Brien was twenty years older than Devlin, and he was the seminary “spiritual director.” O’Brien had spent years grooming Devlin, so that the young seminarian would think nothing of coming to O’Brien’s room to pray Night Prayer, just the two of them. They had, in fact, done so many times.

Devlin writes:

At the end of the evening, Keith would usually envelop me in his hug, and I would leave. However, on that night something different happened. He did hug me… but it was far far longer than it had ever been before, with a greater intensity. I remember as I turned to leave, he sat down and pulled me on top of him.

My first reaction was of total confusion. Had he stumbled and pulled me down accidentally? But then he put his arms around me. I felt a fleeting sense of how ridiculous this was: nearly six-foot-tall me sitting on this much older man’s knee. He began to caress me. He told me that he loved me. At that point I was asking myself if he was joking. But then it became clear he wasn’t.

He told me he would always love me. With ever more urgency he rubbed my arms and chest. My embarassment turned to shame and fear.

Devlin managed to get himself out of the room. The next morning O’Brien manipulated the young man into ‘forgiving’ him. Devlin reflects:

I told him everything was fine. (I was too shocked and confused to say otherwise.) I told him I forgave him. What else could I do?

Devlin continues:

On reflection, without doubt his plea for forgiveness was a way of preventing me from talking about it further. He bound me to silence that morning.

At that instant I gained an important, life-changing insight. I felt with certainty that O’Brien was a conman and a sham.

Keith O’Brien and Prince Phillip welcoming Pope Benedict to the UK in 2010

Like with McCarrick, the silence that O’Brien imposed on his victims stretched on for decades. When O’Brien was named Archbishop of Edinburgh, a few years after the episode narrated above–and only weeks after Devlin had been ordained–the new priest decided he had no choice but to leave the priesthood. He knew he couldn’t serve under the conman.

Twenty-five years later, however, Devlin came into contact with some old friends from the seminary, through the new gizmo called Facebook. He learned that he was not alone in keeping a secret about the Archbishop. And he learned that the Vatican had known some of these secrets for years. Apparently O’Brien sexually assaulted a subordinate while he was in Rome to receive his Cardinal’s hat in 2003.

(Makes me wonder who McCarrick may have assaulted when he got his red hat in 2001–and I was twenty feet away, oblivious.)

Devlin’s conversations with his old friends gave him a new perspective. He writes:

It was almost too astonishing to believe that, after never having spoken with these men for decades, we were now having deep and intimate conversations about similar experiences from the past which had caused us immense suffering.

They showed me true friendship. The did not see what had happened to me as being less relevant than their own experience because I had left the priesthood and they’d stayed and slogged it out.

Devlin thought the group should share their stories with the public. But the others preferred to try the internal Church process instead. Devlin agreed to co-operate with the effort.

Choosing the ecclesiastical-protocol path would eventually expose this fact: There really is no internal-Church process. No one to whom they complained really wanted to do anything about it.

Somehow this took Devlin by suprise.

I had not at all considered that the Church might choose to do nothing. I had never for an instant thought that anyone would need to be convinced. I had presumed there would be some sort of legal process that the Church would have in place to deal with whistle-blowers like us, and it wouldn’t matter if the person being accused were a bishop and Cardinal.

I was very wrong.

It was not enough for four priests to swear before Almighty God and testify that we were abused by O’Brien. Instead the nuncio [Vatican ambassador to the UK] would have to ‘convince all the powers that be in Rome’ to take our concerns on.

(Of course, if Devlin had had the chance to speak ahead of time with all the poor souls who tried for decades to get the ‘powers that be in Rome’ to listen to them about McCarrick’s abuses, he would not have had such a suprise.)

So, in the end, the group of O’Brien survivors did what Devlin had wanted to do originally: go public with their stories.

As it happened, a reporter published their full story shortly before the conclave of March 2013.

The Vatican nuncio had threatened the survivors, insisting that they keep quiet. Had they complied with that threat, O’Brien might very well have entered the conclave as a voting Cardinal. He could have been elected pope, just as McCarrick could have been elected pope in 2005–even though the sworn testimonies of at least two of his victims already sat in Vatican files. (O’Brien could have been elected pope in 2005, too–even though apparently at least someone in the Vatican knew he had sexually assaulted a subordinate in Rome two years earlier.)

The public furor resulting from the late-February 2013 article, however, finally moved the Vatican brass to do something. They put O’Brien out to pasture, with the excuse that he would soon turn 75. O’Brien co-operated.

Devlin reflects:

Church authorities were blinded by their fear of scandal. The true scandal, though, wasn’t the publicity we caused. The scandal was the hypocritical sexual predation of Cardinal O’Brien and the desire by Church leaders, in the full knowledge of that behavior, quietly to cover it up.

They did not want to turn over the rock, for fear of what they might find hidden under it.

Devlin adds, with real magnanimity:

There was also the question of O’Brien’s right to challenge us, his accusers, if he wanted to. Due process in every other circumstance would give someone that right. Not, it seems, in the Church.

The Vatican considered the matter settled after O’Brien went into retirement. But Devlin continued to press for some kind of genuine judicial process. He believed the Catholics of Scotland deserved the truth, and a sense of justice being served. Devlin tried working his way through Church channels again, to no avail. So he wrote directly to Pope Francis.

Holy Father, Cardinal O’Brien has been sent for six months prayer and penance. And then what? Are we expected to regard this as fair and due process? Indeed, is the Cardinal himself not justified in expecting more than this?

I am not asking for much, Holy Father. I simply want to know what is being done, and what will be done, to investigate the abuse and harm caused by Cardinal O’Brien against me and many others.

Devlin laments the fact that, to this day, his letter to the pope remains unacknowledged and unanswered.

A year after Devlin wrote to Pope Francis, a Vatican official showed up in Scotland to take the testimony of Keith O’Brien’s victims. Devlin found the official to be a kind listener.

A year after that, the Vatican announced that O’Brien had resigned the ‘rights and privileges’ of being a Cardinal, while retaining the title. O’Brien made a brief public statement to the same effect.

Devlin writes:

I found out about this announcement through Twitter. There was no personal communication from the Church authorities in Scotland or in Rome. I was offered no sight of the report prepared by the Vatican official, not even a redacted version of it. It may be that it never crossed anyone’s mind that I would have a desire or even the right to see what had been written about me.

In his statement, O’Brien made reference to the ‘fatherly care’ Pope Francis had given both him ‘and those I have offended in any way.’

I’m still waiting to be offered some of that care, fatherly or otherwise, from this most pastoral of popes. I don’t suppose I’ll hear from him anytime soon.

The report prepared by the Vatican official has never been published. Devlin and others demanded that a full, public investigation of the Archdiocese was necessary, because of the cover-up and cronyism involved in O’Brien’s long tenure.

Another O’Brien survivor insisted that there was a financial aspect: he knew of O’Brien giving a jet-ski to a paramour, and no one knew where the money came from.

No such investigations were ever carried out.

O’Brien died in 2018.

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Devlin writes lovely, introspective prose. He has ideas about Catholic sexual morality–ie., that it is wrong. I do not agree with that. But this book is well worth reading. Brian Devlin is a champion of justice and of Christianity. He is a hero.

Conclusion of Evangelium Vitae

JPII The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Conclusion

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The motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and of the Church, involves great struggle.

[Click HERE for full podcast website.]

Gospel-of-Life Evangelization

JP II The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Chapter 4 Part 1

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[Full podcast website HERE]

“Legal” Abortion?

It’s as if Pope JPII wrote this particular part of the encyclical to help us, right now.

It is almost eerie how perfectly this section of a 1995 letter reflects the state of the question in the US, in June 2022.

[Full podcast website HERE.]

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JP II The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Chapter 3 Part 4

Church Teaching About Abortion

JPII The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), Chapter 3, Part 2

[Click HERE for the full podcast website.]

In this section of his letter, Pope John Paul II identifies what abortion is, what we learn about it from the Bible, and what the Church has taught about it through the centuries, and teaches about it now.

The Gospel of Life, Chapter 2, Part 2

JPII The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Chapter 2, Part 2

The Gospel of Life, Chapter 1, Part 2

JP II, Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Chapter 1, Part 2

[Click HERE for the podcast website.]

In this section, the Holy Father analyzes the roots of the democratic ideal.

The Gospel of Life, Chapter 1, Part 1

JP II, Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Chapter 1, Part 1

In this part of the letter, the pope interprets the story of Cain and Abel. Then he unfolds his understanding of the “Culture of Death.”

WARNING: JP II presents us with an examination of conscience here which will indict just about everybody. Remember that God is merciful, He forgives the penitent, and He bings good out of evil.

[For the podcast website, click HERE.]

The Gospel of Life, with New Podcast Series

Karol Wojtyla was born 102 years ago today. He grew up to become Pope John Paul II.

On Annunciation Day, 1995, Pope JP II wrote to the world about the right to life. That letter became one of the basic guidling lights of my little life.

We know now–at least we know to some extent–how deeply John Paul betrayed his own message in that letter, when it comes to survivors of sexual abuse by priests and bishops. Pope JP II presided over an enormously anti-life criminal cover-up, probably the worst criminal cover-up the world has ever seen.

In his letter, the pope explored the problem of blinded conscience. But meanwhile his own conscience was utterly blind to the suffering of people like my friends James Grein and Chris O’Leary. By his anti-life negligence, JP II managed to compromise the evangelical mission of the Church for the foreseeable future.

All that said, though, the letter Evangelium Vitae continues to resonate in my mind. If only JP II could have seen the significance of his own words, when it comes to clerical sex-abuse victims. If he had, we would find ourselves now in a completely different place, as a Church.

But that did not happen. What has, in fact, happened, is: the message of Evangelium Vitae has all but vanished from Catholic pastoral communication.

In the US, we find ourselves at the moment for which we pro-lifers have prayed for decades. But instead of mobilizing as a united force to seize the happy and hopeful day of a post-Roe v. Wade world, we seem paralyzed and directionless. Sheep without shepherds.

For the past couple weeks, I have been sweating in the backyard, laying the foundation for a little chapel. I cannot preach or pray in public; I can’t organize any community response to the end of Roe v. Wade. I remain unjustly suspended from ministry, with no end to that suspension in sight.

But one thing I can do is to read JP II’s The Gospel of Life aloud to you. It should occupy about twenty podcasts, each fifteen minutes long.

JP II’s writing can be difficult to understand. I will try to read aloud so as to make his words as intelligible as possible. For me these words still shimmer with the deepest and most-inspiring significance.

Here’s the first episode:

JP II Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) Introduction

[For the podcast website, click HERE.]

As we will see as we proceed through the encyclical, being a pro-life Catholic means something much deeper than a political tribal loyalty. It is really a spirituality of how we treat other human beings on a day-to-day basis.