A little church history

Every 250 Years the Church Faces Certain Destruction

Timothy Flanders November 13, 2020 0 Comments


In my study of history, I’ve noticed a few patterns. One of these is the cycle of impossible situations. It seems that about every ten generations—250 years, sometimes less—the Church is faced with one of these. It is some crisis which threatens to the destroy the whole Church and prove God false. At the time, it is unprecedented—unlike anything the Church has faced up to that point. During such a crisis many think that the world is at an end and start to identify the Antichrist among their contemporaries. Apocalyptic literature begins to proliferate. Yet somehow, against all odds, God delivers His Church once again.

The Lord’s military strategy for Gideon was to reduce his army from 32,000 to 300 lest Israel should glory against me, and say: I was delivered by my own strength (Jdg. 7:2). This tactic doesn’t seem to have changed over the years. If Church history shows us anything, it is that the “liberty and exaltation of Holy Mother Church” with men is impossible: but with God all things are possible (Mt. 19:26). I think it is important for us to remember these things in order to face our own situation. So here I will review a few of these in succession.





Crucifixion and Persecution (33-313)


The Church was born out of the most devasting crisis—the crucifixion of Christ. The Apostles abandoned him alone, and all their hopes were destroyed when he was buried. They were certain now that their movement was at an end. Consider how they felt when He was in the grave—this temptation to despair would be faced by all our fathers in every impossible crisis to come. But we hoped, that it was he that should have redeemed Israel (Lk. 24:21).

Against every conception of human imaginings, our Lord arose and sent them power from on high. Emboldened, they faced the persecution of the Jews and the Romans (the latter being the fiercest empire the world had ever known). St. Paul traveled throughout the empire boldly proclaiming Christ the King.

But even at the death of the last Apostle, the Church was a tiny movement with a handful of adherents which almost no one believed would amount to anything. The triumph predicted in the book of Revelation must have seemed like raving lunacy in 100 AD. The Church was mercilessly and systematically persecuted again and again by the Roman Empire, and somehow they endured and conquered. In 301, Armenia converted. In 313, Constantine revoked the persecutions and began favoring the Church. Suddenly the unthinkable began to happen.



The Arian Crisis (321-381)

No sooner was a shocking triumph begun for the Church but a new crisis arose which quickly engulfed the faithful. The vast majority of bishops denied the divinity of Christ. The stalwart defender of orthodoxy seemed to be only a single bishop, who was mocked as a lunatic with the phrase Athanasius contra mundum (“Athanasius against the world”). It was a brave new Arian world as Jerome lamented, “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.”

The emperors renewed the persecution against the orthodox, and paganism was even revived by Julian the Apostate. Athanasius was driven from his see again and again. Martyrs shed their blood once more. Churches were seized for the Arian creed. All bishops seemed to abandon the faith as well as the pope. The laity were left alone to fight for truth. Yet once again, against all odds, this raging heresy was beaten back.



The Sassanian and Muhammadan Invasions (602-661)

But as the generations of Arians died away (in the east), a new fracture appeared in Christendom: Monophysitism. This heresy became the cause of the first lasting schism between East and west (the Acadian schism 484-519). It continued as the bishops attempted to resolve it over the successive generations, but by the 6th century bloodshed began to increase between the factions of Christians. While the west was grappling with barbarism, the stability of the east was breaking down as well.

The crisis took a turn for the worst when the divided Eastern Roman Empire could not withstand the incursions of the Sassanians beginning in 602. They penetrated to the Holy City of Jerusalem and even captured the True Cross. The situation was dire, provoking Emperor Heraclius to lead a crusade and recover the True Cross. But he too fell into heresy with another compromise with truth called Monothelitism.

Then the most devastating force arose on the frontier: an army of Arabs with a neo-Arian creed who quickly conquered most of the Christian lands in the East. At this point men were sure that the Apocalypse had come upon them, and numerous eschatological theories were put forth. But a new Athanasius arose who defeated Monothelitism: Maximus the Confessor against the world. The heresy was condemned and the advance of Muhammad was checked.



The First Pornocracy and the Viking Invasion (882-964)

Later, even as the east was experiencing its last great heresy under Iconoclasm, the west experienced a revival and advance under Charlemagne. But around this time a new menace emerged: the Northmen, (“Vikings”) who devastated western Europe like no one had seen before. A new petition was added to various oral litanies: from the fury of the Northmen, deliver us O Lord. They raped and pillaged across the continent, singling out monasteries for destruction.

To make matters worse, the Roman see fell into its first sustained period of corruption. It was a period later known as the Pornocracy, due to the unspeakable acts of sacrilege, profanation, and debauchery committed by the popes and their allies in this time. This hit rock bottom with John XII whom St. Robert Bellarmine called “practically the worst of all pontiffs.”

The people of Rome rebelled against him and the pious Emperor Otto I helped depose the pope and turn the tide against evil men in the hierarchy. This led eventually to the Cluniac reform to cleanse the clergy. Within a few generations St. Peter Damien (1007-1073) was leading the charge against clerical abuse, and shortly later the Gospel was conquering the vicious Northmen. The barbarity of our fathers was being turned into the chivalry of knights for Christendom.



The Great Western Schism (1378-1417)

After a great period of revival in the Church with the glorious 13th century and the Crusade in Southern France and the continued success in Spain, the Church again fell into a period of decline. First, the papacy became the pawn of French politics, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy (1309-1376), or the Avignon Papacy, named for its residence in modern France. This papal palace saw seven popes and five antipopes. Within a generation of this unhappy circumstance, France and England abandoned the glory of the crusade in favor of fighting each other in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Then the Black Death hit Europe, which peaked in 1348, and struck dead about half of the population. Bodies were stacked in the streets.

If this situation weren’t bad enough, the Great Western schism broke out in which Europe divided between two different popes. And then a third pope was added. Ecclesiastical revolt was gaining steam between Ockham (d. 1347), Wycliffe (d. 1384), and Huss (d. 1415). Despite this darkness, another Athanasius arose, the miracle-working preacher St. Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419). He is credited with turning back the apocalypse that everyone thought was coming down upon the world. He convinced the adherents of antipope Benedict XIII (whom he himself believed to be the true pope) to remove their obedience from him and give it to the Council of Constance, which eventually resolved the schism.



The Second Pornocracy and the Protestant Looters’ Revolt (1517-1563)

But once again the Church fell into decline as the Renaissance popes took control. The Black Death seems to have killed off most of the good priests, and by 1500 there was widespread debauchery and corruption, while the papacy followed suit with the worst of the worldly. We may call this time the Second Pornocracy due to its imitation of the First. Luther went to Rome and the scandal helped provoke him.

Suddenly Europe erupted in civil war as Protestants began revolting, looting churches and destroying statues. It was the Second Iconoclasm. Princes and kings joined the movement so they could commit adultery and theft with impunity, and were not above getting military aid from the Muhammadans to fight Catholics. The papacy was mired in corruption, and hesitated desperately to address the situation for almost thirty years while destruction reigned.

Finally, with the great efforts of new saints, the Council of Trent was convened and decreed. Despite fierce opposition even from Catholic kings, the Council succinctly clarified the vast majority of Catholic doctrine under attack and laid out the basic program of true reform. Within a few generations the Catholic Church was back on the offensive, winning back souls to the Church and stopping the advance of Protestantism in Europe. More than this, they began to spread the faith throughout the world from China to Japan to North and South America.



The Republican Revolutions (1789-1800)

But even as the Counter-Reformation gained momentum, Pope Urban VIII betrayed the faith. He induced France to side with the Protestants in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which turned the tide in favor of the heretics. As France became increasingly secular in the 1700s, a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment stirred among the elites who sought a way out of Catholic order. Finally in 1789, inspired by the American revolutionaries, the French began the revolt known as the French Revolution. This targeted the Church for genocidal attacks and mass murder, helped to justify pornography as free speech, and started to replace Catholic tradition with liberal public education.

Eventually this movement turned into an empire, and Napoleon conquested most of Europe, destroying the Catholic infrastructure everywhere. He captured the pope and brought him to France where he died. The enemies of the faith were proclaiming their victory over the old Catholic order by 1800.

But once again a revival took place, against all opposition. The papacy was revived and the Romantic and Ultramontane movements set off a renewal of Catholicism across Europe. France finally began implementing the Council of Trent, and even restoring Gregorian Chant (which had falled into widespread disuse even in Rome). Bl. Pius IX and Leo XIII both worked to bring about a counter-revolution of Catholicism, and especially Thomism after 1879.



The Third Pornocracy and the New Iconoclasm (1965-Present)

But the world responded by killing each other on the most massive scale ever seen in two world wars, refusing to repent even after the Miracle of the Sun. The errors of Russia spread and eventually found their way into the Church. Corrupt men began wielding power in the Vatican, and by 1965 a violent New Iconoclasm had arisen. The popes and bishops responded with timidity, allowing widespread destruction of statues, churches, liturgy and theology. Marriage began to break down across the world, and the unborn holocaust spread its silent bloodshed. In the late 1970s, the dossier of Cardinal Gagnon showed Paul VI that he was living in the Third Pornocracy, in which the debauchery gripping the Vatican had once against reached nadir levels. John Paul II refused to crack down on it, and by the time Benedict began to act, the evil machine was too strong for him to control. And then Pope Francis.

This story is known all too well, as readers of One Peter Five are aware. But when we look at the context of history, I think it is easier to see our present darkness, though unprecedented, as something that God can handle. And He will. Let us consider the faith of our fathers and the saints who continued the tradition of Athanasius against the world. God permits these things so that we may not ascribe to ourselves any sort of glory, since no man can fix the new unprecedented crisis we face. It is literally impossible to resolve. But not for Almighty God. Let us pass down the faith to our children and never lose hope.

TheJudeanChristianWorld

Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity

By John D. Steinrucken

Rational thought may provide better answers to many of life's riddles than does faith alone. However, it is rational to conclude that religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the extent that the West loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism, then to the same extent, it loses that which holds all else together.

Succinctly put: Western civilization's survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Arguably the two most defining and influential Christian concepts are summarized in two verses of the New Testament. Those verses are Romans 14:10 and John 8:32.

Romans 14:10, says: "Remember, each of us must stand alone before the judgment seat of God." That verse explicitly recognizes not only each man's uniqueness, but, of necessity, implies that man has free will -- that individual acts do result in consequences, and that those acts will be judged against objective standards. It is but a step from the habit of accepting individual accountability before God to thinking of individual accountability in secular things. It thus follows that personal and political freedom is premised upon the Christian concept of the unique individual exercising accountable free will.

John 8:32 says: "And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Whatever the theological meanings that have been imputed to that verse, its implicit secular meaning is that the search for truth is in and of itself praiseworthy.

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

An orderly society is dependent on a generally accepted morality. There can be no such morality without religion. Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large -- a peace which translates to a workable liberal society.            

A few years ago, I saw on television the interview of a reforming prostitute and drug addict. When asked why she had chosen to reform, her simple answer was, "I don't want to go to Hell." I am sure that she had previously received hours of counseling from secular social workers, all without discernible effect. What did it for her was the simplicity of a belief in Heaven and Hell, and with knowing that one day, she would stand alone before her God to be judged.

For the majority of a culture's population, religious tradition is inextricably woven into their self-awareness. It gives them their identity. It is why those of religious faith are more socially stable and experience less difficulty in forming and maintaining binding attachments than do we secularists.

Most men do have a need for God. This, I think, is proven by the desperation with which so many of those who have forsaken the God of their fathers (it has been fashionable to do so) are now reaching for meaning in eastern exotica, new-age mumbo-jumbo, and other attempts to fill the spiritual hole.

Or they surrender themselves to secular ideologies or do-good causes, especially those in which they can mass with others in solidarity, shouting in unison mindless, ritualistic simplicities and waving placards of hackneyed and inane slogans.

Secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion. From the time of the philosophes with their certainties in 1789, the rationally thought-through utopias of those who think themselves the elite of the world, when actually put to the test, have not merely come to naught. Attempts during those two centuries to put into practice utopian visions have caused huge sufferings. But they, the clever ones, never look back. In their conceit, they delude themselves that next time they are sure to get it right. They create justifications for their fantasies by rewriting the histories.

We secularists should recognize that we owe much to the religionists, that we are not threatened by them, that we should grant to them their world. Why should we be exercised over a Christmas Crèche in front of the county court house? It is appropriately symbolic of Christianity's benign but essential role as guarantor of our political and legal systems -- that is, of a moral force independent of andtranscendent to the political. And what harm will come to a child who hears prayer in the schoolroom? I daresay harm is far more likely to come in those places where prayer is not heard.

The fact is, we secularists gain much from living in a world in which excesses are held in check by religion. Religion gives society a secure and orderly environment within which we secularists can safely play out our creativities. Free and creative secularism seems to me to function best when within the stable milieu provided by Christianity.         

To the extent that Western elites distance themselves from their Judeo-Christian cultural heritage in favor of secular constructs, and as they give deference to a multicultural acceptance that all beliefs are of equal validity, they lose their will to defend against a determined attack from another culture, such as from militant Islam. For having destroyed the ancient faith of their people, they will have found themselves with nothing to defend. For the culture above which they had fancied themselves to have risen, the culture which had given them their material sustenance, will by then have become but a hollow shell.

An elite must, by definition, have a much larger base upon which to stand. For Western civilization, that base has over the centuries been the great mass of commoners who have looked to Christianity for their moral guidance and for strength to weather adversity. The elitists delude themselves if they think the common people will look to them for guidance once their religious beliefs have been eroded away.

The greatest crime of the elitists -- if they have their way -- will be their failure to use their gifts of intellect to lead and to preserve. Their sin will be the abandonment of that ninety percent of the population which had provided them with the secure societal and material wherewithal for practicing their conceits and dilettantes.

If the elitists of our Western civilization want to survive, then it is incumbent upon them to see to the preservation of the hoary, time-honored faith of the great majority of the people. This means that our elitists should see that their most valued vested interest is the preservation within our culture of Christianity and Judaism. It is not critical that they themselves believe, only that they should publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.

Abuse of due process?

QED

Catholics, Sex, and Cardinal Pell

• 26th February 2019
 
•  Comments (1)

Peter Wales

The verdict revealed today is not an indictment of George Pell and the Catholic Church. It is an indictment of the media, whose vindictive witch hunt led to frenzied demands that someone, anyone, be punished. In this case the designated victim has done more than anyone to eradicate the very abuse for which he was laughably convicted

STRANGELY, for one usually so sceptical and questioning, the alleged high rate of child abuse in the Catholic church was something I simply absorbed from the ether, or perhaps from the ABC, which, since I disagree with it about almost everything, is my primary news source. Looking back, I am still not sure why, while enthusiastically poking holes in most other ABC reporting, I was content to accept their claims about the church being the locus of most child abuse. I wasn’t a Catholic at the time. Perhaps it was simply comforting to be able to think of something so nasty as being nothing to do with anyone I knew, or any organisations I was involved in. Except it wasn’t true.

It is hard to know where to start with this, so I will make just a few key points, which you can follow up or check if you wish. During the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse, the ABC breathlessly reported that 60% of child abuse in a religious institution took place within the Catholic Church. Shocking! How disgusting! What a hive of degenerates! Except that by not telling the whole story, the ABC was saying something completely untrue. What was left out was that during the time under investigation, 80% of children who attended a religious school or were resident in a religious institution, were students in or resident in a Catholic institution. The twenty percent of students/residents in institutions run by other religious groups accounted for 40% of the total abuse reported. In other words, a student in a non-Catholic religious school was more than twice as likely to have been molested than a student in a Catholic school.

In fact, Catholic clergy have lower rates of abuse than clergy of other religions or denominations (some groups, for example the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have far higher reported rates of abuse than any mainstream denomination). In turn, clergy of other denominations have lower rates of abuse than occur in secular community and sports groups and public schools (the Boy Scouts in the US has just filed for bankruptcy because it cannot keep up with payouts for abuse claims). And abuse in any church, school or community group is far outstripped by abuse in the home, where it has been estimated 90% of abuse occurs. As Bettina Arndt noted

It’s total hypocrisy. We jump up and down in the Royal Commission about abuse of people in institutions. We don’t give a stuff about the major risk for children which is, you know, children in single parent families being abused by boyfriends passing in and out of those families … There are a whole lot of areas [of sexual child abuse] we don’t discuss because they are not politically correct. Obviously, we’re trying to get the Catholic Church and attack churches.

The Royal Commission observed there had been 2504 incidents of alleged child sexual abuse in the Uniting Church between its inauguration in 1977 and 2017. This compares with 4445 claims of abuse in the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2015. Some parts of the media pounced on this figure as again proving the disproportionate amount of abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church. But two other factors need to be considered: the Commission did not consider any abuse claims made against the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches during the 27 year period from 1950 to 1977. Most abuse claims in the Catholic Church occurred in the 1970s. This may also have been the case in other denominations. But whether so or not, this is 27 years in which abuse in the Catholic Church was considered and counted, but not in other denominations. In addition, media reports generally failed to note that the Catholic Church has five times as many members as the Uniting Church. On the Commission’s own figures, a child attending the Uniting Church was more than twice as likely to have been molested than a child attending the Catholic Church.

Another important fact that become clear in the cases reported to the Royal Commission is that almost all reported abuse in the Catholic Church occurred in the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties. Was it disgusting? Absolutely. Was it wrong? Absolutely. Should perpetrators be brought to justice? Absolutely. Is it still happening? No. Or hardly.

So what changed? What happened to see the rate of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, already lower than other denominations and community groups, reduced dramatically even further? Part of the answer is that strong leaders like Phillip Wilson and George Pell were appointed to positions where they able to make a difference. It is no co-incidence that those two, who were most vigorous in setting up systems to support victims and to ensure that perpetrators were stopped, are also the men who have been targeted by the media and the courts.

At the time Archbishop Wilson was charged, I spoke to a senior priest, now a bishop. The charges seemed incomprehensible to me. On the evidence available it was not clear how any responsible prosecutorial team could reasonably expect a conviction. He agreed. “They don’t care,” he said. “They just want to get a senior Catholic.” Hard to believe, but if so, then the trials of Wilson and Pell are not so much trials of those two men, but a trial of Australia’s system of justice.

I wrote an article shortly after Archbishop Wilson’s conviction (that he had known of and failed to report abuse by priest James Fletcher) which was published at Quadrant Online. In it I argued that the malleability of memory is so well understood that a conviction could not possibly safely be based on two alleged conversations never noted or reported to anyone else until formal complaints were made over forty years later. I suggested that the presiding magistrate’s finding that the case against Archbishop Wilson was proven could only be understood in the light of the kind of media bias noted above, and predicted the verdict would be overturned on appeal.

It was.

District Court Judge Roy Ellis offered similar reasons to set aside the conviction as I had suggested in my article. Some of the evidence considered at the original trial as contributing to a finding of guilt beyond reasonable doubt was even more ludicrous than I had first believed. One of the two conversations which contributed to the “proof” of later Archbishop Wilson’s alleged guilty knowledge of the sexual abuse perpetrated by James Fletcher took place in the confessional. The complainant acknowledged he could not see clearly the priest was to whom he was speaking, but believed he saw red lips and recalled the priest having a deep voice. On this basis he came to the conclusion it was Fr Wilson, then a 25 year old parish priest! But Archbishop Wilson does not have red lips or a particularly deep voice. The original finding that Archbishop Wilson had known and deliberately covered up knowledge of the activities of James Fletcher, based on this and one other alleged conversation more than forty years earlier, was clearly and grievously wrong. Justice is not done, nor are victims helped, when innocent people are vilified and persecuted.

One of George Pell’s first actions on becoming Archbishop of Melbourne was to set up clear processes for dealing with complaints of sexual abuse. This was not in response to media alarm about child abuse. The Boston scandal, for example, was five years in the future. Nor was it an attempt to protect the reputation of the Church. Pell was one of the first in any organisation anywhere in the world to put protocols in place which protected victims, supported them through whatever processes they wanted to follow — including police action where appropriate — required any accused person to stand down during independent investigation, and which instituted a ‘one strike you’re out policy’.

It is hard to think of anyone in Australia who has done more to prevent child sexual abuse, to bring those responsible to justice, and to support victims and simplify processes for them.

However, it did not take long for The Guardian and the ABC to identify Archbishop, later Cardinal Pell, as an enemy, a prime target. He is on friendly terms with John Howard and Tony Abbott. He has publicly dismissed climate alarmism as a scam which, if policies based on it and urged by the UN and various celebrities were instituted, would cause serious harm to the world’s poorest people. He publicly described abortion as the worst possible child abuse. He declined to be sorry when some Catholic teachings, on the nature of marriage, for example, or the sinfulness of homosexual activity, were claimed to be offensive. He believes that Western culture is worth preserving, and that immigrants to Australia should enter the country legally, and apart from a carefully measured number of refugees, should be people who are willing and able to make a contribution.

And perhaps worst of all in the eyes of his detractors, he noted that it is impossible to take proper action to correct a problem until that problem is correctly identified and, therefore, any proposed remedies to sex abuse in ecclesiastical settings needed to take account of the fact that while girls and young women are overwhelmingly the most common victims of sexual abuse gtenerally, almost all of the child sex abuse that had taken place in the Church involved homosexual men and adolescent boys. Others who have pointed out this connection have been met with similar fury, most recently, German Cardinal Walter Brandmueller .

If you did not know Cardinal Pell and you wanted to invent a perfect nemesis for Australia’s left-wing media, you could not do better than to come up with a an intelligent, energetic, tough-minded, AFL-playing, politically and religiously conservative straight white male.

The ABC’s almost psychotic obsession with finding something dreadful to report about Cardinal Pell was noted at least as long ago as 2015, when Gerard Henderson suggested the mainstream media had the wrong target, and was focussing on Pell simply because he is a social conservative.

Then there are comments from left-wing media consumers. “He must have done something, they’re all at it.” (No, they’re not). “Even if he is not a pedophile himself, he protected them, moved them around.” (There is no evidence whatever this was the case.) “He had to know something.” (ABC journalist Paul Bongiorno, who shared a house with notorious pedophile Ridsdale, says he also didn’t know. As soon as Pell was in a position to do something to stop child sex abuse happening and to support victims, he did). “Someone needs to be held accountable.” (Yes, the perpetrators and anyone who assisted or covered up for them. As I noted above, there is no correction to injustice in committing the further injustice of vilifying and convicting people who are innocent.)

But what of the specific charges against Cardinal Pell? They were that, while Archbishop of Melbourne, he found two choir boys drinking altar wine after Mass at the Cathedral, and demanded they give him oral sex. Shocking? Yes. Terrible? Yes. And ludicrous, as Andrew Bolt noted at the time this claim was first made public .

Firstly, despite the gruesome headlines, there was one complainant, not two. The second boy alleged to have been a victim denied he had ever been abused. The accuser only claimed the second boy had been involved fifteen years after the alleged event, and after that boy, then a young man, died of a drug overdose in 2014. So a single, uncorroborated complaint.

The accuser was not able to specify an exact time when the claimed abuse took place. Instead, he claimed it occurred on a Sunday sometime between August and December 1996. St Patrick’s Cathedral was being renovated during much of this time, and Archbishop Pell celebrated Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral only twice during the accuser’s four month window. On both of those occasions, Pell remained at the door of the Cathedral after Mass, greeting and talking with parishioners and visitors before leaving for other engagements. On both of those occasions he was accompanied by another priest who gave evidence that he was with Pell, rarely at more than arm’s length distance, for the entire time he was at the Cathedral.

Other witnesses pointed out that on both of the occasions on which Archbishop Pell celebrated Mass between August and December 1996, choir practice was held immediately after Mass, and that the absence of two choirboys would have been noted immediately. Other witnesses gave evidence that the accuser’s description of finding and drinking altar wine in a back room was unlikely in the extreme, given that altar wine was kept in a vault and only brought out in required quantities before Mass.

But it was not merely the accuser’s word against Cardinal Pell’s. Journalists and members of the public present at the trial said it was “a slam dunk for the defence.” The defence evidence, some of which is summarised above, showed not only cause for reasonable doubt, not even that Cardinal Pell did not commit the alleged offences, but that it was not possible for him to have done so.

The verdict is not an indictment of Pell and the Catholic Church. It is an indictment of the media, whose vindictive witch hunt led to a public furore and frenzied demands that someone, anyone, be punished. It is also an indictment of police departments and court administrators who allowed themselves to be driven by that frenzy, and perhaps, of the running of the trial and instructions given by the trial judge to the jury. There is a long-standing principle of Western jurisprudence that if there is a reasonable explanation of the evidence which is consistent with the defendant’s innocence, a verdict of not guilty must be returned. At very least, that should have been reiterated to the jury, and evidence of the accuser’s personal and criminal history made available as bearing on the credibility of his accusations.

Hopefully, the verdict will be overturned on appeal, which strikes me as most likely, as was the case with the equally egregious verdict against Archbishop Wilson.

Harm has been done. Firstly to Archbishop Wilson and Cardinal Pell, both faithful servants of the Church and the wider community. Secondly to the Church, which despite having lower rates of abuse than other bodies, has been, with a few appalling exceptions, open, forthright and pro-active in acknowledging abuse where it occurred, and putting processes in place to support victims. Many other institutions face a far larger public reckoning; there is filth lurking in places yet undreamed of. Thirdly to Wilson and Pell’s friends and families, who, like many other friends or family of alleged child abusers, have been subject to irrational hatred and slander, as well as unnecessary pain and doubt and confusion. Fourthly to genuine victims of child abuse, who, seeing these trials and their politically-driven outcomes, will wonder how they can rely on those whose duty it is to listen to them and protect them.

And finally, following these debacles, harm has been done to Australia’s courts and police, whose credibility and independence is rightly open to question.

__________________________

The Herald Sun‘s Shannon Deery lists the defence’s ten key arguments which failed to persuade jurors

The timing of renovations

Victim “AA” alleged he was abused by Pell after a Sunday Solemn mass in the mid 1990s, and then again a month later.

It was established at trial that Pell said just two solemn Masses that year. The cathedral had been under renovation so was not used until November of the year the victim said the offences happened. AA was adamant the second incident occurred in that year, but Pell was able to establish that was impossible.

The timing of Mass

Pell also argued it would have been impossible for him to be in the sacristy, robed and alone, so quickly after mass ended. Instead, he says he routinely spoke to parishioners on the steps of the Cathedral before being escorted back to the sacristy by at least one other priest.

He was never alone

Pell argued that while Archbishop he would never have been alone while robed at the Cathedral.
His legal team compared him to the Queen, saying she would never be left alone while robed for a ceremonial occasion. His master of ceremonies, Monsignor Charles Portelli testified that: “I recall the first two occasions he said mass and I can say I was with him the whole time he was robed on those days”.

There were people everywhere

It was argued that it would be impossible for Pell to molest two boys in the sacristy, or corridor, after mass because of the amount of potential witnesses in the area.

Former sacristan Max Potter, who worked at the Cathedral for decades, told the court he would unlock the sacristy in the minutes after mass when altar servers would start returning to the room to disrobe. They would also clean up after Mass, meaning the sacristy was only ever momentarily unattended.

Only a madman

It was Pell’s legal team’s submission that “only a madman would attempt to rape boys in the sacristy immediately after Mass.” They argued dozens of people would be around watching over the newly appointed Archbishop.

Choirboys don’t go unseen

The prosecution case centred on the fact that the two complainants were able to flee from a procession of choristers, altar servers, and priests, leaving church after mass in order to make their way to the sacristy.

Pell argued it would have been impossible for them to escape the carefully choreographed procession that was monitored with military like precision, without being noticed, and reprimanded. Further, he argued that even if they did, it would have been impossible for them to return to the choir rehearsal that immediately followed mass without being noticed. No witnesses testified that they could ever remember a single occasion when a choirboy left the procession unexpectedly.

The organists would know

Even if the boys did flee, Pell argued they would have most certainly been seen sneaking into the sacristy by nearby organists who continued playing for up to 15 minutes after mass as the congregation left the church.

Robes made it impossible

It was alleged that Pell abused the boys while robed in his Archbishop’s robes, consisting of multi-layered dress worn over his normal clothing. The robes were shown to the jury and exhibited as part of the trial with a demonstration of how they were worn. Pell argued that the nature of the robes meant that was impossible for him to expose himself while wearing them.

There was no red wine

AA testified that he and victim BB were caught drinking red wine in the sacristy.
Pell argued that at the time only white wine was used at the Cathedral because of a preference by the then Dean of the Cathedral. Evidence was called by a wine supplier, but it remained unclear whether white, red or both wines, were available at the Cathedral at the time. Pell’s team argued that AA made up the wine reference based on Catholic tradition of using red wine during mass.

They remained silent

The silence of both boys in the years after the abuse was used by Pell as strong evidence that it never happened. His team argued that if AA and BB were abused they would have, at the very least, discussed it among themselves. There was no evidence at trial that they had discussed it with anybody. AA swore he didn’t discuss it with BB, and there was evidence that even when asked by his mother, BB denied being abused while a chorister.

Sobering Figures On Abuse

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Sins of Omission: The Abusive PA Clergy Abuse Report

PAUL KENGOR

Back in August, after a special solemnity Mass in my parish in the Diocese of Erie, Pennsylvania, I came home and read the grand jury report on clergy sex abuse in six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses, including my own.

I read the 884-page online version. I saw allegations against priests in my diocese and the Pittsburgh diocese where I was baptized. I saw names of priests I know or have met. I was, of course, mortified. The behavior described wasn’t merely twisted, perverse, and psychologically warped, but diabolical.

I felt sick. I struggled for the best invectives to hurl at my screen but was left speechless. None seemed adequate. Making me angrier was the fact that so many abusers got away with their deeds. At least in this world.

If there was a degree of reassurance, however, it was this: in many cases, a good priest or bishop stepped in to stop the abuser or remove him from ministry. This even included some cases with the much-maligned and understandably criticized then-Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh.

And yet, as I worked backward to the report’s introduction, I was assaulted by this summary statement, which instantly became the most quoted passage in the media: “Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing: they hid it all.”

That hit me like a brick. Whoa, I snapped at my computer screen, now that’s not true. They did nothing and hid it all?

This isn’t what I saw. The very report itself contradicted that explosive charge. In fact, I found the name of my previous priest (a longtime friend) in the report. He’s no abuser, quite the contrary. I was gratified to see Father Mark listed for reporting an accused abuser based on just one allegation. He is one of many men of God who did something. And yet, good men like Father Mark endure nasty looks when wearing their collar in public out of suspicion they’re child molesters.

Look at the line again: “Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing: they hid it all.”

Such hyperbole is outrageous and damaging. Worse, I feared it was intentional. I suspected from the language, including remarks by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the report’s front man, who condemned a “sophisticated” and “systematic cover up” aimed at protecting “the institution at all costs,” that the actual target is the institutional Catholic Church.

All of which brings me to a remarkable article published in Commonweal, written by Peter Steinfels, longtime editor of Commonweal and religion reporter for the New York Times. Steinfels and I no doubt have political disagreements and a few cultural and spiritual ones as well. Nonetheless, I stand in admiration of this superb piece of thoughtful, thorough reporting that ought to be read in every course on journalism and media (and legal) ethics.

Steinfels’s nearly 12,000-word piece is titled “Vehemently Misleading: The Pennsylvania Grand-Jury Report Is Not What It Seems.” If you have any opinion whatsoever on the Pennsylvania abuse report or the wider issue of clergy abuse, you have an obligation to sit and read this article. Steinfels has more than confirmed my worst suspicions about this report back in August. He has also confirmed in my mind that certain public officials in Pennsylvania need to be held accountable.

Steinfels begins by laying out the enormous influence of the Pennsylvania abuse report, which has prompted numerous additional states to follow suit. He then quickly zeroes in on what is indeed the most “vehemently misleading” passage, the one that has had the greatest reverberations:

“All” of these victims, the report declares, “were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all.” Or as the introduction to the report sums it up, “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.”

Steinfels gets right to the heart of the matter, asking: “Is that true?” The answer, of course, is no, as is clear to anyone who reads beyond the irresponsible introduction. Steinfels answers his question:

On the basis of reading the report’s vast bulk, on the basis of reviewing one by one the handling of hundreds of cases, on the basis of trying to match diocesan replies with the grand jury’s charges, and on the basis of examining other court documents and speaking with people familiar with the grand jury’s work, including the attorney general’s office, my conclusion is that this second charge is in fact grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust. It is contradicted by material found in the report itself—if one actually reads it carefully. It is contradicted by testimony submitted to the grand jury but ignored—and, I believe, by evidence that the grand jury never pursued.

These conclusions are dramatically at odds with the public perception and reception of the report….

[T]here is the hard reality that not many people have actually read the report, let alone read it critically…. It includes, I can pretty safely add, the journalists on whose news accounts most of these people relied. Almost every media story of the grand jury report that I eventually read or viewed was based on its twelve-page introduction and a dozen or so sickening examples the introduction and the report highlight, written in a language that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court later called “incendiary.”

That was my takeaway, too. Journalists did a shabby job with the report, clearly skimming the introduction as the basis for the nastiest headlines. Then again, in their defense, they surely figured they could safely rely on the report’s own summary introduction. A reasonable assumption.

I will not here summarize Steinfels’s exhaustive review, but a few of his conclusions are worth noting.

First, the report alleged that clergy abuses occurred regularly and routinely “everywhere.” Really? I can name a half dozen parishes off the top of my head with no reported cases. Does the report substantiate this charge? No.

In a particularly jaw-dropping statistic, contrary to the claim that the “men of God” hid everything, Steinfels estimates that “perhaps 90 percent or more of offenders the report lists were identified not by the police but by those ‘deficient’ diocesan investigations.”

Whoa! What’s that?

Yes, 90 percent. That’s in contrast to the, well, zero percent the report effectively claimed (contrary to information provided in the report itself) by asserting that “all” cases were covered up.

This is the height of irresponsibility. Shame on the authors.

Second, the online version of the report ends at page 884. It chops off the more than 450 pages that followed. These pages, as Steinfels notes, consist of photocopied responses from dioceses, bishops, diocesan officials, and certain priests protesting their innocence. They were guillotined.

Further, the grand jury report offered no comparative data or historical context. As I read it, I banged my fist pleading with the anonymous authors for a general percentage of priests involved in abuse. I’m sure the number is in the single digits. Unfortunately, no such analysis was offered. The report evokes a pandemic. I badly wanted to know how many of the guilty priests are dead or alive. One priest highlighted was born the year Ulysses S. Grant became president. There’s one allegation against him. We have no idea if it’s legitimate.

And what about the good clergy who manned up and did their due diligence? This includes the retired bishop of my Erie diocese, Donald Trautman, who is treated very unjustly by the grand jury report. Steinfels, in his analysis, shows that Trautman acted strongly, nobly, compassionately, prudently, and even rapidly—a view backed by an independent analysis done by the Pittsburgh firm K&L Gates. (The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would have served taxpayers far better had it hired K&L.)

Steinfels’s review makes clear that the bad apples did their ugly work primarily in that notorious period I refer to as the Dark Ages of the Church: the 1970s. Two bishops stand out as potentially ignoring serious cases during that time: the late Bishop Alfred Watson of Erie and Bishop William G. Connare of Greensburg.

Moreover, after reading the report in August, and then doing several talk shows on the subject, I had many people ask me how the Catholic Church and its clergy compares to Protestant denominations, public schools, juvenile detention centers, prisons, nursing homes, the Boy Scouts, coaches, physicians, psychiatrists, stepfathers, live-in boyfriends, USA Gymnastics, Jerry Sandusky, and on and on. A friend of mine is a state trooper who investigates sex-abuse crimes against minors. He told me that teachers and coaches are the most common offenders. He has had seven cases of clergy abusers. When I asked him how many of those seven were Catholic priests, he said, “Zero. All of them were Protestant pastors.” He noted that he has a colleague in the eastern part of the state who has arrested priests, but he personally has had no cases involving Catholic priests.

That’s an anecdotal example. Still, such comparative data with other professions is not only valuable but necessary. This report, however, clearly had no such interest. It wasn’t the goal. So what was the goal?

Steinfels concludes that “the real objective” of the Pennsylvania report is that it was intended as a “weapon” by those wielding it:

In Pennsylvania, the criminal statute of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors has been repeatedly extended; the first of the grand jury’s recommendations is to remove it altogether….

The radioactive recommendation is one that has been implemented in four states (California, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Delaware) and proposed in many more. The grand jury calls for a “civil window” of two years during which victims can sue dioceses for abuse not just if accusers are under thirty, as Pennsylvania law now provides, but no matter their age. Pennsylvania’s bishops have previously opposed similar legislation on the grounds that it would expose dioceses, parishes, and charities to huge losses, even bankruptcies, for misdeeds committed by others many decades ago. Who would be penalized for these crimes? Not the actual predators and negligent or culpable church officials, in most cases dead or without assets, but Catholics who had nothing to do with those deeds…. The Pennsylvania bishops’ conference, like its counterparts in many other states, has argued the unfairness of lifting the statute of limitations for such suits against the Church and other nonprofits while barring them, under the doctrine of “state sovereignty,” against public schools, juvenile-detention centers, or other state agencies, where far more abuse occurs.

All this is debatable…. But the critical point regarding the Pennsylvania report is that it has been designed to be a weapon in the debate….

Whether that objective is a good or bad thing is open to debate. But the tool that the attorney general’s office has constructed to achieve it is an inaccurate, unfair, and fundamentally misleading instrument.

That being the case, I have my own conclusions, which will not get anywhere near a scintilla of the publicity the grand jury report received. Here they are:

For starters, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office and governor’s office should disclose to the public the authors of this report, particularly the inflammatory introduction. Who wrote it? Who’s responsible?

If we can’t be informed of the authors, how about the overseers? Did Attorney General Josh Shapiro pause to review the report before it went to press? Did Governor Tom Wolf?

As for Shapiro, I wonder if calls have been privately made for his resignation over this. He needs to clarify and apologize for the rank hyperbole and gross misperceptions. To that end, Governor Wolf should do the same.

Wolf’s role deserves special consideration for this reason: Tom Wolf is a cultural radical. Pennsylvania is a pro-life state where even Democrat governors (e.g., the late Bob Casey Sr.) were staunch pro-lifers. Wolf is so extreme on abortion that Planned Parenthood boasts that he’s the first and only governor who served as an “escort” for Planned Parenthood. Wolf’s radicalism on issues from abortion to same-sex “marriage” to the most fringe elements of the “LGBTQ” agenda is striking. Those Wolf positions are starkly at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church, Pennsylvania’s bishops, and, yes, Pope Francis. I’m sure that Wolf harbors a strong dislike for these teachings. I bet that Wolf was pleased to see his attorney general deliver this take down of the Church in Pennsylvania as well as unleash the wider assault that has now begun by other states eagerly following suit.

Third, the Catholic Church, particularly in Pennsylvania—whether via the bishops’ conference or another organization—ought to fight back. The entire Church was broad-bushed by this report that grossly mischaracterized countless priests and bishops. Some bishops, like Donald Trautman, have taken a severe hit. Gannon University has removed Trautman’s name from its campus. Reputations are being maligned, tarnished, and ruined. Some of these men might have a legal case against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, particularly if material they supplied to the grand jury was deliberately omitted in order for the attorney general’s office to paint a dark picture that shades the full truth.

The Pennsylvania bishops ought to respond, not only as a moral-ethical duty to clear names, but also because they might have no other recourse out of financial necessity, especially if (as Steinfels suggests) this report opens the floodgate for a litigation bonanza that will bankrupt innocent parishes. Moreover, they ought to consider responding as a signal to other states to be more judicious (and not so reckless) as they prepare reports.

Obviously, this report has put the bishops on the defensive, and people in the pews are understandably fuming. So am I. They want heads on a platter. But the innocent need not suffer silent martyrdom. The guilty should be punished fully, but the innocent need not accept injustice.

Do we want to see predatory priests held accountable? Of course. I can’t say that enough. Surely a special circle in Dante’s inferno awaits the worst of them.

But government officials also must be held accountable. Certainly, Pennsylvania officials have done nothing approaching the horrors of the worst abusers exposed in the grand jury report. I commend any sincere effort to shine the spotlight and seek genuine justice. And yet, they have caused damage in their own way. They now need to take steps to rectify what they’ve done wrong with this report.

The grand jury report has its own sins; they are sins of omission. An abuse report of this kind should not itself be an occasion for abuse.

Sexual Revolution Exposed

Why Private Sexual Vice is a Public Concern

ANTHONY ESOLEN

One of the Holy Week events at my old school, Providence College, was a march in favor of a wide variety of sexual inclinations, all of them disordered by biological nature, and considered to be so also by the Catholic Church, which takes its lead in this regard from Scripture and from the doctrine taught by Saint Paul. For the invisible God is known by the visible things he has created; and in the beginning he made the human race male and female, each for one another. That is what Jesus implies when he obliterates the permission that Moses granted to the Hebrews because of the hardness of their hearts. The Hebrews of old could divorce, but Jesus says that “it was not so from the beginning,” that is, before the fall of man. “Therefore,” he says, citing the words of Genesis, “a man leaves his mother and father and cleaves unto his wife, and they two become one flesh.”

Before I get to what Jesus concludes from this verse, I wish to assert that he is not being poetical. It is rather a succinct way to describe what is physically and biologically the case. The man and the woman together in the congress of the sexes as such—we are not talking about kissing and embracing, or about acts of sexual mimicry, such as sodomy—form a one-flesh union for a clear and indispensable biological and human purpose. It is just as if, for an imaginary organism, you needed a male and a female to come together to breathe or to cleanse the blood. What we now know about that union is far more extensive and far more subtle than what people knew in Jesus’ time. We are not talking about accidental or arbitrary contiguity of organs, and if it were not for our desire not to see it, every biology textbook in the land would be reveling in the complexity, the manifold consequences, and the sheer beauty of it all. Check out what a botany textbook says about the subtle and intricate pollination of fruit trees. That, by comparison with the union of male and female human beings, is as a stick-figure drawn by a child to Michelangelo’s painting of Adam and Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

We must deny the bond between Creator and creation if we deny that marriage has a created essence observable in the very structure of human physiology. Now then, because of what marriage essentially is, Jesus does as he always does with moral questions. He raises the bar, we might inadequately say. Just as he condemns lewdness when he says that a man who but looks at a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery with her, he now rules out all means or reasons for a man’s “putting away his woman,” taking care to note, in Matthew’s account of it, that by “his woman” he means a wife properly speaking, since neither Greek nor Hebrew distinguishes verbally between “woman” and “wife,” as also not between “man” and “husband.” If you divorce your wife and marry another, you commit adultery.

Notice that Jesus does not refer to what any famous rabbi has said about it. As usual, and the people are struck by it, he teaches “with authority,” and that authority is not presumptuousness or pride, since he himself is the new law. He does not refer to any social custom. He is sublimely uninterested in what any human being may think about what he says. His only referent is the Father, who “made them male and female” in the beginning. His teaching is in perfect concord with what Saint Paul will say about what happens to the imagination of man after the fall. Then we get not only hard hearts but perverse minds to boot, so that man reduces God to the form of beasts, and reduces himself as a necessary consequence. “Their women,” says Paul, “exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” It is a form of idolatry, just as the divorce that Jesus now condemns was at best a sign of recalcitrance and at worst a rebellion against the Creator God.

All of this fits together. Nor need we limit ourselves to matters regarding the commandment against adultery. Jesus raises and transforms all of the commandments. It is absurd on the face of it to suppose that Jesus would demand holiness as regards telling the truth, or loving your enemies, or restraining your anger against your brother, or severing yourself from undue attachments to your possessions, but shrug away the entire realm of the sexual. What is Genesis but a saga of passions gone awry, including especially the sexual passion, leading to enmity, violence, treachery, and bloodshed? Remember Lot’s wife. Remember also Lot’s daughters, remember Lot’s fellow citizens, remember Cain and Abel, Lamech the murderer, Potiphar’s wife, the rape of Dinah and the treacherous vengeance of Simeon and Levi, the bed-trick with Leah, the casting out of Hagar and Ishmael, the jealousy of Jacob’s sons against their half-brother Joseph, the sons of God and the daughters of men, the incest between Judah and Tamar, Onan the seed-spiller, Noah’s nakedness exposed, and so on. Nor will it do to say that Jesus reserves his most severe condemnation for people who turn religion itself into a banner of pride, and that therefore the sexual sins are hardly to be considered sins at all. The bite of a cobra is worse than pneumonia, but pneumonia can kill you too. Or, to look at it from the other end, if a man’s harboring lust for a woman is a form of adultery, we need not ask about Sodom.

We see that what Catholics call the natural law is affirmed by what Saint Paul teaches about sexual immorality, and is affirmed, purified, and exalted by what Jesus teaches about divorce and the movements of the heart. Now, we may trust what Jesus says about the Father’s will “from the beginning,” or not. But if Jesus is telling us the truth, that truth will not be altered by what we think about it, no more than will the law of gravity be suspended because we want to play at Superman. A law, if it exists, works with sublime independence of human opinion, though the latter can mitigate our guilt when we violate the law. Mitigate the guilt, not necessarily the consequences.

Public Celebration of Private SinSo I return to the march at Providence College, held with the strong support of the administration, and attended by the Vice President of Student Affairs. One of the young women I saw carried a sign that read, “Why do you care so much about my sex life?” I am embarrassed for her sake. Let me try to respond.

Young lady, I do not care at all about your “sex life,” a really ugly term, because I do not care about you, personally. I don’t know you. I’m not your confessor. I should care about you, though. If I were a better man, I would get in touch with you right away, because I would be concerned for your individual welfare. We really are dealing with matters of fact here. If what Jesus reveals about the Father’s will “from the beginning” is true, then to violate the Father’s intent would be like ingesting a poison, or cutting your hamstring with a knife. It has nothing to do with opinion. Those mushrooms will hurt you. Pretending otherwise does not alter the fact.

But you are doing far more than violating the sixth commandment. Everyone is a sinner. You are demanding that certain forms of violating that commandment be honored as rights to be protected, or even virtues to be celebrated. That then involves by necessity the whole community, and indeed it will, if you have your way, corrupt the community, just as would happen if the community accepted or celebrated any other principle that was utterly false and that involved a direct violation of the Creator’s will as expressed in his creation. We may think of the false principle that human beings may be owned as chattel, or that men may challenge one another to duels for the sake of honor, or that property does not belong to you if you cannot protect it, or that children may be slain for the convenience of the parents.

The principle that the young lady was advancing is inherently antisocial and absurd. It says that the act by which the human community regenerates itself is not any business of the human community. It says that the strongest passion in the human constitution, stronger than blood lust, may be indulged as a matter of moral indifference, so long as you remain on the lee side of rape. It says that the one arena of human behavior most constitutive of a culture, both as to its existence as a culture and as to its features, is strictly a private matter—as if the effects of this private matter, called “children,” were mere adventitious results, or private products, like tomatoes you grow in your garden for your own use.

What happens if you accept the principle? We see its results all around us. It was supposed to bring peace and harmony, once those “hang-ups” about sex were swept aside. Blessed Pope Paul VI predicted otherwise, and if he can be faulted for anything, as I’ve often said, it is for being insufficiently pessimistic. We live beside and in an open sewer. Half of our marriages end in divorce. We have fewer people getting married at all, yet biology calls nonetheless, and so forty percent of our children are born out of wedlock. The chaos batters against every family I know. We have a crisis of fatherlessness. Our mass entertainment is indescribably coarse. I do not want to know how many pornographic images will have passed before the eyes of the typical boy before he has ever given a girl a kiss. That is not to touch upon what happens to the girls because of it.

The result has not been harmony. It has been a Lonely Revolution. It is becoming a Revolution of Enmity: each sex blaming the other, “and of their fierce contest appeared no end.” We might also call it a Revolution of the Church for Sale. Why bother with Sunday Mass, when a roll in the hay with your partner is more fun—and when even the priests don’t seem really to believe in sin? But it is a miserable world, and this by the testimony of those who have defended it and promoted it. And so, young lady with the immoral sign, it is because we do not want to live near or in a sewer that we deny your principle.

I can say more. It isn’t just the sewer. It is the Great Thing you miss, because you have no idea that it can exist. That would be a world in which we sinners did acknowledge the moral law governing the relations between the sexes. Oh, it does not mean that everyone is a saint. It does mean that everyone has strong guard rails against going astray, and strong expectations that you can rely on to restrain the will of someone else who might tempt you. It means even more: it means that everyone has an ideal of purity and holiness to which to strive; and the very acknowledgment of the ideal will clear away plenty of space for mirth, innocent flirtation, and relations between the sexes that are characterized by gratitude, forbearance, forgiveness, and humility.

You cannot build a Catholic world upon a denial of the natural law. You cannot even have a half-decent pagan society if you build upon the principle of the Lonely Revolution. Providence College and other schools like it, Catholic and Protestant both, will have to decide more than whether they wish to be Christian. They will have to decide whether they wish to be sane.