Rod Dreher has had extensive discussions of the Groeschel case here. here, and here.
His defenders are saying that Groeschel is senile – he may be, but he is still saying what he said ten years ago:
That priests are the victims, and should not go to jail, because they didn’t “intend to commit a crime.” (Few people say to themselves, “I think I will go out and commit a crime – let’s see, what shall it be, rape, mugging, arson?” They want to do something specific – have sex, hurt someone, steal money – not just “commit a crime.”) A “lot” of the priests shave been seduced by older teenagers – that is what pederasts claim: the kids enjoy the sex.
In one case in a thousand the victim may have deliberately initiated the process that led to sex, but most of the time priests made the first moves, and teenagers, especially boys, being highly excitable sexual creatures, may have responded from curiosity. They may have felt the pleasurable sexual physical sensations mixed with guilt and shame and disorientation.
It is the adult’s responsibility to control the situation even if a child or teenager deliberately or inadvertently makes a sexual move.
Groeschel is a clericalist who cannot image that priests can be wicked, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He has to see priests abusers as in some ways the victims.
In the deepest sense, the sinner hurts himself more than he can hurt his victim. The criminal poisons his own soul with a sickness unto eternal death, and is even more to be pitied than the victim. But that is not is what Groeshel is saying – he is seeing mitigations and making excuses.
Groeschel was imprudent s saying what he thought – his interviewer and the editor of the National catholic Register saw nothing wrong with his ideas, and those ideas are still present in the hierarchy. Their lawyers have taught bishops to say things that make them sound like human beings who are horrified by the abuse and feel the deepest compassion for both the victim and the criminal who has condemned himself to hell. But bishops don’t really believe all that stuff – the soul of the Church is money, and the Pope has appointed bishops to keep the money flowing from the laity to build up the institutions that allow bishops to think of themselves at Big Men and the Pope to think of himself as a World Player. Little has changed since Langland decried in Piers Plowman the rule of Lady Meede in the medieval Church.
Thanks for digging that up. I heard it at the time, and heard him say similar things on tv and radio, and knew him to be a clericalist, which is objectively both a heresy and a sin, by the way, in case we forget.
Did you know that he participated in the Missa Gaia Earth Mass of Paul Winter at St John the Divine New Age Cathedral in NYC? The same Cathedral where a corpus of a woman hung on a crucifix for display.
The late and much loved Mary Jo Heiland who was a dedicated Catholic Pro Life researcher and writer was kind enough to send me a copy of the Program. It was originally sent to her by a Catholic woman in NY who explained to MJ that she ,”….. was so shocked to see a Catholic priest endorse this New Age ceremony that she went to his residence to demand an explanation.” According to Mrs Heiland, ” She told me Groeschel slammed the door in her face!”
I found this very interesting since Fr Mitch Pacwa, who writes and speaks against the New Age is also a Star of EWTN. I first heard of Fr Pacwa when he was doing speaking engagements for The Pilgrims of Peace Center located in Camden Diocese several decades ago. At the time and perhaps even now, they are/were a husband and wife team who went into the Catholic tour business focusing on tours to Medjugorje.
Obviusly, Catholics have been searching for the relevance of Christ’s teachings that has been apparently missing in catechesis and from the pulpits for a very long time.Why else would they create rock star personalities out of priests who charge to speak outside their local parish Church?
Fr Groeschel was also a speaker at the Masters School where a Catholic friend was once a student. Just this morning she told me ,”The religion teacher was the first Episcopal “priestess” I ever heard of and most of my fellow students went on to Harvard or Yale . They were well prepared at the Masters to pass on the New Age religious philosophies we were being taught.” She added,
“When I tried to explain to Fr Groeschel that his friend, Barbara Jones, our religion teacher was teaching religious ideas that directly contradicted the Catholic Faith he smiled and confirmed that he thought very highly of her and quickly changed to subject.”
This lady attended the Masters School during her high school years where, ‘Fr” Groeschel was a frequent guest lecturer.” According to her, “…this is when I first realized that conservative and or orthodox catholic labels for priests really means nothing at all.
She is now in her mid fifties, has delivered nine children , home schooled and is the grandmother of ( sorry I lost count) .I do count her as wise counsel though and value her advice.
“Little has changed since Langland “
It’s changing now, though we don’t want to see it. Christendom is dying, and we are heading towards being a persecuted minority within a pagan empire. As we were in the beginning. The demographic numbers are ugly, and my experience so far has been that Catholics will not even think about them, even when I shove them in their faces. So those bishops whose job is to be managers of plump bureaucratic fiefdoms are going to disappear–likely in our lifetime. The money simply won’t be there. Also, the diocese as we know it is an Industrial Age organization. The new age we are in, the Information Age, will invent something very different to replace it, I think.
And while I grieve in advance over what will be lost, I think the situation is not all bad. For one thing, a big collapse may be the only possible situation where something can be done about the effeminacy of the Church. In desperate times there’s at least a slim chance that people will undertake desperate changes. We will need men, real men.
You are laying the groundwork. You are not, I think, wasting your time.
— From The Church and the Culture War, by Joyce A. Little
Their lawyers have taught bishops to say things that make them sound like human beings who are horrified by the abuse and feel the deepest compassion for both the victim and the criminal who has condemned himself to hell. But bishops don’t really believe all that stuff – the soul of the Church is money, and the Pope has appointed bishops to keep the money flowing from the laity to build up the institutions that allow bishops to think of themselves at Big Men and the Pope to think of himself as a World Player.
Leon, you said it. That’s why God will judge the Catholic Church far more severely than its adherents and apologists can ever imagine.
Priest Plays down Abuse Crisis
Prominent Friar’s Counseling Criticized by NJ Diocese, Victims
By Brooks Egerton
The Dallas Morning News
March 2, 2003
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2003_01_06/2003_03_02_Egerton_PriestPlays.htm
Lee, I remain grateful for your work and for your insight into the real condition of the RCC. Stand firm, despite the howls of the apologists!
I second Joseph’s comments; the RCC Administrators have forgotten nothing and have learned nothing.
Lee Penn
Just in case it may be of interest to anyone.
Program for Missa Gaia Earth Mass ,St John the Divine NYC 1981
The Canticle of Brother Son………written by Paul Winter , music by Jim Scott
The Introductory Forward to this segment in the Program is by Fr Benedict Groeschel.
In the last paragraph of Groeschel’s introduction for the piece he states,”The Canticle of the Son belongs to the Missa Gaia and ( as a non liturgist I am on thin ice) and I believe the Missa Gaia belongs in the church. The non religious may be puzzled at this.The purists may be annoyed,There are indeed some elements of primitive religion in the presentation, but such elements have in various ways been incorporated into the Liturgy many times before. The thought of recorded animal sounds may offend some of the liturgists-but are they not like some of the sounds of the organ which mimic other things like bells and violins? If it upsets you ask yourself honestly what would St Francis think? I think he would be delighted ,for here in the Missa Gaia all creation is summoned to the praise of the Lord Most High. That is what the Canticle of Brother Son was all about .”
……….in the ancient Eastern Orthodox Liturgies of St John Crysostom and St Basil the Great NO instruments are allowed only the voices of the priest and people chanting the parayers during the Divine Liturgy.
Personally I think St Francis would be highly offended that Groeschel would be promoting a pagan ( primitive) mass. You can find the same Paul Winter Missa Gaia Mass on the internet being used in stated “pantheistic” houses of worship.
One last thought……
Note the Opus Dei Bishop that is sheltering Urrutigoity has assigned him to an Orphange knowing full well of his history!
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/father-groeschel-goes/
Mr. Podles, I have been a student and admirer of your work since The Church Impotent. I have always saw it as a peculiar misfortune that the only reporters willing to name names and call real clerics to task for real crimes have also been men who think the Church’s male hierarchical structure is largely to blame. You were a notable exception. I see(as I thought you did) a masculine apostolic fraternity instituted by Christ to rule sanctify and teach. In that masculine public there are too many Judases and too few Peters and Johns. It is not that the priesthood is masculine but that it is not the honor culture that Christ instituted. The Church is also Marian– she is a spotless Bride and it angers us that her covering is so besmirched. Can you really mean these words you say below–they seem so unlike the well directed mature anger with which you have cut so many a bad man from his churchly cloak. Smite those men-but please grant our Mother, the Bride of Christ and the Holy Spirit, the Soul of the Church the reverence that is their due.
THE QUOTE “But bishops don’t really believe all that stuff – the soul of the Church is money, and the Pope has appointed bishops to keep the money flowing from the laity to build up the institutions that allow bishops to think of themselves at Big Men and the Pope to think of himself as a World Player.”
As heirs of the Roman Empire in the West, bishops seem to think that the body of the Church is bureaucracy and its soul its money.
That is, they think that bureaucratic structures are the way to salvation, and it takes money to run them. In Italy small cities and towns had their own bishop and a handful of priests (often related). The Vatican wanted all these small sees consolidated so that they could have chanceries and officials and programs and boards etc.
In America we have the USCCB and its bureaucracy; each diocese has its bureaucracy. Ratzinger commented that as Archbishop of Munich he had more employees than the Vatican has.
Nor is any of this day, as a glance at church history will show. Bishops place little trust in the Holy Spirit and a great deal in the machinery of church government, which becomes an end in itself, at the expense of the true life of the church. I suspect that Benedict XVI would agree with me, although he would phrase it more diplomatically.
A similar phenomenon is destroying the economies of Spain, Italy, and Greece – bureaucracies have been enormous parasites and are killing their hosts.
The progressives in the Church had to create a massive Church bureaucracy in order to implement Vatican II. The centralization of power in the hands of the bureaucracy gave them the power to shove their “reforms” down the throats of the laity.
How did the Church in the USA and around the world manage to exist without bishops’ conferences?
I agree wholeheartedly that bureaucracies in both civic and ecclesial life often become self serving. Public employee unions, the USCCB, many chanceries , Catholic high schools, universities and hospitals all offer multiple instances of that peculiar cronyism. Those who work for an institution which was built for some cross generational higher transcendent purpose look at each other and mutually conclude they are holding the keys to their own perpetual employment. The CHRONOS replaces the TRANSCENDENT as the present day cronies betray their ancestors and rob the next generation(but not necessarily their blood kin who are often let in on the deal). This generational cronyism in Church and State will be the death of many businesses, universities and even countries. But deep in the Marian Church is the real presence of Christ. He abides with us and the gates of hell will not prevail. We will see strong parishes and dioceses organized around a deeper liturgical appreciation of the Eucharist and priesthood. That renewal of our most basic territorial sacramental forms will reform the Church. As Catholics we cannot leave..we are like Peter. When he was first told of the Eucharist and the crowds turned away from that “scandal”, he asked for all of us “to whom should we go?”
Any institution took young pre-teen boys away from their families and sent them to minor seminaries and kept them away from all things feminine, deserves what happened to it! There is a newly dicovered gospel fragment Coptic text that refers to Christ’s “bride” and or “wife”. All Jewish rabbis were required to marry. St. Peter was married and had a mother-in-law in Mark’s gospel. There is a new book called “Half the Sky” and it maintains that women are essential to any community. When the Catholic Church started a “Boys’ Club” for the clergy, it excluded 1/2 of the human family. We are now seeing the horrible results of that decision. Young sexually-retarded men who are called “father” and who know nothing about what it means to be a man, or how to relate to women. These young seminarians were stuck in a pre-adolescent time warp and they never learned how to socalize with women after they were ordained “priests”. This resulted in more gay priests and priests who sought children who were at the same or lower level of sexual development than they were.
“bureaucracies have been enormous parasites and are killing their hosts.’
AMEN!!!
Catholics we MUST put our TRUST in our LORD JESUSCHRIST.
GOD WILL PROVIDE!
and my God shall supply all your need, according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:19
I find it interesting that Fr Stravinskas places the blame for anti clericalism on parents who choose to homeschool? Don’t you Leon?
http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/7963/Homeschoolers-sometimes-at-odds-with-dioceses.aspx
He states,” “That leads to a subtle anti-clericalism, he said, because the children learn that priests cannot be counted on to hand on the faith. It shows in what he sees as a dearth of vocations from home-school families. “Why would you want to join the club if its members can’t be trusted to their jobs?”
http://eponymousflower.blogspot.com/2011/05/father-stravinskas-dismisses.html
dmpence, I cannot disagree with you more, and I’m someone who was raised as a Catholic and had worshipped as a Catholic for the vast majority of his life.
Too many Catholics make a convenient disconnect between the behavior of their priests and bishops, and the sacramental theology they’re supposed to embrace. At some point, however, the church’s true values will reveal themselves through the behavior of its leadership. I’m not talking about Donatism. I’m talking about basic morality.
Until what point can Catholics continue to compartmentalize the pervasive, inherent corruption within their leadership? What has to happen for them to see that the church is nothing but a religious mafia run by, of and for the bishops and their sycophants?
You ask about Christ. I suggest you read about Pope Leo XIII’s vision in the 1880s showing Christ giving Satan permission to destroy the church within a century.
Why would Christ give such permission? Perhaps He knew that the church would never repent of its infatuation with (and lust for) power, prestige, secular influence, wealth and sense of permanent entitlement. God will put up with rebellion for only so long before He allows the rebels to reap the consequences of their actions — even if those consequences are self-destructive.
I have learned that one doesn’t need the Catholic Church to worship the Triune God, follow His Son or listen to His Spirit that He places within all who embrace Christ’s atoning, redemptive sacrifice on the cross as their own.
In fact, the church’s self-proclaimed indispensibility and its misinterpretation of Christ’s words have led it into this very trap.
The Church sets (or set?) high standards for herself. Much is expected of the Catholic Church and far too many priests and bishops have failed completely in their duties.
Mr D’Hippoloto,
Yes, we do disagree. The corruption in the church is NOT inherent. It certainly is endemic and I understand the path you take. Many men who love Christ have been driven away from the true tabernacle. Our souls remain linked by those indelible character marks of Baptism and Confirmation. I hope someday you find your way back to Confession and the Eucharist. They are more powerful than a generation of Judases.