INGLORIOUS HISTORY OF ABUSE AND COVER-UPS

The saga continues

If you were serving in the military and you disobeyed an unlawful order, you would not only be exonerated if your case were tried before a moral convening authority, but the officer who gave the unlawful order would be punished. Unfortunately, many Catholic priests, nuns, and seminarians who refused to cover up immoral behavior over the past decades have been unjustly dismissed or coerced into leaving because of complicit popes and bishops.

In the 1990s, European mother superiors in Africa complained to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II that African bishops were pressuring them to allow their priests to have sex with nuns and novices to reduce the death rate of priests who were contracting AIDS from prostitutes. When the superiors reported the matter to the Vatican, instead of the immoral bishops and priests being laicized or excommunicated, the complaints were sent back to the African bishops who had the superiors deported. Many nuns were later impregnated; some contracted AIDS; and some were forced to have abortions. One priest conducted the funeral of a nun whose death was the result of an abortion he forced her to have after he got her pregnant. In April 2001, the European Parliament issued a formal condemnation of the Vatican, chastising “all the sexual violations against women, particularly against Catholic nuns.”

The pontificate of Pope Francis proved to be no better. Just as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were reported to have covered up abuse, so too did Pope Francis cover up abuse as pope, as well as countless abuse cases in Argentina documented by Martin Boudot in Sex Abuse in the Church: Code of Silence. While Francis promoted prelates like Cardinal Robert McElroy, who covered up abuse in San Diego, Francis never made Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin a cardinal after Martin turned over 80,000 chancery files to the Murphy Commission that exposed sex abuse cover-ups by his three predecessors.

Pope Francis’s legacy is further stained by Nuns vs the Vatican, a new documentary that uncovers sexual abuse allegations that were long ignored by Church leaders who enabled and protected priests like Father Marko Rupnik, a serial predator who has yet to be disciplined by Pope Leo XIV. While Leo has time to meet with pro-LGBTQ advocates Father James Martin and Sister Lucía Caram, and to welcome gay activists into St. Peter’s Basilica, offering them a plenary indulgence for the Jubilee Year, Leo has yet to meet with victims of sexual abuse or whistleblower priests, nuns, and seminarians.

Because Pope Leo has taken no steps to laicize some 150+ bishops credibly accused of abusing minors and vulnerable adults, nor has he disciplined thousands of bishops guilty of covering up sex abuse, why should Catholics be surprised that so many bishops cover up for priests who are guilty of sexual predation and misconduct? Popes and bishops have no moral credibility when documentaries like “The Prayer of the Prey” show how they do nothing to discipline clerics who insert consecrated hosts into the vaginas of little girls or, after raping nuns, force them to drink their semen out of a chalice.

Courageous figures like Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others who lost their lives for standing up to corrupt leaders are role models for whistleblower priests like Father Michael Briese and former seminarian Anthony Gorgia. Both Briese and Gorgia are suffering emotionally, physically, financially, and spiritually after confronting Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy and New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan for covering up abuse allegations and homosexual misconduct on the part of Fathers Adam Park, Peter Harman, and Carter Griffin. Unlike officers who refuse to carry out unlawful orders and are vindicated by higher authority, Briese and Gorgia cannot count on Pope Leo to “sacrifice a bishop for a pawn” by defending them and punishing McElroy and Dolan any more than Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger defended the mother superiors and punished the promiscuous and corrupt African bishops and priests.

No respected theologian would think of blaming the loss of church membership and current doctrinal, moral, and liturgical problems primarily on the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, just as no intelligent Christian would dismiss Form Criticism and adhere to a literal interpretation of Genesis. Many predator bishops and priests were ordained or in seminaries even before the Council ended on December 8, 1965. The Roman Catholic Church will continue seeing “9 out of 10 cradle Catholics” abandoning their faith as long as over 80 percent of the clergy are homosexuals, and as long as no more than half of all priests practice celibacy at any given moment in time.

Some readers have accused me of publishing exaggerated and false statistics regarding clerical celibacy and homosexual bishops, priests, and seminarians. The reason many readers have a hard time accepting my findings is that most Catholics project their heterosexual orientation and chastity (e.g., marital fidelity) onto their priests and bishops. The problem is that when people project their own internal states onto others, they often distort their perception of external reality and can misinterpret the actions of others.

Even though I lived, studied, and worked with a priest for six years, I had no idea that he was a sexually active homosexual and predator of teenage boys. If that happened, it was because I projected being heterosexual and celibate onto him. If you were to ask me if he was a homosexual, I would have said, “No.” However, when a seminarian who knew him for less than a year was asked that same question, he answered “Yes” because the seminarian was a homosexual like the priest. Consequently, if you want to know what priests are straight and what priests are gay, do not ask a straight priest or a happily married heterosexual couple.

The latest sexual study of “actively ministering or retired priests” in the U.S., undertaken in 2012, reported that 26.9% of the priests identified as heterosexuals; 67.3% self-identified as gay/homosexual; and 5.8% reported that they were bisexual. When I first read that study, I thought the percentage of straight priests was low at around 27 percent. However, after confidentially polling both straight and gay priests from various dioceses throughout the U.S., I discovered that those figures were not only correct, but that the percentage of straight priests is even lower today. Based on recent estimates provided by priests themselves, I estimate that the percentage of heterosexually oriented American-born priests today varies in most dioceses between 5 and 20 percent.

One problem that contributes to high celibacy failure rates for diocesan clergy involves living alone. Long gone are the days when the parish priest was heterosexual who enjoyed the companionship of a parochial vicar, and the company and emotional support of a live-in housekeeper. No writer to my knowledge has ever called attention to the real reason why Pope Francis, a Jesuit, moved from the Papal Palace to live with the priests in the Casa Santa Marta, or why Pope Leo XIV, an Augustinian, invited other priests to live with him in the Papal Palace. Insofar as Jesus lived in the company of the apostles and sent them out “two by two” (Luke 9:1-2), it makes sense that Francis and Leo would not want to live alone.

Catholics who project their chastity and marital fidelity onto their clergy need to come to grips with the fact that, at any given moment in time, no more than half of all priests are practicing celibacy. When Cardinal Jose Sanchez, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy responsible for overseeing matters regarding priests and deacons, was asked about the high celibacy failure rate, he said, “I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those figures. As the number and percentage of straight priests continue to decline, the difference between straight and gay partnering rates - a median of 10 for straight men and 67 for gay men - will result in even higher clerical celibacy failure rates.

I will conclude by inviting readers to consider the following four questions:

How do you think straight diocesan priests feel when popes from religious orders - that historically attracted more homosexuals - and who live in community (as Francis did and Leo is doing), create the rules of celibacy for heterosexual priests to follow who often live alone?

How do straight priests feel when some married Catholics with children oppose optional celibacy and want their parish priests to live alone and not have the option of having a spouse and children, as has been the practice in the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church dating back to the time of Christ?

How might the Pope feel if he had to live and eat alone most nights in the Papal Palace, like many diocesan priests are asked to do?

Why do you think most bishops and priests, the majority of whom are homosexual, oppose optional celibacy, while most heterosexual clergy, along with 70 to 80 percent of lay Catholics, support the ordination of both celibate and married priests as has always been the practice in the Eastern Catholic Church?

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Gene Thomas Gomulka is a sexual abuse victims’ advocate, investigative reporter, and screenwriter. A former Navy (O6) Captain/Chaplain, seminary instructor, and diocesan ​R​espect Life ​Director, Gomulka was ordained a priest for the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and later made a Prelate of Honor (Monsignor) by St. John Paul II. Email him at msgr.investigations@gmail.com.