“Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” – Matthew 16:18

[Warning: The facts I include will be GRAPHIC.]

I told a fellow Catholic about a month ago that I was going to attend an online conference. He asked what the conference was for and I told him that it was for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. His response: “Oh wow, that’s good that there’s a support group for that.”

As someone who had my own experience with being sexually harassed at a Protestant nonprofit, causing me to quit a job I loved, I couldn’t believe the level of disconnect coming from another Catholic contained in that sentence regarding the most shameful stain on the Catholic Church that has been coming to light – clergy sexual abuse. I felt no compassion from him for the survivors of such a grisly crime. In fact, I felt no connection from him to the issue at all. 

It was as if I had just informed him about a repair service for a piece of technology that he didn’t own. As if I had brought up a topic so completely routine as to be unremarkable, rather than the suffering of people tortured by memories of unspeakable crimes committed upon them by those entrusted with their souls. Here was a faithful Catholic expressing complete distance and separation from these unimaginable sins as if those crimes had only existed for other people in a land far away and not to his fellow brothers and sisters of the faith in his own backyard.

It took me a while to reply and put into words my disbelief but eventually I texted back, “There shouldn’t have to be but yeah.”

How did we get here? How is it possible that your average devout Catholic lacks the moral indignation of even the most base criminal living in our prison system who recognizes child predators as being the lowest of the low? 

The answer: Because the Catholic leadership lies to preserve their power and control over the laity and the laity believes them.

The issue of clergy sexual abuse has been part of the background of my own Catholic story since the beginning. More than a decade ago, I converted to Christianity, then more recently to Catholicism, due to my fascination with the saints of the early church like St. Thomas Aquinas. In the eight months that it took for me to complete RCIA (the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, the religious education process necessary to become a Catholic), from September 2015 to Easter 2016, the movie Spotlight came out (February 2016) and that was the first time I heard of SNAP and their work. I made a mental note to Google their website.

I was so disturbed after watching Spotlight that I brought up the movie in my RCIA class. The Dominican brother teaching the class diplomatically said that in the past, they wrongly thought that offenders could be rehabilitated with psychotherapy, though they knew better now, to which I said that might be true, but that I thought the Catholic Church had not done enough to rectify the situation.

And then, two years later, came the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. At the time, I could only read some of it before I had to stop because what I was reading was so disgusting. It’s only now, after reading articles and books about clergy abuse, that I could bring myself to read the 300 page report, minus the 500 page Appendix of Offenders.

What the Report shows is that the bishops had the highest level of knowledge other than the offenders themselves, but chose instead to lie, both publicly and privately, sparing neither nuns nor parishioners nor anyone else who might become victims. Time and time again, they placed their power and reputation above the lives of children and created nothing less than a fertile breeding ground for an epidemic of pedophilia within the Catholic Church and outside the church, to everyone the church touches. The lenience of the Catholic Church has incubated and unleashed the virus of sexual disorder worldwide, becoming its most infected super-spreader in the world.

The Church has harbored not only individual pedophiles, but groups of predators, such as the gang of pedophile priests in the diocese of Pittsburgh, which produced child pornography on diocesan property. The ring consisted of Fr. George Zirwas, Fr. Francis L. Pucci, Fr. Robert Wolk, Fr. Richard Zula, and Fr. Francis Luddy. 

In the 1970s, Fr. Zirwas came to one victim’s home, bought him lunch or dinner, took him to see a seminary and on trips and even taught him how to drive. Fr. Zirwas introduced the victim, then a fourteen or fifteen-year-old altar boy, to three of his priest “friends”. I googled them to see what these priests looked like – it is shocking how their faces were the very image of wholesome, attractive, and clean-cut Catholicism. At a rectory, they told him to undress to imitate “Christ in a loincloth”. Then they told him to take off his underwear and took photos of the boy naked. Imagine finding photos of naked altar boys inside a rectory on the internet now, taken by priests. Like pedophile brochures recruiting even more deviants into the priesthood – the exact wrong kind. 

The pedophile gang marked their victims by giving them gold crosses to wear. “The Grand Jury observed that these crosses [given to their boy victims] served another purpose beyond the grooming of the victims: They were a visible designation that these children were victims of sexual abuse. They were a signal to other predators that the children had been desensitized to sexual abuse and were optimal targets for further victimization.”

In the 1980s, one of the gang, Fr. Zula, grew even bolder and escalated from clergy abuse pornography to hosting “parties at Marianna rectory” with “alcohol, marijuana,” and “oral sex, attempt anal sex, whips”. Yet who did Fr. Zula blame? His sixteen-year old victim, saying “the boy first suggested sexual behaviors”. Despite the fact that Fr. Zula would later be charged with over 130 counts related to child sexual abuse, the doctor retained by the Diocese to evaluate Fr. Zula for his court sentencing hearing, Kenneth Stanko, claimed that Fr. Zula was “passive-dependent” and “not likely to be a person to initiate sexual activity.” 

Expert witnesses paid by the Diocese as well as diocesan lawyers have made blaming the victims a staple “excuse” in the fictional construct created by the Church in some bizarre attempt at the defense of “consent” when all these hundreds of cases clearly show that predator priests hunted down children like animals, when they were generally incompetent to do anything, as they were underaged, but additionally usually asleep, medicated, even in the hospital (a priest raped a seven-year-old girl while visiting her after she had her tonsils out and a priest gave a boy juice, after which he woke up bleeding from his rectum unable to remember anything from the night before), and otherwise physically, mentally, emotionally (having confessed previous abuse), socially (estranged from family) incapacitated or otherwise vulnerable before being assaulted. Not to mention spiritually incapacitated as being told what to do by priests holding themselves out to be God in the flesh.

But this is typical of the pedophilic propaganda from the leadership and its lawyers. To hear it straight from the source, we can literally listen in to the delirious depravity of pedophiles’ conversations in Bob Hamer’s book, “The Last Undercover: The True Story of an FBI’s Agent’s Dangerous Dance with Evil”. These predators are the furthest thing from naive – their entire lives, their time and thousands of dollars for international travel, revolve around their sexual obsessions and their next hit. Their actions are not only premeditated, but savored in every last detail.

Hamer reported, “I couldn’t figure out what was so exciting about a toy store until we entered and saw the sixty-foot-high indoor Ferris wheel – and all the children clustered around it. … The Toys “R” Us visit truly opened my eyes to the BL [Boy Lover] mindset. Grown men, most in their forties and fifties, hung on the rail and described in rich, graphic, sexual detail what they would like to do to each boy. These men were predators, and they were prowling the streets.”

Not only that, but they knew EXACTLY the kinds of physical damage they did to boys they had sex with, usually internationally. They didn’t care. Hamer recounts two pedophile predators talking about the physical consequences to a boy from anal sex. Todd replied, “[J]ust gives you hemorrhoids.” “A little surgery, you’ll be fine,” David responded. “Todd said, “Just rectal incontinent later on, but -“ … “You’ll shit in your pants when you’re twenty-two, but that’s all right.” 

In the Diocese of Harrisburg, “[t]he Grand Jury learned that Pease was co-owner of the afore-mentioned boat [the scene of a victimization] with Bach. Bach and Pease were members of a group of predators who shared information regarding their victims and utilized that intelligence to share victims between each other. Fr. Joseph M. Pease had this to say about his actions. “Pease again addressed the reported sexual assault involving a naked child upstairs in the rectory. … Pease said he remembered that incident and that the victim ‘must have gotten excited. I must have turned him on more than I thought.’”

The Pennsylvania grand jury rightly used the words “depraved”, “chilling”, and “sadistic” when describing these men. These predator priests saw “victims as objects rather than people” and objects of their fantasy of being desired, rather than the reality of being repulsive, feared and hated. But maybe they want to be feared and hated – pedophilia appears to be about fantasies of power and control as well. 

A Chicago Tribune article dated May 29, 1985 entitled, “A Self-Confessed Pedophile: ‘I Wish It Would All End’”, an “out-and-out, full-grown, convicted five-times-and-got-off-lucky-once, smiling, affable, liked-by-all, funny, friendly, nice-looking, talented, witty, good-company, man of the world . . . man-next-door-after-your-son child molester’’ swings wildly in self-esteem between bragging about his prowess with children and ashamed self-hatred, hating his lot in life.

“Phil, 41, lives with his mother in a Near South suburb. A tall, well-built truck driver with a cynical wit and a seemingly easy-going manner, he appears disarmingly normal in his worn jeans, running shoes and T-shirt. But he is a textbook example of a pedophile, an adult who obsessively seeks children as sexual partners. Phil said he contacted the newspaper because ”everybody has a niche, something they’re good at. Unfortunately, I’m very good at picking up kids. Someone’s got to tell 13-year-olds how to avoid it. Maybe I’m guilty, but if this is what I do, let’s make some use of it.’’ 

Therapists say child molesters’ desire to discuss their sex lives is much more complicated than that. Pedophiles such as Phil distort reality to avoid taking responsibility for molesting children, experts believe. They relentlessly seek validation, constant reassurance that they are basically good people.” What better way to gain “validation, constant reassurance that they are basically good people” than to become a priest? It’s no wonder that pedophiles might flock to the priesthood. “Phil” talks about his fear of his mother and lack of respect for his weak father, which seems to translate to an aversion to women along with self-hatred of adult men, leaving him with an attraction to boys with whom he can feel dominant and act like a kid with as well.

By retaining and not expelling these predator priests, the Catholic Church has basically created a tenure track of pedophilia within its ranks. By not interrogating the causes and depths of the depravity of these priests, it allows evil to exist fundamentally unexamined. The debate around the church’s basic teachings around sexuality make everything even less clear and even easier for pedophiles to fly under the radar due of the church’s reluctance to look at its own hypocrisy with respect to sexuality. The murky and perhaps even unknown depths of sexual formation from God-only-knows what – pornography? past abuse? – are unquestioned, unexamined, and unknown. Yet these are the building blocks of people’s sexual formation.

But finally, even worse than the fact that the safety of victims is less important to the Vatican than its own power, control and freedom to operate above God’s law as well as man’s law, is that clergy sexual abuse comes straight from the devil. The testimony of Fr. Gary Thomas, American exorcist, states:

“Eighty percent of the people who come to me are sexual abuse victims. … People involved in satanic cults, for example, there is always sexual deviancy. There is always sexual abuse. There is always periods of orgies. So all of these distortions of how ordered we are as a church teach in terms of the natural law and what that means is becoming much more jumbled and diffuse now because of people’s decisions to act out in some other kind of way.”

He continues, “But sexual abuse is actually a doorway too. Now because someone has been molested or abused at a prepubescent age or when they’re two years old or even if they’re a teenager, that doesn’t mean that there is going to come a demon. That tends to come when you mix the occult and you’re an abuse victim already. … It’s the same thing with people who will dabble in the occult and be sexual abuse victims. That’s like putting a ball of blood outside your back door and waiting for raccoons to show up, because demons are always looking for people with broken relationships or no relationships.” The Vatican has literally, by permitting these pedophile priests to operate, for fear of disclosure, opened up children and adults to be possessed by the demonic.

Because what happens when a child is sexually abused? When you commit an act of horror on a child, you cut them off from a normal life and sentenced them to suffer for the rest of their lives. You have cut them off from God and the church, perhaps to the damnation of their souls. You have broken and entered violently into the sanctity of the child’s physical body, and the place where his soul dwells. In a church which reveres the Virgin Mary, where is the outrage of the rape of child virgins? You have separated a child from his family by burdening him with a truth that could break his own family apart. You have broken a healthy formation of sexuality. You damage not only his soul, but his physical body, perhaps permanently. And with a broken body, a broken mind as well. Not to mention effects on his ability to make a living and the burden of having to pay to fix everything that the perpetrator has broken in your life.

Can any amount of money compensate you for the breaking of your soul and your sexuality? The devastation of your faith and your physical, mental and emotional integrity as a human being? How many hours, days, months, years and decades of someone’s life does it take to gain any resemblance of recovery from this fundamental of a level of violation? Yet I’ve commonly heard even from Catholics on Facebook that victims should “just get over it.” Spoken like true pedophiles. It is obscene.

Child victims have literally been infected with the demonic virus of sexual deviance by these criminals. They have been covered with the filth of their perpetrators’ diseased sexuality. Nobody wants to introduce the concept of sex to children except the depraved, so how are these children even supposed to have the vocabulary to speak about what has happened to them? No wonder a child feels dirty, through no fault of his own. Yet in this dysfunctional Catholic culture, the child doesn’t blame the perpetrator; he blames himself.

Meanwhile, the perpetrator feels no guilt or shame because he has already projected his deviant desires onto the confused recipient of his disordered perversion. They pervert reality by reversing roles with them and acting as if they were the innocent children in front of their “benevolent” managers. Furthermore, Catholic leadership fully endorses this version of reality in order to save their own skins.

The report states that in 1989, Bishop Donald Wuerl clearly “warned the Vatican that Catholic bishops and diocese could become liable once they are made aware of sexual abuse complaints and that priests who deny the ‘crime’ of pedophilic activity with minors is ‘common in pedophiles’ and that pedophilia is ‘incurable’”. It is the Vatican that is ultimately to blame. Its culture of permissiveness to the point of licentiousness has become a greenhouse garden for super-predators like McCarrick and many others like him. And we still have no report on McCarrick.

I believe that the abuse of children by clergy is nothing less than a pandemic of demonic activity enabled by lies sanctioned by the popes themselves. The only way to combat these lies is to tell the truth – the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God. Which I hope the Catholic leadership will, as the lawsuits may finally require them to do, under oath. Unless they decide to perjure themselves. There are strongholds for the demonic in the church where men have no fear of God, only fear of man. They laugh at God’s laws and the laws of men as well. But instead of the victims being protected and applauded for telling the truth about these evils, clergy sexual abuse survivors are attacked by the leadership and rejected by the laity. The lies have to stop. The truth must be rewarded.

In 1968, Fr. Mark Mecca in the Diocese of Scranton wrote to Bishop McCormick, “This problem [of a predator priest] is too big for me. It has grown into something that is unbelievable. … There is so much that is missing, and all very, very serious. … Your Excellency has definitely noticed that I am under an incubus … all on account of some of these things.” The Grand Jury “noted that ‘incubus’ is a Latin term for ‘a male demon obsessed with the sexual’ and can be a ‘nightmare known for causing oppression or burden’”.

It’s time to place the burden of guilt and shame where it belongs – on the perpetrators and those who sanctioned their continued “ministries”. The Vatican chose time and time again to sacrifice the lives of the laity and accept the risk of countless litigations rather than to lose face, power and control.  If Jesus overturned the tables of money-changers, how much more would He do to child molesters? Is this the Church of God or the church of Satan? How can there be any question of whose side God would be on, the victims or the perpetrators? How much more domestic abuse is the laity going to take before it refuses to accept lie after lie after lie? To the degree that we perpetuate the lies spread by the leadership, we participate in their guilt. I pray that the laity will do better than that.