Major Miami Archdiocese Exposé in Gawker

Greetings to all readers of Gawker who have found their way to my humble blog. What follows is my editorial commentary on the story. I hope it provides some much-needed context and balance to the story.

My latest at RenewAmerica:

A major exposé just penned by sometime sparring partner Brandon K. Thorp has forced me to reconsider a personal resolution I made in June 2010 to cease writing about the sins and travails of the Archdiocese of Miami. Home to about a million Catholic Christians (myself among them), the Church in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties was once described by my colleage Matt C. Abbott as “one of the worst — if not the worst — archdiocese in terms of the presence of non-celibate homosexual clergy.” This nomination, sad to say, only scratched the surface of many of the problems that festered under the pontificate of the archbishop emeritus, John C. Favalora. The sad story is accurately and detailingly recounted inGawker’s recent exposé on the subject, and I direct my readers to it as context for the commentary that follows:

“Sin City: The Catholic Church’s Secret Gay Cabal”

This piece is a substantially accurate portrayal of circumstances I’ve only briefly referred to in earlier commentary. While I am not in a position (morally or legally) to publicly (and in writing) confirm every allegation reported byGawker, I will enthusiastically endorse and stand behind the overall picture painted by Mr Thorp, even as I hope to provide more context, and hopefully more reasons for Christian hope.

I wish to start by explaining my motivations for participating in Thorp’s exposé when consenting to being interviewed by him. Thorp rightly notes my initial reluctance to do so: I did not provide him a copy of Miami Vice, and since Archbishop Wenski’s installation have had no desire to satiate the scandal-mongering of the mainstream leftist press by giving it more ammunition with which to shoot down the Church. As far as I was (and substantially still am) concerned, my co-religionists and I who make up Christifidelis achieved what we wanted with Favalora’s early retirement from the episcopacy and his replacement by the likes of Wenski. While leaving readers to draw their own conclusions, Thorp has substantially vindicated our consistent insistence that Favalora’s resignation was compelled by the Holy See and that his successor has been given a clear mandate by the Vatican to clean the Church’s house in South Florida.

I’ve often been asked why, if we’ve obtained what we set out to, I insist on publicizing (if only briefly and modestly) our victories. This was asked me when I penned my editorial on Wenski’s appointment, and again when I reported on the circumstances surrounding the recent resignation of Bishop John Ricard from the See of Pensacola-Tallahassee. As a practicing Catholic with absolutely nothing to gain (materially or reputationally) from reporting these things, my goal has been to show lay Catholics — especially those who consider themselves “conservative” or “traditionalist” — that Rome really does listen to the well-thought-out appeals from the lay faithful, when they are made through the proper channels and with appropriate documentation. Catholic leftists often have recourse to the secularist press when they wish to place public pressure on the Church to conform to the post-modern expectations of contemporary anti-culture, while those who pride themselves in subscribing to magisterial orthodoxy almost never go beyond bitching, moaning, and conspiracizing in chat rooms and on message boards. What I hope to have shown is that the Church does eventually respond to well-reasoned grievances by the lay faithful aired through the proper hierarchical channels . . . even if sometimes she needs to be prodded along with prudent,critical, and charitable exposure in the secular press. I have always tried to maintain this proper balance, only having recourse to the latter when I’ve reasonably exhausted the former.

So, back to Thorp. I agreed to participate in the story only because he had already obtained a copy of Miami Vice from a colleague of his I had given it to three years ago (well before Wenski’s appointment), he seemed determined to pursue the story with or without my assistance, and I believed it was in the Church’s interest that I cooperate, lend a nearly-lone voice sympathetic to her, and make sure the final product was accurate in all particulars for which I have personal knowledge. I am pleased with the final product, and substantially endorse it.

With some important qualifications. Like most magazines, Gawker lies squarely in the center-left of the politico-cultural spectrum, and this is reflected in the aforementioned exposé, and even more so in the editorial follow-up. We Catholics do not, of course, “hate penises” or “demonize homosexuals.” We love both of these a heck of a lot more than Thorp or his editors do, which is why we insist on sharing with everyone our utterly humanistic conviction that the natural world is fundamentally rational, that this rationality is reflected in our bodies, that a proper use of our bodies is integral to moral living, and that sexual complementarity and procreativity are not just random and incidental flukes of an orderless cosmos but God-given means by which the human person (as male or as female) is to both understand and realize himself as originating in, and ordered to, life-giving Love.

As you can see, this understanding of sexuality, and both its personal and public implications, does not lend itself easily to sound-bite and catch-phrase, which is why even many Catholics tend to reduce this wisdom to a series of regurgitated thou-shalt-nots: no fornication, no masturbation, no contraception, no adultery, no polygamy, no sodomy, etc. Those Catholics who fantasize about a pre-Vatican II utopia of well-memorized catechetics, beautiful liturgy, and fervent devotionalism would do well to learn that it is precisely this sort of reductionist presentation of the Faith (all-too-common in the past as it is in today’s “traditionalist” circles) that lends itself to caricature and ultimate rejection.

The Gawker piece — and here I suspect the fault lies more with his editors than with Thorp himself — also gives way more “air-time” to its leftist/dissident interviewees than it does to myself or either of the two other Catholics when it comes to assessing what the root causes are to the Archdiocese’s problems. Allowed to go unchallenged are various assertions to the effect that voluntarily assumed commitments to celibacy caused the crisis, that seminary formation intrinsically lends itself to psychological maldevelopment, and that the Church’s solution to its supposed “demographic crisis” is to remake itself in the image of the Protestant Episcopal Church and the Congressional Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party.

Serious observers, whatever their criticisms of substantive Catholic doctrine, know that each of these leftist nostrums is just so much superstitious nonsense. Try as they might, none of the Church’s detractors can produce a single shred of evidence that voluntary assumptions of sexual abstinence and non-marriage lend themselves to sexual deviancy, much less that Catholic seminary formation does. And however grateful I personally am for the unfortunately-named Peter Fuchs’s willingness to speak with Thorp concerning his experiences at St John Vianney College Seminary, one wonders whether the Catholic Church would be best served heeding psychological advice from a 50-year old “married” “gay,” i.e., a grown man who still has not figured out the basic differences between a man and a woman, and what relationship his having a penis has to this. As to Thorp’s unidentified and cowardly “liberal priest” (of the follow-up, third paragraph from the bottom): I am willing to bet he is himself sexually active, and his rant is just so much projection and rationalization of his own childish inabilities to face up to long-term commitments.

And while Thorp himself is to be commended for his journalistic prowess, his argument that the Church’s survival depends on its taking its cues from the pages of Colin Spencer’s Gay Kama Sutra is belied by both commonsense and what empirical data do exist on this subject. The demographic plummet of the “liberal” Protestant mainline — and especially of America’s Episcopal Church — is both well-documented and undisputed, but for brevity’s sake a comparison of the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami with the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida is rather instructive. Even though the Episcopal Diocese encompasses a broader swath of territory than its Catholic counterpart, the former can count a mere 34,000 or so members while the latter (byconservative estimations) numbers some 860,000. And while the Miami Archdiocese experienced no relative growth whatsoever in church membership in the years Favalora governed it with a laced fist, Catholic numbers did increase absolutely, while in the same time period membership in the Episcopal Diocese shrank both relatively and absolutely.

And these contrary trends are replicated both nationally and internationally. After a short period of demographic stagnation under the late Pope John Paul II, who tolerated much of the theological leftism Thorp and many of his interviewees recommend to us, the Catholic Church seems to be experiencing something of a “Benedict bounce” in her demography. The Church, both in the United States and globally, is growing, both relatively and absolutely, withrecord numbers entering the Church every year, and indeed every day.

And it’s not hard to see why, whatever the ultimate fruits of the Church’s earthly labors, her institutional perdurance does not depend on adopting the latest whims and fads endorsed by the likes of Cosmo or even Gawker. A Christianity that is not radically countercultural is a Christianity not worth believing in, because it is no longer distinctively religious, let alone Christian. Most people intuit this. A Christianity shorn of its dogmatic and moral essentials, and endlessly accommodated to the editorial pages of the New York Times, is radical only in its redundancy. To paraphrase the late Flannery O’Connor, if Catholicism be reduced to pomp and circumstance, bells and smells, and requires of you no moral exertion or self-denial, then fuck it.

If, after so many futile and failed attempts, today’s nonbelievers still wish to see the demise of l’infâme, they’re gonna need to challenge and discredit the Church for who she is, has been, and always will be. The accommodation urged upon her by those most committed to her eventual destruction would be both demographically suicidal and philosophically dishonest. I respect Thorp’s full-throated enthusiasm for the former, but can’t believe a man of his acuity could possibly hope for the latter.

All of which is not to deny the obvious: while institutionalized voluntary celibacy does not per se result in a culture of sexual deviancy, the institution certainly can attract deviants who lack the tools and support needed to come to terms with their psycho-sexual deficiencies, and the Church must be assiduous in sifting between sincere religious vocations and faux-pious exercises in psychological escapism. To my knowledge, no evidence exists illustrating that Catholic priests are less faithful to celibacy than married persons are to monogamy, and it’s no coincidence that both vocations — priesthood and matrimony — have experienced their crises in recent decades, and in many places still are. The crisis in contemporary Christendom is that of all developed peoples: a crisis of personal commitment and self-sacrifice. The Gawker exposé is in many places refreshingly honest about the underlying assumptions of its editors, and a culture committed to the idea that “[w]anton hedonistic . . . sex is of course unobjectionable — even encouraged” cannot begin to diagnose, let alone prescribe a solution to, what ails the Catholic Church.

Finally, Thorp’s exposé highlights an important piece to the historical puzzle, but happily not the final one. The Archdiocese does seem to be on the rebound after its Favaloran slump. As I’ve reported previously, since the Apostolic Visitation of Spring 2006, the reform of St John Vianney College Seminary has proceeded apace: I know from several sources that sexual impropriety is no longer tolerated, fidelity to Catholic orthodoxy is the enforced norm (but not without critical reflection on the articles of faith and the Western metaphysical tradition), and seminary enrollment is thriving, even in record numbers. The Pope Benedictine liturgical reform of the reform is proceeding slowly and steadily, and new attention given to every field of ministry, from practical charity to college campuses. Most dramatically, and as Thorp aptly documents, the Archdiocese’s “lavender mob” is shaking in its boots and Wenski is working to sift out the wheat from the chaff, if not fast or furious enough for my tastes and many of my fellows in Christifidelis.

However reluctant my initial participation in it, perhaps the story published byGawker is one that needed to be told, and needs to be learned from. Brandon Thorp and his editors were singularly equipped to tell that story, but as we have seen, woefully handicapped in directing us to a happier ending.