No Moderates Please

Posted on Sun 03/03/2013 by PA Pundits - International

By Tom McLaughlin ~

The Mainstream Media (MSM) get very interested in the Catholic Church when they want it to pick a “more modern” or “moderate” pope. They’re running lots of pieces on what American Catholics want. For one local example, The Portland Press Herald – biggest newspaper in Maine – proclaimed “Maine Catholics hope for a younger, more moderate pope.”

As a Maine Catholic I had to comment, because what the MSM means by “more moderate” is a pope who won’t call abortion “murdering babies.” A “more moderate” pope would play down the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and would lift Pope Benedict’s ban on homosexuals being admitted to seminaries. A “more moderate” won’t believe as Pope Benedict does that the Church’s nightmare scandal in America and Europe was a homosexual priest scandal and not a pedophile priest scandal.

A “more moderate” pope would be “worth a bucket of warm spit,” as Vice President John Nance Garner said about the vice presidency. Revelation 3:16 says “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” A moderate pope is what the Catholic Church absolutely does not need, especially at this critical juncture. So-called “moderate” Catholics are people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, to name just a few and there is no shortage of their counterparts in the Vatican.

I’m fine with a young pope, as long as he is on fire in his faith. He’ll need energy to cope with the “moderates” from Europe and the United States because he’ll have a tough time with them. My advice to those who want the Catholic Church to moderate itself? Leave. Join the Episcopalians or the Unitarians.

Conservatives John Paul II and Benedict XVI were in office long enough to appoint lots of like-minded young cardinals who will be electing the next pope. When that guy, whoever he is, takes over, he’ll be reading the 300-page dossier prepared at the request of Pope Benedict to look into what’s being called the “Vatileaks” affair – when Benedict’s butler smuggled out some of his private papers. Benedict appointed three trusted cardinals to investigate this and they reported back last December.

We don’t know what’s in their report, but two Italian media outlets published articles last week purporting to know and they suggest that Benedict chose to resign after reading it. They allege the existence of a homosexual cabal or gay mafia within the powerful Roman Curia – governing structure of the Church in the Vatican – which conspires against Benedict.

That there’s a homosexual cabal in the Vatican wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That Benedict was shocked to discover it just last December I don’t believe for a minute. As Philip Lawler points out at Catholicculture.org:

Pope Benedict, who has lived in Rome and worked with the Roman Curia for more than 30 years, has surely heard the reports and the rumors. He cannot possibly have been shocked by the news that some Vatican officials are homosexual. ‘He is probably the last person who would be surprised by such a so-called revelation,’ remarked Jean-Marie Guenois, another veteran Vatican journalist and editor of Le Figaro.

That fits with my view. As former editor of The Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic newspaper and official media outlet of the Archdiocese of Boston, Lawler is quite familiar with the workings of powerful homosexuals in the Catholic Church. He wrote about them in a brilliant but depressing book entitled “The Faithful Departed.” Do you want to understand why Boston Cardinal Bernard Law resigned? Want to understand why New Hampshire’s Republican house majority leader called [then NH] Bishop John McCormack a “pedophile pimp who should have been led away from the State House in handcuffs with a raincoat over his head”? Read Lawler’s book. Lawler ran The Pilot from 1992 to 2005 during the thick of the homosexual priest scandal and knew both men very well.

You won’t see Phil Lawler on the “Today Show” or in any other MSM outlet. He knows what was really caused the scandal and so does Michael Rose, who in his book “Good-bye Good Men” claimed that upwards of 40% of American priests who went to seminary between the seventies and the nineties were actively homosexual. You won’t see Rose on “The Today Show” either. Their analyses don’t fit the MSM spin on the sex scandal set in motion by “The Boston Globe” in 2002.

The Catholic Church in Europe and America has suffered severe decline under the leadership of “moderate” priests, bishops and cardinals. God save us from a moderate pope.

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Tom McLaughlin is a (now retired) history teacher and a regular weekly columnist for newspapers in Maine and New Hampshire. He writes about political and social issues, history, family, education and Radical Islam.