5 Feet of Fury

Liberal Catholic heroes always turn out to be scumbags, part XVII

While the men running the place can be their own special brand of idiot.

Rod Dreher slices and dices Rembert Weakland — and his Roman enablers:

…how is it that a gay archbishop who by his own confession had multiple homosexual affairs, and in one of them paid his lover nearly half a million dollars — money that he stole from the Church, mind you — now suddenly becomes an authority on what Catholic teaching should be, or a moral authority on anything?  (…)

Denial has been the way the Church hierarchy has dealt not only with the abuse crisis, but with the fact that so many of its clergy and episcopate are gay, and not celibate (this, alas, is not just a Catholic problem — we Orthodox suffer from it too, worldwide, as a recent scandal in Greece showed). Weakland admitted that he’d shuffled priest sex abusers from parish to parish, without telling parishioners — just like so many other Catholic bishops did, even conservative ones. What we may never know, though, is what role his fear of blackmail by his gay sex partners may have played in his decision to sacrifice the safety of Catholic children to keep up appearances.