Old School

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (of the dead, [speak] nothing unless it is good) has always been one of my favorite Latin aphorisms but it would put us historians out of business.  It would also permit the ideologues to totally distort the truth about the past, something that a wide variety of the krazy spectrum—from the ‘Tea-Party’ folk in politics to the Latin Massers in the Church—do well enough already with their various rewrites of history, secular and religious.

And today Cardinal Edward Egan, former Archbishop of New York, is laid to rest.  The television is replete with a variety of people ranging from the policeman who stands in front of the Cardinal’s residence on Madison Avenue to a Knight of Malta resplendent in the cowl of his Order saying what a warm and kind man His late Eminence was.  De mortuis nihil nisi bounum is about selective memory.  History needs to be more rounded.

There are good things one could say about the Cardinal. Edward Egan was not a bad man and even if he were, everyone has something good that can be said about them.   His family testified to his love for them and his love for the people of New York.  Love he may have had but he certainly was not one to emote in public or even show affection.   He certainly was there for the people of New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and, while not a warm man, he was dutiful in personally performing the funeral rites of many and visiting many more in hospitals.   

He was a great money man.  And despite all our liberal “disdain” of filthy lucre, the fact is the Church needs money to accomplish its mission.  On the one hand, Cardinal Egan was a great fund-raiser and, on the other, he could tighten a budget in a way that Scott Walker could only envy—and, unfortunately, too often with the same amount of human suffering of which the good Governor is proud of in the great State of Denial, I mean Wisconsin.  Egan was more successful in reaching solvency for the Diocese of Bridgeport when he was bishop there than he was in New York, but New York’s problems were much greater and, on the bottom line, he didn’t do bad for New York from the fiscal perspective.  He was slow to close underpeopled churches which has left headaches for his successor but which somewhat modulated his unpopularity among those parishioners whose churches he kept open. 

He also was a staunch promoter of priestly vocations though the quality of men he attracted to his seminary and the “reforms” he enacted at the seminary in Yonkers (Saint Joseph’s, Dunwoodie) are not universally admired.  One would have to say that the Jury is still out on those questions.  He certainly didn’t anticipate the “Francis Model,” though the worst system will still produce some good priests and the best system some rotten apples.  He also missed Francis’ boat when it came to providing a retirement residence; let’s just say that it wasn’t a downward move when the left the official Archbishop’s residence on Madison Avenue for his new retirement digs. 

He was a staunch defender of the unborn but also a proponent of interpreting canon 915 to exclude those in public life who saw their public duties differently.  He instructed then Mayor Rudolf Giuliani not to receive Holy Communion and was furious when the Mayor received Communion at Pope Benedict’s New York Mass in April 2008, issuing a public rebuke of the Mayor over the matter. 

Both as Bishop of Bridgeport and Archbishop of New York, Egan had somewhat of a checkered history when it came to the issues of reporting clerical sexual abuse.  His position in Bridgeport was that there should be an internal hearing to determine the credibility of the accusation before the individual was reported to the civil authorities lest the priest be the victim of unfounded allegations.  Priests were grateful for this protection from potentially false or ill-motivated claims but it was in violation of the civil law.  In 2002 he gave an apology saying: "If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry."  However he was later to retract this apology saying “I never should have said that…I don’t think we did anything wrong.”  

In New York the Cardinal lost the confidence of many of his priests and an anonymous letter from the priests was circulated, published, and sent on to Rome saying “During the last six years, the Cardinal’s relations with the Priests of New York have been defined by dishonesty, deception, disinterest and disregard.”  The writers of the letter said they had to remain anonymous, at least as regards the published letter, because of Egan’s “vindictive” nature. 

Cardinal Egan’s episcopacy needs be measured by the fact that like so many of the Bishops appointed during the John Paul years, he was the wrong sort of man to be a bishop.  Like his best friend and soul-mate, John Richard Keating, a fellow Chicagoan and fellow Canon Lawyer, Egan had the heart of a bureaucrat, not a shepherd.  The Church needs bureaucrats; it is—among other things—a bureaucracy.  But it is not at its heart a bureaucracy and it shouldn’t have bureaucrats at its heart—that is, in the ministry and office of Bishop.  This isn’t to say that Edward Egan wasn’t a good man, or even—in his own way and according to his own gifts—a good priest.  He just wasn’t what the Church needs.  Conservative though he was, he was no right-winger.  He had no interest in validating the “Old Rites,” but then he had little or no interest in the “New Rite” either.  The slovenliness of his funeral rites were appropriate to his own liturgical style.  He was a lawyer, a money-man, a person dedicated to making the system run as efficiently as possible.  He did that well and as I wrote above, we need those sort of persons around—on the chancery staff—but not necessarily among the ordained and certainly not with miter and crosier.  John Paul gave us some good bishops but mostly corporation men like Egan.  Benedict gave us brighter men, men who could think, but not necessarily braver men or holier men.  Benedict’s bishops (for the most part), like those of his predecessor, were climbers.  Every so often an O’Malley or a Curlin or a Morneau got snuck in, but over the last thirty-five years for the most part we got our Cordileone and Lori and Finn and Morlino and Dewayne.  It will take some time to clear them out and hopefully we will in the future receive more bishops like Blase Cupich or Christopher Coyne or Robert McElroy.  In the meantime, eternal rest to Edward Egan.  He may not have been the best we could have hoped for, but neither was he the worst.  While I am not an admirer, I did think that singing the Dies Irae as he was carried to his crypt was more than a bit harsh.  He was as good a man as he was able.  God be good to him. God be good to us all.  

Why Arlingtion? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 4

The Arms of the Diocese
of Arlington

Bishop Paul Stephen Loverde is a Massachusetts native who studied in Rome and received  his STL degree there in 1966 before being ordained for service in the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut.  He worked in the diocesan tribunal and distinguished himself in a number of positions as vicar for priests, being especially popular and trusted among the priests of the diocese.  (The Vicar for Priests is the assistant to the bishop who looks after the pastoral and professional needs of the clergy of a diocese—the “pastor to the pastors” as it were.)  After twenty-two years of priestly ministry he was named auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Hartford and then six years later he was given his own diocese in Ogdensburg, NY.  Bishop Loverde was highly regarded by clergy, laity, and religious in Ogdensburg where he assiduously implemented the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in a collaborative and collegial manner.  One religious sister who worked on his staff remembers him as “a good man, a compassionate man, a listener who truly was interested in you and the challenges you were facing.”  Bishop Loverde’s episcopal motto is—To Encouarage and Teach with Patience. 

In March 1998 with the death of Bishop John Keating while making his ad liminia visit to the Holy See, the Diocese of Arlington became vacant.   The Diocese remained vacant almost a year while the Holy See searched for a successor.  Reportedly a number of bishops turned down the See because of the reputation of the clergy for unruliness.  There certainly were problems.  One retired priest remarked “Back in 1974 when the diocese was split from Richmond we had our conservatives and our liberals.  There was Monsignor McClunn and Dickie Burke and that crew on the one side and Tom Quinlin and the young Turks on the other.  But we all got along.  We would get together on Sunday nights in the summer at one parish or another for supper and have a few drinks.  But now these guys don’t even speak to one another and they tear each other down to the people in the pews.  It is a different diocese; it has become toxic.”  

Paul Loverde seemed a good choice to bring together a divided diocese.  Patience was his motto.  He had a reputation for working well with his clergy.  He had a track record of implementing the counciliar and post-counciliar changes.  Those who had been frustrated by the backwards looking policies of the Keating years were hopeful that the diocese would get on track again. 

Bishop Loverde did his best.  He came in and was not quick to mandate changes but tried to win the trust of his priests in order to build a more cohesive presbyterate.  He made few staff changes in the chancery keeping people in place but trusting that they would implement his vision for the diocese.  Arlington was one of only two dioceses in the United States that did not permit girls to serve at the altar.  Bishop Loverde brought the matter up to his clergy for discussion but decided to maintain Keating’s restrictions until he could win over the resisting priests.  Similarly he kept in place Keating’s restriction on giving the laity the chalice at weekend Masses.  He also made no effort to restore the permanent diaconate program which had been shut down in the Keating years.  The left and center began to grow disillusioned and felt that they were losing out and that all concessions were being made to the neo-traditionalist camp without the moderates gaining. 

The problem was that the hard-core conservatives of the clergy never came aboard the Bishop’s program, but resisted the Bishop at every opportunity.  What they wanted wasn’t compromise, much less conciliation, but total capitulation on the part of those who disagreed with their reactionary policies. They took what they could wheedle out of the Bishop and gave nothing in return.  When the Bishop mandated that each parish have a committee to look at ecumenical cooperation among the churches in their area, few parishes complied.  When he would bring up the question at priests’ meetings of allowing girls to serve at mass, his priests actually booed him.  When he finally did make some compromise about female altar servers—allowing pastors to install them on a parish-by-parish basis if their parishioners wished them—priests wrote to Rome asking if the individual priest had to abide by the bishop’s decision to permit girls serving.  (Rome, incredulously, overturned the theological principles of Christus Dominus and asserted that the individual priest, not the bishop, has the final word over the liturgy!)  The bishop was hurt that his priests would appeal to Rome against his decisions; the liberal and moderate clergy were furious that they had to conform to diocesan guidelines but that the neo-traditionalists could spit in the bishop’s eye. 

The end result has been that the Diocese of Arlington is a deeply fractured Church—almost three distinct Churches in a unity that is no more than nominal.  On the one hand you have parishes such as Nativity in Burke, Saint Francis in Triangle, Christ the Redeemer in Sterling or Good Shepherd in Alexandria that would be mainline in any other diocese but are the “liberal” parishes which are jammed and to which people flock from twenty and thirty miles away.  (You also have the “exiles” who cross the river to Holy Trinity in Georgetown and other Washington churches.)  Then you have other parishes such as Saint Mary’s in Oldtown Alexandria, Saint John the Baptist in Front Royal, Saint John the Beloved in McLean, or Saint Catherine’s in Great Falls that are throwbacks to the Catholicism of the 1950’s.  They too draw from a wide area and are jammed.  And then there are the great number of the bland and the boring, the mildly conservative and stalwartly unimaginative parishes where nothing much happens except disillusionment and discouragement.  But that is not unique to Arlington—spending as much time on the road as I do, and being present at Mass in so many different churches, I can only wonder what has happened to the excitement of the Vatican II years when the fresh breeze let in by John XXIII’s open window made such a difference.  Vatican II is alive in some nooks and crannies of the American Catholic World but in many more places there are shattered dreams of what the Church could be again if only the Council were taken seriously.      

Why Arlington? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 3

While I mentioned Fathers X, Y, and Monsignor Z, unnamed clergy of the Arlington diocese who developed disciples among the more extreme younger clergy of their diocese in order to pass on the “true faith” of old-time-religion, Catholic style.   One of these had come to the diocese in its early days having been refused final vows in the Dominican Order because he was too backwards looking for the Dominicans.  Now, internationally the Dominicans are a very liberal order, faithful to their mendicant tradition of service to the poor and so one of the most committed orders to the principles of justice and peace as laid out at Vatican II and in a string of encyclical letters going back to John XXIII and Mater et Magistra, but the East Coast Province in the USA, the Saint Joseph Province is not typical of the larger Dominican family.  They are good men and well trained in theology and they perform well in their many ministries, but when it comes to the trappings of religious life and to their theological methodologies, they are antiquarians of the first degree.  It is impossible for me to imagine what it would take to be dismissed from them for being “too conservative.”  But seminarian X was.  He was no sooner out of the Dominicans than picked up for Arlington and ordained by Bishop Welsh for the Arlington Diocese. 

I don’t know as much about Father Y except that he is not native to the Arlington Diocese but a refugee from the then liberal Archdiocese of Detroit from the days of Cardinal Dearden.  He has ties to Opus Dei, and is a polished orator—perhaps more accomplished as a stylist than for his content.  In other words, he is more articulate than knowledgeable—a common quality of many clergy.  Well, it would be if one could say that there were many of the Catholic clergy who were at least articulate.  Father also is given to the buttons and bows of clerical dress and to gilding the lily of the Mass with as many liturgical antiques as can be devised.  Before the restoration of the Tridentine Mass he was known as a specialist in tricking out the “new Mass” to look like the old in the “Solemn High Masses” at his former parish.    However, to his credit, I hear that he makes a charming guest at dinner parties in the better homes of Northern Virginia. 

Monsignor Y—and to be honest, while I am not certain that he is a Monsignor (I suppose I could check the Kennedy Directory) I know that that he does not contradict those who called him that—is a pompous Irish windbag who would introduce himself as “Doctor Y” although he had never finished his dissertation.  The Irish are very good at making fun of pompous asses, but that requires that there be among them pompous asses of whom to make fun and Monsignor Y has always been good enough to oblige.  He particularly liked to criticize the “faulty” translation of the 1970 Sacramentary when the fact was his Latin was not, shall we say, itself Ciceronian.  

There actually was (is) a fourth horseman to this Arlington Apocalypse.  This fellow is bright, and I hear an above average Latinist.  He has always dreamed of living in a world untouched by Vatican II and so appealed to go to Bishop Fabian Bruskewicz’s Diocese of Lincoln, the only diocese more conservative than Arlington.  Unfortunately he was sent back after only a few years.  Like the others he was given to whining and complaining about the liturgy and was very active in the “Reform of the Reform” movement championed by Father Joseph Fessio, a member of the minority of Jesuits who have rejected the direction that the late Father Pedro Arrupe took the society during his tenure as General (1965-1983).  These Fathers were the nucleus of a catechetical school for young priests to unteach them anything they had learned in the seminary that smacked of progressive thought and to reform them in their own image and likeness as “Reform of the Reform” clergy.  They have had great influence over many of those 84 priests ordained by Bishop Keating and not a few of those ordained by the current bishop, Bishop Loverde, and their catechisis has created a distinctive sort of priest that one does not often find elsewhere.  In Arlington one might find a priest in his cassock picking up a few items at the supermarket or taking the parish youth for ice-cream at Coldstone Creamery.  In Arlington it is not all that unusual to find a priest facing away from the people for Mass or celebrating the preconciliar Requiem Mass, perhaps in English with some mumbled Latin, for a funeral.  Birettas are common, Roman or fiddle-back chasubles more common.  Purple Vestments (rather than Resurrection-white) is a common color for funeral Masses. Churches being built in the diocese these days are an architectural throwback to the 1950 Chicago-gothic and antique fixtures from the closed churches of Boston and other northern cities are finding new homes in the parishes of northern Virginia.  God forbid you come to Church with an Obama bumper-sticker on your car—you will find a note on your windshield telling you that you shouldn’t be coming to communion and just to make sure, it is not unlikely that some parish stalwart might track down your license plate and tell your pastor that he should refuse you communion at Mass.  It is not only a considerable number of the clergy in Arlington who are throwbacks to the days of the gentle Torquemada but an invisible empire of NKVD apparatchiks who monitor everything from the sermons of the suspiciously liberal to the liturgical oddities of the boomer generation priests to textbooks in religious education programs, to hymns sung at Mass.  One of their favorite targets of complaint and criticism is none less than the bishop himself.  But more on that in future postings.      

Why Arlington? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 2

Mount Saint Mary's Seminary, Emmitsburg

where many of the Arlington clergy are

trained.

Arlington began to chart its distinctive ecclesiological path under its second bishop, John Keating.  Keating was an unusual choice for bishop as he was not particularly religious.  He was not a bad man, much less a bad priest; it was just that the Church for him was more a career than a vocation.  He was trained in canon law and had a love for the law, not in the sense of being a rigorist (which he was anything but) but as a genuine aesthetic appreciation of the Canon Law as an intricate intellectual system with its own unique internal comeliness and logic.  He approached the law like a chess-master appreciates his game or a calligrapher his script. 

Keating had made his mark as a canon lawyer with his Doctoral Dissertation at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome “The Bearing of Mental Impairment on the Validity of Marriage.”  This dissertation was a game-changer for Catholics seeking annulments to their marriages as it opened up the issue of psychological maturity (or, actually, lack thereof) as one the grounds for a marriage being declared null in Church courts.   In fact, Keating was no conservative during his tenure where he served as Vicar General of the Chicago Archdiocese under Archbishop Cardinal John Cody from 1979-1983.  He also was apostolic administrator of the Chicago See from the death of Cardinal Cody to the tenure of the new archbishop, Joseph Bernadin in 1983.

While Keating had a reputation for being a progressive, he and Bernardin were not cut from the same cloth and Bernardin wanted rid of him.  Yet, his years of service in the difficult final period of Cody’s tenure which saw the diocese in chaos because of  Cody’s deep unpopularity and the allegations of financial and moral impropriety against the Cardinal, meant that Keating had to be pensioned off in some way and not merely returned to a parish posting as a pastor.  And so he was named to be the second bishop of Arlington.  Bishop Welsh was translated to the Diocese of Allentown in Pennsylvania—a lateral move at best—and Keating was ordained bishop in his place on August 4, 1983. 

As I wrote above, John Richard Keating was not a bad man but neither was he particularly religious.  He always reminded me of a 12^th century Bishop of Reims to whom is attributed the declaration: “This wouldn’t be a bad job (being a bishop), if you didn’t have to sing Mass.”  The liturgical duties of being a bishop seemed a torture for the canon lawyer.  Allegedly rather than officiate in his Cathedral or a parish church in his diocese on Sunday Mornings, he said a private Mass in his chapel and then headed out for a standing tee-time of 9 a.m. Sunday mornings at the Washington Country Club.  When he did say Mass publicly, he wanted the ceremonies had to be abbreviated as much as possible.  Confirmations were streamlined.  At the Easter Vigil he permitted the minimum of only two readings from the Old Testament and no baptisms or confirmations; you would be out in 90 minutes from a rite that took at least two and a half hours in most parishes.  After his body was entombed in the new mausoleum constructed in the crypt of Saint Thomas More Cathedral, the clergy joked that it was the first time that Keating had been present for all the Holy Week ceremonies in his Cathedral. 

I am not faulting Bishop Keating for his detesting the long and complicated rituals of his office—actually I think it could be seen to his credit.  As I have often complained about Cardinal Burke, most of the rituals surrounding prelates are more to their glory than to God’s.  But I don’t think the man was interested in the oversight of his diocese and he let many things go somewhat unsupervised.  One of them was vocations recruitment.

From this point out I am not going to give names to most of the figures I will write about as they are still living and perhaps they have repented of their misdeeds but one of the unnamed is a priest who served as vocation director for most of Bishop Keating’s tenure. 

In just over ten years as bishop, Keating ordained 84 priests for service in his diocese—record numbers for a small diocese in what was a national vocational drought.  How did he do it?  Well, let me tell one story.

Among my friends is a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington who served as a driver for Cardinal James Hickey during Hickey’s tenure as Archbishop of the nation’s capital, just across the river from the Arlington diocese.  This good priest has a poor sense of boundaries and loves to put the needle of jest, sometimes poisoned and always barbed, into anyone higher up the ecclesiastical food-chain than himself.  So one day he said to Cardinal Hickey: “How is it that Bishop Keating is ordaining twelve men this year and you are ordaining three.”  Hickey’s response was: “I don’t want the lawsuits.” 

The Vocation Director (they are called V.D.’s for short) for Arlington was notorious for grabbing any candidate he could in order to “make the numbers.”  A student was dismissed from a seminary for failure to make the grades—Arlington would grab him and send him on to a seminary where the standards might be a bit more, shall we say, “flexible.”  A seminarian was let go because his bishop thought he was too rigid or too conservative—no problem Arlington would take him.  Many—not all, but many—of the Arlington seminarians were part of the ‘biretta brigade’—seminarians who collected the antique vesture and vestments of the past with dreams of restoring the days of priests in the gender-amorphous regalia of nineteenth-century French abbés.  (When you think of it, you never saw Father Chuck O’Malley, aka Bing Crosby, dressed in all that folderol.  He wore a black suit, a clerical collar, and a straw hat.  No biretta.)  While Arlington managed to acquire some good men in this period, it also acquired a significant and disproportionately high number of highly dysfunctional ones thanks to this particular V.D. 

And it was not only the V.D. who was proactive in creating the ecclesial fantasyland that we developing in the northern reaches of the Old Dominion.  There was a small coterie of priests in the diocese who would train the young blood in the ways of reconstructing 1950’s Catholicism.  I remember one time asking a professor at Mount Saint Mary’s, the Emmitsburg seminary where many of the Arlington clergy train, “what are you teaching them there?” in response to some recent bizarreness I had witnessed.  I was told by this professor: “It isn’t us—it is what they are getting from Father X, Father Y, and Monsignor Z back in Arlington.”  And it is true.  But more on that next time.  

There Is Always More to the Story . . .

The Cathedral of Saint Thomas More,
Diocese of Arlington

In my last entry I mentioned Father Marcel Guarnizo, the priest who had refused communion to a woman at her mother’s funeral back in February and James Haley,  the former priest who allegedly was defrocked and excommunicated earlier this year.  I had a number of inquiries asking more about Mr. Haley and I only know what I have read about him on a number of right-wing websites posted by friends of his.  All in all it seems a tragic story. 
       James Haley was ordained for the Diocese of Arlington in 1987 and was suspended from priestly ministry fifteen years later.  He fought his suspension in Rome but—at least according to his defenders—ended up being defrocked and excommunicated rather than vindicated. 

      Mr. Haley claimed in a court deposition while he was still a priest that until he was ordained he had no idea that there were homosexuals in the Catholic priesthood.  He sure had that misconception cleared up early on.  According to an article by Mark Fellows on the website Daily Catholic    (http://www.dailycatholic.org/issue/2003Feb/febfor1.htm) back in 2003, Haley was assigned to one gay-pastored parish after another.  Now, I’m not saying this couldn’t happen but if Mark Fellows is to be believed, Sodom and Gomorrah looks like a finishing school for young ladies next to the presbyterate of the Arlington Diocese.   And then, as if all these gay pastors wasn’t bad enough, apparently every gay priest in the diocese began going to confession to Haley as he had to see a psychologist for counseling to help him cope with the emotional burden of “knowing what I did not want to know about my fellow priests through confession."

        Let me just take a break here and interject that other priests have told me that the subject of homosexuality in the clergy was discussed in their seminary years and that while it may have been disheartening to hear of this subject, later life experience came as no surprise much less trauma.  Priests have also said that it is highly unlikely that sexually active priests would confess to “such a delicate soul as Haley purports to be.”  In other words, they believe Haley was over-dramatizing his surprise and trauma in the deposition he gave and which Fellows related in his article.
         Deposition—what deposition?  Well that is where the trouble began.  But before I get to the deposition let me continue the narrative.  Haley went to the bishop about his “discovery” that there were gay priests in the Diocese of Arlington.  The bishop at the time was John Keating, aka “John the Good” according to the right-wing detractors of the current bishop.  Nevertheless, as good a bishop as Keating may have been, he told then-Father Haley he was powerless to do anything about the gay clergy and their acting inappropriately.  (“Inappropriately” is, I realize, an understatement if Haley’s stories are true.)  Haley kept accumulating evidence about his fellow priests whom he saw as betraying their vocation.  Now here is where it gets a little weird.  Well, no, it has gotten plenty weird awhile back.  Here is where I get confused.
         Then-Father Haley was assigned to All Saints Parish in Manassas, Virginia, an outlying suburb of Washington DC.  While on the parish computer, he discovered that the pastor had been visiting gay porn sites.  That is a risky thing to do on a computer to which others have access, but hey, we all know about bucks in rut running across eight-lane highways when they get the scent of a doe, or another buck if the first buck be gay.  But that isn’t all.  Apparently the pastor at All Saints wasn’t gay but omni-sexual as Haley also found over 300 love letters from the pastor to a married female parishioner.  And according to Haley the pastor and his lady friend had become a source of scandal to the entire parish, if not to all Loudon County, for their carrying on in hot tubs at parish parties.  (I have yet to go a parish party featuring hot tubs, but then hey I am a Yankee and we north of the Mason Dixon are a bit more, how you say, puritanical?  My parish doesn’t have hot tubs even for Easter baptisms much less for the Altar and Rosary Society annual banquet.   I guess what I am trying to say is that James Haley seems somewhat of a Drama Queen, er, sorry, King.) 
         Well things escalated from there.  The woman in question divorced her husband and like the fork with spoon, ran away with the pastor.  There was an ugly lawsuit from the (justly) aggrieved husband at which then-Father Haley testified and spilled the beans not only about the adulterous pastor-in-rut but about any priest he ever knew of who had a voluntary sexual discharge. Here is where the deposition comes in and if you read the deposition—it is on line—it is a bit over the top but would make a great mini-series.  The Thornbirds looks like the Ave Maria Hour after you read this. 
         But wait, there is still more, between the time Haley discovered the pastor’s combined taste for gay porn and straight sex—which (porn and loveletters) by the way he downloaded onto a disk and gave to the new bishop, Bishop Keating having died—and the deposition, Haley had been transferred to where he could do more “investigating”  Why would any pastor let a man into his house who would go through his computer, his rooms, and his wastebaskets, looking for “evidence” of misconduct? It is one thing to find such material; it is another to actively search. Once the pastor (the guy who likes gay porn and female parishioners) knew the “parish computer” had been raided for the material of his viewing pleasure, it was clear Haley could no longer stay in that house.  So he was transferred to a new parish where the pastor “confided” to him how he was embezzling parish funds and was into gay porn.  My God, is there a straight priest in Northern Virginia???  Or a priest with enough common sense not to tell his associate of his crimes and sins?  Haley reported this pastor too to the bishop and while the pastor was not reprimanded in any way, Haley was transferred to another parish with—you guessed it—another gay-porn addicted pastor.  What are the odds?  Once again, Haley reported the matter to the bishop but this time the bishop demanded Haley resign from active ministry. 
         This is an incredibly sordid affair.  There is no doubt that the pastor in Manassas was carrying on with a married parishioner or that the subsequent pastor had embezzled funds.  The one priest left the priesthood, married the woman (after her divorce); auditors found over $300,000 taken from the second parish.  Some of the other stories Haley related in his deposition seem to be without basis in fact in as that various priests named continue to be in good standing.  Haley has been suspected in some circles of tampering with the evidence he presented to the bishops regarding the alleged misconduct and porn.    
         James Haley had been an engineer before entering the seminary and supposedly had a history of whistle-blowing that led to his loss of employment.  Whistle blowers are not always the heroes of stories.  And sometimes people start fires so they can be the hero who discovers the fires and puts them out.  This pattern of whistleblowing was repeated in the Diocese of Arlington.  Was each and every alarm a genuine fire?  I don’t know.  Father Haley’s defenders are quick to insist it was.
         Earlier this year it was reported that the Holy See defrocked and excommunicated James Haley after a long series of judicial procedures, the records of which are not publicly available.  Haley’s supporters claim that he was framed and railroaded by the Bishop of Arlington in revenge for the deposition he gave regarding the clergy of the diocese.  They also claim that at least one canon lawyer was told that he “would never work again” if he defended Haley in Church Tribunals. While I see why James Haley may have been suspended from ministry, I am sorry to hear that he has been defrocked, but I am curious about the excommunication.  Granted, there was an allegation against Haley that he had, while a priest, absolved a partner (a woman) in a sexual sin and this brings an automatic excommunication that is reserved to the Holy See for lifting.  But that does not seem to be the reason for this excommunication. Such an excommunication is latae sententiae,i.e. automatic, whereas the stories reported seem to suggest that in Haley’s case there was an actual decree of excommunication.  The story is that the woman had taken Father Haley’s hand and put them on her breast to see if he could tell which breast was “the real thing” and which had been reconstructed after surgery.  Father Haley was not a willing participant in this act.  Furthermore, it was not a sin for anyone unless and except in the intent of the woman for it to be sinful and it would thus only be sinful for her and not for Father Haley who actually would be the victim of sexual harassment in this situation.  Third, any first-year seminarian would know enough to tell the woman, if she thought she needed absolution for this act, that is if her intent were sinful, to see another priest.   There has to be something more to incur excommunication, even latae sententiae.  And then—if incurred—excommunication is one of the easiest problems to resolve.  All you need do is repent of whatever you did.  James Haley might not be able to get back into the priesthood for whatever crimen got him defrocked but the excommunication only requires the humility of repentance.  I feel bad for him.  I suspect he is a very disturbed individual.  It is probably good that he is out of ministry but I hope he has friends and a confessor who can help him find the balance to rebuild his life.  It isn’t that he has been persecuted by the Bishop of Arlington and a lavender cabal that runs the diocese.  Like the story of Father Guarnizo and his various “charities” there is more to it that we don’t know.  I am not saying that the machinery of Holy Mother Church is always just, I am only saying that there is more to this story than has been admitted to.  And pardon me for ending a sentence with a preposition.  According to Sister Arrabiata in seventh grade this incurs a penalty worse than latae sententiae.  

Altar Girls? A Question Once More? Only in Arlington

O c'mon, do you realy think the

gates of hell are going to prevail if

girls are allowed to serve at the

 altar?

The Diocese of Arlington has made the news again—it’s never good and this time downright foolish.  It seems that a local pastor, Father Michael Taylor, has decided to disallow girls from serving mass in his parish.  Almost two-thirds of the parishes of the diocese do not permit girls to serve mass despite Vatican assurances that there is nothing in Church law that prohibits it.  I really must admit that I am a bit baffled by this.  If we said that only white kids could serve at the altar we would see the arbitrary injustice involved but hey, it’s ok to discriminate against girls because we have a tradition that upholds that custom.  In Virginia they had a tradition that discriminated against blacks too, but fortunately that has been done away with, at least in the more visible situations.  Come to think of it though, how many black priests does the Diocese of Arlington have?  About as many as they have women priests, I would guess.  After all there is no law against ordaining blacks as long as they have the biological equipment that certifies a candidate as fit for ordination.  And that brings us to the crux of the problem in the Arlington Diocese.       It isn’t Father Taylor’s fault, at least not at the root.  I know Father Taylor.  When I lived in the DC area back about ten years ago I attended mass at the parish where he was the parochial vicar.  He is a sweet man.  He is the sort of priest you want for confession.  He is just good.  The problem is that he is also, well, to put it bluntly, stupid.  That’s ok, God doesn’t always choose the best and the brightest and—by the way—I do think that Father Taylor is among the best, just not among the brightest.  He could never grasp the big question but would always get hung up on some semi-relevant (at best) detail in any situation.  He tried so hard to do the right thing but would have a failure of moral courage because someone somewhere told him some obscure law or theological detail or papal whim (real or imagined) and without checking it out, he would make the wrong decision.  It was never from an uncaring heart, only from the confusion of super-ego and conscience.  And where were those super-ego tapes—those little “voices of authority” in one’s head coming from?  Well that is part of the problem in the Arlington Diocese too.  There is the magisterium of the Church  and then there is the shadow magisterium of a group of self-appointed mentors who have too long shaped the minds of many of the younger priests of that diocese, confirming them in ignorance and disinformation.  When Father Taylor would say some of the outrageous things he would say and I would ask him for his source it was always Father Fasano or Father McAfee, or Monsignor O’Brien or Father Pokorsky or someone else in the “Gang of Thirteen.”  Once when I was at the AAR convention I was having lunch with several professors from Saint Mary’s Seminary Emmitsburg, and in relating to them various stories about the Arlington clergy, I asked them—teasingly—what they were teaching up there at the Mount.  “O, they’re not learning that from us” I was assured.  Amidst laughter they told me “They have a special post-graduate program in the diocese where they bring in the ‘experts’.”    
      Much of the Arlington quagmire dates back to the episcopacy of John Keating (1983-1998).  Well actually the problem is rooted in the fact that the Arlington diocese, like all of us except the Blessed Virgin, was conceived in sin and born in iniquity, but we won’t go there in this entry.  John Richard Keating was a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and had been, I believe, administrator of the Archdiocese between the death of Cardinal Cody and the appointment of Joseph Bernardin as Archbishop.  Bernardin knew he was on a very different page than Keating and so to remove him from power (he had been Vicar General prior to Cody’s death) without humiliating him, Keating was named the second Bishop of Arlington.  He reminds me of an eleventh century bishop of Reims in France, Manasses II (1096-1106), whose famous quote, describing the office to which he was called, was “This wouldn’t be a bad job if you didn’t have to sing Mass.”  Bishop Keating was an administrator, a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat.  He was a superb canon lawyer and responsible for introducing the “psychological maturity” argument into the annulment process.   He wasn’t a bad man, at least as far as anything I have heard.  He just wasn’t very religious.  Nine o’clock Sunday Morning would find him, most weeks, not in his cathedral but out on the links at the Washington Country Club.  After his death, a crypt was constructed in the cathedral to hold the remains of the Bishops of Arlington and Keating’s body was removed from the mausoleum at Fairfax Memorial Park where it had been temporarily entombed and properly put in the episcopal crypt.  The joke was circulated among the clergy of the diocese the following Easter that this had been the first Holy Week the Bishop had spent in his Cathedral.  While he would show up at the Cathedral for the Mass of the Chrism and the Easter Vigil, he would not permit baptisms and confirmations at the Vigil and would only allow the minimum number of Old Testament lessons so that the liturgy would not go over an hour and a half.  “This would not be such a bad job if you didn’t have to sing Mass.” 
     Bishop Keating was a great delegator of responsibility which is to his credit, but he seems not always to have followed up.  He really didn’t care much if individual priests or parishes were conforming to Church practice as long as they weren’t actually breaking any canons.  This led to a lot of idiosyncrasies in Arlington.  Some places had “Solemn High Masses” which were the (at the time required) Novus Ordo Rite but which were counterfeited with Deacons and “Subdeacons” and an ad apsidem posture to masquerade as the old Tridentine Solemn High Mass.  Birettas and cottas and even maniples were salvaged from closets and drawers, altar-rails were installed and kneeling for communion restored, and old time religion, Catholic style, became somewhat normative in the Arlington Diocese.    And when the clergy informed the bishop that should he permit girls to serve Mass as was being done in other dioceses, they were “outta here”—well, Keating was not one for confrontation and so “altar girls” were on the verboten list. 
     This preconciliar Shangri-la was bound to attract vocations from other dioceses where seminarians were afraid that they might not be permitted as priests to do the grocery shopping in their soutanes or required to take a Latin exam before being permitted to say Mass in the language.  There was a very enterprising vocation director, Father Jay Gould, who scoured seminaries around the country for men who would be thrilled to be part of this ‘50’s revival and for years Arlington had an abundance of vocations.  Conservatives in the diocese, clergy and laity alike, look back on the “Golden Days of Gould” when vocations abounded and cassocks were de rigueur.   A prominent Washington Archdiocesan Monsignor who had served as driver/Master of Ceremonies to the late Cardinal Hickey (Archbishop of Washington 1980-2000) told me that he had once ribbed the Cardinal saying: “What’s wrong with our Archdiocese?  Keating is ordaining twelve priests this year, you’re ordaining two.”  Hickey’s response to the disparity of vocations was “We don’t want the lawsuits.”   So much for screening.   
      All this is background to the issue of female altar boys in Arlington.  About five years ago, Bishop Loverde, the current bishop, lifted Bishop Keating’s ban, allowing pastors—with the advice of the Parish Pastoral Councils—to permit girls and women to serve Mass.  Rome had no problem with it; the Bishop had no problem with it.  But there are always those like Father Taylor, who know better.  I am not saying that sometimes priests and even lay folk don’t know better than bishops—or even the Pope.  History bears out the facts.  I am only saying that a smart priest doesn’t come into a parish and stir up a hornet’s nest over an issue as inconsequential as this one.  But then, as I began, while Father Taylor may be no less intelligent than many of his colleagues, he sure didn’t demonstrate street smarts, much less pastoral sagacity, here.