PURGE. SANCTIFY. DEFEND
“ Go rebuild my Church, which you see is falling into ruins.”
WHY IS IT SO BAD?
Why is it so bad?
The connection between child molestation and sexually active priests and religious is not always apparent. What we have to understand is the culture of the church for this link to be understood.
Priests and religious take a Vow of chastity towards society. It is replacing sexual activity with a life of celibate love to God. Priest are married to the church. The bride of Christ. Female religious see a similar spiritual marriage to Christ.
When this vow is broken it is considered a grave offense, and in a spiritual way adulterous to one’s professed love.
In the Catholic Church it is a reason to remove someone from ministry.
The act of heterosexual unions is recognized as a normal inclination where homosexual unions are not. When you have same sex religious institutions these inclinations provide even greater problems.
Catholics are to refrain from living with people to whom they may be attracted to prior to marriage. It is called the near occasion of sin. For these reasons men with same sex attractions are forbidden entry to the priesthood. It would be like asking a heterosexual man to live in a sorority.
The culture that had developed (and remains today) was and is one of sexually active priests.
In a normal culture child molesters are found out and exposed. They compose a small portion of any organization and the good in an organization weeds out the bad. When you have so many priests and bishops that are sexaully active you compromise the system.
This situation grows exponentially worse when you have people of same sex attractions living together.
As mentioned above in our diocese this broke out into four groups. Child molesters, Homosexualy active priests, heterosexually active priests and celibate priests.
Where a normal organization might have 10 percent of its organization involved in improper sexual activities our numbers were much closer to 75 percent.
People reading this (especially priests ) will say this is too high. It was Bishop Hogan who stated in His court testimony that the problem with our priests was so widespread he didn’t know what to do.
In the PA Attorney General's report we read the explanation by one of our priests that he thought 80 percent of priests were homosexual and that was his reason for assaulting a young man. You can argue with his numbers, but here is a priest in our own diocese saying he believes this number to be true. Studies in the US have placed the number at fifty percent of all priests.
So you have a culture of collusion , conspiracy and blackmail. So many people have committed offenses where they should be removed or imprisoned that everyone has something on each other.
Case in point, a true story. It was widely known that Father Palko had a girlfriend. Bishop Adamec asked a senior priest to approach him and explain the girlfriend had to go. Confronted with this direct approach the girlfriend was removed only to return a week later. When the Senior priest called and spoke with Fr Palko he was told, “the bishop has his friends and I have mine”. Why wasn’t Father Palkos current sexual activity considered when the diocese was advised that he had molested a teenage girl.
Father died while working at the girlfriend's house.
In another parish, the priest was told the girlfriend was to leave. The priest wouldn’t do it and the Bishop wouldn’t make it happen. Finally, the parish council told Bishop Adamec the television stations would be there that evening. The priest and the girl left the diocese that day.
Many of the heterosexual men took offense to the diocese position. The homosexual men were promoted and allowed their activities yet the heterosexual men were not. We have had a large number of priests leave with their girlfriends or to marry. I know of only one homosexual man who left. I am glad that these priests had the integrity to leave, if not the integrity to live their vows.
Bishop Adamec added to our problems by ordaining men he was told were sexually active homosexuals and supporting this culture.
In his press releases he said he had no trouble ordaining homosexual men as long as they were celibate, when he knew in fact, his priests were not. The diocese invited speakers who disagreed with the church teachings, ran articles supporting the lifestyle in our catholic register,had priests running editorials supporting homosexuality, supported sex fest events in State College and had people who were trying to weed out orthodox seminarians.
The incidents of male homosexual child abuse in this diocese are many times higher than heterosexual and many arguments including the John Jay Study suggest a correlation.
Under Bishop Adamec, at one point in time, almost everyone who surrounded him had been sexually active or accused of child molestation. From his personal secretary, to the head of missions, to the liturgy, to the newspaper. Every office was corrupted and in some cases continues to be.
Bishop Adamecs secretary (a priest) finally ran away with a male protestant preacher.
Fr. Kelly who was accused of child molestation for which the diocese paid for counseling was the head of missions for decades. We had an accused child molester in charge of going overseas to poor partialy naked children. Father Maurizio is a good example of how that worked out.
Father Mazur has been the head of the liturgy for over two decades. His affair with Father Grattan an accused child molester was going on while he was the assistant principal under Father Skupian principal of Bishop Guilfoyle who was also an active homosexual and accused child molester. The victim of Father Grattan was a student at Bishop Guilfoyle. He contends Fr. Mazur not only knew of Father Gratton's abuse and failed to report it, but bullied him in school as a result of this.
The head of the newspaper was and is Father Timothy Stein. I had approached Bishop Adamec in the past because of Father Stein's apparent support of homosexuality in the Catholic Register. In 2001 I was approached by a layperson who found unsettling accounts on their parish computer. Father Roesch had two accounts on America Online with two separate screen names. “Willpay4some” was one name, while the other was” MaypayU”. The bio for these accounts said that the person was interested in young men and liked sucking. I believe father also had some previous questionable activity because he was mentioned in the Luddy case files. Father had also asked his religious education teacher to take kids on a religious retreat with Brother Stephen Baker. There was also a state college chatroom saved on his computer which was for people with homosexual inclinations to connect with. When we logged onto the chatroom we came across frtimdioc@aol.com which was known to me as Father Tim Stein. He was logged into a homosexual chat room that the previous priest had saved on his computer.
The Bishops spokesperson at the time was Sr. Mary Parks. In State College there were vigorous discussions going on in the newspaper. Fr. Hlubik the Catholic Chaplain had written numerous articles in apparent support of homoseuality. He was quoted as saying “Although some Bible passages speak negatively of homosexuality, there are positive images as well.” During this time the diocesan intake psychologist Dr. David Brown was also supporting homosexuality. While the laity and some priests were fighting these opinions the diocesan spokesperson was fighting them. I discussed this on the phone one day and Sister Parks commented “you didn’t even ask me what my orientation was”. I responded “it shouldn’t matter when we are talking about the church's teachings”.
Just about every corner of Bishop Adamec's administration was involved in covering up and in some cases supporting priests and religious living lives contrary to our faith.
This attitude was so pervasive that a group calling itself the Priests Federation was born. They acted like the priest mafia publically threating the Bishop, priests and lay people.
Bishops in the church ignored teachings on homosexuality for decades There are many reasons for this and I will mention a few.
1. Some bishops thought the church was wrong on this issue. They disagreed with the church on this so they ignored it.
2. Some bishops wanted to change the church. People openly disagreeing with the church's teaching on sexual morality would be much more inclined to follow a Bishop who opposed the church.
3. Some bishops were promoting homosexuality. This was a way to influence the church by getting more members who agreed with his point of view. They would be more likely not to report abuse or sexually active priests.
4. Some bishops were heterosexually or homosexually active. This provided them with power, sex and people who would protect their lifestyle.
Our bishops have created a culture in the priesthood that has encouraged sexual relationships. This atmosphere in Altoona/Johnstown was so encompassing that is dragged a lot of priests into it's clutches. Imagine almost all of your brother priests engaging in sexual activity but you do not. It was and continues to be an immoral atmosphere. Worse, was if you supported Catholic teaching in opposition to the Diocese gay positive role models, you were chastised causing many men to leave the church.
This atmosphere has created a local church that is morally contrary to our faith. The result has been unprecedented sexual abuse of our children and our laity.
This is also seen as a problem with the laity and other diocesan functions. It takes a large group of support people to hid so many transgressions.
Each succeeding Bishop has failed to address this problem, or have participated in it, and have allowed it to flourish.
This is the culture of our church that they have developed and hope to hide. Now is the time to face the truth and reclaim our faith.