MCCARRICK REPORT REVEALS VAT II'S 'NEW MORALITY'

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Father Theodore McCarrick in 1974 with James, who claimed McCarrick sexually abused him over 2 decades

Pope John Paul II was aware that the now-defrocked Cardinal McCarrick repeatedly slept with priests and seminarians.

Pope Benedict XVI had received public warnings by US journalists that McCarrick had homosexual relations with priests.

Pope Francis was informed by several of his collaborators about McCarrick’s history yet decided to collaborate with him on multiple fronts: the McCarrick Report reveals how Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis all had an all-too lenient attitude toward the defrocked cardinal. 

This is an edited version (in the interests of brevity) of a LifeSite News essay by Professor Roberto de Mattei, a prominent Italian historian and traditional Catholic. De Mattei explains the link between the decades-long evasion by the Church of warning signs about McCarrick and the weakening of the Church’s moral integrity since the Second Vatican Council. With the Council, he says, came a “new morality” and the loss of the Church's determination to condemn evil and fight sin.

Professor Roberto de Mattei

According to Professor de Mattei, there "emerged" from the Council a “nouvelle morale” that embraced the world and changed the Church’s view of sexuality.

Gaudium et Spes reversed the ends of marriage, giving its traditional primary end -  begetting and raising children - less significance than conjugal love and support. The path to a love independent of procreation – thereby indirectly opening a path to homosexual “love” – was opened up. De Mattei speaks here of a “distorted idea of love.”

The German progressivist wing of the Church repeatedly stresses that the marital act need not be linked with its procreative act. For example, Professor Stephan Goertz, a moral theologian, proposed in 2015 that procreation was linked with sexuality in the times of the Old Testament because the Jews then struggled for survival. This “is obviously not any more our situation, and that, since the (Second Vatican) Council, it has also not been any more our own moral teaching on sexuality.”

Professor Stephan Goertz whose research interests include gender and sexual ethics and LGBTQ. Yes I know what you're thinking

 

• whose research interests include gender and sexual ethics, human rights and LGBTQ Theologies. I know what you're thinking ...

Professor Eberhard Schockenhoff – key architect of the German Synodal Path that  questions Church teaching on sexual morality, male ordination, and the hierarchy – proposed last year that sexuality and lust be regarded as helping people to “assure themselves of their identity,” thus they be regarded as a “end in itself,” without reference to procreation.

Professor Eberhard Schockenhoff RIP - another incognito priest

Professor de Mattei explains: “Sexuality was defined as an essential value for the personal maturation of the individual. The Council's Constitution Gaudium et Spes, which abandoned traditional doctrine on procreation as the primary end of marriage, was considered a manifesto of this new relationship with the world.”

This statement is equally applicable to all the prelates who embraced and welcomed the Second Vatican Council.

Professor de Mattei stresses that “Certainly not everybody, within the Church, has brought this discourse to its logical consequences, but unfortunately John Paul II, with his ‘theology of the body,’ has proposed a false alternative to the new morality.”

Pope Benedict XVI, “while vigorously opposing pedophilia, has never dared to condemn the rampant homosexuality within the Church, applying a policy of silence, which has become aiding and abetting sin.”

This can be seen not only in the McCarrick case – where Benedict XVI explicitly decided against opening up a canonical investigation which would have brought justice into the matter – but  in the case of  'Monsignor K'. Benedict decided merely to move him from the Vatican and then, after persisting reports about Monsignor K’s aggressive homosexuality, to dismiss him from the diplomatic service and send him back to his home diocese, instead of investigating these allegations

A third example of Pope Benedict's “policy of silence” that turns out to “abet sin” is the case of the Integrated Community (Integrierte Gemeinde), a Catholic community that had received its canonical status from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1978, with certain conditions. However, he did not ensure that these conditions were met. He did not take warning reports seriously. This group had a cult-like character, intruded into the personal lives of its members, telling some they should not have children and that much of their personal wealth should be handed to the community. Much abuse in more than 40 years has led to the estrangement of parents and children and the break-up of marriages.

“Just like Pope Benedict,” de Mattei adds, “also many other conservative prelates were affected by this weakness in dealing with and confronting the homosexual problem within the Church. Ignoring these responsibilities would be hypocrisy.”

According to de Mattei, Vatican II weakened the Church's abhorrence of evil and her willingness to fight sin. He points to Pope John XXIII's opening speech at the Council, where he made “the distinction between the truths of faith and morals and ‘the way in which they are announced.’”

“From that moment on,” de Mattei continues, “the supreme authorities of the Church gave up explicitly condemning evil, and limited themselves to speak, in an often unclear way, on the good. No truths have since been defined and no errors anathemized. Evil was often hidden or ignored.”

So Vatican II not only brought us an opening toward a “new morality” that opened paths to an acceptance of homosexuality, but it also weakened the Church's determination to fight evil. 

In this sense, Pope Francis’s new encyclical Fratelli tutti is for Professor de Mattei a continuation of the loss of this “supernatural” worldview that keeps in mind the end stages of our human existence, heaven or hell.

"For us it is better to face, if necessary, our due death of the flesh at the hand of tyrants, rather than consent by our silence, whether out of fear or convenience, to the ruin of the Christian law. We know in fact that our holy Fathers said: He who, in consideration of his office, does not oppose evil men; it is as if he agrees with them: and whoever does not eliminate the evils which should be repressed; it is as if he committed them" 

(Pope St Gregory VII,  Registrum,  IV, I).