there is only One that is good

 

"There is only One that is good" -- which is a grievously weighted text from today's Gospel reading (Matthew 19.16-26).

 

From our Lord Who said that His yoke is easy and His burden is light, these particular words come as a heavy, heavy woe to the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

 

I've been busy fighting secularism and witnessing to the goodness, beauty and peace of the Holy Trinity, and the omnipresence of such divine, sophianic traces in the everyday life of the poor and not-so-poor, my neighborhood and the world. Suffice it to say, it's been hard work. And I've been trying to be a decent Samaritan to those left along the wayside.

 

So I, and some other clergy, have been doing our best under less than the best working conditions.

 

Now I'm shocked to find out that more than a few of my fellow-clergy (at least nominally defined) have been tippling back pink cosmos and draping gold jewelry as brands around their victim herd.

 

Woe to the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

 

For we Pharisees and Sadducees in the institutional church are certainly not good. Our institutional structures have been crumbling for decades, and in these past few years the acceleration of decline has been climbing on an exponential scale.

 

Treasuries have been frittered away by malfeasance and edifice-complexes. Corporate institutional development schemes have been adopted and believed in and transmogrified into stone-cold idols before callow eyes.

 

But far, far more important, the treasury of public trust and confidence is bankrupt today.

 

Zero. Less than zero.

 

Today, with the publication of Pennsylvania's stomach-churning, bowel-emptying 900-page report of sexual abuse by clergy -- priests, seminary rectors and even bishops -- I will say it out loud: the entire church's public profile has been permanently, irrevocably damaged ...

 

... i.e., polluted, toxified, besmirched, driven to the septic depth.

 

I am aware that some of my FB correspondents call for "non-judgmentalism" on my part and everyone else's.

 

Sorry, but no. I am from Pittsburgh. What's more, I worked with children, adolescents and other victims of sexual abusers for 15 years in clinical settings, and I have had the really bad fortune of getting dropped onto the ice of Lake Cocytus, just to interview the wretches who inflicted this abuse onto children.

 

I have never talked with such soul-less, self-vindicatingly sincere liars as I have with sexual abusers -- who almost always believed that the victim somehow led them into sexual acting out; that it was somehow "not bad" for the victim; that it was their "right" as an abuser; that they were only doing this out of their "depression" and history of "victimization."

 

As I looked into their pale eyes, I couldn't say "go to hell" as I wanted because in fact, they were already there. And loving it.

 

Do you know what happens to sexually abused children? Do you really understand that they will never, ever be the same? Can you come to grips with the fact that the innocence, the trustful wonder, the winsomeness, the magical playfulness that should have been rich in childhood has been, because of a sweaty fat man's white-collared tumescence, horribly mutated into post-traumatic stress coupled with premature sexual precocity and multi-faceted conduct disorder?

 

That now, ever since these “visitations,” these children have had to learn how to separate themselves from direct consciousness of life, to the extant that more than a few of my clients described watching experience “from a distance” because experience had become so poisonous ... one youth went so far as to tell me that he now watched life from the bottom of a Coke bottle, looking at reality through the aperture of a distant green-glass ring.

 

My God. This demonism was done under the rubrics of the Church.

 

My God.

 

Does the RC have any idea what it has done?

 

I have long called for friendship and cooperation with the Catholic Church. And I have taken a lot of criticism from some of my Orthodox friends for doing so.

 

Even today I will not end my friendship with priests and laity in the RC. But I will wait now and see if this present Pope will be a man and do something courageous, something significant and immediate. Every single bishop in Pennsylvania needs to be called to Rome, and many of them need to be laicized (and maybe prosecuted). I think Cardinal Wuerle needs to be removed.

 

Frankly, it is time that (non-episcopacy-bound) celibate clergy should start retiring to the confines of the chancery and the monastery. The parish, practically, is no longer a viable place for them.

 

Already, I have to take overwhelming precautions. I will never counsel anyone without some other adult (like my wife) in the same building. The door will always stay open. I will not travel with a youth by myself. I will not take a group of altar boys in a van to a retreat without an adult woman chaperone. I will not "hang out" with people, generally, except for my family and my close -- just as old and cranky -- friends.

 

Listen, brothers and sisters, you can stop with this nasty pro-Trump and anti-Trump business, because something worse has crept up out of the septic tank.

 

Mordor has won. We are now in the dark days of the second age. And it's the fault of prurient, blackhearted clergy.

 

Thank God there remains "One Who is good." There remains the Body of Christ, but for my part, the recognizable lineaments have surely changed.