At the Dallas meeting, Uncle Ted was allowed to make a mockery of the entire Conference by prancing around like a lady from "The View", pretending to care about victims of clerical sexual abuse while his brother bishops sat on their hands and said nothing about the biggest abuser of them all.

Author’s Note : Back on June 30, 2002, I wrote the following Remnant article on the now-infamous Dallas meeting of bishops (convened under the pretense of addressing the clergy sex abuse crisis). That utterly impotent meeting would go on to produce the now-laughable “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People”, drafted by — wait for it! — Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

We’re reproducing this 16-year-old article by way of providing archival proof that certainly by as late as 2002, all of us were scandalized, sick and tired of the homosexual problem in the priesthood. For a couple of decades prior to that, in fact, thinking, believing, breathing Catholics had no delusions about the extent of the problem and certainly had no trouble imagining how high up the hierarchical latter the cover-up went.

Between the close of the Council and the Dallas meeting (leading up the John Jay Report in 2004) we’d seen a pope personally accused of being a homosexual, the head of the CDF issue a directive on the pastoral care of homosexuals in the Church (but call for an end to their admission into seminaries), nine men file formal charges (ignored by the reigning pontiff at the time, of course) against the powerful Legion of Christ founder Fr. Marcial Maciel, and, of course, Cardinal Bernard Law's scandal and resignation on December 13, 2002. All of this after having long since grown painfully aware of the fact that the Roman Rite itself had become so emasculated as to seem almost tailor-made for a homosexual clergy.

We knew very well what was going on. And yet, somehow, in the face of the unspeakable scandal of systemic infiltration of the priesthood, the lowly “rad trads” continued to fight for their besieged holy Mother Church, held captive by an occupying force hellbent on defiling her.

It never even occurred to us to jump ship in disgust. Our Mother—pure and inviolate—was under siege, and it seemed to us that the duty of her loyal sons and daughters commanded us not to abandon her in the face of those who would violate her.

Today, McCarrick has fallen, the bishops are exposed as the frauds most of them are, and the great Novus façade is shaken to its very foundations. But we're still here in the trenches, fighting like hell against the forces of Hell that got over walls. We're no heroes... just angry Catholics for whom defecting is simply not an option. Not then. Not now. Not ever. MJM

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Before there was Baltimore, there was Dallas . . .

(Excerpt taken from "From Dallas to Chartres: An Example of Polar Opposites," by Michael J. Matt, June 30, 2002 issue of The Remnant)

Elsewhere in this issue of The Remnant, Dr. Thomas Woods comments on the rather startling statement issued by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz on, among other things, the recent debacle in Dallas. Bishop Bruskewitz's statement has been widely hailed by traditional Catholics as the most important development to come out of the otherwise less-than-impressive bishops' meeting.

True to form, our seemingly pixilated shepherds could hardly bring themselves to mention the real crisis at hand—the homosexual infiltration of the Catholic priesthood—but instead saw fit to drone on and on with motions, and points of order, and amendments, and proposals, and votes...all of which had about as much relevancy for the country's scandalized Catholics as a motion to rearrange the deck furniture might have had for passengers dangling from the promenade railing on the Titanic.

Having watched as much of the bishop's meeting as I could stomach, it came as no surprise to me that Bishop Bruskewitz's statement is being received as it is—with cheers of approval from Catholics who otherwise heard nothing out of Dallas that would suggest that most of these bishops even knew what year it was, let alone how critical is the present predicament. Like the bishop of Lincoln, I too was struck by the ineptitude of, as he called them, this "hapless bench of bishops." And if the future of the Church in this country depends on these men, I think it is safe to say that we are well beyond the crisis stage. Like that doomed Titanic, the American Church has hit an iceberg and is sinking faster now than anyone ever thought possible. Bishop Bruskewitz's statement can quite appropriately be described as courageous, given the excruciatingly cowardly tenor of the rest of the event.

As our bishops enacted their little drama, it occurred to me to wonder if most of these men could possibly be as embarrassed as they should, in all decency, be.There they sat—the modern successors of the apostles—discussing their priests who have a propensity for raping children, but most of them doing so with the matter-of-fact attitude of a parish committee trying to determine where to apply its bingo proceeds.

There was some laughing and joking, some sleeping and, yes, you're reading this correctly, some vigorous nose-picking (captured by a C-span camera crew). But I heard precious little mention of the necessity of doing public penance for the outrage these men have overseen; I saw no serious motion to defrock and imprison the criminals who've been parading around in Roman collars and lamenting the altar girl permission for all the wrong reasons; I heard no clarion call for restoring morality and order to those houses of iniquity that are laughingly referred to as Catholic seminaries. No, the meeting in Dallas was more like a business meeting, chaired by bureaucrats who were hoping to preserve their fat-cat bureaucracy until the ravenous media go after some juicier scandal. (In fairness, there were a handful of bishops who did periodically try to raise some cogent points that spoke to the need for some genuine reform, but they were quietly ignored. Collegiality, after all, has its limits.)

Most of our bishops seemed to have generally abandoned the pursuit of a divine solution to this mess and have instead concocted a human one that is as insulting to Catholics as it was ludicrous to the press. Great, so Father Jeffrey Dahmer, Father Ted Bundy and Father Freddy Krueger will no longer be permitted to hold their jobs inside the "Catholic Christian community," even though they will be allowed to remain priests. Super! That'll fix it. Meanwhile, Father Richard Simmons, Father Elton John, and Father Rock Hudson will be free to carry on.

Talk about the abomination of desolation!

The Catholic priesthood is teaming with homosexuals, and the American Catholic bishops don't give a tinker's dam. Or, perhaps, they know all too well that blowing the whistle on homosexual priests might have ramifications for some, how should I say, less-than-virile churchmen in very high places.

Anyway, the root problem was never seriously addressed, and nothing of any real consequence is apt to change as a result of Dallas, except that the worst offenders will have to mind their manners for a while around the few altar boys they haven't as yet scared off. Other than that, and aside from a few token hand slaps, it'll be back to business as usual.

To paraphrase Thomas More in Robert Bolt's play, A Man For All Seasons, the bishops of America would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount, but they'll labor like scholars over how to protect child rapists in Roman collars.