Archbishop Chaput Neeeds to Stay Out of Politics

On Thursday, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput was installed as leader of the sexual abuse scandal plagued Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Chaput has a track record of being a culture wars warrior and homophobe only too willing to sanctimoniously attack gays and others while ignoring the cesspool nature of the institutional Catholic Church and the complicity so many of his fellow bishops and cardinals had in the aiding and abetting of the abuse of tens of thousands of children and youth. A column in the Washington Post suggests that Chaput needs to tend to his own foul house before injecting his standard hate and division into the politics. A column in the National Cathlolic Reporter likewise calls on Chaput to clean his house in his new diocese rather than seek to use politics to distract sheeple in the diocese from the truth of what knowingly was allowed to transpire. First these highlights from the Washington Post:

PHILADELPHIA — Archbishop Charles J. Chaput was installed Thursday (Sept. 8) as leader of the 1.5-million strong Archdiocese of Philadelphia, placing the outspoken culture warrior at the helm of a once tight-knit bastion of American Catholicism that now faces a series of crises.

From a damning clergy sex abuse scandal to a strike by Catholic school teachers, the 66-year-old Chaput has his work cut out in restoring the spirits of Philadelphia’s faithful while not backing down from debates on hot-button issues like gay marriage and abortion.

A scathing grand jury report last February accused church officials of routinely sheltering child abusers in the past, and perhaps even up to the present day. The scandal led Chaput’s predecessor, Cardinal Justin Rigali, to suspend more than two dozen priests and to submit his own resignation in July.

The scandal resulted in a string of arrests, including a high-ranking church official who was charged with child endangerment for allegedly transferring predator priests to new parishes. Chaput will eventually have to wrestle with an investigatory report by a former prosecutor appointed by Rigali.

Chaput is also likely to have a higher profile in the East Coast media market, and receive greater scrutiny for his frequent remarks and writings on issues like gay marriage (”The issue of our time,” he says), abortion rights and what he calls the perilous American drift into secularism and moral relativism.

Those are the kind of remarks that have dismayed more progressive Catholics who say Chaput and other bishops should worry more about pastoral concerns than politics, especially given the ongoing sexual abuse scandal.

“Until this task is accomplished, Chaput would be well-advised to leave politics aside,” wrote Nicholas Cafardi, a former chairman of a national church sex abuse review board, in Thursday’s Philadelphia Daily News. “Issuing divisive political rebukes will only undermine his ability to minister to a city in desperate need of healing.”

Then there are these highlights from the National Catholic Reporter:

[M]any individual priests have violated untold numbers of innocent children in the five counties that make up the Philadelphia archdiocese. Together with church authorities who protected these errant priests, all was done in the name of God.

The facts are documented right there, in excruciating detail, in the Philadelphia grand jury reports of 2005 and 2011.

Protocols said to have been put in place and followed by the archdiocese after 2005 were exposed as mere window dressing and PR spin like the archdiocese's cover story on Fr. Robert Brennan which Bishop Edward Cullen (an auxiliary bishop of the Philadelphia archdiocese before becoming bishop of Allentown in 1998) admitted in sworn deposition, "It's not the truth."

[T]he Philadelphia church has particular needs. It needs a pastoral leader who believes in justice, the rights and protection of all; especially those who were so unable to protect themselves as children.

It needs a pastoral leader who is not afraid to recognize and admit to the existence of corrupted man-made structures which allowed the church's sexual abuse nightmare to continue unchecked for so long.

The bishops of the United States knew about the serious nature of sexual abuse in the early 1960s and they knew that priests were abusing children. A documented pattern of collusion, conspiracy and cover-up was the order of the day in dioceses both across the country as well as in Denver and Philadelphia

However, their right to due process and to the justice afforded in the criminal courts was suborned to the protection of rogue priests until statutes of limitation had expired.

Every time Chaput opens his mouth to denigrate gays, gay marriage, liberals and others he deems unworthy of full citizenship rights, he needs to have the Church's moral bankruptcy hung firmly around his neck. Until the Church cleans house, Chaput and other members of the hierarchy should be afforded no credibility on any matters of morality or politics.