John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, advocated use of financial pressure against the Catholic Church to address the sexual abuse scandal following Tuesday’s grand jury report regarding a systematic cover-up of sexual abuse in Pennsylvania dioceses.
Zmirak also called for the imprisonment of priests found guilty of sexual abuse crimes and the bishops who covered it up, during a Wednesday interview with Breitbart News Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.
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Zmirak noted that the current revelations emerged because “[t]he attorney general of Pennsylvania did what I wish the attorneys general of 49 other states would do. He went into the decades-old criminal conspiracy of Catholic bishops to cover up sexual abuse of minors, mostly boys in their teen years, by priests. Eighty percent of the crimes were against boys, and most of them were between 14 and 17 [years of age], so it really is mostly a homosexual scandal of post-pubescent boys. It’s not a pedophile scandal.”
Zmirak added, “Unfortunately, for some segments of the gay community, it’s par for the course to cruise for teenagers, and those kinds of men seem to be the ones who are filling the seminaries. The statistics on priests that I’ve read, according to the John Jay report that the Catholic bishops paid for themselves — they weren’t thrilled with the results — [are that] between 18 and 58 percent of Catholic priests are homosexual. That’s compared to two percent of the population at large, so there’s seriously a problem.”
Zmirak examined the relationship between the Catholic priesthood’s celibacy requirement and sexual abuse of children and teenagers by priests.
“I think a large part of the problem is that not that many young men who are straight are willing to be celibate and be priests,” assessed Zmirak. “In past decades, men were willing to do it because it was better than working in the coal mines [or] being a subsistence farmer. They were willing to make the sacrifice. Not that many men are willing to be celibate, but you have a fair number of men who are willing to pretend to be celibate.”
“We have seminaries full of gay men who are practising with each other, who are being seduced by their gay seminary teachers or the rector of their seminary,” remarked Zmirak.
“The former cardinal archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, would get seminarians to go in bed with him and call him ‘Uncle Ted,'” recalled Zmirak. “If they were willing to cuddle with him and do more than that, he would promote them up the chain to become priests and bishops themselves.”
Zmirak continued, “One of McCarrick’s proteges is Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl, the current archbishop of Washington, DC. … The report that came out yesterday is just staggering, and for which I have to thank the attorney general of Pennsylvania. He did a service to the country, and also unwittingly to the church. Cardinal Wuerl, who presented himself as a big fighter of sex abuse, it turns out that he paid hush money to a priest who was removed from service because of his addiction to child pornography. He paid that man an income for like 20 years, and when that man wanted more money, one of the conditions Cardinal Wuerl put on him was basically that it be hush money; that he not reveal details.”
Zmirak went on, “In case after case after after case, the [attorney general] found that the church purposely ran out the clock on the cases so that they would miss the statute of limitation, and therefore the predators would never be prosecuted. Most of these predators continue to be on the church’s dime.”
Zmirak highlighted an instance of a sex-related cover-up involving a teenaged girl impregnated by a priest.
“Now, many of the worst bishops were the liberal bishops, but there were some conservative bishops who were terrible, too,” said Zmirak. “Archbishop Timlin of Scranton, who was the guy who brought back the Latin Mass to Pennsylvania and claimed to be loudly pro-life, well, one priest statutorily raped a 17-year-old girl, got her pregnant, and pressured her for an abortion which he paid for. What did Timlin do? He left the man in the priesthood, moved him to another parish, and wrote him a very sympathetic note about what a difficult time he must be going through.”
Zmirak added, “There are cases in there of priests engaged in sadomasochistic rituals that involve the desecration of Eucharist and involve getting naked boys to pose like Christ on the cross; diabolical stuff.”
“If you were a sex pervert, and you’re in a religious environment all the time, your perversions are going to take on a religious flavor,” surmised Zmirak. “It’s not that surprising. … I think it’s perfectly plausible that somebody who never had any place in the priesthood in the first place and joined for cynical reasons is going to be cynical and perverse in the way he treats these things. You see anti-Catholic sacrilegious things in the gay community regularly; you see men dressed up in leather outfits as nuns [and] men dressed in leather clothes with a priest collar.”
“[These are not] repressed and recovered memories,” noted Zmirak. “All the attorney general did was get the church’s own internal documents. All they did was open their files.”
Zmirak stated, “All they care about is money and reputation. Any organization can operate like a cult [and] fall into cult-like behavior. This was cult-like behavior. This was mafia-like behavior. I do think that the homosexual takeover of the Catholic priesthood has been a serious problem, where 80 percent of the sex abuse is of teenage boys.”
Mansour noted, “We’re talking about 301 abuser priests, and we’re talking about over 1000 victims. This is over a period of 70 years. The majority of the abusers that we’re talking about are currently dead. Over 90 percent of them are dead. Full disclosure here, most of these things are in the past. Some of the bishops, especially Archbishop Wuerl — now Cardinal Wuerl — is alive, and he needs to answer very clearly. He needs to have his red hat gone, and he needs to go to jail. He needs to be in a yellow jumpsuit. … This is a problem of secrecy and cover-up, and worrying about the institution instead of the victims.”
Zmirak recommended using financial pressure against the Catholic Church to compel its improvement. He also asserted that any panel assembled to investigate the abuse and provide solutions must be run by Catholic laity, not the bishops or priests.
“I want Catholic millionaires who donate to the church on [a] panel [to investigate the abuse], and I want that panel to be wielding the sword of money. … Grab these people by the purse strings and squeeze,” Zmirak said. “Remember, 40 percent of the bishops’ money comes from government contracts serving immigrants through Catholic nonprofits, charities, and relief services. We need to press the Congress to redirect the money away from Catholic nonprofits, because they are keeping the church alive like morphine [or] methadone. They’re keeping the church stoned, but barely alive.”
Zmirak added, “We also need to put some of these bishops in prison. I would like to see federal RICO charges filed against the bishops who were involved in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the abuse of children [and] the distribution of child pornography. There were real crimes here, and I don’t think a damn thing is going to change until at least one — but preferably two or three — bishops are rotting in federal in state prison.”
Mansour noted that Pope Benedict XVI did “a lot to clean up the situation” with the sexual abuse scandal in the Church “for the brief time that he had” as pope, “and he got railroaded, by the way, by the Vatican cabal.”
Zmirak framed Pope Francis as unwilling to appropriately address sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.
“[This won’t] happen under Pope Francis, because the Lavender Mafia are the ones who elected him,” appraised Zmirak. “Cardinal Wuerl and Cardinal McCarrick were big boosters of Pope Francis. The guy he appoints vice pope, Cardinal Maradiaga — this Marxist from Honduras — he is heavily involved in covering up sex abuse. This is the Pope of the sex abuse lobby, so while he’s in there, nothing’s going to get fixed.”
“We’re just going to have to wait for God to call him home, and then maybe the next pope will fix things, but I’m not going to wait for the church to fix it,” added Zmirak. “I want Caesar to fix it. We’ve got to put these guys in jail, take away their federal funding, laymen need to cut off their donations.”
Zmirak considered the ordaining of married men: “Start letting married men of good character take training in theology and ordain them to serve, unpaid, as sort of emergency priests, to say mass. … More normal men would be willing to be priests if they didn’t have to pretend to be celibate.”
“The only people I knew that considered the priesthood, the only seminarians that I knew, all turned out to be gay,” added Zmirak. “They were all conservatives, Latin Mass guys. Thankfully, only one of them got ordained.”
“[Homosexual men] should not be ordained,” advised Zmirak. “Not in our pansexual society. You don’t put gay men in an all-male environment any more than you send men out with 16-year-old girl scouts into the woods. You don’t put people where they’re likely to be tempted. The all-male environment of the priesthood, this is not hypothetical, it has become a gay bath house atmosphere in one seminary after another; even the conservative seminaries.”
“Celibacy is not the only issue, but it seems to be a decisive issue right now,” determined Zmirak. “It seems to be that the Catholic priesthood has become a gay refuge. Compare the statistics: two percent of the general population versus a minimum of 15 to 18 percent and a maximum of 58 percent. Those are all statistics from the church’s own study. Fifty-eight percent was the highest estimate that Catholic researchers came up with based on their surveys.”
Zmirak said cleansing the Catholic church of sexually abusive priests will garner political support from faithful members of the Catholic laity. He noted the reluctance of government officials to hold Cardinal Roger Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, accountable for his role in covering up sexual abuse.
“The prosecutors thought they would be seen as anti-Catholic and that it would lose them votes. What they need to see now is that it is pro-Catholic. They’re doing the church a favor, and ordinary Catholics will be grateful to see these bishops in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits if this is the stuff they’ve been doing. I guarantee you it will turn out the Catholic Church if this is the last thing that’s going to protect the church is that Caesar has to step in to save the church from its own corrupt bishops, and frankly, its own corrupt pope. Frankly, I really think there’s no political downside. They need to put on their big boy pants and start locking these people up.”
Zmirak concluded, “Unfortunately, now, the pope is not on our side. The pope is not on the side of cleaning this up.”
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