Bishop Morlino Offers Clarity

Bishop Morlino

Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison Wisconsin has released a pastoral letter which gets it right regarding the scandal of sexual predation within the Church. At a time when ordinary Catholics no longer know whom to trust, here, it seems, is one clear voice making the paths straight.

I wish we could count on Pope Francis to issue something similar to this. But I fear he is part of the problem. He is always wanting to fudge the moral issue, make the lines less clear, overlook sin. And he seems always to be playing to popular opinion.

Everyone should read the whole thing. But if you only read one passage, read this one:

“If you’ll permit me, what the Church needs now is more hatred! As I have said previously, St. Thomas Aquinas said that hatred of wickedness actually belongs to the virtue of charity. As the Book of Proverbs says “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate wickedness (Prov. 8:7).” It is an act of love to hate sin and to call others to turn away from sin.” 

At the most fundamental level, the problem here is a modern tendency to mistake overlooking or denying sin with forgiveness. The two are opposites. If you do not hate the sin, you hate the sinner.

“For too long we have diminished the reality of sin — we have refused to call a sin a sin — and we have excused sin in the name of a mistaken notion of mercy. In our efforts to be open to the world we have become all too willing to abandon the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In order to avoid causing offense we offer to ourselves and to others niceties and human consolation.”

And he is prepared to name the sin.

“To be clear, in the specific situations at hand, we are talking about deviant sexual — almost exclusively homosexual — acts by clerics. We’re also talking about homosexual propositions and abuses against seminarians and young priests by powerful priests, bishops, and cardinals.

… There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary.”

“It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church’s teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest.”

And so, one vital step to restore the Church is to ban homosexuals from the priesthood. And this he calls for, speaking of psychological tests. Not everyone is called to be a priest, after all; woman cannot be priests either.

Moreover, those found guilty must be punished—not quietly abetted and sent on retreats. The former is an act of mercy: the latter is malicious.

“A just punishment is an important work of love and mercy, because, while it serves primarily as retribution for the offense committed, it also offers the guilty party an opportunity to make expiation for his sin in this life (if he willingly accepts his punishment), thus sparing him worse punishment in the life to come. Motivated, therefore, by love and concern for souls, I stand with those calling for justice to be done upon the guilty.”

Bishop Morlino concludes:

“More than anything else, we as a Church must cease our acceptance of sin and evil. We must cast out sin from our own lives and run toward holiness. We must refuse to be silent in the face of sin and evil in our families and communities.”

On this premise, he is right to call for prayer and general expressions of remorse from all Catholics. It is a systemic problem in modern life, perhaps our biggest problem: confronted with sin and evil, we now generally turn our heads and pretend not to see.