Rachel Mastrogiacomo delivers a courageous testimony at the Rome Life Forum, revealing how she survived satanic ritual abuse committed by a Catholic priest. She exposes the horrifying truth that such sacrilege and occult infiltration have entered the Church from within, enabled by silence, cover-ups, and cowardice among bishops and Vatican officials. Her story echoes the warnings of saints and exorcists who foresaw a deep spiritual war inside the Church. Yet through her suffering, Rachel discovered healing in Christ, devotion to Our Lady, and the power of forgiveness.
If someone high profile, on the side of the angels about a given issue (either literally or figuratively), announces, "if I am found dead and they tell you it's suicide, don't believe them," and then that person is found dead and the people on the other side insist that the damage was self-inflicted, would you believe them?
We all saw Pope Benedict with bruises on his face that would have caused a relative with a loved one in a nursing home to call for an elder abuse investigation, after he characterized himself as a prisoner, effectively, whose authority ended at his own office door.. We all looked on as Cardinal Pell perished from a routine procedure in Rome after being absurdly accused, incarcerated, and acquitted, allowing ourselves to be written off as conspiracy theorists rather than pushing the issue of the transfer of Vatican funds, mysteriously, to Australia, at or about the same time. We all wondered how George Neumayr had managed, unexpectedly, to die of malaria, but it isn't beyond the realm of possibility, either. We've seen priest after priest, bishop after bishop, religious community after religious community, endure what look like egregious canonical abuses to the concerned outsider. Some of the targeted cry foul; others choose not to. The outcome seems to be the same, either way.
Now, we are confronted with the year-long silencing of Father Chad Ripperger. What to make of it? Father himself had just said (to Shawn Ryan) that he is "persona non grata" to certain members of the hierarchy, who want him gone. At the same time, there has been no public word from the Internet exorcist himself, seeming to confirm the party-line take (echoed by Fathers Gerald Murray and Dan Reehil, who are both willing, evidently, to pronounce the conclusion of nothing-to-see-here in the absence of any direct knowledge of the situation while denouncing others for doing the same thing with the opposite take) that this was spiritual direction, not coercion. Even if it was--even if, in other words, Father Ripperger did readily agree--we would still be free to ask if his attitude, alone, suffices to make things right. Consensual sex can still be sinful, as can consensual (Bishop Strickland, are your ears burning, here?) violation of justice itself. The glaring double standard confronting us everywhere also testifies to this reality. If Father Ripperger ought to pipe down and focus on his own community's internal concerns, why not Father James Martin?
The most suspicious aspect of this latest dust-up may be Archbishop Golka's characterization of the silencing as a "fast." If there is one thing we are all sick of, it is the nauseating application of Catholic-sounding words to things that just don't qualify. Undertaking some small act of service in the context of your own parish's life may be a salutary and commendable thing to do, but that doesn't make it your "vocation." A group of people undertaking such activities all together do not become, except in the most loosely of metaphorical senses, a "family," either. We have seen how the Church of Nice leverages such language to try to impose its anti-charitable obligations on those who would otherwise stand against moral depredation; if being a lay Extraordinary Minister in quite ordinary situations is, in fact, someone's "vocation," then anyone who would like to mention that this practice is actually a liturgical abuse would have to take it up with God Himself; if the collaborators around you are really your "family," you would be in violation of the Fourth Commandment (or so it is alleged) to point to any infringement of the Sixth. And so it goes. If we had heard--maybe, from Father himself?--that both Ripperger and Golka felt that a redirection of energies was in order, well and good. But the declaration of a "fast" as it is dubbed by the side that initiated the whole thing and that holds all the cards? Slimy sounding, at best--let alone the fact that Lifesite got a screenshot of Father Ripperger listed as "retired" immediately afterwards. Although this term has since been taken down, one can only speculate about whether the exorcist's ministry was actually, and is still, supposed to "fast" itself unto death.
There are also the thundering denunciations of Monsignor Coronado to take into consideration--a man who does have, as opposed to those quite willing to write the whole thing off--notably relevant personal experience. There is the bizarre and still unaddressed removal of Rachel Mastrogiacomo as a scheduled speaker in Bishop Golka's own archdiocese not very long ago. We can keep refusing to see the pattern, I suppose, but how long will it be before God begins to regard such refusal as morally culpable?
Pope Benedict told us, in no uncertain terms, to pray for him lest he should flee in fear of the wolves. The subsequent debate regarding whether he resigned voluntarily or not misses the point; if he resigned in violation of canon law--in "substantial error" regarding the nature of the papacy and his own relationship to it, for instance--then whether he did so of his own free will matters not a whit. Cardinal Pell was not only looking into Vatican finances and finding questionable things; he went on the record, right off the bat where the Bergoglian elevation was concerned, about the fact that the Church has confronted, deposed, and survived various anti-popes before. George Neumayr had taken to cornering corrupt members of the American hierarchy and filming them on his phone, in situations where the veneer of calling things "vocations" and "fasting" couldn't really do them any good. Monsignor Coronado was willing to act as a canonical representative for victims of the kind of abuse that Rachel Mastrogiacomo has suffered herself and was about to talk about in Denver, if the talk she wasn't permitted to give, but did give and upload online in another context, is any indication.
What is the underlying factor lending coherence to the whole ugly show? Abuse--of authority, of Catholic terminology, of unwary people willing to be gulled into thinking that everything is basically OK. Amoris was, if not the watershed, then a watershed; while we continue to investigate how things ever got this bad, we can all agree that, if you're willing to swallow Footnote 351, you'd be willing to swallow absolutely anything. And if you take the step of questioning it without ultimately demanding that your question receive an answer, and a correct one at that, then you have departed from the path of Christian discipleship altogether. Dubia are to be answered; authority figures, held accountable to the King of Kings. People made in the image and likeness of God are to have their physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity respected; words, used to advance the cause of the truth rather than undermining it. The intellect is not to be deflected from its work of determining that two and two make four, theologically speaking or otherwise--not to be deflected by the possessor of said intellect nor by actors in cassocks or Roman collars, on or offline, of either good or ill will.
You are reading these words in this moment, and nothing in life, death, or eternity will ever change that fact. In the same way we are, each and all, living and breathing right now, not in a situation of invincible ignorance where the inversion of authentic Catholicism is concerned. We know--if not, we could choose to know--that moral sin does not become other than what it is, regardless of who tries to say so. The silencing of Father Ripperger could be written off as just another day in the life of a Church that is definitely not in crisis, but can anyone think of a good reason why it should be?
