How Lay Catholics Can Help Stomp Out Clerical Corruption

Last updated on: July 2, 2018 at 10:17 am by Jennifer Fitz

How Lay Catholics Can Help Stomp Out Clerical Corruption 2018-07-02T10:17:17-05:00 Jennifer Fitz

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Rod Dreher has a McCarrick follow-up post sharing e-mails from priests who have contacted him to say We want to end this corruption, but we don’t know how.

Your bishop won’t listen to you.

You have no place to go if your clerical career is ruined.

Your friends and family may not believe you, since widespread denial is part of the problem.

Dreher writes:

Even after all that the public has learned since 2002 about what’s behind the façade of the Church, it’s hard to get people to accept that these corrupt, often abusive, structures are still in place (though several of my clerical correspondents say that they have been broken up in some locales). Back in 2002, I interviewed a seminarian who told me that his own parents refused to believe him when he told them about all the open gay sex at his seminary, and how normal it was. It was easier for them to believe their own son was lying than to believe that the Church was so corrupt.

What do you do?

And remember that to have gotten ordained in the first place, you were probably more of a get-along guy than a natural whistle-blower.

Lay Catholics are the missing link.

Do you have a guest suite or vacation home where an unemployed priest could live until he gets back on his feet?

Do you have a business that could employ a liberal-arts grad who needs to do a mid-life or late-in-life career change?

Do you have the computing skills necessary to put together an informational network connecting whistle-blower clergy to the laymen (Catholic or otherwise) willing to help them?

Speak up.

Let’s give honest clergy a place to land so that Bishop Coverall no longer holds good priests prisoner to the fear of homelessness.

A little daylight goes a long ways. Photo via Wikimedia, CC 3.0

Photograph taken by Dirk van der Made

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