More Blood on the Floor in Minnesota

Archdiocesan moral cretins hid priest’s porn collection (including child porn) from cops and parishioners. This is, by the way, a different priest from the one MPR reported on last week.

Classic Institutional Butt Cover moment: When the archdiocese lawyer describes the chancellor-turned-whistleblower as a “disgruntled former employee.” Yes. Disgust over covering up child porn does tend to rob one of one’s gruntle.

It will be interesting to see if the state of Minnesota decides that some people need to go to jail. However, at this point nothing appears to be happening–except, of course, perfectly justified outrage at a Church bureaucracy that seems incapable of elementary moral reasoning. God deliver us from the scourge–not of a media that exposes this stuff, nor from enemies of the Church who delight in it, nor from lawyers who profit from it–but from the God-damned (literally) sin itself and from the sin that hides and does not purge it from the Church.

You know that moment from “Snakes on a Plane” when Samuel L. Jackson registers that the limit of his patience for snakes on a plane has been reached? I’m at that point with any bishop or bureaucrat that *still*, at this late date, does not grasp the fact that the thing you do with priest or church employee who poses a danger to innocents is “get them away from innocents” and, when they are guilty of gross criminality, you cooperate with Caesar in order to protect innocents. Yes, the Church’s duty is to minister the mercy of Christ even to wretched creatures like child porn users. I get that. Yes, I understand that our culture’s obsession with salvation through law and punishment is part of the problem and not part of the answer. Yes, I get that a bishop has a duty to see his priests as his children. But for heaven’s sake, you don’t minister mercy and grace to a fallen priest by making innocent parishioners lab rats so that Father Perv can try to come to terms with his obsessions through parish ministry and “find himself”. The priesthood is about service, not about clerical voyages of psychoemotional self-discovery in which laity and their children play bit parts while an ordained narcissist and his pals take center stage as the stars of their own spiritual drama.