Believing Lies

When I posted this particular article I didn’t realize it was Veterans Day. I might have written something more focussed on the day if I had remembered. If I had remembered the fact of the day I would have honored it. So now  I want to acknowledge and say Happy Veterans Day to all Veterans who have served our country. It is also the feast day of Martin of Tours. An appropriate saint for this day as Martin had been a soldier.

We don’t always realize the realities around us. If we did we might make different choices and decisions about the activities in our life. We might make better choices if we had better knowledge about certain things. We might not put our trust in certain people if we knew they were going to take advantage of his for their own gain. This brings me to the beginning of the central story of my post.

I used to work with a girl named Jamie  at my job at St. Patrick’s. She was a nice young girl who seemed clean cut and a good kid. She was down on her luck at one point and needed a place to stay so we let her have an empty room in our house to live in.  She seemed trustworthy with no particular reason to suspect her of anything sinister or terrible.

Cut to a few months later and after a number of instances we found out she wasn’t as innocent and clean cut as we believed. If the asking of money on a regular basis, with one time to bail her friend out jail so they wouldn’t be deported, her not showing up at work on a regular basis and getting fired, her driving her friend’s car illegally and her smelling like a pot factory to the point of my wife gagging  when she came home didn’t warn us of something not quite right, her stealing money out of our bank account did. She wrote checks to her self with our checkbook and signed Kristin’s name on it. It was then that we realized that we had been played all along.

Even after this known deceit we still were willing to give her a chance. Her mother asked us to have her arrested, but we didn’t.  We didn’t have the heart to put a permanent stain on her young record. We wanted to show some mercy. We even offered her to stay with us if she followed some strict rules, but she choose to leave. We continued to have a pretty good relationship with her and it looked like she was on her way to changing for the better.

Cut to a few months later when she said she needed some money to pay her rent because she wasn’t making enough at the Olive Garden to accomplish this necessary task. So, even though she owed us a lot of money and had stolen money from us, out of compassion for her living situation we loaned her some money with her promise to pay us back in a couple of days.

And of course, she didn’t pay.  She said she would pay us back right away and she didn’t.

Instead we actually went to her job a week or two later to confront her about this issue and left a messege with her co-workers to contact us about the money she owed us. Her response was to later break into our house when we weren’t there and confront our newly arrived house guest and ask him where we were. She was yelling and screaming and damaged our big screen TV in the process. After that we had no option but to put a restraining order on her and then have nothing to do with her.

This is not the first time I have been taken advantage of and lied to about things. Our own daughter does this to us on a regular basis. I had a friend whom I had given money to for years when he was in a bind, one time tell me he only used 10% of the money I gave him on illegal drugs. People who really want something and have no lack of scruples and no lack of skill in the lies and deception that they can tell others to get their own way to satisfy their warped, debased and sinful desires and addictions. It’s not just plain gullible people they prey upon but people who actually are kind, generous and believe in the goodness of other people. It’s easy to believe lies sometimes.

It is as hard for a good person to believe evil of another as it is for an evil person to believe good of another… paraphrased from a comment the Lord made in one of his modern messages. –Gail from Facebook

I worked in a major prison for many years and encountered many pedophiles in the course of my duties. No one who hasn’t met them can know how incredibly manipulative they are and how convincing. It’s almost like a magic trick. The Church must be hyper vigilant and transparent and totally set its face against this abomination but people should be wary of condemning outright those who have been taken in.-Anne from Facebook

The McCarrick Report, which details the ill activities of serial sex abuser Cardinal McCarrick,  tells of who knew what and when. St. John Paul 2 was made aware of his depraved activates but didn’t believe in the duplicity of the reports and thus assigned him to positions of power he shouldn’t have gotten.  How did such a despicable scoundrel deceive a saintly man?

In all honesty I believe Cardinal McCarrick was able to get away with lying to St. Pope John Paul 2 because JP2 believed in the goodness of the man based on years of friendship and unlike Our Lord didn’t realize what a Judas he really was. He didn’t have the supernatural abilities to read souls the same way St. Padre Pio did.

“McCarrick lied to and fooled much of the U.S. episcopate,” said Weigel.

“He lied to and fooled many lay Catholics, including those who funded his activities, and many on the Catholic left, for who he was a hero. And he lied to and fooled St. John Paul II.”

“It is the eternal paradox of the Church, one Christ speaks about in the Gospel, that her greatest saints and worst sinners CAN live and work side by side in the same field.”

CDA Daily News, JPII biographer says ‘pathological’ McCarrick ‘lied to’ the pope (November 10, 2020)

I judge St. PJP2’s unwise decision in light of his whole life. A man who stared down communism, made sacrifices on behalf of the poor and the unborn, and wrote deep theological truths he tried to live out would surely have ousted McCarrick had he truly known what kind of man he was. But he was fooled because he believed in the goodness of his friend he had known for years.  I also judge his poor choices in light of my own poor choices. If you believe in the goodness of others you will end up many times trusting the wrong people who will end up hurting you and in the good pope’s case hurting others.

Here is a good explanation of how St. JP2 made his decisions about McCarrick.

It would seem that JP2 was personally reluctant to promote McCarrick on three separate occasions because of the rumors, and had actually ordered four bishops to investigate him. The reports from these bishops were incomplete and inaccurate, and McCarrick himself lied to the pope and denied any wrongdoing, giving the pope little evidence at the time to go beyond rumors and gossip. It didn’t help that JP2 in his lifetime had witnessed how innocent bishops and priests were destroyed in communist Poland through unsubstantiated allegations and rumors, which unfortunately predisposed him to view McCarrick with sympathy when the investigations back then revealed little evidence of guilt. People who were asked refused to talk, and those in the hierarchy who knew were complicit in keeping quiet.

Report reveals McCarrick lied to John Paul II to become archbishop of Washington– Rome Reports

We don’t have to de-canonize him or tear down his monuments or take his name off places dedicated to him.  We don’t have to pretend either that he made perfect decisions and excuse them away. He is after all a man like anyone else. But we have to realize that even the best of people can be deceived and make poor choices and yet still be a good and even a holy person. In other words…

A Saint