This is a really good article by somebody who has figured the core falsehood at the bottom of the wrong-headed Conservative Catholic \u201creform\u201d of the Church: that the problem is gays and liberals and if we can just purge them then the Church will be right as rain again.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not true.\u00a0 The problem is abusers, gay and straight, and enablers, liberal and conservative.\u00a0 As long as at that falsehood continues to drive the pigheadedly unlearning Conservative\u2013steadfast in his self-righteousness and unwilling to consider any opinion but his own\u2013we will continue to fail.\u00a0 Check it out<\/a>:<\/p>\n Ten years ago, I believed a myth. In the beginning, there was Vatican II. It was good but messy, and the Bad Catholics hijacked it to undermine doctrine. They took over seminaries and turned them into cesspools where heresy was mandatory and depravity rampant. Then Pope John Paul II came along. He drove out the Bad Catholics and cleaned up the seminaries. Too late! The Bad Catholics had already committed terrible crimes, which were covered up without the pope\u2019s awareness. In 2002, their abuses exploded into public view, and the JPII Catholics got blamed for crimes committed by a dying generation of clerics. The JPII bishops took it on the chin, but they fixed the problem with the Dallas Charter. Then Benedict XVI, the great theologian, appointed orthodox bishops who would carry forward the renewal. The horrors of the Scandal were behind us. The two primordial forces of the postconciliar church, orthodoxy and heresy, had fought a great battle, and orthodoxy had been vindicated.<\/p>\n My diocese, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, was proof. In the 1980s, we were led by Archbishop John Roach. Appointed by Pope Paul VI, Roach fit the \u201cSpirit of Vatican II\u201d archetype to a tee. Under Roach, Saint Paul Seminary was taken over by dissenters, one of whom described the Eucharist as \u201ccookie worship\u201d that he had \u201cmoved beyond.\u201d There were open homosexual affairs. Those who dared adhere to church teaching were punished.<\/p>\n Saint Paul soon experienced one of\u00a0the first abuse scandals<\/a>\u00a0in the American church. For years, Roach and his cronies had secretly shuffled abusive priests between parishes. When this came out and the diocese was sued, Roach found himself under oath, where\u00a0he became conveniently forgetful.<\/a>\u00a0The diocese lost, with the victim awarded $3.5 million\u2014paltry by today\u2019s standards, but shocking at the time. In response, Roach imposed \u201ctough policies,\u201d which won praise from newspapers. Privately, he declined to enforce them.<\/p>\n Finally, in 1995, Roach retired. John Paul the Great\u2014as we called him\u2014appointed Archbishop Harry Flynn. Flynn was a kindly Irishman with an adorable accent. He came from the Diocese of Lafayette, where he\u2019d handled another early abuse scandal. He\u2019d healed the victims of Lafayette, and he\u2019d largely written\u00a0the USCCB\u2019s new abuse policy.<\/a>Flynn was a JPII man. He loved prayer and took strong stands. He turned the feeble St. John Vianney College Seminary into the biggest minor seminary in the country. After Archbishop Flynn\u2019s arrival, the sex-abuse story finally faded from the headlines. We were so\u00a0proud<\/em>\u00a0when Flynn\u00a0led the American church<\/a>\u00a0in drafting the Dallas Charter.<\/p>\n In 2008, Pope Benedict appointed Archbishop John Nienstedt, an orthodox leader who led the campaign against redefining marriage in Minnesota. While much of the country was roiling from Boston and its aftershocks, we enjoyed a palpable sense of peace. The Good Catholics had saved Vatican II from the Bad Catholics, and our Charter would keep it from happening again.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Our myth\u2014their lie\u2014collapsed<\/strong>\u00a0in 2013. Archbishop Flynn was no healer, we learned. He was\u00a0the USCCB\u2019s damage-control guy.<\/a>\u00a0In 1986, Flynn went to Lafayette and killed the bad publicity. He said he\u2019d visited all the families of the abused there. He hadn\u2019t. He said he\u2019d got the abusers out of ministry. He hadn\u2019t. He got the media to think he had, but focused on getting the records sealed by court order. The scandal went quiet\u2014but it was the quiet of a muzzle, not of healing.<\/p>\n When Flynn came to Minnesota, he did the same. We pew-sitters were led to believe the scandal ended here because Flynn\u2019s policies solved the problem. In fact, it ended because Flynn\u2019s legal team convinced a court that Minnesota\u2019s statute of limitations on sex crimes barred most lawsuits. Flynn drafted the Dallas Charter, but he never bothered much with following it. In 2004, the diocese found pornographic images on Fr. Jonathan Shelley\u2019s computer. To some, it seemed to be child porn; others considered it only \u201cborderline illegal.\u201d The borderline caucus won, and Flynn kept Shelley in ministry. That same year, Fr. Daniel Conlin provided marriage counseling to two of his parishioners, then fathered a child with the wife. Flynn removed Conlin from the parish\u2026and\u00a0transferred him to the marriage tribunal<\/a>, where he came into contact with\u00a0more\u00a0<\/em>vulnerable women. All of this and more was covered up.<\/p>\n Archbishop Nienstedt mostly\u00a0continued the lax practices of his predecessors.<\/a>\u00a0While more proactive than Flynn, Nienstedt still fell far short of church policy and law. Nienstedt made one excellent choice: he appointed Chancellor Jennifer Haselberger, a canonist devoted to interpreting ecclesial law as written\u2014not bending it to favor Roman collars. When Haselberger rediscovered Fr. Shelley\u2019s \u201cborderline illegal\u201d porn in 2011 and showed Nienstedt, chancery officials spent more than a year debating what to do, instead of just calling the police. As\u00a0similar cases mounted<\/a>, Haselberger resigned and blew the whistle.<\/p>\n Our beloved myth exploded. Twin Cities Catholics like me came face-to-face with an unpleasant fact: the orthodox Good Clerics hadn\u2019t taken over from the Bad \u201cSpirit of Vatican II\u201d Clerics and cleaned house. The Good Clerics were\u00a0buddies<\/em>\u00a0with the Bad Clerics. They did everything in their power to\u00a0protect\u00a0<\/em>the Bad Clerics\u2014even violating moral, civil, and canon law on their behalf. We\u2019d believed there were two sides in the Church: orthodoxy and heresy. We often cheered for the clerics on our \u201cteam\u201d and booed the other guys. But we were wrong. Everyone in the chancery was working together\u2026against us.<\/p>\n I know there are good priests. There may even be good bishops. But don\u2019t trust your instincts. I knew most of the people in our diocesan crisis. Reading the depositions, I saw old family friends pitted against each other. My childhood babysitter called the priest who used to be so sweet to us kids at the big parties a liar and an obstructionist. The man I worked for in college closed ranks with my wife\u2019s childhood pastor to protect the priest who celebrated my wedding from the scrutiny of my\u00a0alma mater<\/em>. I never saw any of this coming. Their orthodoxy (or lack thereof) had nothing to do with it. My judgment of their character (or lack thereof) missed the mark. There was only one consistent pattern: the closer they were to power, the more my shepherds collaborated to keep the sheep deaf, dumb, and victimized.<\/p>\n One could blame all this on some kind of network of unchaste priests and their allies, who supposedly work to shield one another from accountability while undermining Catholic teaching on sexuality\u2014a\u00a0so-called \u201clavender mafia.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Or one could blame it all on clerical celibacy and sexual repression. A rumor circulated for years that Archbishop Nienstedt cruised for gay sex and punished priests who refused his advances. Most of us scoffed at this rumor as an obvious smear. But a 2014 investigation into Nienstedt\u2019s past\u00a0revealed so much evidence<\/a>\u00a0that Auxiliary Bishops Pich\u00e9 and Cozzens concluded Nienstedt should resign and immediately flew to Washington to confer with papal nuncio Carlo Vigan\u00f2. Instead, the nuncio ordered the investigation be\u00a0drastically narrowed<\/a>. (Vigan\u00f2 fiercely disputes suggestions that this was tantamount to ending the investigation.) Fr. Christopher Wenthe, while serving as my associate pastor,\u00a0told a vulnerable woman<\/a>\u00a0about the difficulties of his vow of celibacy, just before\u00a0abusing her<\/a>\u00a0in my childhood parish\u2019s rectory. Yet when A. W. Richard Sipe articulated how a priestly culture of secret unchastity created space for child abuse, people like me dismissed him as an anti-Catholic kook.<\/p>\n