Flores: It is no surprise that the unchecked liberalism that has permeated our Church for the last five decades is coming to bite us with a vengeance.

Who made the community organizer such a powerful entity to have the ability to “ empower” others? Oh, that’s right . . . the liberal clergy and laity in the Catholic Church.

Funded through the Church’s Campaign for Human Development, Obama’s job was the typical community organizer’s job. Go out and agitate people about their conditions, use them, and, at the end of the day, the only winners are the community organizations and the political cronies who benefit by voter registration drives that are really blatant canvassing efforts in favor of liberal politicians.

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Catholic clergy clash over home schooling

Although I wasn’t home-schooled, I fully support parents who are in a position to do so. Thus, I’m perplexed and disappointed in remarks made by Catholic author Father Peter M.J. Stravinskas in a recently-posted article on the website of Our Sunday Visitor.

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George Weigel on the clerical abuse scandal and the John Jay Report

A Church that was not in doctrinal and moral confusion from the late 1960s until the 1978 election of John Paul II might have been better armored against the worst impacts of the sexual free-for-all unleashed in the mid-1960s. A Church that had not internalized unhealthy patterns of clericalism might have run seminary programs that would have more readily weeded out the unfit. A Church that placed a high value on evangelical zeal in its leadership might have produced bishops less inclined to follow the lead of the ambient culture in imagining that grave sexual abusers could be “fixed.” All that can, and must, be said.

But if the Times, the Globe, and others who have been chewing this story like an old bone for almost a decade are genuinely interested in helping prevent the crime and horror of the sexual abuse of the young, a good, long, hard look will be taken at the sexual libertinism that has been the default cultural position on the American left for two generations. Catholic “progressives” who continue to insist that the disciplinary and doctrinal meltdown of the post–Vatican II years had nothing to do with the abuse crisis might also rethink their default understanding of that period. The ecclesiastical chaos of that decade and a half was certainly a factor in the abuse crisis, although that meltdown is not a one-size-fits-all explanation for the crisis and the way it was handled.

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