John Allen knows his Catholic “stuff”

“Most people assume that knowing how the sausage is ground is hazardous to your spiritual health, but in my case it’s had the opposite effect. I already knew there were politics and careerism and petty jealousies in the church before I started this gig, so there weren’t too many scales to fall from my eyes.”

“The surprise has been how much more I’ve discovered. … I’ve seen how the Catholic faith has inspired ordinary people to do mind-blowing things, such as serving the poor and healing divisions and fighting corruption and saving souls.”

“My experience has helped me to see beyond the normal preoccupation with scandals and division and heavy-handed exercises of authority, as important and unavoidable as those stories are, to how much more there is to Catholic life.”

“In the end, that’s deepened my faith rather than causing some existential crisis,” he said.

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Roeser: While not all homosexuals are same-sex pedophiles, all same-sex pedophiles are homosexuals.

Allen contrasts two views—Benedict’s and that of Dominican priest Thomas Doyle who has been studying the crisis for years.  Benedict is indubitably right.  He goes straight to the heart of the problem—in “priestly formation” i.e. the theology taught in seminaries and lays the blame where it belongs on the heretical dogma of relativism which by downplaying good and evil and in Allen’s words “treating morality as a matter of weighing consequences” the door was opened to “justifying gravely immoral behavior including the sexual exploitation of minors.”   Allen you see ran a seminar on the issue with George Weigel.

Read Tom Roeser’s article

Read John Allen’s Article

George Weigel’s Observations