Bishop Thomas Daly: How much more can the People of God put up with?

From The Spokesman Review:

"Light streamed into Bishop Thomas Daly’s office one recent afternoon as he spoke, in sometimes blunt terms, about the widening scandal of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the United States.

'It’s a moral crisis,' Daly said. 'We have degenerate behavior, hypocrisy and now cover-up. My thought is, How much more can the people of God put up with?’ 

As the leader of the Spokane diocese since 2015, Daly has the final say on some investigations into abuse by clergy. He talked to The Spokesman-Review in late October following a wave of headlines about sexual abuse in all ranks of the Roman Catholic Church.

It began anew in June, when allegations emerged that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., had sexually abused minors and adult seminarians over the course of decades. Pope Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation in July. And then in August, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office released a grand jury report finding that church leaders had covered up the abuse of more than 1,000 people over a 70-year period, prompting investigations in several other states.

Sexual abuse scandals have rocked the church for nearly 17 years. After the Boston Globe exposed a systemic cover-up in that city’s archdiocese in 2002, similar reports emerged across the country and the world, forcing the church to pay billions of dollars in settlements and establish reporting and prevention programs. The Spokane diocese is among those with a history of predator priests – revelations that sent it into bankruptcy in the early 2000s and dogged it for more than a decade.

The diocese has responded to new allegations in the aftermath of the bankruptcy. Last year, for example, Daly sanctioned a retired priest who had been 'credibly accused' of raping an altar boy in Spokane in the 1980s..."

As I warned in the pages of The Wanderer back in 2002, Canon 1040 of the Code of Canon Law states that: "Persons who are affected by a perpetual impediment, which is called an irregularity, or a simple impediment, are prevented from receiving orders."

Irregularities arise either from defect (ex defectu) or from crime (ex delicto).  It seems clear that a homosexual inclination, which the Church teaches is "intrinsically disordered," would constitute an irregularity ex defectu. And, as Father Heribert Jone, O.F.M. Cap., J.C.D. explains: "An irregularity is not a penalty, but a means to safeguard the dignity of the clerical state and office by excluding those who are unqualified for the service of the altar."

In fact, when asked by a Bishop if it is licit to confer priestly ordination to men with manifest homosexual tendencies, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments replied with a letter signed by Jorge Cardinal Medina Estevez which stated that, "Ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore, fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders."

And we've witnessed this firsthand as homosexual predators have satisfied their perverse appetites by sexually abusing teenage boys.

Bishop Daly has said it well: How much more can the People of God put up with?