25AR30-17

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AR 30:17 - Cardinal McCarrick and Catholicism's "Lavender Mafia"

In this issue:

HOMOSEXUALITY - an active poison within the Catholic priesthood

PETERSON, JORDAN - an epiphany?

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION - China grows ever more abusive

WOKEISM - "a kind of corrupted and totalitarian religion"

Apologia Report 30:17 (1,706)
May 15, 2025

HOMOSEXUALITY

"Uncle Ted Is Dead. Uncle Ted Lives On" (Rod Dreher Substack, Apr 5 '25) -- the piece begins with excerpts from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's New York Times April 4 <www.tinyurl.com/3s68bkpc> obituary: "The accusations against Cardinal McCarrick, who had helped shape many of his church's policies for responding to its sexual abuse crisis, were shocking but hardly incredible when they came to light in 2018, after a church investigation concluded that he had molested a teenage altar server in 1971 and 1972 while he was monsignor in New York City. Thousands of priests before him had faced charges of abuse, and the church had paid victims hundreds of millions in settlements. In 2012, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the archbishop of Boston and America's senior prelate, resigned amid revelations that he had protected pedophile priests for years.

   "Although Cardinal McCarrick promptly resigned his ministry 'at the direction of Pope Francis,' church officials said, he contended that he was innocent, saying he had no recollection of the reported abuse. He cooperated with the church's inquiry and did not contest its findings."

   Dreher adds that in 2002: "I learned from a parish priest of a delegation of prominent lay Catholics who had gone to Rome to warn the Vatican not to move Archbishop McCarrick of Newark to Washington, where he would become a cardinal. Why not? Because McCarrick was a serial abuser. ...

   "I told [another] reporter (who wasn't Catholic) about the Lavender Mafia - the network of gay priests and bishops who advance each other's careers and protect each other. This is not just a clerical thing, I told him. I quoted a prominent left-wing Catholic journalist who had told me back near the beginning of the scandal that the biggest blind spot on his side is the refusal to see the homosexual aspect of the scandal, because the facts violate their preferred narrative. It is possible, I said, that your gay editor does not want this to come out because it stands to fit into a narrative of gay men as sexual predators. The question of legalizing same-sex marriage was just starting to gather steam, and reporting that the most influential US Catholic cardinal is in fact a gay sex predator might hurt the Cause. ...

   "Uncle Ted never really had to answer for his crimes. Those who benefited from his influence to advance their careers in the Church are happy to memory-hole him. The pontiff who rehabilitated him after Pope Benedict XVI sidelined the dirty old rapist cardinal won't have to answer for what he did, not in this life anyway." <www.tinyurl.com/bdd9nw84>

   Related: "Pope Francis vowed to fight abuse in the Church. The crisis persists" by Chico Harlan (Washington Post, Apr 24 '25), wherein we read that the Vatican's McCarrick report "was a one-off. And abuse experts, as well as Vatican officials, acknowledge that the church still does not operate with transparency or consistency." <www.tinyurl.com/ycrmep7p> (paywalled)

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PETERSON, JORDAN B.

This short video appeared about three months ago: "Christ is God … it's Indisputable" #JordanPeterson" <www.tinyurl.com/54nhkbuh> and if it makes you wonder, consider this critique by Cameron Bertuzzi who asks: "What God does Peterson believe in?" Bertuzzi notes that "this statement from Peterson marks a significant moment in Peterson's intellectual and spiritual journey. Peterson has admitted in another interview with Alex o Conor prominent atheist YouTuber that he suspects Jesus physically rose from the dead. Peterson isn't just toying around anymore with abstract ideas he's actually seriously considering the historical and metaphysical claims of Christianity." <www.tinyurl.com/4fpcm86w>

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RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION

"China Moves to Formally End Christian Missionary Activity" by Simon Kent (Breitbart News,  Apr 8 '25) -- "The regulations, which take effect May 1, prohibit foreigners from preaching, sharing their faith, or establishing religious organizations without official government approval, International Christian Concern <www.tinyurl.com/bdewa34h> reports. ...

   "'China's public security authorities intensified efforts to dismantle cult organizations in 2024,' reported the Global Times, a state-run media outlet. 'They have worked to curb the growth and spread of cult organizations, mitigating potential threats to national political security and maintaining social stability.' ...

   "As Breitbart News reported, the CCP declared then it is 'intent on rooting out every pocket of independent religious thought' and persecutes Christians by shutting down house churches, stripping children from Christian families, and monitoring every detail of Christian citizens' lives.

   "China is an officially atheist communist state that claims to tolerate only five legal religions: Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam.

   "All five of these religions are only legal through government-operated institutions, however, that do not actually preach the teachings of the faiths but instead encourage believers to abandon the faith and worship dictator Xi Jinping." <www.tinyurl.com/42ybew3c>

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WOKEISM

"The Religion of Secular Doomsayers" by Alexander Riley (Chronicles, Mar 2025) -- begins by observing that "There is now a small collection of books that examine wokeism as a kind of corrupted and totalitarian religion. [And,] their mere existence is an indication that a central cultural problem is now increasingly widely recognized.

   "Bruce Abramson, the author of American Spirit or Great Awokening?, <www.tinyurl.com/m2u5rhe9> is an attorney with a Ph.D. in computer science who was raised in an observant Jewish family. He fell away from that familial tradition into materialist secularism before beginning a critical rethinking of his trajectory. That reevaluation eventually led to the publication of this book. ...

   "Abramson is at his best in his careful decoding of the hidden religious elements of wokeism's fascination with climate apocalypticism and trans identity." Riley finds that "the new climate end-timers dance exactly the same dance as earlier religious movements did as they condemned humankind's moral fallenness and issued apocalyptic prophecies. ...

   "Moral drunkenness, however, occupies an increasingly large role in all expert communities. ... The moral thrust of alarmist wokeist climate eschatology points to a beleaguered Mother Earth. ...

   "The fervor of the pronouncements from this new cult is as extreme and intolerant as that of any of the cargo cults in the anthropological literature.

   "Abramson is most brilliant in his reading of the trans movement. Although the cultists of this movement also chant the constant mantra 'follow the science,' it is only too clear that there is no scientific, purely materialist basis to justify reassigning someone to the opposite biological sex. ...

   "Abramson neatly ties this existential methodology into the broader desire of humankind everywhere to arrive at some firm, unchanging, immortal essence of self that is not confined by the vicissitudes of the physical body. ...

   "American Spirit or Great Awokening? unfortunately makes some significant missteps. Even in his superb analysis of trans ideology, Abramson wants to separate the trans movement from the segment of 'the gay community' he describes as fully contributing to 'the healthy fabric of American communal life.' ...

   "The U.S. homosexual population is much less likely to be married and to include children than the heterosexual majority. Only about 10 percent of American homosexuals are married. That percentage has not risen significantly since the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, which activists insisted would produce a flood of gay marriages.... Among married male homosexual couples, children are present in less than 10 percent, while in homosexual female married couples, they are present in barely one in four. ...

   "The truth is that the LGBTQ movement has represented a radical offensive against marriage and the family from its very beginning. Trans ideology accelerates that movement in a number of ways, but it is perfectly consistent with the earlier waves of the movement in its basic hostility to the institution of the family. ...

   "It is certainly true, as Abramson argues, that wokeists exaggerated every possible aspect of the virus in the interests of their cult of safetyism and the expanse of state power. And it is true we would do well to keep out of positions of power those who still drive around alone in their cars wearing masks. But to insinuate that COVID is basically indistinguishable in its lethality from other respiratory viruses, such as influenza, that have been with us for thousands of years, is to show basic ignorance of the data on these diseases.

   "It is especially egregious for Abramson to claim that public health officials should have known that measures like masks and social distancing would be ineffective. ...

   "Abramson correctly notes that there are extremists who incorrectly believe that if only everyone had been vaccinated and boosted multiple times, worn masks religiously 24/7, and stayed in lockdown for five years, we could have eradicated COVID and prevented all infection. ...

   "A late 2022 study <www.tinyurl.com/6w5ja3ek> of mathematical models of actual COVID infection in comparison with hypothetical scenarios in which the vaccines did not exist showed more than 3 million fewer deaths in the U.S. as a result of the vaccines. ...

   "In the final analysis, and despite its numerous strong points, Abramson's book fails to propose anything coherent or systematic in response to the wokeist religion. ...

   "What he does offer is an allusion to what he calls 'the American spirit.' By this, he means the cultural embrace, from whatever faith tradition, of a set of essentially nondenominational political values that are more or less what has been called the 'American civil religion' (this is Robert Bellah's adaptation of the phrase he borrowed from Rousseau). It consists, Abramson writes, of 'faith in a creator, natural law, the inherent equality of all humans and a set of individual rights.' 

   "The same criticism religious conservatives typically make of so-called civil religion is applicable to Abramson's case on 'the American spirit.' With nothing more morally subterranean to base these quasi-religious political values on, it is not at all clear that this is enough to sustain a non-woke culture. ...

   "It is disheartening in the extreme to consider the possibility that America may have been doomed to develop the cultural cancer of wokeism by elements of its own original cultural nature." <www.tinyurl.com/2s3dcxfd>

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