After reading the Stack Note above that was forwarded to me by my dear friend and colleague Sean Griobhtha, an intellectual reservoir was tapped and a myriad of thoughts on the subject poured forth. I immediately swept away the printed words that had cluttered my desk over the last several months in order to create a literary space to respond in kind. This is what came of it.

What follows is a response to the note that is depicted above.

There are two pivotal events that set Christianity on the path to be the dominant religion in the Western hemisphere for over 2 millennia. These are there stories.

1)

Constantine’s Rise

In 312AD, the Roman General Constantine eliminates his rival Maxentius’s army at the battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, and became the undisputed Caesar of the Western Roman empire. Previous to the battle, Constantine looks beyond the plain and sees a cross of light in the sky, while simultaneously a voice enters his mind and proclaims, “Conquer by this.”

Seeing this as a sign from God, Constantine orders his soldiers to mark their breast plates with the sign of the cross as they march toward Maxentius’s forces. According to the histories, after the victory, Constantine adopted Christianity as a belief and became the senior benefactor of Christians across the empire. The cross became the standard of Constantine’s color guard that led his soldiers into battle and the emblem was forged on each combatant’s shield.

Eventually, the cross, a symbol of suffering and torture, replaces the fish as the central symbol of Christianity, and the crucifixion takes center stage while the life and teachings of Jesus, and the resurrection into new life are pushed into the background. As the former Pauline Priest, James Carroll states,

“The cross signifies the problem: When suffering is seen to serve a universal plan of salvation, its particular character as tragic and evil is always diminished.”

The short version reads- suffering becomes a necessary “holy” experience that leads to salvation.

In 325AD, in order to generate a solidified Christian populace across the empire, Constantine ordered a meeting of a council of bishops in the city of Nicaea, Bithynia (modern day Turkey). At this meeting he recounts his vision of Milvian Bridge to the bishops and they sketch a set of primary Christian belief statements declaring other statements to be anathema (heresy). Over the next several centuries, these statements evolved into what is known as the Nicene Creed. Using the same mould as previous Roman Emperors, this creed defines God as a punitive magistrate who will come “to judge the living and the dead.” Those who lived or died in sin would be condemned to an eternity in the fires of Hell.

Fifty five years later, in 380AD, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, officially declared Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, and prohibited all other forms of worship. Two years later Theodosius I issued a second decree of death for all Manichaean monks, Manichaeanism being a chief competitor of Christianity. This seated a theocracy where the line of authority between the State and the Church became blurred. In this, the religion of the previously oppressed became the religion of the oppressors. Religious oppression marked the path toward Theodosius I’s declarations. One good example among many, in 315AD Constantine issued an edict making it a crime for Jews to proselytize to non-Jews, i.e. recruit new believers. Within the next hundred years it became a crime punishable by death.

Within the span of less than a hundred years, Jesus as the humble servant, the healer of the poor and marginalized, slowly fades within the hierarchy, and Jesus the super god, hero warrior of the apocalypse emerges to lead his legions into the final battle for salvation.

When Constantine became the sole Roman Emperor in 324AD, the Christian population of the Roman Empire was estimated to be around 10%. Within the first quarter of the 5^th Century (425AD), Christians held the overwhelming majority population of the empire. Christianity went from being a small evolving religious sect that had spawned from Judaism, to being a religion that shaped world politics. Christianity was now imperial, and mimicked the top down structure of the Roman Empire. The emperor had his territorial governors to help manage the state. The Pontiff had his bishops who became the ecclesial regional managers of the Church. Dissenters were eliminated and their assets confiscated and turned over to the imperial treasury.

This patriarchal hierarchy, that placed ultimate power over doctrinal matters in the hands of the few bishops of Rome and their intermediaries remains today. Like all hierarchical structures, their prime objective is to elicit strict obedience from the population to those who occupy the pinnacle of the structure.

2)

The Augustinian Shift and the Battle for the Mind

Not long after Emperor Theodosius I’s edict, A young Roman African and Manichaean teacher of rhetoric Aurelius Augustinus comes under the tutelage of a Christian Roman Governor of Milan named Ambrose. Through the influence of his Christian mother and conversations he had with Ambrose’s teacher, Simplicianus, Augustine begins to consider a conversion to Christianity. In 386 AD he converted, within 4 years he was ordained a priest and in 395 he was tapped to be the Bishop of Hippo (current day Annaba, Algeria). Augustine was convinced that it was his task to interpret the Christian scriptures in a proper manner that would lead his congregations to eternal salvation.

In Augustine’s time in human history, the creation stories situated in the first three chapters of Genesis were accepted by many as historical fact. It’s worth mentioning that the Christian theologian’s appropriation of these stories as their own, and the subsequent interpretations that followed, were loathed by the Jewish scholars who had a legitimate claim to the narrative. In their arrogance, the Christian writers assumed that they provided the conclusive context in which to read the Jewish scriptures, since all that happened before the Gospels was only in preparation for the coming of Jesus.

It is also important to note that the literacy rate in Rome in 400AD would have been around 10% of the population. This means that the general populace of the empire had few alternatives but to believe the interpretations presented by the Catholic Christian Bishops. As time progressed into the Middle Ages the literacy rate significantly declined leaving populations even more vulnerable to the influence of the Catholic Bishops.

The bishops were the princes of The Church and had considerable political, economic, and ecclesial power within the regions they controlled. Each claimed to speak for God in all administrative affairs. More than this, they held the keys that unlocked the door to the Kingdom of Heaven. For those who believed, without their favor, salvation was unattainable.

With the advantage of hindsight and widespread literacy that we enjoy today, it has become obvious to many that reading the Biblical text as a historical fact book lays the breeding ground for misogyny, racism, and unwarranted religious exceptionalism. Including the notion that, ‘my god’s right and yours is wrong and I’m willing to kill you prove it!’

For those who have been following the current conflict in Palestine, this false narrative has been used repeatedly by zionist commentators to justify their aggression and extermination of the Palestinian people.

A Toxic Misinterpretation

Augustine’s crowning achievement within the Catholic tradition is centered in his theory of Original Sin, and the associated theory of Substitutionary Atonement. Augustine’s theory of Original Sin derives from his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve located in the book of Genesis in the Jewish Torah.

This utterly bizarre reading of the events that followed Adam and Eve’s creation in Genesis 2-3 not only did violence to the spirit of the ancient Jewish authors who composed the text, but robbed this creaturely fable of its narrative power. Previously viewed by Jewish congregants as an attempt to explain the persistence of human suffering in a volatile world (Pathos), Augustine’s interpretation places Eve, and by association Adam, in an unescapable rock and hard place.

Within the brief sketch of the creation story seen below you can click the hyperlinks for more context.

At Gen. 2:17, the anthropomorphic character of God enacts a brutal prohibition that prevents our first parents from accessing wisdom…

“but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

With this prohibition in place, all moral discussion is forbidden, leaving our original ancestors in a state of moral ignorance.

At Gen. 3:1-5, Eve has a consultation with a Serpent who suggests that the Creator is withholding critical information about the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Serpent further states that the prohibition was instituted with a hidden agenda, that prevents her from becoming knowledgeable like the Creator, which actually turns out to be true as seen at Gen. 3:22.

At Gen.3:6, Eve, longing to gain wisdom, heroically breaks the prohibition and eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Eve then shares the fruit with Adam and immediately self-consciousness erupts with the anxiety of being naked and vulnerable overwhelming them. Hearing the oncoming approach of their Creator they hide behind the leaves of the garden…

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” (Gen 3:7)

Augustine interprets Eve’s defiance as an unforgivable offense against the Creator, that not only condemns our first parents to an eternity away from God, but this offense is inherited by their offspring, leaving humanity to wallow in a perpetual state of moral calamity, bound to a life of sin, and eternally alienated from the life affirming force of the Universe. Augustine overlooks the fact that the character of the Creator in this story, like the god depicted in the Book of Job, can hardly be understood as moral in any sense of the word. Eve, like Job, seems to hold the moral line in the narrative.

What would have happened if Eve and Adam had not eaten the fruit?

They, and their offspring would still be in a position of arrested moral development, unable to discern between sinful and good acts because they are denied the knowledge necessary to make such decisions. This interpretation placed an unnecessary chasm between God, our source, and the rest of humanity, instituting a tensive relationship between creator and the created.

When you link Augustine’s theory of Original Sin with the understanding of Substitutionary Atonement, Jesus would not have become incarnate had Eve and Adam not sinned. Jesus would not have “died for our sins” (1 Cor: 15:3) because there would be no original sin to forgive. Looking at the scriptures in this context, Eve suffers a double damnation, not only as the first sinner (I Tim 2:14), but ultimately becomes responsible for Jesus’ death on the cross.

The Canadian Historian Margaret Wade Labarge stated that this yoke of guilt associated with Eve’s damnation was a lingering thorn in women’s side from the time of Augustine through the Middle Ages and continues into the current period.

[The] fallen daughters of Eve… were so constantly lectured on their natural inferiority and their inheritance of Eve’s guilt, as well as hedged by so many prohibitions about their behavior, their level of stress must often have been unbearably high.

In this distorted reading, Jesus’ message of abundant new life through the resurrection takes a back seat, and Jesus himself becomes an auxiliary instrument who is manipulated by the human actions of our first parents.

Nonetheless, Augustine’s theory was accepted at the Council of Carthage in 418AD and eventually became Church Doctrine. This acceptance significantly shifts the defining moment in Christian history, from Jesus’ appearance on the human stage around 30AD preaching a new Gospel, to a focus on human sin and the ever widening gap between where we came from and where we are today.

Guilt, Madness, and Fomenting Self-Hatred

In his autobiography Confessions, Augustine depicts his decade and a half history of deep neurotic turmoil over his inability to completely abstain from human sexual expression. Unable to discern the difference between sexual objectification (lust) and honorable sexual admiration (a sacred gift), Augustine becomes mentally entangled in an either/or, body V. spirit, mind trap. This dualistic palette becomes the foundation on which Augustine colors his future theological theses. Echoing the sentiments of Mersault’s statement at the beginning of this article, the seasoned theologian Matthew Fox states,

Augustine planted dualisms of body vs. soul, sexuality vs. spirituality, nature vs. grace, male vs. female alongside his notion of original that fashioned a dualistic Christianity that spread in Western Europe and beyond…

“Christianity became less and less moored to Jesus and his teachings and to the original meaning of the Christ event… Unmoored from the gospels, it became moored to the needs of empire-building including invoking the idea of “redemption” (understood as redemption from original sin) as the rallying cry to conquer peoples of the earth…

“[This] astonishingly leaves out the teachings of Jesus. No mention whatsoever of “love thy neighbor”; “what you do to the least you do to me”; “Be you compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate”; the Beatitudes; or justice.”

Despite Jesus’ insistence in Luke 17:21 that the bodyspirit are one, and that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, Augustine viewed his sexual longings as an obstacle that prevented him from a full communion with God. This developed into a festering sense of self- loathing.

In a scene depicted in his Confessions that carries allusions to Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane, Augustine retreats to a garden that adjoins his dwelling to sort through his fierce mental anguish. In this scene, he begins to physically assault his own body,

I was beside myself with madness that would bring me sanity. I was dying a death that would bring me life. . . . I was frantic, overcome by violent anger with myself for not accepting your [god’s] will and entering into your covenant. . . . I tore my hair and hammered my forehead with my fists; I locked my fingers and hugged my knees.

In what seems to be a hallucinatory state, Augustine continues his lament,

I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes. . . . In my misery I kept crying, “How long shall I go on saying ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?

Although Augustine appears to make peace with himself at some point, since he did not dislodge the root of woundedness that resided within himself, the learned, compulsory, negative, behavior patterns that often accompany inner conflict continued to find an outlet in an altered form, causing Augustine’s self-hatred to levy a pernicious influence on his interpretation of the scriptures.

This neurosis became projected onto the congregations that listened and believed his words. Highlighting the unbridgeable distance between humans and God, God’s contempt for his creation became a reoccurring theme that textured Augustine’s oratories, peppered with misogynistic and antisemitic overtones.

In his Sermon Preached at Chusa, experiencing the warped and twisted turmoil within, he expresses God’s hatred for his own congregants:

You are all twisted, and you want God to be like what you are, not what he is. But if you are satisfied with him as he is, then you will correct yourself and align your heart along that straight rule from which you are now all warped and twisted. Be satisfied with God as he is, love him as he is…

He doesn’t love you as you are, he hates you as you are. That’s why he is sorry for you, because he hates you as you are and wants to make you as you are not yet…God hates you as you are but loves you as he wants you to be, and that is why he urges you to change. (author’s emphasis)

Who’s the Boss?

As previously discussed, some interpretations of Genesis 2-3 claim that divine justice demanded its “pound of flesh” through Jesus’ brutal torture and execution on the cross as the only fitting expiation for Eve and Adam’s offense. As Roman Catholic doctrine dictates, “all men [people] are implicated in Adam’s sin,” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, pg. 102, Para. 404). This means that without Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross to alleviate mankind from this original sin, all people would be condemned to hell for eternity. This includes children previous to their age of consent, who have yet to achieve any sense of abstract concepts like love, hate, envy, or pride.

In a parallel narrative, some theologians try to absolve God the father of being responsible for ordering Jesus’ execution with the concern that this could cast the Creator into being labeled as a sadistic child abuser. In this version, commentators claim that once the first couple ate the fruit, they switched their allegiance from God to Satan who appeared to them in the form of a serpent, and that it was Satan who demanded the blood sacrifice to free humans from eternal sinfulness. As the story goes, the powers-that-be complied with Satan’s demand. It is this interpretation that views the world as a battle ground between God and Satan, and that once Jesus- the warrior- returns, he will set things right.

Believe it or not, this is the predominant theory currently espoused by most Fundamental Christians in the West!?! It is the interpretation that is held by the Fundamental Christians that are near to the ear of our current POTUS. It is this “righteous” interpretation that our current leaders use to justify the open slaughter of innocent civilians all over the world.

If this second narrative takes precedents over the first, then Satan is the culprit, right? Wait a minute… who the hell is running the show here?

Did God, the all-powerful and all-knowing, wake up one day and announce, ‘I was scheduled to play golf with Moses and Elijah today, but instead I think I will create my arch nemesis and call him Satan; who will eventually have my son brutally tortured and murdered.’

Concocting such notions as this supreme act of self-sabotage renders the whole Original Sin theory as absolutely senseless. In this context, I suspect that any truisms found within the Biblical Scriptures reveal much more about us as human beings, than they reveal to us about God.

Once Augustine substituted human sin in place of Jesus as the defining event in Christian history, the doctrine of Original Sin and those doctrines associated with it, became systematically predatory and Jesus became identified as the first necessary victim. Many more victims from many faith traditions were soon to follow.

The Push Back

Several Catholic theologians who were contemporaries of Augustine, confronted him on the problematic issues that his translation posed. One of Augustine’s chief detractors was the Celtic monk Pelagius, who was famously noted for contending that God had created humans with free will and the full ability to do good without the divine intervention of Jesus’ crucifixion. Augustine had powerful friends in the political and religious circles and relentlessly pursued Pelagius through ecclesial councils causing his excommunication in 417AD. Pelagius’ writings were permanently condemned at the Council of Carthage in 418AD.

And many more over the next 1600 years continued to push back against this warped vision that called for the congregants to obediently worship God out of fear. Their numbers are too numerous to mention here. Those that come immediately to mind include the brilliant theologian Peter Abelard who in 1130 AD wrote that, “Christ came to show humans how to live, not to submit to a brutal death willed by a sadistic Father.”

Abelard further insists that Christians must not serve out of fear, but out of love as Jesus taught us. For his efforts he was, at one point, condemned to perpetual silence and temporarily excommunicated by Pope Innocent II, which was later lifted after his death.

More recently, the theologian Mae Forrest Barnes issued a warning in a February 2024 article that Augustine’s doctrines “can easily be used as a weapon against the faithful.” And, indeed it was used as just that, in particular against women, and with devastating effects. Barnes concludes that these effects are “catastrophic and ongoing.” She further defines Augustine’s teachings as, “a severe and self-hating theology that has lasted long past its due.”

Augustine, Up Close and Personal

In conclusion to this writing, I would like to share with you some previously unknown information that was brought to my attention within the past few weeks. I leave it to you, the reader, to determine whether Augustine’s shadow is still breathing down our necks.

It has been 15 years since my mother passed away on July 22^nd, 2010. She was 83 years old at the time. She was a deeply spiritual and devout Irish Catholic throughout her life and passed that tradition down to each of her 13 children, the same as her parents did to theirs.

On December 18^th, 1969 five days before Christmas, my father, at 44 years of age, died of a heart attack at 4:00 am in the morning. This left my mother, at 42 years of age, with 13 children to raise on her own, the youngest was 11 months old. From that moment forward…

She cried every day for the next five years. She never remarried, and it was her belief in a loving source that carried her forward. When I witness the tears of those mothers who mourn the loss of those so dear to them in Gaza, I am reminded of my mother’s tears.

My mom’s funeral card. Notice the words of the prayer, begging for “mercy,”

asking for leniency in “Thy Judgement,” and the focus on the “blood” from

Jesus’ crucifixion. The reference to the “devouring flames” of hell, the

begging for angelic intervention, as not to become another burnt offering

to a punitive God. The Augustinian influence is inescapable even after death.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

I received a phone call from one of my older siblings two weeks ago who said that they found a trove of documents that belonged to our parents in a storage area. One of these documents was a hand typed personal journal that was dated, Sunday, January 25^th, 1988, composed by my mother at 63 years of age.

Within these two pages of stark, honest self-reflections, the instances of self-recrimination and self-loathing have Augustine’s finger prints all over them. At one point she even considers that death would be “better” than continuing life in this stint of anguished turmoil. At the height of feeling as though her pain was beyond the reach of any one’s healing compassion, she calls out to the only one left who might take the time to listen, and even this is held in doubt as she claims to her Maker, “Do I despair that you can even heal me?”

Many people with good intent have come to explain to me that my mother’s belief in the healing power of Jesus was not real, and only a figment of her imagination. Those that did seem to have missed the point. Giving my mother a lesson in epistemology was not going to help heal the woundedness inside of her. Jesus was a reality to her and her mental construct was the one that counted since she was the one who was in deep pain. People eventually did come into my mother’s life that did take the time to listen. Throughout the next twenty years my mother did heal, and came to know joys that were beyond her imagining at the time she wrote this journal. This story leaves me convinced that the key player in my mother’s healing was herself, and she can call this healing influence whatever she wants. Augustine be damned!

A 6 minute video which gives a brief synopsis of Augustine doctrine of Original Sin can be accessed here: Augustine’s Original Sin Theory

A special thanks to Mae Barnes for her help in writing this article! Her full essay, I Hate Augustine and So Should You, can be found here: I Hate Augustine .

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Having embarked on a psychological analysis of the current world scene, I can’t avoid saying something about Donald Trump. Many professional psychologists have asserted that his words and behaviors clearly and unmistakably show that he suffers from malignant NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder).

Besides confirming with a medical acronym what many of us knew already, psychologists may help us exploring the issue a bit further. Narcissism is deeply linked to shame. Obviously the current POTUS experiences no conscious shame, i.e. he exhibits constantly a shameless behavior, but that is precisely a clear indication that he hosts within his subconscious mind an enormous amount of shame.

Average people feel shame when they realize that they have behaved in ways that hurt or displeased others (thus one can also distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate shame). Emotions can escalate to feelings of guilt for repeated or intentional behaviors (again, appropriate or inappropriate “feeling bad”).

Shame and guilt are matters of human life which cannot be simply eliminated. In the case of persons suffering from NPD they are deeply repressed. If they came to light all of the sudden, being huge as they are in their case, they would destroy their minds at once.

Narcissists, however, not only push such feelings down as much as they can but — unfortunately for the rest of humanity — they also project them outwards in a desperate effort to free themselves from them.

Like a rolling ball of shame running amok and continually projecting blame, Trump has not only become a liability to America, but is responsible for an enormous amount of pain and suffering inside the USA and around the world. The question then is: why? Why has the currrent political/social system given so much power to a person who is so broken? Many people have been duped, but that does not explain the situation well enough.

There must be within US society a consistent group of narcissists who identify themselves with the behavior of their chief — they already behave like him in private, but they fantasize being him, i.e. being as destructive as he is without paying consequences.

There must also be a consistent group of masochists — for lack of a better term — who are so used to be mistreated by narcissists that they find a kind of perverse comfort in the nation being led by him rather than by someone who would make them think, with the risk of bringing up to consciousness their real feelings.

Donald Trump is sick, but a healthy society keeps power away from people like him.

Years ago, I was alerted by my friend Fr. Richard Rubin to the dynamics of shame and guilt: how they play within individuals and groups, and how Christianity could be understood as an attempt to “lift the shame” — meaning the inappropriate kind of shame — from people’s hearts.

Since then, I have been testing his hypothesis, often reflecting on New Testament expressions such as “shameful death on the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Dying on a cross in Roman times was a shameful death, without a doubt, but I am now convinced that early Christians “appropriated” such shame, meaning that they made conscious the shame that they felt inside as slaves or lower class people.

And then they went further. By consciously placing “the crucified” as the foundation of their community (see 1 Corinthians 1), they not only proclaimed that the most humiliated are actually worthy but they also helped lifting the excessive shame from the shoulders of the newly converted, while the community was safely closed off to any narcissist who wandered in and attempted to project shame.

I know that this combination of social and psychological realities is fundamentally the opposite that the kind of Christianity that most people have known in their lives, especially but not exclusively in the USA. Personally, I think that learning from these 1st-century folks is worth a try.

Guy’s Comments;

Paragraphs 1 thru 9 of the article above are an excellent expression of the connection between shame and narcissism. Then things take left turn. There is no doubt that, “early Christians appropriated” the shame of the cross, but this shame was a toxic projection issued from an imperial power structure, and this shame “uplifted” no one. Instead, this projection likely evoked feelings of total vulnerability, helplessness, fear of abandonment, and a complete inability to facilitate an effective response to the actions of a superior physical power. In short, the shame afforded no life affirming effect, similar to the Yahwist narrative in Genesis 3, where Eve in her longing to attain knowledge is brutally prohibited from engaging in any form of moral discourse with the creator or the created. Had Eve remained compliant, moral theology would have been forever lost to some of the worlds most profound commentators. Once Augustine comes on the scene this toxic shame becomes stamped in dogmatic code, and ‘I am not worthy’ becomes the hall mark of Christian identity. And yes, this was highly “inappropriate.”

Shame can evoke life giving effects, if I am willing to own those occasions when I have wounded others and take the opportunity to practice honest self-reflection. As this locates the perspective within myself, I am called to explore the depths of my own self-protective strategies, to re-assess my own urges to assuage my loneliness (emptiness) with self -indulgence, and review my own self-deceptions and formulated excuses I use to shove people off who are telling me a truth about myself that I don’t want to hear. Then I can approach the offended and personally tell them, ‘I am sorry for the pain I caused you, I was wrong and it never should have happened.’

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As I read through the essays presented here by Sean Griobhtha, Sobia Quazi, Palestine Will Be Free, and other poignant commentators on the Stack who are a part of the Anti-Empire, Anti-War, and Pro-Palestinian collective, I find myself humbled and honored to be considered in their number. Each has their own unique way of identifying the peace that is always an option in times of conflict, and exposing the power structures who ignore this possibility, at the cost of “The Other’s” life and limb, in order to accelerate their own insidious genocidal motives and blatantly apparent agendas. They, like me, and a couple billion other global family members, refuse to sit idly by as any sense of humanity we have left slowly slips through our fingers.

Today, I wish to invite all of you to respond to a recent topic that has come to the fore in relation to those things that happen within our inner being and metastasizes in our outer sphere in extremely grotesque ways. This came to a head two days ago in a Twitter/X post that I have republished at the end of this writing as a case in point.

Guilt

For my part, being raised in a conservative Catholic tradition, where we learned to plead guilty to just about everything that went wrong (thanks to the neurotic distortions of scripture that were presented by the often praised Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD), that eventually became codified into Church dogma) guilt and shame became the way of our inner and outer life. It took some of us fellow travelers 60 years to untangle this conditioned web of deceit that was seated in the far reaches of our consciousness.

On the matter of guilt, I direct you to a profound in depth exploration that situates this culprit of defilement in its proper place, written by the noted French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his work, The Symbolism of Evil. In his commentary, Ricoeur defines guilt for what is,

Guiltiness is never anything else than the anticipated chastisement itself, internalized and already weighing upon [one’s] consciousness; and as dread is from the beginning the way of internalization of defilement itself, in spite of the radical externality of the evil, guilt is a moment contemporaneous with defilement itself… It is because man is ritually unclean that he is ‘burdened’ with fault; he need not be the author of the evil to feel himself burdened by its weight and the weight of its consequences.

It is not by accident that this language embraces, “both the public domain of penal justice and the private domain of moral conscience” Ricoeur reminds us.

I remember those times in my childhood, when a note was sent home from one of the nuns at our Catholic grade school. The moment you saw the folded white paper sealed with a single staple, a secret warrant, you knew that bloody hell had entered the room and violence was just a flicker away.

The guilt became so internally embedded, that you learned to keep up the pressure within the confines of your own mind, as you stood alone under the ever watchful eye of an invisible, omnipresent, and angry god. In this, consciousness transforms into a guilty conscience, as you became familiar with your self-created mental torture chamber. As Ricoeur so elegantly expresses,

It is enough for the sense of sin as being before God be abolished for guilt to work its havoc; at the limit, it is an accusation without an accuser, a tribunal without a judge, and a verdict without an author. To be accursed without being cursed by anybody is the highest degree of accursedness, as Kafka shows. By the semblance of intention that remains in a radically anonymous condemnation, the verdict is hardened into fate.

One of my former mentors, a Franciscan Friar named John J. Lakers, an outstanding language philosopher in his own right, in his unpublished work titled Reflections, maps out the dynamics of internalized guilt that played a key role in his formative years.

The metaphors [of power and judgement that] evokes guilt is quite straight forward. It functions as an internalized judge who subjects [our] actions to codified systems of prescriptions and prohibitions designed to promote some “common good.” In everyday English, it clothes its judgments in a language of “should” and “should not,” “ought,” “duty,” and “obligation.” And since it seems to speak from nowhere, it seems to texture its judgements with divine authority… this language is really the voice of a committee in one’s head which activates memory traces of judgements imposed on us by significant people in our lives, and its formative power re-enforces their sad belief that a system of rewards and punishments will succeed in producing moral individuals.

Shame

As often as we see guilt, fault, and shame placed in the same box, these identifiers are not synonymous with one another. As noted above, guilt is a worthless tool in the hands of compassionate individuals; and has nothing to do with forming moral individuals; and has everything to do with indoctrinating the populous into an obedient disposition toward a particular power structure. Shame, however, is quite a different phenomenon.

Shame is a natural mechanism present in all of us that is triggered when we have said or done something that has wounded ourselves or another. It is that uneasy feeling in your gut that we all have experienced at some time or another, that lets you know that something has gone wrong.

Only those who have been indoctrinated beyond hope, those whose inner wounds have been neglected to the point that the mechanism has congealed and become arrested within a thick layer of callousness, are beyond shame. Some speculate that these individuals have been wounded on so many occasions that the bodymind develops a self-protective strategy to shield them from further injury. In this case, all feelings are choked off to the point of sociopathy, i.e., they don’t feel anything.

In this context, shame falls into two categories, it can be toxic or life giving. In the former, shame is thrust upon an unsuspecting victim who did nothing to provoke the actions of the agent. I have spent hours upon hours with clergy sex abuse survivors who have told their stories. They were violated at a young age that was well before they had attained the psychological maturity to mitigate such traumatic violence. These stories are filled to the brim with feelings of total vulnerability, helplessness, fear of abandonment, and a complete inability to facilitate an effective response to the agent’s actions. To those readers who have been witnessing the horrors that have been unleashed on the children of Gaza, which is a daily showering of toxic shame, I am sure you will find these words to be all too familiar.

One of the points of this writing was to inform the viewer that our utterly incompetent leaders are attempting to thrust toxic shame onto us, their own populations, in the US, Britain, and the other European counterparts, as well as in Palestine. Protestors beaten into submission, journalists arrested and/or murdered, threats and lethal retaliation against family members, employment termination, the whole works. All for a situation that for many of us, until recently, was beyond our scope of knowing. We didn’t create it, we didn’t cause it, and we had zero control over it, until now. And I’m here to tell you, I’M NOT HAVIN’ ANY OF IT!

Life Giving Shame

The latter, Life Giving Shame, moves in the opposite direction. In this case, I am the adult agent and I have committed the offense. This locates the perspective within myself. If the offender/ receiver relationship has not been severed, this provides me with an opportunity to practice honest self-reflection, to explore the depths of my own self-protective strategies, to assess my urges to assuage my loneliness with self -indulgence, to review my own self-deceptions and formulated excuses I use to shove people off who are telling me a truth about myself that I don’t want to hear. Close friends are good for this. Good friends are hard to find and will keep you honest. They are often the receivers of these petty slights that spawn from my anger and frustration over a particular situation.

With this in play, I have the golden opportunity to walk with personal integrity to those I have wounded and tell them, ‘I am sorry, I was being a major league asshole, AGAIN.’ “Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door to the kingdom of heaven,” the U.N. Known Poet once wrote, and it’s true. And I’m not talking about the heaven of our childhood, that is far away in another time and place, heaven now! The heaven that resides in the brief moments of peace that friends can share with one another all things real and imagined that come to them without the cast of judgement upon us.

A Case In Point

Two days ago, one of my colleagues on Twitter/X directed me to a post that was up on his feed. The poster’s name was Brandon Stanton. According to his website, Humans of New York, Stanton is a writer and photographer who runs a story telling platform that has garnered accolades from over thirty million followers.

The post is authored by an anonymous pediatric intensive care unit doctor who recently spent 2 months in Rafah among the barely breathing skull and bones of what used to be children. As I write these words Al Jazeera reports that 8 more people including 3 children have starved to death in the last 24 hours in Gaza. This is all the introduction you will need as the words below speak for themselves.

Post

Brandon Stanton

@humansofny

“When I entered Gaza, the Israeli military had a rule: I was only allowed to bring in three kilos of food. As I was weighing out protein bars, trying to get under the limit, I said to my husband: ‘How sinister is this?’ I’m a humanitarian aid worker. Why would there even be a limit on food? I’ve worked in many places with extreme hunger, but what’s so jarring in this context is how cruel it is, how deliberate. I was in Gaza for two months; there’s no way to describe the horror of what’s happening. And I say this as a pediatric ICU doctor who sees children die as part of my work. Among our own staff we have doctors and nurses who are trying to treat patients while hungry, exhausted. They’re living in tents. Some of them have lost fifteen, twenty members of their families. In the hospital there are kids maimed by airstrikes: missing arms, missing legs, third degree burns. Often there’s not enough pain medication. But the children are not screaming about the pain, they’re screaming: ‘I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” I hate to only focus on the kids, because nobody should be starving. But the kids, it just haunts you in a different way. When my two months were finished, I didn’t want to leave. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in nearly twenty years of humanitarian assignments. But I felt ashamed. Ashamed to leave my Palestinian colleagues, who were some of the most beautiful and compassionate people that I’ve ever met. I was ashamed as an American, as a human being, that we’ve been unable to stop something that is so clearly a genocide. I remember when our bus pulled out of the buffer zone. Out the window on one side I could see Rafah, which was nothing but rubble. On the other side was lush, green Israel. When we exited the gate, the first thing I saw was a group of Israeli soldiers, sitting at a table, eating lunch. I’ve never felt so nauseous seeing a table full of food.”

3:00 PM · Aug 11, 2025

https://x.com/humansofny/status/1954996475571646976

In closing I want to make it clear; we will never stop our compassionate involvement with the deeply wounded People of Palestine. Our commitment goes well beyond the point of when the killing stops, as we intend to infuse ourselves in the healing process that will take decades to see it through. We will not be diverted by the obscene remarks that flow from the mouths of zionist supremacist politicians in Israel and the USA, in an attempt to dampen the massive eruption of moral outrage from protestors across the planet. We are well aware that as each day passes, the total extermination plan enacted by Netanyahu and his minions becomes tomorrow’s reality. We are also aware that the children of Gaza hold the humanity of the world in the palm of their hands, and if they go, we all soon will follow. I only need to look in the faces of my own children and grandchildren to know that if the world is not safe for the children of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, the world is not safe for anyone.

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Introduction

This article discusses the sexual abuse of children by clergy. Detailed depictions of graphic physical violence are not a part of this article.

The classifications,  Catholic Church or Roman Catholic Church (RCC), is used in this article to refer to all people who identify as Roman Catholic, i.e., clerics and congregants.

The classifications, Administrative Elites of the Roman Catholic Church, signified by the acronym AERCC, refers to the Pope, all other Bishops, and Non-Clerical administrators of the RCC who are seated in the upper echelons of power within the Vatican or other diocesan administrations.

Information that could be obtained through the use of a competent encyclopedia is not cited. All other information is cited and sourced.

I apologize to those who are extensively familiar with the topic being discussed and find themselves on familiar ground. Some statements bear repeating for those bishops who like to hover around the memory hole.

G. Schell 02.18.24

A friend of mine pointed me to an article he had discovered that was published September 20^th of 2023 that made some alarming statements. The head line red, “CLERGY SEXUAL ABUSE DISAPPEARING.” 

‘Where did it go,’ I thought, ‘because it sure as hell hadn’t disappeared as of this morning.’

In 2018, I spent the better part of the year researching and writing about the clergy child sex abuse atrocity of the Roman Catholic Church that has been covered by main stream media, in a big way since the 2015 movie Spotlight hit the theaters. I was born into a Conservative Roman Catholic family, and believed the stories that victims told about their experiences with Catholic priests, but I was not prepared for the information that came from the research in 2018. The sheer numbers were astounding. For example, a low estimate of the number of victims of the spiritual holocaust was 100,000 in the USA alone in 2012. And this was one statistic of a thousand that steam rolled over any thoughts that I previously held that considered the administrative elites of the Roman Catholic Church (AERCC) honorable. Paraphrasing an old cliché, the Vatican rots from the head down. 

In a report from the United Nations in October of the same year, “the total number of victims worldwide is uncertain...it could be three times(100,000) in some counties alone.” Again, all of these estimates are on the low end. When writing the victims stories in 2018, I would crawl into bed sometimes at 2-3am, mentally and physically exhausted, and weep for people I didn’t even know. I was physically abused as a child at home, and in my Catholic grade school, but not sexually abused. The abuses that these victims suffered at the hands of so-called, “agents of god” were so horrendous in scope and scale, that mentioning my abuse did not seem appropriate. This was the first wave of the shocks that would come. The second hit me closer to the heart. I wanted to sound the alarm by telling my Catholic family members and friends. Most didn’t believe me, many ridiculed me, some even shunned me for life. I was alone and morally outraged.

How Did the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis Appear?

There are many answers to this question. Sexual abuse of children is a systemic problem that has haunted Europe for millennia and transferred to the Americas when Europeans began migrating West. The senior culprit has to do with the abusive economic systems that the West utilizes. After extensive research on different systems of thought, I have a general suspicion that child sexual abuse was likely present in Native America before the European invasion however I found no evidence of this. Catholic Colonialism under the direction of wealth thirsty Popes and European Monarchs played a huge role in propagating the disease of abusive systems throughout Europe and the Americas. Child exploitation was a part of that package. A brief historical account from the late 19^th century may help explain. 

In 1896 an up and coming neurologist named Sigmund Freud published an Academic thesis on trauma titled, The Etiology of Hysteria. This research paper illuminated his discovery that “perverted acts against children,” were widely common throughout the whole of society. Being a radical understanding at the time, he thought this would be his ticket to greatness among the medical scholars of Europe. Instead, he was shunned by the upper class medical community that he inhabited. Even though his findings were acutely accurate, his social network was not ready to publicly acknowledge that they or some of their extremely wealthy friends were physically and sexually abusing children. This network financially supported academia and researchers like Freud. He retracted the theories expressed in the paper he wrote, had he not, it would have meant career suicide and possible poverty. Through this story one can easily see how critical economic survival is in such decisions.

It is common knowledge that this tactic of using wealth and institutional status as a weapon against people who promote positive human development is still in play within our society today; in ways that would have made Freud’s head spin. Just ask Fr. Mark White, the previous pastor of two parishes in Southwest Virginia, who has been “suspended” from performing his clerical duties because he openly discussed the clergy sex abuse crisis with his parishioners through a blog post. All he wanted to do was comfort those who were negatively affected by the crises.  White’s Bishop Barry Knestout of the Richmond Diocese, a loyal sycophant of child sex criminal and former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, ordered White to shut down the blog site. Fr. White described what happened in an article for NJ.com:

In November 2019, he ordered me to remove my blog from the internet. I initially complied. But when the pandemic hit, I felt it was important to connect with my parishioners online. I resumed posting this past March. In April, the bishop transferred me away from the two towns I know and love to serve as a prison chaplain several hours distant.

Fr. White declined to accept the assignment. The assignment would not only put him several hours away from his parish family, his mother lives in an assisted living facility in the same area. In retaliation, on May 6th, 2020 Bishop Barry Knestout suspended Fr. White from Church ministry. 

How many times have I heard Catholics tell me that the Catholic Church is the Church of the family? “If you want to bring happiness to the whole world, go home and love your family,” is a quote that has often been ascribed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. “Insofar as it is a 'small- scale Church,' the Christian family is called upon... to be a sign of unity for the world,” Pope John Paul II stated. 

Abuse survivors and their advocates are well aware that the AERCC are the destroyers of individuals, families, and family unity, both figuratively and literally. John Paul II and Benedict XVI being two of the worst offenders, as they ignored the repeated reports that priest were raping children for over a quarter of a century. 

“Destroyed” is the language that victims, their parents, and health professionals use to describe the abuse that is still happening every day within the Catholic Church. 

“I was sexually abused by my parish priest. It not only ruined my life; it also destroyed my family.” survivor Robert Costello wrote. 

Bob Burns was sexually abused at age 14 by Thomas O'Rourke, the local Catholic School priest and family friend. When speaking about the destructive nature that clergy abuse levies on individuals in their adolescent years Burns stated, "You're taking someone at one of the most formative stages of life, (when they are) not able to deal with it, or (during) puberty when so many things are confused, and you're ripping them to shreds." 

Beth Ward’s son was serially abused by the Springfield, Illinois priest, Joseph Havey from the time he was 10 years old into high school, “The biggest thing that (sexual abuse by a priests) does is destroy the child and the family,” she said. 

In the words of psychologist Diane Langberg , “Abuse destroys relationships.” The journalist Beth Miller, who interviewed Dr. Langberg, understands that the effects of abuse go well beyond the events themselves, but damages the future of the abused, “their marriages, their friendships, their families, their faith in God, their trust in people. The effects can extend for generations.” There are hundreds of thousands of stories like these. 

As the problem of clergy sex abuse continues, people continue to die. Not only have numerous people been murdered by bishops, priest, and others to cover up the clergy sex abuse horror, suicide rates among the victims is off the charts. Suicides attributed to clergy sex abuse victims is 50 times higher than the rest of the population. When I think of trauma events that mentally, physically, and emotionally devastate a family, immediately and for generations to come, suicide of a family member is somewhere at the top of the list. In one case, at St. Alipius Grade School in Ballarat- Victoria, Australia, 12 of 33 children pictured in a 1973 4th grade class photo committed suicide later in life. 

Every aspect of this crisis carries the smell of death and decay with it. Suicides among Roman Catholic Priest involved in the crisis are also on the rise, even among the wrongly accused. News outlets are not in the habit of reporting on individual suicides in general; information from Christian authorities on the suicide rates of ministers is even more rare; here are few reports from United States, Brazil, and Ireland. 

Why Isn’t Clergy Sex Abuse “Disappearing?”

The answer to this question comes with a high degree of certainty. It spawns from dozens of historical practices and policies of the AERCC that shed considerable light on the current realities of the clergy sex abuse crisis. Due to the limits of time and space at this juncture, I would not do justice to the afflicted by trying to cover all of the historical practices that caused the current crisis in this writing.  This is one in a series of articles that will be published on the topic; so I will focus on a few historical practices here. 

In the lead up to this discussion it’s important that some facts are clearly stated. Pope Francis, and the other bishops within the Roman Curia that administer the offices of the pope, have no ability to address the clergy sex abuse crisis, nor do a large majority of the bishops across the board. They simply do not have the tools to do it. The abuse will not be stopped by the current administration nor by future administrations of the same caliber. Only The Body of the Church, the laity, and honorable pastors currently have the ability to do this, and they are. Within my sympathetic imagination I envision that eventually The Body will envelop the Church’s head. This isn’t optimism, fantasy, or wishful thinking, this is already happening, slowly, painfully, and progressively, right now.  

There would have to be what conservative Catholics consider “radical” changes in Catholic Church doctrine and Cannon Law for the AERCC to appropriately address the crisis. The operating system of the Roman Catholic Church would have to be completely restructured. Even if such changes took place, it would take time to implement them, and two generations for the changes to have significant effect. The Body of the Church doesn’t have time for all that. They need change now. It is their children, their parents, their family members, their parish communities that are at stake, and are currently suffering 99.9% of the devastating consequences of the abuse. They would be fools to put the future of their children, their families, their communities, or their spiritual development in the hands of those who repeatedly betrayed them and continue to do so.  

The Seminarian Underground

Most of the AERCC followed the same educational trek that the abusive priest took in their journey to the priesthood. Becoming a Catholic priest today has changed since the mid- 20th Century. Back then it was a passage from adolescence to priesthood. When I was growing up in the 1960’s in Midwestern USA, three of my older brothers left for the seminary after the eighth grade. Most of the families in my neighborhood were Catholic families. Many of their sons did the same. Their parent’s hoped for a priest in the family. Catholic families for centuries had been immersed in the idea that the primary focus was on God. Having a son as a priest would help to maintain that focus. Perhaps it was a remnant of the ancient Jewish Rabbinic understanding that the first born son was to perform the priestly duties of the family.  

My oldest brother entered the Pontifical College Josephinum minor seminary in 1963. This is the same seminary that graduated the notorious Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, in 1961. Josephinum already had incidences of sexual abuse previous to my brother’s enrollment and many incidences of abuse and sexual assault after my brother left. Several priests who were educated there were later accused of sexual assault or played a part in shielding abusive priest who were committing sexual assault. Much of this did not become exposed until 40 years later. By this time there were several seminaries in the US that were tagged as places where physical and sexual abuse was prevalent.

Parents and other family members were not meant to be involved in their son’s seminary formation. While my brothers attended, family visits were limited by the seminary administration. In the 4 years that my oldest brother attended Josephinum seminary high school the parents visited once. On that visit they were not allowed to take their son off campus under their parent’s custody. Not being made aware of this until they arrived, my parents were angry and confused but eventually compliant. 

Seminarians were not allowed to leave the seminary grounds. In order to discourage this, any money you had on your person when you arrived was confiscated and returned at the end of the year. You were issued seminary tokens if you wanted to buy anything that was sold at the seminary store. Social isolation, rigid control, and demanded obedience were the order of the day for young seminarians. As it turned out, none of the entries into the seminary from our neighborhood of those years became priests.  

For those who completed the journey and became ordained as priest the institutional Church was their whole being. They were completely dependent on the Church system and those who occupied the upper tiers of the hierarchy for all their primary and secondary needs. Without the Church they would be totally lost. To ensure the security of their future welfare they had to place their total trust in the hierarchy. At that time, they were oblivious to the fact that placing your livelihood in the hands of people who occupy the highest tiers of any hierarchical structure surrenders any freedom of conscience to the will of whoever occupies the pinnacle of that structure. 

Any person from the outside who pierced the walls of this sacred structure or questioned a priest or a bishop's decisions were considered a threat. Bishops of a diocese were considered to be entrusted with power from God and that they should, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mat. 5:48) People on the outside looking in could too easily find perceived mistakes, and/or cast judgements, and spread the news. To preempt such disruptions all inner workings of the clerics within the institution were shrouded in secrecy. Scandals, such as accusations of child sexual assault by a cleric, a priest fathering a child, homosexuality, or situations where large amounts of money turned up missing sent shock waves to the highest tiers of the pyramid and were immediately and aggressively covered up. Many clerics down the chain of command from the Vatican through the bishops to parish priests were complicit in the cover up for fear of being excommunicated or shunned from the structure; this could leave them destitute, losing the only livelihood they have known since they were 14 years old. Candidates for the priesthood were taught to keep information within the system in their seminary years and were to maintain that position for the rest of their lives. 

Ask Marie Collins, an abuse survivor from Ireland who became a champion of abuse survivors and protecting children. She was repeatedly sexually assaulted in the 1960’s by a child pornographer priest named Fr. Paul McGennis when she was 13 years old. For 34 years afterward she suffered the devastating effects of the toxic shame that this priest had levied on her. “I lived a life for over thirty years where just getting from one day to another was a struggle,” she said.  At the behest of her doctor to “warn the church about this priest,” she decided to report her abuse to the designated authority in her parish for the first time. 

I was very nervous. It would be only the second time I had spoken to anyone about what had happened to me. This priest refused to take the name of my abuser and said he saw no need to report the chaplain. He told me what had happened was probably my fault. This response shattered me. 

Later, when this priest was questioned by the police, as to why he would not allow Collins to give him the name of her abuser, he responded, this is “what he had been taught in the seminary.”

Psychosexual Retardation

When one enters an all-male seminary immediately after grade school this excludes them from the female/male interactions with people of the same age group that are typical among the rest of society. These interactions are essential in gaining an understanding of acceptable social norms concerning sexuality. Previous to this stage of adolescence sexuality is still in the realm of mystery for those who have not been subjected to sexual trauma during their childhood. Josephinum Seminary had a strict “no dating” policy. Celibacy was already instilled as part of the vocational path seminarians had chosen. This was relatively common among most seminaries of that time. 

During my grade school years of the late 60’s early 70’s Catholic clerical educators taught that psychological problems were the product of sin that could be remedied by confessing your sins to a priest with a renewed determination to avoid the sin in the future. This was the favored corrective measure used by bishops for priest who had committed acts of sexual abuse. Psychological motivations of the priest were typically not considered.¹  Seeking psychiatric or psychological help was only condoned in cases of extreme chemical unbalance (e.g. schizophrenia).    

After the close of the Vatican II Council in 1965 priests, seminarians, and congregants began leaving the Church. It’s estimated that over 100,000 priest’s left religious life between 1965 and 1990.² Concerned over the lack of incoming seminary candidates to compensate for the priest void, as early as 1970 AERCC  leaders began commissioning psychological evaluations of the priesthood. Supposedly, clear explanations would initiate effective remedies. 

There had already been a workshop for psychologists assessing candidates for the priesthood in 1966 that took place in New York. In this workshop psychologist quoted a recently completed study that found out of 107 candidates, 

8% of these were sexually deviant, whereas 70% were described as psychosexually immature, exhibiting traits of heterosexual retardation, confusion concerning sexual role, and fear of sexuality, effeminacy, and potential homosexual dispositions.  

The commissioned studies showed that significant psychological and emotional problems were still present long after candidates became priests in the US.³ One study completed in 1971 and presented to a Synod of Bishops at the Vatican came from two psychiatrists who had treated 1500 priests in over a 40 year period. Their results included alarming data stating that 1 in 4 priests in North America had serious psychiatric difficulties while 70% suffered from emotional immaturity.⁴

Another study completed in 1972 showed that only 7% of the priests in the US were psychologically developed in agreement with their age. The same study saw 8% as “Maldeveloped”, meaning severely psychologically impaired. This number closely resembles the profile percentage of predator priest who sexually abused children and adolescents.⁵ 

The studies in general concurred that most priests functioned at a psychological level consistent with that of a pre-adolescent.⁶ This indicates that when they entered the seminary after grade school psychological development, in particular psychosexual development, had stopped. When a priest whose own psychological development is frozen abuses children, he passes the disease to the child, causing the victims themselves to become psychologically locked. This opens the door to the possibility of the victim becoming a future abuser.  

In an article titled Reflections of a Recovering Priest which was attached to a 1995 recommendations publication for the US Bishops named Restoring Trust, the anonymous author describes his arrested development: 

I entered the seminary at 14 years of age. In many ways the seminary picked up where my family left off. (In that) The subject of sexuality had remained largely unaddressed. When I was 20 years old I realized I was attracted to young adolescent males. Up to this time I had been able to characterize my attraction as some form of latent homosexuality. By age 20 it was clear that I kept getting older but the persons I found attractive remained 12-15 year old males. I was afraid to mention the nature of my sexual attraction to anyone in authority at the seminary because I feared it would result in my not being ordained… I denied the fact of my desire for boys to reduce the internal dissonance I felt. I wanted very badly to be a priest. I also was very ashamed and frightened by my sexual orientation.⁷

A hyperlink to the whole article can be accessed at the foot note below.  

All of these studies included recommendations from seasoned mental health professionals to address the obvious problems. One doctor who participated in the studies, when reviewing the bishop’s reactions wrote: 

The most distressing aspect of this study is that the signs of crisis, or distress, of immaturity, of human and spiritual need were ignored. Few if any steps were taken to assist the American priests. In individual dioceses bishops surely did make some changes. ...But I could find no evidence that the NCCB (National Conference of Catholic Bishops) initiated discussions on the findings... made any attempts to follow through on suggestions made, to respond to the needs of their struggling priests, to address the questions raised by the study or to urge bishops to attempt diocesan responses to the institutional call for setting priorities. One cannot help but think that perhaps the abuse crisis might have been identified earlier if more had been done to assist priests who were crying out for attention and help.⁸  

This has repeatedly been the posture assumed by the bishops since the abuse crisis became exposed. Bishops who suffer from their own psychosexual retardation have no capability to address priests with the same affliction. Keep in mind the conclusions from these studies were well known by the Vatican bishops as well as US Bishops previous to the sexual violations of predator priests that occurred after 1972. There is little doubt that some of these violations, if not many of them, could have been avoided if they had begun actively removing accused priests from the ministry at that time. To be clear, priest who have abused children in any fashion have no business being employed in a job that would allow them access to children.

Repeat Performances   

Shortly after Pope Francis was elected in March of 2013, he chose a council of Cardinals to assist in governing the Church. Three of those chosen, George Pell, Francisco Ossa, and Oscar Maradiaga, had long been known to be protectors of sexually abusive priests. Maradiaga was appointed as the head of the Pope’s governing council. Pell, who was tapped to be the Vatican Secretary of the Treasury, eventually took a leave of absence to face civil proceedings in Australia for a 40 year history of abuse allegations against him, and for concealing abusive priests.

Pope Francis promoted two bishops, Gerhard Mueller and Riccardo Ezzati, to Cardinals shortly after his election; both of whom had lengthy histories of shielding sexually abusive clergy. Mueller was the chief of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith which has the obligation of addressing clergy child abuse allegations. These bishops had nothing to gain and everything to lose by pursuing investigations into sexually abusive priests; as these investigations could lead to information that would expose their own involvement.

Spiritual Abuse

During the 35 year reign of Popes John Paul II (JPII) and Benedict XVI (Oct. 1978 to Feb. 2013), the Church entered a dark era in which a minority of ecclesial authorities attempted suffocate the spiritual development of the faithful while simultaneously reinforcing antiquated doctrines that spawned from a psychosexually retarded mindset. (This statement, in part, is in reference to doctrines set forth by Augustine of Hippo and his minions which I will address in a forth coming article.)

To the point of stifling spiritual evolution, previous to Benedict's papal election, he served as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith under JPII. Identified at that time as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, he issued a document on 05.24.90 titled, Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, which was approved by JPII. This document enunciated that Ratzinger and the Vatican elites disapproved of dissenting theologians discussing their opinions in a public forum, and stated that there was, “serious harm done to the community of the Church by attitudes of general opposition to Church teaching.” The document continues:

Indeed, when dissent succeeds in extending its influence to the point of shaping; a common opinion, it tends to become the rule of conduct. This cannot but seriously trouble the People of God and lead to contempt for true authority.

The document highlights a language of patriarchal enslavement denouncing the questioning of papal authority or church doctrine. The word “authority” is mentioned on thirteen occasions within the writing; the word “obedience” is used six times, with the document stating that in the cases of magisterial authority, 

the response called for is that of the religious submission of will and intellect.  (Para.23) 

The willingness to submit loyally to the teaching of the Magisterium  on matters per se not irreformable must be the rule.  (Para.24)

Even if the doctrine of the faith is not in question, the theologian will not present his own opinions or divergent hypotheses as though they were non-arguable conclusions. Respect for the truth as well as for the People of God requires this discretion. For the same reasons, the theologian will refrain from giving untimely public expression to them. (Para. 27)

The theologian should avoid turning to the "mass media”... for it is not by seeking to exert the pressure of public opinion that one contributes to the clarification of doctrinal issues.  (Para. 30) (Emphasis added)

Over the next 23 years through Benedict's influence theologians who explored enlightening ideas that promoted social justice, protected the innocent, and served the forgotten of our society were attacked. Hundreds of priests, nuns, and deacons were punished, silenced, or expelled. This was an extreme betrayal to many who sat in pews of Catholic churches each Sunday. It was a double extreme betrayal for those who suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of clerics who traded in their moral compass to pay homage to an ethically bankrupt institution. Some of those victims paid with their lives. A partial list of these pastoral leaders is attached at the end of this writing.

The Dominican friar Matthew Fox who was silenced by Pope Benedict in 1988, and eventually expelled from the Dominican Order and all Catholic educational facilities in 1993, had this to say upon Pope Benedict's resignation in February 2013: 

It was a breath of fresh air to hear that the pope has chosen to step down, the first pope in 7 centuries to do so. What he and his predecessor wrought to the Catholic Church as we know it is nothing short of devastation. But as a Christian I see their 42 [sic] year reign as so destroying the church we know that now the Holy Spirit can give birth to a community far more attuned to the revolutionary Gospel of Jesus than the current and dying structures ever could be. Those structures are as passe as the Berlin Wall.

The link above takes you to a page where Fox goes into great detail in documenting some of the tragic happenings that befell Catholics during the reigns of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It’s definitely worth a read.

Theological Abuse, the Abuse of the Mind

“God the Punitive Father is not a God worth honoring but a false god and an idol that serves empire-builders... ‘All the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.’ (Meister Eckhart) Thus people who worship a punitive father are themselves punitive.”

Matthew Fox -95 Thesis

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Heb.10:31)

To give intellectual grounds for resuscitating the antiquated doctrines of religious enslavement to the institutional church, doctrines that had long become morally bankrupt, non-functional, and physically unhealthy, the AERCC Popes and Bishops enforced a one theology church. This theology was called Apologetics or Atonement theology, which defends the idea of god as judge and punisher. Since those who worship a punishing god become punishers themselves, that’s exactly what the elites did. 

To appreciate the psychological dynamic, Apologetic theology defends the Church’s doctrine of Original Sin. This doctrine has its roots in the Catholic tradition but the protestant reformers adopted the precepts as well. This doctrine claims that all humans are sinners from the time they are conceived and are born with a moral defect. As the theory goes, this sin was inherited from the first man, Adam, who originally disobeyed god in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The Catechism of the Catholic Church issues the incriminating statement that, “all men are implicated in Adam’s sin.” 

In the story, when god becomes aware that Adam disobeyed him, the lord casts judgment on Adam and punishes the man by separating him from the immediate presence of god. According to Church doctrine, there was only one way that Adam and his descendants (the human race) could reunite with their lord. Reunification required god’s own son, Jesus to become human and to be brutally abused, tortured, and executed, as a “sacrifice to god.” The son’s willingness to do this is understood as an act of love; “Out of love…Jesus freely accepted his Passion and death” In this, violence, abuse, and love become merged into a distorted and confusing ball of wax as though the terms are synonymous and function simultaneously. 

Using this theological frame, Christians large and small are called to emulate god and god’s son, Jesus. Bishops, priests, pastors, and congregants, whether identified as abusers or abused, are only acting out their assigned roles in the name of love as they comply with the will of an abusive god. Abusers mimic the godhead depicted in the Adam and Eve story, or the people who, at god's demand for divine justice, carry out the execution of Jesus depicted in the Gospel accounts. The abused mimic the suffering servant Jesus, who accepts the abuse willingly out of love for his father and the abuser(s).  

The Christian theologian Bishop John Spong In his sermon Why Atonement Theology Will Kill Christianity, describes the logical progression of this doctrine starkly claiming that it portrays god as an unforgiving, sadistic “monster, a demon” and the “original child abuser.” Continuing the progression, Jesus becomes a masochist who enjoys suffering and being a perpetual victim. What is at the front and center of every traditional Catholic Church one enters? The portrayal of Jesus being crucified. There was a crucifix hanging in practically every room of the house I grew up in. Jesus is seldom allowed off of his cross. The clergy and congregants become “guilt filled zombies” who are condemned to repeatedly abuse and be abused as they bow in worship to this punitive god. 

The current crisis of child abuse and the domination over women, men, and children within our society are an echo of this theology that Church representatives taught its congregants to believe for centuries, and still teach today. These ideas have been so deeply embedded in Christian culture in the US, and by association into other parts of the culture, that people almost without notice have accepted and repeated the learned behaviors throughout their lives. 

The violence, abuse, and love distortion is clearly depicted in the testimonies of the abuse survivors. This is where you come to the conclusion that the effects of this teaching are indeed diabolical. Fr. Thomas Economus, a powerful survivors advocate, was sexually molested as a boy by Fr. Don Murray on a regular basis. The violations continued for 3 ½ years at a school for troubled boys in Sky Ranch, South Dakota during the 1970’s. At 17 the molestation became forced rape. In an interview with PBS Frontline, Economist recalled his psychological state at 17 after being forcibly assaulted by Murry for the first time. 

For me, at the time, I was very confused. Because on one hand, I very much loved this priest. He was very good to me, in that he took me on trips, and he bought me clothes, and he was very affectionate and very loving. And then there was this other side of him that was very violent and very brutal. But I also knew that as long as I kept quiet, then the good things that he did for me would kind of balance or outshine this horrible secret that I was keeping. 

Like others before him, Economus still held a few ounces of belief in the clerical agents of the Catholic Church. At age 21 he sought help from a psychologist priest in Chicago. After nine appointments with the councilor, he was forcibly raped by the psychologist in the following session.

In the Frontline interview Economus details the reckless behavior of Fr. Murray. Don Murray was a dangerous “out of control” alcoholic with a history of life threatening negligence. His superiors were well aware of his alcoholism, abuse, and behavior but failed to intervene. On one occasion Murray was driving his car as it went off the road and two boys were killed. On October 11th in 1975, Fr. Murray, a licensed airplane pilot, piloted a plane that took off with three Sky Ranch boys as passengers. One of the passengers was Thomas Economus’ brother. Shortly after take-off the plane nosedived into the ground killing Murray and two of the passengers, Economus’ brother was mangled but survived. The FFA report stated that Fr. Murray was 3 times over the legal alcohol limit when he entered the plane. 

A Microscopic View of Clergy Sexuality 

In conclusion I feature excerpts and commentary from an interview that was conducted in 2011 by Dr. Laurent Schley of Luxemburg with A.W. Richard Sipe who passed away in August of 2018. The information provided still sheds light on the gap between what we are told by Church authorities and what is the reality on the ground concerning the sexual behavior of Roman Catholic Clergy. 

Baltimore psychotherapist A.W. Richard Sipe, was a former benedictine monk who has spent 25 years researching celibacy and sexual abuse among priests. According to his website, “he served as a consultant or expert witness in 250 cases of clergy abuse of minors and other clergy professional malfeasance in the United States and Canada, 1988-2011; and (was)deposed 45 times.”

In a Preliminary Expert Report published on the Bishops Accountability website, Richard Sipe provided more detail about his extensive hands on experience regarding clergy sex abuse with in the RCC:

Over the years I have had a therapist/patient or consultative relationship with over 1,000 Catholic clerics and over 500 persons with whom Catholic clerics have acted out sexually. I have conducted extensive research, counseling, interviews and reviews of case histories of 2,700 sexually active clerics and 2,000 victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics.

According to the most recent figures available from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in 2018 there were 37,302 Catholic Priest in the United States.  

Sipes research that concluded in 1985 indicates that, “no more than half of Catholic clergy professing celibacy were actually practicing sexual abstinence.” In a May 1993 press conference in Rome, the acting Chairman of the Dicastery on Clergy Cardinal Hose Sanchez, when asked about Sipe’s conclusions told reporters, “I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those figures.” 

In the interview with Dr. Schley, Sipe goes on to state that, “The most reliable estimates of abusing Catholic clergy in the U.S. now run between 6 and 9 percent, with many dioceses recording 10 percent.” This leaves the number of priests sexually abusing minors in the US anywhere between 2238 to 3730 for the US. In some of the Diocese the numbers are as high as 23%; in religious houses they climb to 25%.⁹  For those Catholic parishioners who think that this isn’t still going on in 2024, you can read for yourselves.

In paragraph five of the transcript from the interview Sipe draws a direct link between Catholic teachings on sexuality and the crimes committed by abusive priests. When you have psychosexually retarded clerical authorities defining appropriate sexual behavior for their congregations and claiming that their words come straight from the mouth of god, these are the results. I quote the paragraph at length because Sipes' conclusions clearly reflect the frustrations that many Catholics (priests included) have expressed to me over the last 30 years. 

The idea that the Catholic Church knows and defines the intrinsic nature of sex is not correct... the scientifically unfounded and distorted teachings about human sexual development and nature the Vatican holds cannot be sustained by reason. A large proportion of priests and a great number of lay Catholics cannot assent to its moral conclusion. The assertions that all sexual activity outside of a legitimate marriage is mortally sinful is as unreasonable as it is to assert that the sun revolves around the earth.

... the tangle of issues that clog the agenda of the Catholic Church and keep it from productive leadership and credible action... all have to do with sex: abortion, contraception, masturbation, sex before marriage or after divorce, homosexuality, artificial insemination, the requirement of celibacy for ordination, the ordination of women to the priesthood, and a married priesthood.

Refusal to dialogue about the reality of human sexuality leaves Catholic priests in the untenable position of having to teach what they cannot live, believe or defend. 

When priests are prohibited from any form of sexual expression, compulsive sexual episodes that seek instant gratification are to be expected. As stated earlier these priests desperately need help in deprograming the sexually repressive conditioning they received during their indoctrination. The “rock and hard place” position they are placed in is not only non-functional, it presents a clear and present danger for the human “objects” of their obsession. Sipe goes on to state that the Church’s, “Dependence on the secrecy of the sacrament of penance to hide violations and assure easy forgiveness facilitates repetition and recidivism of sex crimes rather than reform of behavior.”

One of the most significant takeaways from the voluminous body of work that Sipe presents is that the AERCC issues doctrinal demands upon their congregations that they themselves could never adhere to. Each prohibition, if not followed, carries the threat of an eternity in torturous anguish in Hell. This alone is psychologically destructive to anyone who sincerely believes it. One only needs to review the hundreds of thousands of testimonies of the victims of abusive clergy from across the globe to determine that the perpetrators were poignantly efficient in injecting a real and devastating lifelong hell in each victims minds. Apparently the clerical elites have concluded that due to their service to a non-human, dysfunctional institution, they each have “get out of Hell free” card pinned to their souls.

Here are some examples of the gap between the preached and the practiced: 

"Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 2352) 

Sipe:  “Most priests (90%) abstain from sex periodically. At any one time 50% are sexually active in a variety of behaviors. Masturbation is the most common and most frequent sexual activity across the board among priests and bishops.”

*****

"Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication (defined as intercourse between consenting adults of the opposite sex), impurity, licentiousness... I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 1852)

Sipe: For priests, “Involvement with women is prevalent either experimentally or in sequential affairs, or with one companion.”

*****

“Sacred Scripture... presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 2357)

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, 1985, Paragraph 3)

Sipe: “Repeated studies indicate that 30%  (of priest) have a homosexual orientation. Informed sources declare that this is true also of bishops in the United States. Several knowledgeable and well respected priests claim that 50% of men in seminaries and novitiates today qualify for this categorization. Because gay orientation is common across the board the priesthood is popularly considered a gay profession... Many saints, popes and bishops can be counted among the homosexual population.” (Richard Sipe, Luxemburg Interview, Para, 17)

*****

“Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 2354)

Sipe: “Many clergy try to satisfy sexual curiosity via pornography; the Internet sex is new and fertile source of preoccupation for some priests.”

*****

Much of what is presented here would not have been possible without the painstaking research of people like Tom P. Doyle, an inactive American Catholic priest who holds a doctorate in Canon Law, Fr. Michael R. Peterson (deceased), who was a Doctor of Psychiatry, and Richard Sipe (deceased), former priest and Clinical Mental Health Counselor. All of these dedicated the bulk of their lives to honestly addressing the causes and remedies of Roman Catholic Priests physically and sexually assaulting children. It is important to remember that, if not for the work of people like David Clohessy, Marie Collins, Barbara Blaine, Robert Hoatson, and thousands of others, there would have been NO CHANGES initiated by the AERCC. 

My heart goes out to those who have carried the bulk of the traumatic weight associated with this catastrophe, that being the spiritually betrayed victims. They are the ones who stood up, and in so many ways answered the urgent call of the Spirit of Life in a manner that was beyond the reach of the institutional Church. In their tenacity they jerked back their dreams of wholeness from the clutches of the clerical demons who had stolen them, and walked with integrity toward a new life experience where respect for their mental, emotional, and physical person was unquestioned and a matter of course. If you want to go where the Spirit of peace resides follow these. This is where the Spirit is free to do its work and abundant life flourishes.  

Guy Schell © 2024

Notes:

1. Doyle, Thomas P, Roman Catholic Clericalism, Religious Duress, and Clergy Sexual Abuse, Pastoral Psychology, Vol.51. No.3, January 2003 (p 191) URL:

https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/WEB.0154.001.0006.pdf

2. ibid. (p 199)

3. ibid. (p 198)

4. ibid. (p 198)

5. ibid. (p 198)

6. ibid. (p 199)

7. Anonymous Author,  Reflections of a Recovering Priest, Nov. 13th 1995,  Restoring Trust Vol.2, Bishops Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse

URL: http://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/1995-11-RestoringTrust/rt95-03-priest-offender.pdf

8. Doyle, Thomas P, Roman Catholic Clericalism, Religious Duress, and Clergy Sexual Abuse, Pastoral Psychology, Vol.51. No.3, January 2003 (p 199) URL:

https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/WEB.0154.001.0006.pdf 

The original study: Through the “Lens” of the Organizational Culture Perspective:

A Descriptive Study of American Catholic Bishops’ Understanding of Clergy

Sexual Molestation and Abuse of Children and Adolescents 

By Dr. Barbara Susan Balboni,  1998, pp. 87–88

9. Letter to Bishop Robert McElroy from Richard Sipe, 07.28.16, Pg.2

URL: http://www.awrsipe.com/Correspondence/McElroy-2016-07-28-rev.pdf

Addendum

The Wailing Wall of Silenced. Expelled, or Banished

Theologians and Pastoral Leaders under Ratzinger. (Incomplete)

1.Jon Sobrino, S.J. (El Salvador, but born in Spain)

2.Bernard Haring, CSSR (Germany)

3.Sr. Lavina Byrne, IBVM (UK)

4.Jacques Dupres, S.J. (France)

5.Thomas Reese, S.J. (USA)

6.Prof. Michael Buckley

(USA – denied promotion to full Professorship even though Buckley was President of the Catholic Theological Society of America.)

7.Fr. Philip S. Keane, S.S. (USA)

8.Fr. John McNeill, S.J. (USA)

9.David Hollenbach, S.J. (USA)

10.Anthony de Mello, S.J. ( Indian Goan Priest)

11. Michael Morwood, (Victoria, Australia)

12.Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (Detroit, USA)

13.Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Arns (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

14.Jose Antonio Pagola  (Basque)

15.Fr. Hans Kung (Switzerland)

16.Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. (Holland)

17.Fr. Charles Curran (USA)

18.Fr. Leonardo Boff, O.F.M. (Brazil)

19.Fr. Anthony Kosnik, (USA)

20.Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, (Peru)

21.Fr. Karl Rahner S.J. (Germany)

22.Fr. Matthew Fox, O.P. (USA)

23.Sr, Mary Agnes Mansour, RSM (USA)

24.Sr. Elizabeth Morancy, RSM (USA)

25.Sr. Arlene Violet, RSM (USA)

26.Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, (Seattle, USA)

27.Fr.Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua)

28.Fr.Robert Nugent (USA)

29.Sr. Jeannine Gramick (USA)

30.Sr. Barara Ferraro, SND (USA)      

31.Sr. Patricia Hussey, SND (USA)

32.Miguel d’Escoto, Maryknoll (Nicaragua)

33.Fr. Edgar Parrales (Nicaragua)

34.Fr. Uriel Molina, O.F.M. (Nicaragua)

35.Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Haiti)  

36.Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, O.M.I. (Sri Lanka)

37.Fr. Eugen Drewermann (Germany)

38.Sr, Ivone Gabara, SND (Brazil)

39.Bishop Jacques Gaillot (France)  

40.Fr, Fernando Cardenal, S.J. (Nicaragua)

41.Fr. Roger Haight, S.J. (USA)

42.Sr. Margaret McBride (USA)

43.Fr. Andre Guindon (Canada)

44.Bishop Remi DeRoo (Canada, forcibly retired)

45.Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga (Brazil)

46.Fr. Paul Collins (Australia)

47.Sr. Jane Kelly (USA)

48.Bishop Helder Camara (Brazil)

49.Fr. Gyorgy Bulanyi (Hungry)

50.Don Luigi Sartori (Italy)

51.Fr. Eugenio Melandri (Italy)

52.Fr. Paul Valadier S.J. (France)

53.Don Vittorio Cristelli (Italy)

54.Bishop Bartolome Carrasco Briseno (Mexico)

55.Fr. Philippe Denis, O.P. (France)

56.Bishop Samuel Ruiz (Mexico)

57. Teresa Berger (Germany)

58.Fr. Renato Kizito Sesana (Kenya)

59. Don Leonardo Zega (Italy)

60. Fr. John Sye Kong-seok (Korea)

61. Fr. Paul Cheong Yang-mo (Korea)

62.Fr. Edouard Ri Jemin (Korea)

63.Fr, Jacques Dupuis, S.J. (Belgium)

64. Luigi Lombardi Vallauri (Italy)

65.Fr. Jim Callan (USA)

66.Monsig. Luigi Marinelli (Italy)

67.Reinhard Messner (Austria)

68.Fr. Marciano Vidal (Spain)

69.Josef Imbach, O.F.M. (Italy)

70.Don Franco Barbero (Italy)

71.Fr. Cipriano Carini, O.S.B. (Italy)

72.Juan Jose Tamayo (Spain)

73.Don Vitaliano Della Sala (Italy)

74.Rev Mary Ramerman (USA)  

75.Rev. Ludmila Javorova (Czechoslovakia)

76.Bishop Feli Maria Devidek (Czechoslovakia)

77.Rev. Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger (Austria)

78.Rev. Adelina Theresia Roitinger (Austria)

79.Rev. Gisela Forster (Germany)

80.Rev. Iris Mueller (Germany)

81.Rev. Ida Raming (Germany)

82.Ren, Pia Brunner (Germany)

83.Rev. Angela White (Austria and USA)

84.Fr. Edward Cachia (Canada)

85.Fr. Clodovis Boff (Brazil)

86.Fr. Bill Callahan, S.J. (USA)

87.Fr. Johannas Metz (Germany)

88.Fr.Pedro Arrupe, S.J. (Spain)

89.Fr. Alvero Arguello (Nicaragua)

90.Fr. Jacques Pohier O.P. (France)

91.Archbishop Oscar Ramero (El Salvador)

92.Bishop George Robinson (Australia)

93.Fr. John Dear, S.J. (USA)

94. Fr. Roy Bourgeois, MM (USA)

95.Bishop William Morris (Australia)

96.Sr. Elizabeth A. Johnson (USA)

97.Fr. Willigis Jager, OSB (Germany)

98.Fr. Jose Maria Vigil, CMF (Spain)

99.Fr. Jose Comblin, CMF (Spain)

100.Fr. Joseph Imbach, OSF (Germany)

101.Fr. Benjamin Foreano, CMF (Spain)

Source: The Pope’s War, Matthew Fox, 2011, Pg 238-241