Bulletins

August 12, 2018

This week I had wanted to be able to tell you about the National Catholic Classical Schools Conference which I attended recently at Catholic University along with our new Headmaster, Jeff Presberg. The Institute for Classical Liberal Education (ICLE) put on the event and even included our very own Michael Ortner as one of the plenary speakers. An article about it and us recently appeared in the Arlington Catholic Herald. It was a great week.

The Herald went to press just a day too early to be able to include the news that Mary Pat Donoghue, Director of School Services for the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, has just been appointed as the new Executive Director of the Secretariat of Catholic Education for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Mary Pat was the founding Headmaster of St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, Maryland, when it made its now famous move to a classical curriculum. I could not be more encouraged by the USCCB having hired her.

Instead I have to talk about criminal Cardinals and capital punishment. It may seem a week too late but we do have our own turn-around time with which to contend. The solution would have been easier a week ago: anyone found to commit a crime against the innocence of a child should have a millstone tied to his neck and be thrown into the river. But now I can’t say that. If solitary confinement for life sounds worse than the death penalty, let’s agree to compromise.

Speaking of compromise, let’s see who is willing to ban both the death penalty and abortion by the same legislative act. I know many traditionally--minded folks who would go for that in a second.

On a different but related note I can say that any spouse caught in and genuinely repentant of the sin of adultery can be forgiven and even restored to the common life. A cleric caught in a similar sin should be punished more severely. While we mull over the nolonger-secret sins of Cardinals, can anyone tell me why Archbishop Weakland still has a public ministry? In the meantime I can tell you that even as a seminarian twenty-some years ago I heard about purportedly bad habits with (gulp) seminarians practiced by Archbishop McCarrick. The allegations were common knowledge. His predation against minors, however, could not have been known widely. Seminarians hear every rumor, even the false ones. The Holy See apparently knew about Uncle Ted’s bedroom policy at the New Jersey Shore. The word I heard is that those who complained about it found out later that the eventual Archbishop of Washington was only told to get rid of the beach house. I have to admit that I am genuinely surprised that no American bishop has brought this to light in their own defense. At the time it was crushing to my confidence I had in the system.

There is no cavalry. We have to rely on each other.

God have mercy on us. Christ, save us.

Fr. Christopher J. Pollard

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