Refusing To Reform
by Thomas A. Droleskey
The lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism have dealt with the truths of the Faith in an arbitrary manner, accepting some, rejecting others, redefining many to the suit the needs of their false religion that has devastated so many hundreds of millions of souls and has deprived the world of many graces as they have blasphemed and profaned the honor and glory and majesty of the Most Blessed Trinity. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that they have dealt with their critics arbitrarily, finding the clericalism of the past to be very much in vogue when it suits their purposes to seek to silence and intimidate those who have their doctrinal defections, administrative malfeasance, and unrepentant persistence in moral misdeeds to light.
One would think that the scandals that have broken into full public view in the past eight years after having been reported in such disparate outlets as The Wanderer and The National Catholic Distorter (er, Reporter) and the over $2 billion that they have had to pay out since 2002 would be enough human incentive for the conciliar "bishops" to reform their ways. No, steeped in a prideful arrogance that makes some of their pre-conciliar predecessors in the Catholic Church seem like timid pussycats by way of comparison, many of the contemporary 'bishops" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism are still determined to punish "whistle-blowers," still determined even at this late date to intimidate others who might come forth with any past or current allegations of clerical misconduct.
Consider this report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the conduct of the recently installed conciliar "archbishop" of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Jerome Listecki, when he was the conciliar "bishop" of La Crosse, Wisconsin:
The Eau Claire police chief is accusing Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki of being untruthful to lawmakers about the notification procedure for clergy sex abuse allegations in the La Crosse Diocese, where he previously served as bishop.
In a development that victims' advocates say is related, a La Crosse priest has been charged with sexually assaulting a woman he was counseling through a divorce, months after the diocese investigated and found no credible evidence supporting her accusations.
In a Jan. 22 letter to state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, Eau Claire Police Chief Jerry Matysik takes issue with a La Crosse Diocese policy that directs those with accusations of clergy sex abuse involving children to notify the diocese - rather than civil authorities, as directed by some dioceses.
According to Matysik, Listecki told Erpenbach during a Jan. 12 Senate Judiciary hearing that the policy was not current, saying, "If you take a look at the statement, that's not something that is happening now."
Matysik said the policy has remained unchanged, only substituting Diocesan Administrator Monsignor Richard Gilles' name as the point of contact for Listecki's, who took over as Milwaukee's archbishop in January.
In the letter to Erpenbach, Matysik said: "Senator Erpenbach, I carefully reviewed the interchange between you and Archbishop Listecki and it is clear that Archbishop Listecki's response was untruthful."
In an interview Thursday, Matysik said about Listecki: "He either misunderstood the question or misled the committee."
For more than a year, Matysik has been trying to get the La Crosse Diocese to change the statement, which appeared in the La Crosse Catholic Times as recently as late January.
"Archbishop Listecki appears more interested in protecting the organization than he is in protecting children," he said.
Listecki was not available for comment Thursday, his spokeswoman said. Erpenbach did not return a call seeking comment. The Jan. 12 hearing involved a bill that would make it easier for sex abuse victims to sue their offenders, which Listecki testified against.
Attorney defends diocese
La Crosse Diocese attorney James Birnbaum said the diocese's notification policy has been vetted by auditors and law enforcement officials on its sex abuse review board and made available to prosecutors in the diocese's 19 counties, and that no one but Matysik has taken issue with it. He said the policy lets the diocese respond more quickly to protect children, and that it turns over all allegations involving children immediately to civil authorities as required by law.
"We've never failed to report (child sex abuse) immediately to authorities," he said.
The Milwaukee Archdiocese's notification statement, which is posted on its Web site at www.archmil.org, directs those with complaints of sexual abuse involving victims younger than age 18 to notify civil authorities.
The latest sex abuse charge in La Crosse, against the Rev. Edmund Donkor-Baine, a visiting priest from Guyana, involves an adult, for which there is no state requirement to notify civil authorities. But it illustrates the concerns raised by victim advocates who say the La Crosse Diocese, where Listecki served as bishop from 2005 until 2009, sides overwhelmingly with priests over victims.
Donkor-Baine, 47, is accused of indecent [crimes, details removed from this site] in August. . . .
Donkor-Baine, who is free on a $250 signature bond, is scheduled for a hearing Feb. 11 in La Crosse County Circuit Court on a charge of fourth-degree sexual assault.
La Crosse County Sheriff's Capt. Kurt Papenfuss said the woman first reported the incident to the diocese, but it dismissed the allegations as not credible.
Birnbaum denied that characterization in an interview Thursday but was quoted in the La Crosse Tribune as saying "sufficient evidence did not exist to confirm the woman's story. There were no other like or similar allegations ever made."
A letter from Listecki to the woman in December said he needed a "sufficient amount of corroborating evidence to proceed" and could not "conclusively determine what happened," but the diocese has taken steps to limit and monitor the priest's activities.
A study for the U.S. Conference of Bishops found that the La Crosse Diocese sided with priests over victims in 64% of cases, compared with the national average of just less than 10%.
"This is a real-time illustration of what we've been trying to bring forward about the problem up there," Peter Isely of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said of the charges against Donkor-Baine. "The bishop is instructing Catholics to report sex crimes to him. That's what this woman did, and this is what happened."
Papenfuss and Matysik, who was not involved in the investigation involving the woman, said victims of crimes should notify police, not the perpetrator or his employer.
"If my car is stolen, I'm not going to go to the thief," Papenfuss said. "Why would you go to the person who wronged you?" (Listecki misled legislators on policy, Eau Claire police chief says - JSOnline.)
Apart from the refusal to admit that one has been negligent in the supervision of his subordinates, a problem that recent events have taught us once again cuts across the vast expanses of the ecclesiastical divide, the conciliar "bishops" have refused to reform their behavior in large measure because many of them do not understand the horror of personal sin themselves and they see no problem in denigrating the seriousness of the persistence by others in personal sins, no less those sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and those that involve the spiritual and physical abuse of the sheep who had entrusted their souls to their pastoral care. Many of the conciliar "bishops" do not accept that an inclination to commit perverse sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments is in and of itself abnormal and a sign of mental illness (see
Statement Of The Catholic Medical Association).
Moreover, the conciliar bishops and their henchmen in their chancery offices and who work for their insurance companies and attorneys have sought to make an "example" of those who dare to bring their legitimate concerns known even privately before, acting in full accord with the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the matter, that they have had to go public with abuses that have gone unacknowledged and/or uncorrected.
One of those who was particularly singled out for the imposition of the full weight of conciliar canonical disciplinary power has been "Father" James Haley of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, a man who remains in conciliar limbo some ten years after he first brought charges of moral impropriety against the then pastor of All Saints Church in Manassas, Virginia, "Father" James Verrechia, and "Fathers" William Ehrbacher and Daniel Hamilton. It was Father Haley who was subjected to the full weight of conciliar "canonical" discipline, not those who were guilty of grave abuses against Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the souls for whom He shed every drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem:
A Catholic priest who exposed the sexual misdeeds of fellow clergy at three parishes in the Diocese of Arlington is being prosecuted by his own bishop on five ecclesiastical charges.
The Rev. James R. Haley, an Arlington priest, will appear before a church tribunal to answer charges brought against him by the Most Rev. Paul S. Loverde, bishop of Arlington. Presiding as judge will be the Most Rev. Thomas G. Doran, bishop of Rockford, Ill.
The hearing is set for Wednesday at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa.
The charges against Father Haley include sexual misconduct; absolution of an accomplice in sexual sin; and the "use of instruments of social communication [the media] to injure good morals, to express insults and to excite hatred or contempt against the Church."
He also is charged with "publicly inciting subjects to animosities or hatred against a [bishop]" and "injuring the good reputation of another."
Sources familiar with the case say the first two charges involve an event in the mid-1990s involving a woman who made sexual advances toward the priest. When he refused her, she asked for absolution, which the priest granted.
Father Haley's attorney, Gregory Murphy, said the priest was found not guilty of any impropriety by the former Arlington bishop, the Most Rev. John R. Keating, who died in 1998.
"They're throwing in any issue they could find against him," Mr. Murphy said. "So they have dug up an incident that was, right from the start, found in Father Haley's favor."
Stephen Brady, president of Roman Catholic Faithful, a group defending the priest, said, "These issues were brought up several years ago and dealt with. So why is Loverde resurfacing them now?"
The bishop is exacting revenge, Mr. Brady said, for a July 2002 court deposition which Father Haley was subpoenaed to give about an affair between a married woman, Nancy Lambert, and the Rev. Daniel Verrechia, pastor of All Saints Catholic Church in Manassas. Father Haley was a priest at All Saints in 1999.
Mrs. Lambert later divorced her husband, Jim Lambert, and married Father Verrechia, with whom she has had a child. Mr. Lambert sued the diocese in 2002, saying Bishop Loverde knew of Father Verrecchia's relationship with Mrs. Lambert but did not remove him from the parish.
Although the lawsuit later was dismissed, Father Haley's testimony supported Mr. Lambert's contention that the diocese knew of the affair months before the priest was ordered to stop seeing Mrs. Lambert.
Father Haley also exposed misconduct by two other priests: the Rev. William J. Ehrbacher, who resigned as pastor of St. Lawrence Catholic Church in Franconia after an investigation revealed he stole from church collection plates and maintained a stash of homosexual pornography; and the Rev. Daniel Hamilton, pastor of St. Mary's Parish in Fredericksburg, Va., who resigned amid accusations that he kept a collection of homosexual porno- graphy in his rectory bedroom.
After Father Haley made public accusations against the priests, Bishop Loverde suspended him from all priestly functions and put him on a small stipend, his attorney said, reducing the cleric to a hand-to-mouth existence in different homes around the diocese.
Father Haley was in Richmond yesterday meeting with the Rev. Scott Duarte, a canon lawyer assigned to defend him in the case.
An e-mail from him to Father Duarte obtained by The Washington Times shows the priest learned of the trial only last Friday.
The Diocese of Arlington did not comment on the case. (Catholic Citizens.)
"Father" Haley is still in conciliar limbo nearly six years after his star-chamber hearing as the conciliar "bishops," affirmed time and time again by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, show that they have as much contempt for the moral probity of their subordinates as they do for complete fidelity to the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Mrs. Mary Ann Kreiter, the founder and president of Les Femmes, posted the following on blogspot she created last year to ask publicly about the canonical fate of "Father" Haley ten years after he first brought forth his accusations:
In 2001 Fr. James Haley was given four hours to vacate the St. Mary's rectory in Fredericksburg, VA where he was a pastoral vicar. His faculties were suspended and his preaching privileges were taken away. he was denied the right to wear clerical garb and was put under a penal precept of silence.
Why?
Did Fr. Haley molest a child?
Embezzle from the Church?
Murder a parishioner?
Strike the bishop?
No, his crime was providing Bishop Paul Loverde proof of the homosexual immorality of his pastor. It wasn't the first time. Father lived with one homosexual pastor after another during his 15 year service to the Church:
Pastors who had vicious collections of homosexual pornography,
A pastor who brought a little boy into his bedroom and others who engaged in homosexual relations with fellow priests or consenting adults, and some who "just" enjoyed the homosexual flirting and camaraderie of "the club."
Did Father make a public declaration? No, he brought the problem to the attention of his spiritual father, the bishop, as he should.
And did his spiritual father correct the situation? No, he moved Father Haley and allowed the homosexuals to continue on their merry ways.
Since Father's suspension in 2001, he has been an outcast - from his parishioners, his fellow priests, from the life of service he loved. He went from a respected and beloved spiritual father to a homeless vagabond - all for telling the truth - not to the world but to his bishop. I have watched the injustice for almost eight years and can no longer participate in the conspiracy of silence that allows a faithful priest to be a sacrificial lamb instead of the bishop's spiritual son. It is unjust and immoral.
Let me make it absolutely clear that this blog is entirely my doing and I have had no input or encouragement from Fr. Haley. Most of what appears here is a matter of public record that I am gathering in one place. I take full responsibility for the content.
Why am I doing it? Because I love Holy Mother Church who continues to suffer from the cancer of homosexuality, secrecy, and dissent. All three of those things tend to converge in the homosexual priest problem.
Finally, I ask Bishop Paul Loverde: Where, Your Excellency, is Fr. James Haley? (Bishop Loverde, Where is Fr. James Haley?: Letters to Bishop Loverde; see also an important link that discusses why those who seek to minimize the harm of pornography are contributing to the moral delinquency of souls,
HARD-CORE HARM: Why you can't be soft on porn. A more detailed article about the persecution of conciliar priests/presbyters by their conciliar "bishops" can be found at
Persecuted Priests. It has been sad to see this pattern of persecution repeated in the past three months, a pattern that has been documented on this site and on the SGG Info website.)
No conciliar "bishop" has stood up against "Bishop" Loverde. Not one. Some have said, at least privately, that the injustices visited against "Father" Haley are "local" matters that do not concern them, that they can't "interfere" with events in another diocese, especially those that have been adjudicated according to the precepts of the counterfeit church's "code of canon law." "Local matters." That lame phrase is just a slogan designed to assuage the consciences of those who should come to the defense of the persecuted but who believe that it is virtuous to remain silent in the face of persecution and injustice. "Local matters."
Thus it is that many "conservative" priests and presbyters in the conciliar structures who might come forth with documentation to protect the souls entrusted to their care have learned how to keep their own mouths shut about moral turpitude and abuse of clerical authority as they have been silent about the false "pontiff's" reaffirmation of adherents of false religions in their false beliefs and in that "pope's" efforts to evangelize anathematized propositions as being consonant with the Catholic Faith, and as these priests and presbyters have gone along with altar girls and what purports to be "Communion" in the hand and "Communion" under both kinds and the proliferation of laity in the sanctuary despite their knowing that these things are wrong and opposed to Catholic truth. A conspiracy of silence thus permits moral abuses to remain unchecked as those in "episcopal" authority seek to indemnify the abusers time and time and time again by intimidating whistle-blowers who are attempting to do their duty before God to seek to reform that which is in urgent need of reform.
As I have noted on other occasions on this site, I learned all about this clericalism decades ago when attempting to bring my own concerns as a "conservative" Catholic about what I thought at the time were "liturgical abuses" and my concerns about defections from the Faith that I realize now to be nothing other than normal expressions of the false faith that is conciliarism. Letters sent to "bishops" and chancery officials in the 1970s were met with perfunctory responses. Efforts to discuss matters on the "local" level in parishes with pastors and priests and presbyters resulted in protestations, sometimes made quite vociferously, that I was refusing to live in accordance with the "spirit of Vatican II," that I had no authority to correct or even to complain about things that went beyond even the officially approved abuses of the conciliar church. I received essentially the same kinds of responses after conducting first-hand interviews of the victims of perverted clergy and of "episcopal" abuse of power when writing hard news stories for The Wanderer in the 1990s.
Although I listened to those who argued with me in the 1980s about the futility of fighting battles in a false church, I trod along my merry way as I wrote letter after letter to conciliar officials in the Vatican. Advised that working on the "inside" would be helpful, I gave up a pretty secure government position in September of 1988 to work for a conciliar "bishop," the late James S. Sullivan of Fargo, North Dakota, as his ghostwriter and communications director, being aghast at how he tolerated liturgical "abuses," which included the invocation of the names of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Oscar Romero, among others, in the Novus Ordo version of the Litany of the Saints during what purported to be the Easter Vigil Mass on March 25, 1989.
I just could not fathom how this "conservative" bishop, who died on June 12, 2006, and who was very devoted to Our Lady's Fatima Message, was so hostile to the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, which had just been "liberated," I thought at the time, by the Ecclesia Dei motu proprio to extend the earlier "indult" for the offering of the modernized version of the true Mass that had been granted when I was visiting Rome in 1984. There was no intention to seek to discipline malefactors. Indeed, the man responsible for the invocation of Martin Luther King and Oscar Romero in the "Litany of the Saints" at Saint Mary's Cathedral in Fargo, North Dakota, nearly twenty-one years ago now, Father Al Bitz, is the conciliar pastor of the Basilica of Saint James Church in Jamestown, North Dakota, hardly a demotion for a man whose "liturgy committee" at Saint Mary's Cathedral demanded to vet the sermons given by a presbyter known for his "conservative" leanings back in 1989.
No one who is as of yet attached to the conciliar structures can contend that the false "pope" and his false "bishops," men who have shown no inclination at all to return to the Catholic Faith, have any intention of reforming even their administrative procedures that have caused so much scandal and have dispirited so many millions upon millions of Catholics as now over $2 billion in monies have been paid out so needlessly to victims of their abuse of power and their indifference to moral crimes that should have been handled with alacrity as soon as they were brought to their attention. Men who believe that the sheep are lesser creatures and who believe that it is a crime against the clerical state to bring even privately complaints to them lest their tender sensibilities and sense of impeccability be disturbed will remain unbent in their arrogance until the point of their deaths, barring, of course, a miracle of grace, as those who stiffen their necks and harden their hearts to the bleating of the sheep entrusted to their care will find that God withdraws His graces from them more and more as they persist in their indifference to the suffering of those who have looked to them for examples of the tender mercies of His Most Sacred Heart.
We must make sure that we never fall into this trap ourselves, that we recognize that we must reform our own lives on a daily basis, especially as we approach the holy season of Lent, and that it is frequently the case that our best friends are the ones who force us to take a hard look at ourselves in order to help correct that which needs to be corrected before the moment of our own Particular Judgments.
We must pray very fervently to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as clients of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially on this First Friday of the month of the Poor Souls, the month of November, that we will live long enough to make reparation for our sins and that we will be humble enough to accept the reform of our lives when the Saint Johns of the Cross that God places in our lives attempt to help us to rediscover the simple truth that we are not infallible and that we can always learn from those seeking to help us without castigating them as our enemies.
To Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart belongs the triumph that will vanquish the lords of Modernism once and for all. May our own efforts to make reparation for our sins, many though they may be, to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our states in life permit, help to plant a few seeds so that more and more Catholics, clergy and laity alike, yet attached to the false structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism will make the break once and for all and receive true Sacraments from true bishops and true priests who make absolutely no concessions to conciliarism, men who are never afraid to speak the truth and act with complete integrity in its behalf, knowing that we never have anything to fear from the truth about the state of the Church in this time of apostasy and betrayal and, yes, more importantly, the truth about ourselves, no matter how painful that may be for us to face at any moment of our lives.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
