When Theodore McCarrick was spooning and fondling seminarians, quite obviously he did not consider how far his enormities would reverberate.
At the General Judgement, he will be shown how far his despicable actions have reverberated through society and how they harmed the lives of people he has never met. At the General Judgement, he will know, and it will be excruciating. And there he will meet my daughters.
My wife and I have worked very hard to keep the wolves away from our daughters. We have never considered sending them to corrupt government schools. We searched and found authentic Catholic schools and moved our home to be close to them. And when I say authentic, I mean it. We know too much to fall into the trap of trusting parents from decades ago who sent their children to “Catholic” schools that only ended up ruining their faith.
We moved into a community with like-minded families and what we teach our children is mirrored in the homes of their friends. We purified our house of cable television years ago. We finally gave it up when the gay agenda even barged into cooking shows. We stopped taking the New York Times and the Washington Post because they are tools of propaganda rather than newspapers.
We are well aware that the broader culture offers pure poison for children, and seeks to recruit our children into its soul-destroying army, like the Sultan kidnapping Christian children and turning them into Janissary armies to battle the Christians.
At the risk of being overly dramatic, we know demons are circling around their precious heads, trying to find a way in, a way to ruin them, steal their souls, damn them.
And so, after all these years of protecting our daughters, we now face the prospect of sullying their innocence by telling them about Uncle Ted and the men who helped him and hid him. Who would have thought our own churchmen would be among the wolves? Who would have thought it would be princes of the Church who would harm our children’s innocence?
No, our daughters are not the immediate victims of this vicious behavior. But, news of Theodore McCarrick and his enablers will surely reach them. What horror for them. They love their priests. They love their bishop and all bishops. What will they hear? What will it do to their faith? We cannot know. And so, we have to tell them first and help them understand as if anyone can understand.
The culture has forced us to tell our daughters what the “gay rights” movement has done to marriage. I was watching that cooking show with them when a female chef started talking about her “wife.” Our culture is all-gay all-day. No way to avoid it and that is how they want it. They will not allow us any privacy away from their ideology.
But our daughters do not know about the perfidy of some heretical, hypocritical Catholic priests. They do not know it would be remotely possible for a Cardinal to molest his spiritual sons. And we certainly won’t tell them that.
But they are well-catechized children, and they know the story of Judas. We will remind them of him, the Apostle who betrayed Christ and the Church and ended up killing himself. Judas reminds us that some number of Bishops will turn on Christ and his Church, and that includes us. We can talk about Judas and through him explain that something terrible has happened with at least one of our shepherds, that he has betrayed the Christ, the Church, and us.
We will explain that former Cardinal McCarrick is a Judas for the modern age, a Judas for all time, and so are all those who were in positions to do something but never did. So are all those who promoted him knowing full well what he had done. Did they not even consider this would come out? Did they not think that we would all know, that my daughters would find out and be scandalized? But, with our daughters we will pray that these Judases do not end like him. We will pray with them that they seek forgiveness.
We have worked hard to protect the innocence of our daughters. We have largely kept Satan at bay. But Satan is a wily fellow, and we never considered he would come to them in the guise of a bishop.
(Photo credit: Cardinal McCarrick meets Pope Francis on July 24, 2018; Vatican Media / CNA)