This morning (22 Feb) I watched the report on Holland’s public broadcaster (NOS) about the opening of the Vatican summit dealing with clerical sexual abuse of minors (via satellite). The reporter puffed to bursting with indignation and adopting the manner of a North Korean newsreader laid into the Catholic Church.

There was no end to the evil of that malignant organisation whose desecration of children went back ‘perhaps’ centuries. Nothing had changed, she said, indirectly suggesting the clerical sexual abuse would end when the Church was destroyed. In a way, the reporter can’t be blamed for her manner and the distortions, even falsehoods, of her report. A fierce incorrigible anti-Catholic bigotry has long seized the low countries. She wouldn’t dare departing from the national narrative.

The Australian midday news reports were more subdued. The Seven Network, drawing on the usual critics of the Church, lay and clerical, blamed ‘clericalism’ for the corruption, meaning the power and authority structures were to blame. This is the refrain we get from the Catholic left. Eliminate the power structures and you will eliminate the sexual abuse.

Astonishingly the ABC midday news did not cover the summit which might indicate they were already aware of an alternative unreported narrative in the background. They might be reflecting on the case of Mr McCarrick, the recently defrocked and laicised Cardinal who until recently wielded enormous power in the American Church. Indeed, Mr McCarrick is the window through which one might see the full dimensions of clerical sexual behaviour.

It was a poorly kept secret that McCarrick for years led a homosexual lifestyle which he made scant efforts to hide from his immediate surroundings. It was an open secret that he had affairs with adult priests and seminarians besides seducing teenagers. McCarrick was the powerful de facto leader of the homosexual network that has the American Church in its grip. That network is no small group.

The records show a sharp rise in the numbers of homosexuals entering American seminaries from the late 1950s. The records show that the rise in the numbers was paired with the sharp rise in the sexual abuse of minors. A related figure is the claim that up to 80% of clergy in the Vatican are homosexual. Indeed, the incidence of male-on-male abuse suggests the network is worldwide. For insiders and close commentators, this network is a given.

When the reports of clerical sexual abuse began to surface more than 25 years ago in Australia, many orthodox Catholics thought the anti-Catholic media were at it again. The last few years have brought a dramatic change, Of course, the mainstream media will always be anti-Catholic. Anti-Catholic bigotry landed with the First Fleet and the media is crammed full of scribblers whose heads are full to bursting with Marxist/postmodernist propaganda. But we realise now that much of the reporting contains some truth. There has been widespread sexual abuse of minors and there has been a cover-up. The difference is in understanding the cause and its background. The cause is homosexuality and the cover-up is of the network protecting its own.

It is a travesty that the extensive Royal Commission in Australia into the clerical sexual abuse turned a blind eye to the wider dimension of clerical sexual abuse that has become so obvious in the American Church. Instead, it used its power to destroy a decent man whose religious, social and political ideas were in conflict with those of the leftist hegemony. It established the groundwork for a framing of state proportions.