It is a topic quite in the news these days in the United States. But abuse in the Catholic Church in America is neither limited to clerics nor is it restricted to sexual abuse. For the perpetration of abuse, and serious abuse at that, is also to be found among ‘professional’ lay Catholics in the nation – Catholics who purport to teach the Faith to others. This includes those who are part of the Third Order Franciscans in the US, some of whom also blog for conservative and ‘reputable’ Catholic mainstream media outlets.
For example, you will find among the above, with black-on-white evidence, men who claim to say the Liturgy of the Hours daily to fulfill their Third Order obligations and “pursue holiness” – while telling women to go and prostitute their bodies for money (concurrently mocking their physical appearance), and also to commit self-abuse. And this even to women who are consecrated to God. These are men who, at the same time, love pontificating to all on the nature of mortal sin under the rubric of hamartiology.
You will find men – White, middle-class, middle-aged, ‘respectable’, heterosexual Catholic men – who write repeatedly about the lives of the saints and how they find them inspirational – while threatening different kinds and levels of violence toward women in revenge, if (when) their threats are ignored; even lying without compunction to priests in an attempt to fraudulently extort large sums of money from their victims. Men who file false statements with multinational corporations under penalty of perjury and who threaten women with pennilessness and homelessness. Men who are receiving the Eucharist, it needs to be said, to their own eternal damnation. And you will find men who consider themselves ‘good Catholic gentlemen’ – while using all kinds of unrepeatable language toward women in what has been described as sadistic hate mail bordering on the level of psychological torture; also attempting (in vain) to blackmail others in order to gain one thing and one thing alone: money. For Mammon is their god.
Not the God of Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yakov, from whose Spirit none of the above behaviors come.
Poseurs and tartuffes. Hypocrites par excellence. Fraudsters, as has been said by others.
No better words describe such men. This is just the tip of the abuse iceberg, the rot, that is present among the ‘professional’ lay Catholic class in the US.
And it needs to be cleaned out, once and for all.
