Amchurch Comes Out. (Book Review).

Paul Likoudis, Amchurch Comes Out, Petersburg, Ill, Roman Catholic Faithful Inc., P.O. Box 109, tel. [phone], www.rcf.org; 2002, xxi + 260 pp., $32.50 (Cdn.).

After Michael Rose's Goodbye! Good Men, which, despite some controversial sections, has been a startling expose of widespread homosexuality and pro-homosexuality in American Catholic seminaries, we now have a startling expose of widespread homosexuality and pro-homosexuality in the larger Catholic Church in America.

Paul Likoudis is news editor of the Catholic weekly, The Wanderer, the oldest independent lay-run Catholic newspaper in the United States. This present book is really Amchurch Comes out of the Closet. "Amchurch" is "shorthand to signify a deeply entrenched, influential, dissident faction within the leadership of the Catholic Church in our country -- among the bishops, the heads of religious orders, college and university administrators, chancery officials, prominent theologians, and university faculty." And this book is a blow-by-blow account of how homosexual Amchurch has become, and of the persons who have brought this about. In the fourth century St. Jerome wrote that the Church woke up one morning and found itself Arian. In the twenty-first century the Church has awakened one morning and found itself homosexual.

The author has done research on this topic for fifteen years, much of it having been published piecemeal in The Wanderer. Individual articles do not have the force of a collected work, however, and this painful recital of betrayal after betrayal of the Church's teaching on homosexuality is like a bombshell. One would think that by itself it would force the Church to action, but recent history tells us that likely nothing would happen unless the results of homosexuality in the clergy were blazoned on our secular newspapers time after time. In June, 2002, at the meeting in Dallas of the United States bishops, Bishop Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, made a motion that the bishops appoint a committee to look into the relation between homosexuality and child abuse, but the bishops voted it down!!! Why was it voted down? This book helps us to understand why.

It deals with bishops and priests who have abused boys sexually; bishops who foster pro-homosexual appointments and activities; priests and religious who promote the homosexual way of life; and Catholic lay homosexual activists. There are pro-homosexual programs in Catholic schools which claim to help young people who have some attraction to the opposite sex, and the parents of these children, but the young people and their parents are not told that homosexual sexual activity is sinful, or that very often a homosexual attraction can be altered by therapy. New Ways Ministry, a dissenting Catholic homosexual group, recently had a symposium in Louisville, KY, sponsored by over 60 organizations most of which were religious orders of men or women. The dissident Catholic homosexual group Dignity has often been granted privileges by Catholic bishops to use Church property, even churches, for their activities.

Fr. Enrique Rueda, in his 1982 The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy, told us what was happening and what it would lead to, but "the evidence is now irrefutable that an influential and very powerful coterie within the Catholic Church -- well-embedded and well-protected by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and their peers in the police, the courts, the legislatures, and the media -- is successfully advancing a sexual liberation agenda that will not end until every social stigma attached to any sexual activity, no matter how bizarre, has been erased."

The book "chronicles a story which would literally be unbelievable had we not actually lived through it, a descent into Hell which would have been unimaginable fifty years ago .... Homosexuals ... in the priesthood rose to prominence in the Church ... and began carefully plotting and promoting a sexual liberation, ... an agenda that first manifested itself in the new catechetical texts.... The immediate attacks were on Church teaching regarding masturbation, fornication, adultery, contraception, and divorce; but by the middle of the 1980s it became clear that this was only the first stage, to be followed by the aggressive promotion of homosexuality, bisexuality, and 'transgenderism'."

"There have been close to a thousand ... cases involving tens ... of thousands of victims, costing the Church an estimated $1 billion .... And, through all this, the leadership of the Catholic Church in the United States has pursued a homosexualizing agenda in its grammar and high schools; colleges and seminaries; social service agencies; ... catechetics; and pastoral ministries at the diocesan and parish levels."

This book should do as much as the present court cases of sexual abuse of boys and young men to begin a reform in the Church.