The "lavender mafia". (Book Review).

Michael S. Rose, Goodbye! Good Men. Washington, DC: Regnery Press, 2002, 288 pp. Hard cover $27.95

Back in 1995, Omaha's Archbishop Curtiss wrote an article in his diocesan newspaper in which he made a startling assertion based, he said, on his experience as a seminary rector and diocesan vocations director. He charged those responsible for promoting vocations with having a "death wish" for the male, celibate priesthood, and declared that the priest shortage was "artificial and contrived." Curtiss said that for decades seminaries had been turning away candidates who exhibited orthodoxy or piety, or did not jump on the bandwagon of dissent regarding Catholic moral teaching.

His article was reprinted in Our Sunday Visitor, and sparked a mini-controversy that lasted several months. Ironically, the critics seemed to back up Curtiss's thesis; the National Catholic Reporter interviewed several vocation directors who negatively criticized Curtiss's article and Catholic teaching, effectively substantiating his claim. The well-known liberal priest- sociologist Andrew Greeley affirmed the existence within the Church of a largely gay bureaucracy, which he gleefully termed a "lavender mafia," controlling the portals, hallways, and bedrooms of many Catholic institutions.

Enter Michael S. Rose, Catholic commentator and investigative journalist, whose latest book Goodbye! Good Men picks up where the Curtiss controversy left off, and is even more startling in its revelations. Rose interviewed more than 125 current and former seminarians, priests, and faculty from dozens of seminaries across the U.S. and Canada, and fearlessly names people and places that have become infected with an institutionalized corruption that exudes not just the whiff, but the full, rotting stench of the diabolic. His thesis, in short, is that there is an organized, deliberate attempt to create a vocational shortage, in order to advance the agenda for a married and female priesthood, as well as a new, relativized moral theology. This is sustained by a network of unorthodox and heavily homosexual seminary staff who weed out orthodox candidates, all under the ignorance or blind eye of the bishops.

The book reveals a seminary underworld where sexual harassment and homosexual promiscuity are commonplace, and where the chaste seminarian is marginalized and submitted to intrusive and debasing psychological evaluations. In many Catholic schools, psychotherapy's dogma that sexual relationships are necessary to authentic personhood is often allowed to trump Catholic moral teaching. Seminarians who show fidelity to Catholic teaching are routinely mocked, and many, spent from fighting for survival and sanity, leave the seminary in disgust. In story after shocking story, Rose shows how this pattern has been entrenched throughout North America, becoming a hidden status quo, while the facade of normality served.

In one moving account, a seminarian tells how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago helped him persevere in his vocation: "His imprisonment and constant surevilkance was in many ways identical to my seminary life in which cultural revolutionaries sought to 'rehabilitate' the orthodox into becoming full-fledged party members on the new dissidence. As in the former USSR, if you opposed the 'party line,' which in the case of the sereinary was their particular brand of heterodoxy, then you were labelled mentally unfit and kept under close scrutiny for 'your own safety.' The games, spying, hidden agenda, as well as the vast bureaucracy, of the KGB were cloned in the seminaries across America: "Fellow seminarians spy on one another; blackmail, intimidation, slander, threats, and even violence are employed to protect the status quo Quote the Pope and you are an arch-conservtive, John Birch, KKK, neo-Nazi; quote Gore Vidal and you are an intellectual Renaissance man."

Another seminarian tells how he was expelled from the American College at Louvain, Belgium, for refusing to enter into an "intimate" affair with a senior seminarian.

Rose spares no detail in anecdote or criticism this book, therefore, is not for the faint of heart. He names the more flagrant hotbeds of homosexuality and heterodoxy, seminaries such as Baltimore's St. Mary's (nicknamed the "Pink Palace"), New Orleans' Notre Dame ("Notre Flame"), San Francisco's St. Patrick's Seminary, Chicago's Mundelein, and others. He demonstrates that the problem is so widespread, few seminaries--Canadian schools included--have been left untouched. Rose acknowledges that many seminaries have been reformed in recent years. But this is an expose, and corruption, past and present, is brought to light with unabashed realism.

Those of us who were at or around seminaries in the 1980s and early 1990s will find an eerie resonance with these testimonials. From the effete campiness of many seminarians and clerics, to the heretical books passing as foundational texts at Catholic colleges, few late-20th-century Catholics involved in Catholic apostolate or study could have failed to observe the symptoms of a disorder. And symptoms they are, since the deeper crisis must necessarily be one of guardianship. It begs the question: where were the watchmen?

The cure

It is precisely here that Rose (not just diagnosing an illness) points to the cure. He observes that while dissent kills vocations, orthodoxy begets vocations. He examines the success of dioceses such as Lincoln, Omaha, Arlington, and Denver, which have enjoyed an abundance of vocations. He singles out the Diocese of Peoria as a prime example, which, under Bishop John J. Myers (now Archbishop of Newark, NJ), and with a Catholic population of only 232,000, ordained 72 priests in the years 1991-1998, an average of nine each year. This he compares to the Milwaukee Archdiocese, under Archbishop Rembert Weakland, with a Catholic population three times that of Peoria, which has suffered a vocational dearth, ordaining just two priests in 2001. The difference, Rose posits, is that one bishop is faithful to magisterial teaching while the other is a leader in the movement of dissent. One promotes the true sacramental nature of the priesthood; the other advertises it as a sort of glorified social work.

Rose cogently argues that bishops can have success in restoring orthodoxy to their dioceses, often with startling results. He recounts the remarkable case of the Archdiocese of Denver. When then-Archbishop Stafford bought their plagued seminary from the doctrinally-challenged Vincentians, he and his successor Archbishop Charles Chaput oversaw a dramatic increase in vocations, from 26 in 1991 to 88 in 1999. Today the new St. John Vianney Seminary is rooted in the theology of John Paul II and Catholic Tradition, and its students and faculty are overtly and joyfully supportive of the sacred character of the priestly vocation. Noteworthy is the marked absence of sexual scandals from these dioceses.

The recent flux of allegations and disclosures of priestly sexual abuse have demoralized many Catholics, who are now searching for answers. This book effectively and wrenchingly puts its finger on at least one of the root causes of the crisis, and is a must-read for all Catholics interested in the spiritual health of the Church. It has been praised by Catholic historian James Hitchcock, who said: "Few books in the past thirty years have shed more light on the continuing crisis in the Catholic Church."

The background story of Goodbye! Good Men also bears mentioning. First released in spring of this year by Aquinas Publishing, with a forward by Alice von Hildebrand, and the subtitle "How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood," it featured high praise from well-known advance reviewers, and word spread rapidly through Catholic and secular circles.

Now Goodbye! Good Men has been picked up by the conservative publishing giant Regnery Press, which has given it the provocative new subtitle: "How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church", with a reputed print run of more than 250,000 copies.

To my mind this book serves three purposes: first, it will shatter any lingering notion that all is well in the formation houses of our priests; second, it will dissolve the myth that celibacy is the cause of sexual disorders in priests; third, it will constitute a clarion call for Catholics to demand a reform of the Church, one which sees Catholic teaching more faithfully and vigorously proclaimed.

John O'Brien is director of Wayside Academy, Peterborough, ON.