Arturo Vazquez eloquently discusses the treatment of Bishop Weakland by the local traditionalists for Inside Catholic. He has also written an after-article, wherein he accuses the traditionalistas of casting stones and residing in glass houses, citing some abuses by a few clerics of traditional or conservative bent.
Despite making some awfully good points, he denies the significance of the salient issue of the relationship between homosexuality and the liberal agenda which Bishops like Weakland propose by undertones and overtones so obvious and monstrous, it's difficult to do them justice to a clerical set and laity so morally anesthetized and stunned, they don't know if what they see is real - don't believe it can be true.
Considering the work of Randy Engel's Rite of Sodomy, Michael Rose's, Good-bye, Good men, Father Cozzens' Freeing Celibacy and the last forty or so years of periodicals like The Wanderer, not to mention some of our own personal experiences of clerical failure in this line, it's hard to believe that there isn't a dreadful correlation between the sin of Sodom and that all-too-familiar self-indulgent behavior from the clerical homosexual with regard to notoriously bad taste in everything from liturgy to music and theology. From my perspective it's hard not to be sympathetic to the traditionalistas crying for some retribution, and it's still harder to bypass the tribulations of those people who've left the Church for this reason. Frankly, it's an injustice that this man still walks the street and has any freedom at all to attempt to justify himself, as guilty and close-minded as even he makes himself to be, in the national spotlight. No doubt, he's still got supporters, viscious men in soft garments, no doubt, and a small hoard of loyal pew warmers who still can't believe the truth.
I wrote on Arturo's blog a brief rejoinder: you do highlight his impoverished, malfeasant and highly bureaucratized life, but remain critical of him none the less, while asking those of us, and I am one, who are critical enough of him to want him punished by the civil arm and not at liberty, if we don't live in glass houses.
We're not Bishops, actually, we've just been sold a bill of goods and bear the responsibillity of what our ancestors handed down to us when they taught us to say our prayers, and asked us if we knew our Catechism.
The only thing I wanted on my First Communion, aside from the vague sense that I was communicating with Jesus who loves me, having memorized the Apostle's Creed which I remember to this day, not to be too impious, was the cake and presents I was going to get when I'd made my first communion. I was filled with this idea of my importance and that I had just come upon a milestone in my life. I was given something of inestimable importance, yet I very dimly understood it, and I bear the burden of that moment, my self-importance, vanity and fascination with that tasty, frosted cake.
But I'm not a Bishop, nor am I a priest, nor am I [Fr] Timothy Svea. It's not fair to compare them, for their burdens are unequal to the ones that we bear. Those of us who are laymen, married or not.
Perhaps you rightly point out that we put our foot in mouth, for we all sin, but most of us aren't Bishops entrusted with the souls of a large North American Diocese, and I'd also like to point out that the unpunished pathological histrionicism of this Bishop, [Fr.] Timothy Svea or Fr. Vander Putten (if what you say is true) is not a burden that most traditionalists share, however self-important, overreaching and vain we are.
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