Dear Ann,

A blessed and merry Christmas to you.

Thank you for your blog posts and videos, many of which I have found very helpful in understanding the current insanity in the Church and the world. I am particularly thankful for your recent posts on clerical celibacy and continence.

In the novus ordo Church, even before Pope Frankenstein the Merciful, there is a common notion that allowing a priest to be laicized, so he can marry a woman, is a merciful concession to human weakness.

BULL-.

I am a priest, and I am strongly attracted to women. I can understand the idea that allowing a priest to continue in his ministry after he has fallen into sexual sin (and therefore also sacrilege) with a woman and repented is a merciful concession to human weakness. By the grace of God I have never fallen into such sin as a priest, but I can easily understand how it’s possible.

Laicization and marriage is completely different. Repentance, and therefore true mercy, which requires repentance to be effective, is totally absent. In its place is substituted the cleaning up of a canonically irregular situation. A priest violates his grave obligation of continence by getting it on with a woman, and possibly also violates his obligation of celibacy by invalidly attempting civil marriage with her; and the response of the ecclesiastical authorities is to dispense him from his obligations and allow him to marry her validly in the Church.

Um, no. That doesn’t help. It actually hurts. A lot.

Although it may mean his future copulation with his wife isn’t mortally sinful, it does nothing to purge him of the guilt of his previous mortal sins of fornication, sacrilege, and abandoning his priestly ministry. On the contrary, by receiving a nice signed and sealed rescript from Rome, he is encouraged to believe that he has done the right thing, and is now “right with the Church.” Of course that’s not true. As alter Christus, he was espoused to the Bride of Christ, and has now abandoned Her for some trull that he found more to his liking. His repentance now will almost require a miracle. He will very probably burn in Hell for all eternity, with the blessing of his bishop and the Pope. And how they will avoid burning in Hell for helping him get there, I don’t know.

My moral theology professor in seminary, Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., told us that “A priest who leaves for a woman is the scum of the earth.” I see more and more how right he was. Such priests–and they are many–simply declare that they love copulation more than they love God and His Mother. God have mercy on them.

The painful irony, so typical of the post-conciliar Church, is that Fr. Cessario, an excellent teacher of unimpeachable orthodoxy, is also a close friend of the very politically connected woman whose daughter’s scandalous marriage to a priest you recently referred to.

I wish I could draw some pithy conclusion from this, but I can’t, so I’m going to have a beer, read some P.G. Wodehouse, and go to bed. May God bless you and your work. And may He have mercy on His poor Church.

Signed,

Father