If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse a child. That line from the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, which focused on the sex abuse scandal in as it unfolded on the pages on The Boston Globe back in 2002.
Yep, for horrible institutional sin to happen, the institution must be a participant.
But what is "the institution"? It, as its own entity, doesn't really exist. There is, for example, no real entity — the Catholic Church in the United States.
That's a catch-all term for the collection of all things, ultimately coming down to people, that comprise Catholicism in the United States.
What is the institution anyway? It's nothing more than the practices, policies, protocols and procedures instituted by the people who run it. In short, the institution is really people and then how they decide things will run. It's nothing more than that.
So what needs close examining in all this filth is who is running the show — but not just the bishops, because in truth, the bishops would have zero ability to do anything, including cover-up stuff, if it weren't for the people around them.
Those people around them have for decades assisted in all this evil, each person within his or her own specific realm.
Whether it's lawyers doing their lawyering or chancery officials officiating, each one of those men and women made a choice to participate in this evil. And frankly, they are still, right now, as we sit here, still making that same choice.
They are not saying what they know. They are not turning over incriminating evidence. They are not revealing the truth of everything that should be known.
But there is one group in particular that should be held up for open public ridicule and disdain. And that would be members of the alleged Catholic media. These "professional" Catholics have enabled all this filth, and they will have a serious accounting to have to give.
They have used the double weapon of ignoring the truth while at the same time, giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
They personally profit from using their pens to paint a picture of peace. And as a man who has me a living as a professional journalist, their actions are disgusting. They do not report "truth" — rather they distort the truth.
Take, for example, Catholic News Agency's Ed Condon who a few days back wrote a fawning essay on the at-last departure of Donald Wuerl from the scene as Wilton Gregory assumed control of Washington, D.C. as archbishop.
As a journalist, it was hard to hold back the vomit. Makes you wonder just how close a friend he is of Wuerl's because "his article" sure sounds like they are best buds.
He offered praise for Wuerl's "achievements" during his days in Pittsburgh addressing the homopredator abuse crisis. He did so however by never mentioning a series of cases where Wuerl moved bad priests around and at least one student died as a result.
He never pointed at Wuerl paying extortion money to another priest who threatened to out the whole gay network in Pittsburgh. After getting his money from Wuerl, he hightailed it to the Caribbean and was murdered by a gay prostitute.
When his body was eventually returned from the Communist nation, Wuerl presided over a funeral where he declared the priest was a loyal and faithful priest and is now in Heaven.
The list goes on, and Wuerl's scandal is not the focus of this Vortex. But the cover-up, or perhaps better stated, the enabling of his scandal — and others — is the focus.
The enabling, not the behind-the-doors enabling by chancery rats, but the public enabling of these lurid scoundrels, their enabling is the focus.
When Viganò dropped his bombshell last August, Crux founder and editor-in-chief John Allen cautioned readers to take everything Viganò was charging with a large grain of salt.
Turns out, a year later, every last thing and more that Viganò said is true. But what Allen doesn't spend too much time telling you is that he and his failed effort Crux is now paid for by the Knight of Columbus.
So just how independent and therefore trustworthy can Crux and John Allen be? They, just like CNA, have every reason to protect the status quo, the institution.
We're willing to bet that since the news broke about secret papers now being made public provingthat Wuerl knew all about McCarrick's evil for decades that Ed Condon isn't exactly rushing to retract his canonization of Wuerl.
Here's the rule to remember with the bought-and-paid-for professional Catholic media crowd: They will do and say and report and comment on whatever the bishops want — period. They have to. The bishops are their bread and butter. The bishops give them interviews, access, press passes, endorse their books, advertise for them in bulletins, invite them to speak — you name it.
The bishops do all that in exchange for an "ask no questions" press corps, which amounts to a little else than a giant public relations machine.
They aren't press at all. They aren't reporters. They aren't journalists. Heck, most of them can't even deal honestly with the concept of truth, much less actually convey the truth in the written word.
They have grown accustomed to their role as enablers, say everything good, never ask probing questions and deflect and defend.
Heck, when necessary, they will do some of the dirty work for the bishops by smearing and attacking Catholics like Church Militant and others who do want the truth to be told and do tell it.
Catholic News Agency, headed by JD Flynn — a canon lawyer, not a newsman — and various other pretend news outfits wouldn't actually know something newsworthy if it bit them in the face.
But they do know how to protect, defend and enable. Take, for example, Catholic radio host Al Kresta of Ave Maria Radio, who went out of his way to protect and defend Lansing Bishop Earl Boyea against charges by a victim of a priest who used to be on his radio show, Fr. Pat Egan.
One of Egan's targets — a young man Church Militant has met with — reported the priest years earlier and Boyea did nothing about it.
Then, the young man approached a group of professional Catholics, of which Kresta assumed control, and asked for their help. Kresta's knee-jerk reaction was protect the bishop, let's work with the bishop, let's trust the bishop.
Kresta turned on the young man and ostracized him from the group after the victim confronted Boyea at a public gathering and secretly recorded Boyea's totally insulting, dismissive response.
Why? Because that's how the institution operates; protect the institution, especially when you have a personal stake in the same institution.
Boyea is bishop of the diocese in which Kresta's Ave Maria studios are situated, near Ann Arbor, Michigan and well, it wouldn't go very well for Ave Maria if all of a sudden the local bishop yanked his support and began making life difficult for them now, would it?
So when Kresta, or John Allen or Ed Condon or JD Flynn or any other notables who enable all this filth in a hundred different ways, either by their silence or scheming or phony reporting — when they have something to say — just remember, keep in your mind who's really doing the talking.
It's the institution that has bought and paid for these ecclesiastical mercenaries. Do they say some true things? Sure. Do they report some things correctly? Yeah.
But as seemed to be the point of Condon's glowing essay on Wuerl, even Hitler repaired the roads, and Mussolini kept the trains running on schedule.
Bottom line, if an outfit is not independent, meaning no official ties and blessings from the institutional Church, then you cannot trust them and should not trust them.
Question anything they assert. They did not come clean about all this evil even when they knew it was going on. Why should you trust them now?