Fr. Altier Tells the Whole Truth about the Abuse Scandals 8/19/18

The following is a transcription of the August 19, 2018 homily given at the Church of St. Raphael in Crystal, Minnesota by Fr. Robert Altier.  

In the second reading today St. Paul tells us that we have to make the most of our opportunity because the days are evil. We aren’t just simply living in days that are evil, we are living in the days that Isaiah spoke about, the days when they will call evil good and good evil. And we have been brainwashed into thinking that evil things are okay, they’re not.

So, from this point forward, what I am about to say is completely politically incorrect and if you have young ears that you don’t want to hear it, you may want to take a fifteen-minute walk.
In the last couple of weeks, we have heard some pretty unfortunate things. A cardinal of the Church who abused children and young men, and now in Pennsylvania the grand Jury report 301 priests violated more than a thousand children. And on top of that we have the episcopal cover-up, the word episcopal means bishops, so the cover-up by the bishops. And, it’s not just simply a cover-up, it’s an agenda.

If you’ve listened carefully, since 2002 when all this broke, the bishops keep on coming back to the same point, pedophilia, its pedophilia, it’s pedophilia, its pedophilia. No, it’s not. In fact, the John Jay institute, the group that the bishops themselves hired to look at what was going on, came back and said this is a homosexual problem. 86.6% (if I recall correctly) of all of the abuse cases were on post-pubescent males, and the bishops told them “no you go back, and you rewrite it and you say that it isn’t a homosexual problem.” So, they came back and said well 86.6% of this is all about post-pubescent males, but it’s not a homosexual problem; like really?

So, pedophilia is the violation of pre-pubescent children, less than 3% of all of these cases were pedophilia. Ephebophilia is the violation of post-pubescent children, pederasty particularly, post-pubescent males. That’s what we are dealing with here.

Now we need to make an important distinction, there are some very, very good people who struggle with a homosexual orientation. All of us struggle with different things, that doesn’t mean that we’re a bad person just because we have certain weaknesses. And the Church recognizes that that orientation is not evil, it is the activity which is evil. And so, for these men who want to live a good life and who are trying to fight against those temptations and the struggles, this is a cross. And it is a huge cross that they have to carry. In fact, you can think how much God loves these people if he allows them to carry a cross that is that big; its huge.

Now we need, as again we look at our own selves, we can say alright there are some for instance who struggle with alcohol or people who struggle with pornography, whatever. If they’re really trying to fight against those temptations these are good people with a weakness. That’s different for instance from the drug dealer, or from the guy who is making pornography, or the guy who is trafficking the women or something; those people are pigs. The guy who is struggling and trying to live a good life is a good person with a weakness. And that is the distinction that we need to keep in mind.

And so, the Church is very clear that even for men with a deep-seated homosexual tendency, that they are not to go to the seminary. That’s not because the Church is being discriminatory or hates these people, but rather because the same principle if you look at it and say: would you take somebody who is struggling with an alcohol addiction to a bar? It’s a point of temptation. We don’t allow men into women’s convents because it’s not going to be long before somebody’s going to be having problems. And that’s what the Church is looking at to say this is not good.

Go back to when I was in college seminary. I was having a conversation with another seminarian, in the midst of the conversation he looked at me and said would you ever consider taking a shower in the women’s locker room? I said certainly not. He said well why not? I said well the temptations and the problems… and he said you’re right, now you know what I have to go through when I go into a men’s locker room. I thought oh my goodness…yuck. This is why the Church says even for these good men who are struggling and trying to overcome this, we don’t want to put them in a point of temptation.

So those are not the people that we are having a problem with. The people that we are having a problem with come from two different groups and understand there is an intentional and malicious infiltration of the Church for the purpose of destroying her from within.
This is what you need to understand.

When I was in the seminary, it was one of the worst seminaries in the nation. 1983 is when our seminary was at its absolute worst; I started in ‘85. It was getting slightly better. But these people were so arrogant. I should point out when I was in the seminary if you were not homosexual or a radical feminist you were in big trouble. One of the professors actually was arrogant enough to stand up in front of the class and say “Martin Luther had the right idea, but he did it the wrong way – he left the Church. You can’t change the Church from the outside you can only change it from the inside, so we’re not leaving.”

So, these are people with an agenda. And what are the two groups? The two groups are: number one, a group of predatory homosexuals. They started their infiltration of the Church in 1924. You want to look it up? There is a book called The Homosexual Network written in 1982, so this is 20 years before all of this stuff hit. A man named Enrique Rueda looked at all of this, studied all of their own publications, (they were publishing every year the number of seminarians, priest and bishops they had), he traced it back to when they started, it began in 1924. And then five years later, in 1929, the communists began their infiltration of the priesthood and the two groups did exactly the same thing. You want to read about the communist one? There is a woman by the name of Bella Dodd who was a deep-seated communist who got out of communism and converted to the Faith. She testified before congress in 1953 and in that testimony she said that “we got the instructions from kremlin in 1929 as to what we were to do,” and she said “we were to take the best and the brightest, the guys who were smart enough to live a double life, good looking guys who were sociable so that they would be noticed by their bishop, and they would get promoted, they would become vocation directors, they would become bishops, they would become rectors of seminaries, they would have influential positions” and she said “we were successful beyond our wildest imagination.” She said: “I am personally responsible for more than 1,200 seminarians, priests and bishops.” And in 1953 mind you, again, now they started in 1929, in 1953 she said: “we already have four cardinals in the Vatican.” That was 1953, it’s way worse today.

So, we have these two groups. If you want to read about her, she wrote a book called School of Darkness, that was published in 1954. You want to understand why all of the promotion, the propaganda, the agenda? You can go back and read another book that was written in 1932 by a man named William Foster. William Foster ran for the president of the United States in 1924, 1928 and 1932 for the Communist Party USA. In 1932 he wrote a book called Toward Soviet America. And in that book, he said “we aren’t being able to get to the Americans because of three things, their morality, their family and their patriotism.” And he said: “so the way that we are going to attack these three things is through homosexuality and radical feminism.” They have been extraordinarily successful.

So, what are we dealing with? We are dealing with a group of predatory homosexuals who became priests not to serve the Church but to destroy her from within. In this, they are at every level. There was – there is an article that just came out from the Catholic Register in which six priests from the Newark diocese were interviewed and they spoke about the homosexual network in their diocese. It’s in all of them, not just in Newark. They cover up for another, they share their victims with one another, they do all kinds of horrible things. It is so wide spread now that there is actually talk on the federal level of using the RICO laws against the Church because of this kind of nonsense that’s been going on.

And people ask, why don’t the good priests speak up? I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, he looked at me and he said: “I’ve known about this for 50 years and you’ve known about it for 40 years.” Yep, it’s about time it’s coming out. So why didn’t somebody speak up? Number one if I would have stood here even a couple of years ago would you have believed what I am telling you? Number two, who were we supposed to go to? It was at every single level all the way to the top. You wanted to be ordained a priest, you couldn’t day a word. And even as a priest you can’t.

Again, these priests that were interviewed in the Catholic Register were interviewed only because of anonymity. It required anonymity because they were afraid of what was going to happen to them if the bishops and the people at the chancery found out who it was that spoke. These people have that much power. And so, we need to realize that. So, again just to tell you a quick story about how bad things were. When I was in the seminary, they would put up their communist propaganda, I would rip it down and every time I would do that there would be an announcement “Whoever is taking the notices off the bulletin board…” When I would put up a notice that says we were going to pray the Rosary, that would get torn down immediately and there was never anything said. Now having said that, thankfully the seminary today is way, way better than it was. These young guys are not having to deal with this trash, but that was the climate at the time.

Now if we just use the McCarrick situation, since that’s been in the news, everyone is disgusted with what this man did to boys and to young men, and rightly so. But anybody, by the way, who thinks that all of this is just great – they’re such nice people and they’re no different – look at what McCarrick did: that is what predatory homosexuality looks like.

These are not nice people who are just like everybody else. But as disgusting as all that is, think about the fact that this man was in the pulpit for 50 years, he sat in the confessional, he was in the bishop’s office making decisions about priests’ lives, about diocesan finances, about the direction of the diocese and so on. He served on Vatican commissions, he was a consultant to the Vatican, he made lots of bishops. What kind of advice do you think somebody struggling with some sexual problem in the confessional would have gotten from somebody like this?
What kind of men do you think might have been elevated to be bishops by somebody like this?

You now understand why all that we get is fluff and stuff instead of good homilies? You understand why there are problems in the world that aren’t being addressed? That’s what it is about. Where is the doctrinal integrity? Where is the moral teaching? Someone that is not living it is not going to teach it. Now there are, after this grand jury report came out a few days ago from Pennsylvania, there are several more states already talking about doing their own grand jury investigation. It will probably go all over the place, so I say that to simply say there is going to be more in the news coming up.

And as sad as this is we have to recognize that it is actually something very good. It is the purification of the Church and that is going to lead ultimately to her crucifixion. Not many are going to remain faithful, unfortunately. But when we look at it and say: “well if this is what is going on in the Church what are we supposed to do?” We are supposed to look at Jesus and say exactly what St. Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”.
Jesus founded one Church and that one Church is the only institution in the world for the salvation of souls. It was founded for that purpose and it will remain to the end of the world for that purpose.

I have spoken with a number of people in the last week or two about what’s going on, prayerful, holy people and they have all concurred on the same point – Our Lady’s work has finally begun. Praise God!

She gave the bishops 16 years to clean up this mess and they did nothing. Now we are hearing from the bishops the same exact thing that we heard back in 2002: “Oh we need more policies and we need to do…” Nonsense. We need action, we don’t need more policies, but nobody is listening. It’s too late. The bishops are even admitting that they have lost all of their moral authority. Nobody trusts them anymore, which is really sad because we do have some really good bishops and they are going to get lumped into the same group.

But remember our faith is not in priests, it is not in bishops or cardinals, it is not even in the Pope. Our faith is in Jesus Christ, period. And we need to keep our focus on Jesus, he is the one who founded the Church, he is the one who promised the jaws of hell would not prevail against her. So, this is a time of trial for the Church, and the Church is going to appear to be destroyed. The Church is Jesus Christ, look at what happened to Jesus. His apostles had to make a decision: were they going to remain faithful all the way up to Calvary or were they going to run away?

You and I now have to make that same decision, are we going to remain faithful or are we going to run away? What we are going through – or is just beginning – is like a mom with a teenage kid. The mom has told the kid “clean your room, clean your room, clean your room, clean your room” and they didn’t do it. Finally, mom gets tired, grabs a garbage bag, and heads toward the teenager’s room. At that point the kid panics, but it’s too late; there’s no stopping mom once she starts for that room. And the kid starts out by despairing, thinking mom’s going to throw everything away. When it’s all done the kid is actually really happy, the room is immaculate. That’s what’s going to happen.

I’ve been telling people for 20 years that back 2000 years ago Jesus cleaned out the temple, but He did it like a man: He picked up the big stuff in the middle of the room. This time He’s sending His Mom; she’s going to clean like a woman: there won’t be a cobweb left and there will be no dust, not even in the corners. She’s going to clean house and it is going to be beautiful. But, it’s not going to be pleasant getting there. The resurrection will happen only after the crucifixion, and are we going to remain faithful?

So what has happened and what is happening is horrible, it is tragic, it is disgusting; put in whatever other adjective you want to put in there trying to describe it, but actually in the Church it’s not even the worst. Depending on which study you read, in public schools anywhere between 4 and 8 out of every 100 kids is violated somewhere in their 13 years in public schools by a teacher. That’s all being covered up too.

So, you’ll notice that the media, the politicians, the educators, they are all focused on the Church because they are trying to keep the focus off themselves. That’s okay because you know what, read the first letter of St. Peter, he says the purification begins in the house of God and he said if this is what happens in the house of God what’s going to happen when it goes outside of the house of God? It’s all going down. It just starts in the Church, praise God, because it needs to be cleaned up. Our Mother is going to clean the house and she has begun that work.

St. John Paul spoke of a new springtime, Our Lady of Fatima spoke about a triumph of her Immaculate Heart, and after that triumph she said there would be a long period of peace and unprecedented growth for the Church. So that’s what’s coming. It is not a point of despair, it is not something we should run away from, we need to remain faithful, we need to continue to pray and we need to fast because our Lord told us with this kind of demon only prayer and fasting is going to be able to get rid of it. So that’s a choice we all have to make, we are going to go through some hard times, but we have that resurrection, the new springtime, that triumph of our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. So, all I can tell you is: no matter what happens remain faithful to Jesus. It is just that simple.

St. Louis de Montfort told us that in these times, the latter times, he said that God is going to raise up the greatest Saints that we have ever seen. Even to the point, he said, that those Saints will tower over the Saints of the past the way that a cedar of Lebanon towers over a shrub. Think about some of the great Saints we have, and they are going to look like shrubs compared to what’s coming. And you can be one of those Saints. There is no reason why you can’t. So that’s when we, again, put it into context of what St. Paul said in the second reading today, this is making the best out of the situation. The times are evil so make the best of your opportunity he said. Remain faithful to Jesus all the way to the crucifixion and become a great Saint.