BishopAccountability.org

This Is How Cults Work, Not Religions

By Charles P. Pierce
Esquire
January 8, 2019

https://bit.ly/2HaDeoa


Opus Dei just paid a hefty settlement to the victim of beltway power priest John McCloskey.

Back in 2003, when I was writing for The Boston Globe Magazine, I wrote a cover story about how the conservatives in the Roman Catholic Church were organizing themselves in the lengthening shadow of the crisis springing from the revelations of sexual crimes committed by members of the Church's clergy. There was a conscious effort to prevent more liberal elements among American Catholics from using the exploding scandal to change the institutional Church from within in ways that the conservatives found contrary to what they believed to be unchanging Church doctrine. Central to the story was an Opus Dei priest in Washington named John McCloskey, whose office literally was on K Street. It was McCloskey who baptized Beltway power brokers like Newt Gingrich, the late Bob Novak, current White House budget director Larry Kudlow, and former Kansas senator and governor Sam Brownback. McCloskey, whose first career was as a trader with Merrill Lynch, had some ideas that were...interesting. From our 2003 interview:

He is talking about a futuristic essay he wrote that rosily describes the aftermath of a "relatively bloodless" civil war that resulted in a Catholic Church purified of all dissent and the religious dismemberment of the United States of America. "There's two questions there," says the Rev. C. John McCloskey 3d, smiling. He's something of a ringer for Howard Dean—a comparison he resists, also with a smile—a little more slender than the presidential candidate, perhaps, but no less fervent. "One is, Do I think it would be better that way? No. Do I think it's possible? Do I think it's possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of family, over a period of time to choose to survive with people who think it's OK to kill women and children or for—quote—homosexual couples to exist and be recognized? "No, I don't think that's possible," he says. "I don't know how it's going to work itself out, but I know it's not possible, and my hope and prayer is that it does not end in violence. But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way. If American Catholics feel that's troubling, let them. I don't feel it's troubling at all."

If you don't know what's coming by now, you are new to this shebeen. From the Washington Post:

The survivor is a devout, D.C.-area Catholic who was among the many who received spiritual direction from McCloskey through the Catholic Information Center, a K Street hub of Catholic life in downtown D.C. She told the Post McCloskey groped her several times while she was going to pastoral counseling with him to discuss marital troubles and serious depression. The guilt and shame over the interactions sent her into a tailspin and, combined with her existing depression, made it impossible for her to work in her high-level job. She spoke to him about her “misperceived guilt over the interaction” in confession and he absolved her, she said. “I love Opus Dei but I was caught up in this cover-up—I went to confession, thinking I did something to tempt this holy man to cross boundaries,” she said. The complaint was not made public by the order until Monday but behind the scenes the ministry of the well-known priest had been sharply curtailed. A lot of D.C.-area Catholics have wondered for years what happened to McCloskey, who was the closest thing to a celebrity the Catholic Church had in the area.

(You will note that the survivor's first instinct was to blame herself for tempting McCloskey to cross the line. This is the way cults work, not religions, and one is not the same as the other, so save your comments.)

According to Opus Dei, McCloskey is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease, with which I am painfully familiar, so that's too bad. (Out of charity, I wish I believed that statement 100 percent, but I don't.) McCloskey, in his time, was a genuinely dangerous man with genuinely dangerous ideas that had less to do with the gospel than a chain saw does.




.


Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.