YAKIMA (WA)
Yakima Herald
November 17, 2018
By Robert Fontana
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a gay man in a church that teaches homosexual behavior is sinful, has been exposed as a sexual predator who targeted males, mostly seminarians, and young boys.
According to Kenneth Woodward (former religious editor for Newsweek, Commonweal -11/9/18), McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., was not only protected by his high office but by a network of gay clerics that had secrets to keep. Woodward writes, “By network, I mean groups of gay priests, diocesan and religious, who encourage the sexual grooming of seminarians and young priests for decades, and who themselves lead double lives – breaking their vows of chastity while ministering to the laity and staffing the various bureaucracies of the church.”
These men hide behind a veneer of public ministry, celibacy and Catholic orthodoxy while living secret lives of sexual misbehavior, some of it criminal.
Readers of the Yakima Herald-Republic saw a glimpse of this in the story of Juan Jose Gonzalez Rios. Gonzalez, a former seminarian and retreat director, was arrested in the spring, 2008, for an outstanding warrant for accessing child porn. Charges were later dropped (“Former Seminarian Tells His Story,” Yakima Herald-Republic, 5/15/08). Gonzalez described how his pastor drew him into parish ministry, simultaneously introducing him to a public life of service and a private life of pornography, sex games, drinking, and gambling. This behavior continued as Gonzales entered the seminary and ended, according to Gonzalez, when the priest sexually assaulted him.
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