NEW YORK (NY)
Esquire
January 8, 2019
By Charles P. Pierce
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.
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