Our View: Father White should be praised, not silenced

MARTINSVILLE (VA)
Martinsville Bulletin

February 4, 2020

The First Amendment, the mission statement of our democracy, holds self-evident two primary rights for each of us: to say freely what we think and to practice the religion we prefer without interference from the government. Oppression against those tenets is why a group fled England on boats and why their (and our) ancestors made those protections the first in our Constitution.

So it is with ultimate irony that a proceeding today in Richmond could determine if a free religion can limit free speech – even to the point of firing and keeping quiet an employee for doing the job he is supposed to be doing, which is comforting the afflicted.

Maybe what Father Mark White really has been doing is inflicting the comfortable of the Catholic Church, because we find the steps the church has taken to censor his comments and threaten his calling to be both repugnant and ridiculous.

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But among those were the eyeballs of his superior – Barry Knestout, the bishop in Richmond — and quite possibly others from the Vatican. Because someone decided Father White needed to keep his fingers still and his mouth shut when it came to the church’s practices. We suspect those orders were handed down from above the bishop’s pay grade.

Now Father White did not hesitate in his writings to be frank about what he saw as his church’s failings. He was enflamed by the fact that one of the guilty was Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick, the man who had ordained him as a minster. Father White told Bill Wyatt of the Bulletin that he began to recognize how McCarrick had conducted himself, that he now sees how McCarrick might have signaled his interest in the men who said he had abused them.

Fueled by righteous anger and his oath to protect the innocent from the abuse of anyone in any way, Father White challenged the way his church was protecting the perpetrating priests more aggressively than they were those injured innocents.

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