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This past summer the news was filled with story after story of cover-ups that reached to the highest levels of the Roman Catholic church leadership. Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law recently resigned because of his involvement in a longstanding cover-up of immoral priests. What needs to be stressed though is that this is not an isolated incident involving a single catholic leader. Just in the last twelve months, auxiliary Bishop Reginald Cawcutt of South Africa resigned after his participation in a pornographic web site became public knowledge. Bishop Kendrick Williams resigned in June 2002 after lawsuits were filed against him alleging sexual abuse. Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, resigned in May 2002 when it was publicized that he had paid $450,000 to keep a homosexual relationship quiet. Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Wexford, Ireland, resigned in April 2002 after being accused of protecting an immoral priest. Earlier, Bishop Daniel Ryan of Springfield, Illinois, resigned in October 1999 because of homosexual liaisons with priests and male teenage prostitutes. Bishop Joseph Keith Symons of Palm Beach, Florida, resigned in 1998 after admitting that he had sexually abused five teenage boys. Bishop Anthony O'Connell, who took Symons' place, resigned in 2001 after admitting to a homosexual experience many years earlier. Four men claimed that O'Connell had sexually abused them in their youth. Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, California, resigned in the 1990s after admitting to a homosexual affair with a priest from Costa Rica. Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, New Mexico, resigned in the 1990s because of illicit affairs with at least five women. It was revealed that he was with covering up the sexual abuse of priests under his care.

In the Fall/Winter 2002 issue of the Catholic magazine Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam in an article called "The Bishops' Fall from Grace." they write: "the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church--about 90%--involve homosexual priests preying on teenage boys. This sick group makes running off with the secretary look virtuous. What is really sad is that major media in the U.S. wants to spin the homosexual factor out of the entire scandal. A man named Jason Berry wrote a book called, Lead us not into Temptation: Catholic priests and the sexual abuse of children. He documents 400 priests who were accused of sexual abuse and $400 million paid out by various Catholic dioceses in legal and medical expenses. "In late March, 2001, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Vatican had 'banned' a recent book by Australian Christian Brother Dr. Barry Coldrey, an historian, that attempts to give a broad overview of clerical sexual abuse scandals in the English-speaking world. That book, Religious Life Without Integrity: The Sexual Abuse Crisis Within the Catholic Church, offers detailed and abundant documentation on the 'sexual underworlds' that have grown up in dioceses and religious orders in Australia, England, Ireland, Canada and the United States and the complicity on the part of leadership, who have nurtured them and made it possible for them to flourish.

Trumpet readers, I have often asked the question, why would a lost man enter a priesthood that required him to be celibate? To my way of thinking there can only be one answer. The answer is, that would be priest is a sodomite looking for a place to practice his filthy sin. Certainly this information helps all of us to better understand why the Bible described Rome as an immoral harlot in Revelation 17! -- Editor