Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The governor of Washington and that state’s legislators all have to know that this legislation will inevitably be contested and eventually be struck down. Surely we haven’t come to such a point that such an outrage against the First Amendment would be upheld in court?
I watched the news conference wherein Governor Ferguson announced his signing of the bill into law. Of course, he claimed to have been raised Catholic, and mentioned that his uncle— a Jesuit!— would have approved of this garbage.
Any priest worth his salt will ignore this deeply stupid, anti-Catholic and evil law. And any Catholic layman with any basic grasp of our Faith— and our Constitution— understands that this outrageous ‘law’ is unconstitutional as well as stupid and wrong.
I assume these Washington lawmakers are doing this because it pleases their leftist constituents. Never mind the time and money it will cost before it is inevitably overturned— these politicians have virtue signaled to their followers, and polished their leftist credentials. And really, that’s all this garbage legislation was really engineered to do.
Exactly how does the Soviet Socialist Republic of the State of Washington expect to find out if a criminal has confessed a crime to a priest, let alone enforce such a law? Or must priests under this law give periodic reports to KGB authorities on the confessions of penitents which they have heard, e.g., monthly reports of the number of penitents and their identity with a summary of the content of each confession?
By the way, does this new law apply to AA and NA sponsors who hear the Fifth Step moral inventory of a recovering alcoholic or addict?
Sidenote: four decades ago there was a man in our AA group who told us his story. He had done something illegal while intoxicated (no surprise there; I can raise my hand on that one). Unfortunately, what he did was really very criminal (I don’t know the details, and even if I did, I wouldn’t share them). He was Catholic. So he confessed his crime to his priest, and revealed what he had done to his AA sponsor during his moral inventory. Both of them – priest and sponsor – said that to make direct amends in this particular case (that’s the Ninth Step), he would have to admit the crime to the police and take whatever punishment the court deemed fit. So he spent six years in jail, repaying his debt to society. He said that he would rather repay his debt than go around with a guilt that would make him drink and drug again. Now Folks, that’s how it’s supposed to work. And that process is exactly what the government of the State of Washington has so successfully sabatoged.
So if two ordinary people are talking and one admits something to another then how are the authorities going to ensure that person dobs the other one into the authorities for what they have told them? You can’t police a private conversation. Confession is, by secular definition, a “private conversation.”
Besides, let the entertainment industry, the government and the institutional child sex predators heads role first.
Typically stupid and unenforceable law designed to achieve nothing more than headlines. Yet, we all know such laws and headlines would not exist if the Church’s response to “The Crisis” was more than making the laity attend Virtus Training. McCarrick in cold jail cell would have done much more.
Quite right.
The motivations for this law are not secular, they are spiritual. The Enemy claims a victory for every soul that avoids the confessional. It makes no difference to him if it is through an illegal, unenforceable law or failure of a parish to properly schedule confessions.
The spiritual battle is ramping up. Public Satanism, attacks on the seal of confession, vandalism of churches, jailing of people who publicly pray, banning licit Masses.
Once there is white smoke, the next five years are going to be uncomfortable. Either explaining to your friends and family of why you are following what the media will call the pope of hate, or by enduring the stream of bad actions from a pope that the media exhorts you to adore. Perhaps we will get lucky and get another lukewarm, placeholder pope, but you know what Our Lord says about lukewarmness….
McCarrick in cold jail cell would have done much more.
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Putting McCarrick in jail would have required enforcement or relict statutes against ‘consensual sodomy’. It was a class B misdemeanor in New York, so he would not have been in a cold jail cell for long unless he was sentenced consecutively for a long string of incidents. I suppose you could try to get him on some sort of extortion charge; one would have to check the case law on that. He was also accused > 4 decades after the fact of using an adolescent as a catamite. You’d have to eliminate statutes of limitations and convict people on the basis of the oral testimony of a single accuser. (Lee Podles was explicitly in favor of the former and never came clean about favoring the latter).
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The Seal of Confession cannot be broken because the priest is a third party witness to an intimate relationship between Christ and the penitent.
Whatever the priest hears in Confession is uncorroborated hearsay and inadmissible in a court of law. For all their energy invested the authorities have nothing to hang their hats on. Viva Christo Rey.
The governor of Washington State needs to be removed for unconstitutional behavior. We, the taxpayers are paying his salary. Where is the tar and feathers? Communism would not cater to him.
Art Deco – good point, but I think that can be remedied by the Church returning to the 1917 Code of Canon Law, at least in so far as imprisonment is an option. That the Vatican has a total of three jail cells is an indicator of how seriously it has either abrogated its responsibility or simply let the Jesuits run the place.