Dateline Arlington: Further Adventures in Orthodoxy

Sure, I'll admit it; Catholic parish life in Northern Virginia is reasonably good. We have at least one new parish every year (we've only supressed two parishes in our history, and that was just a merger of two rural parishes into one), and most of the newer church buildings actually look like churches. (Design hint: think post-modern nouveau-Romanesque piazza.) Plus we've got a lot of really great priests here -- not to mention more than we know what to do with. (Seriously, we really don't know; otherwise we'd offer early buyouts to the few Father Feelgood types still holding on). Best of all, we are spared most of the usual It's-all-about-me-everybody-sing-Kum-By-Yah craziness (not all of it, though) that transpires during a typical Sunday Mass in America.

But still, we don't think the rest of you out there in the hinterlands should have all the fun, now that this Scandal thing is all the rage:

"A Catholic priest who exposed the sexual misdeeds of fellow clergy at three parishes in the Diocese of Arlington is being prosecuted by his own bishop on five ecclesiastical charges... The[y] include sexual misconduct; absolution of an accomplice in sexual sin; and the 'use of instruments of social communication [the media] to injure good morals, to express insults and to excite hatred or contempt against the Church'..."

I've gotten a good dose of both sides of the story, so I've found a little niche firmly in the middle of the two camps. Besides, I've already commented on one of the "misdeeds" before, namely the priest who ran off with some guy's wife while his superiors stumbled all over one another. No one has ever officially apologized for that. Something about liability. Of course.

Then there was the priest who used parish funds for gay pornography. I've dealt with that bozo myself, and he's lucky I'm not his bishop.

So, kids, we're sure to have some of the usual lawyers-guns-and-money before it's over. After all, we who reside here in Eden need redemptive suffering too, you know?