COOL! Just in time for Christ-Mass, Amazon has bundled my two new books, namely, More Catholic Than the Pope, which I co-authored with Patrick Madrid, and Surprised by Canon Law, which I co-authored with Michael Trueman. Purchased together from Amazon, you save over four bucks.
I know, this is another shameless plug for my books; but this being Christmas and I being a doctoral student with two little children...I need the royalties!
Canonical: December 2004 Archives
Good news: a corrupt religious order has been suppressed!
The bad news: a few years ago, the community's vision sounded rather promising, and a lot of us were rooting for it.
Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton announced last week that he was suppressing the Society of St. John, a community of traditionalist priests founded with the aim of fostering Catholic culture and the Tridentine Mass.
The Society, founded in 1998, had an ambitious plan to found Catholic villages and a liberal-arts college, but $5 million in donations for those purposes seems to have gone to lavish spending.
The Society even racked up over $2.6M in debts and got then-Bishop Timlin's agreement to have the diocese co-sign for it. That had to be a sign to anyone with an attention span that something was wrong. For that matter, any Catholic in the U.S. who got their elaborate and attractive fund-raising mailings could tell that money was not being spent wisely.
The game started to unravel when lay supporters noticed they weren't getting an accounting of where the money was going; it all hit the fan when the two top priests in the group were found to be taking home and sleeping with teenage students from a prep school. Since the members of the Society were all Scranton diocesan priests, the diocese itself is now the target of lawsuits.
Who knew? The story illustrates a bunch of problems we've all heard before: immature priests justifying their kinky conduct with a new self-invented philosophy about sex; arrogant clerics who think that they know better than experienced laymen how to run financial matters and practical affairs; a bishop who (although he did a lot of good in other areas) neglected his responsibility to protect the people of God from a few self-indulgent charmers.
But there is good news: the new bishop has done what he can to put an end to it. Thanks, Bp. Martino.
Rod Dreher wrote about the case in '02, and CWN reported the bishop's decree last week.
In the meantime, the Society's website is still soliciting funds.
