The shoe drops in Shohola

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.

9 comments

  1. Blowing the high-school quarterback? No problem, just keep it quiet.
    Mismanaging finances? You’re History!
    We now see where the priorities of, as Kevin Miller calls them, “Our Fathers In Christ” really are.

  2. Bubbles and RC,
    Having worked in the Scranton Tribunal, before moving to Florida (and ultimately back to Canada), it is a little more complicated than presented. Bishop Timlin and Bishop Martino are two different persons with two different personalities, sets of strengths and weaknesses, etc… One of these differences is that Bishop Martino is more “street smart”…
    Bishop Timlin is a wonderful Bishop. It was an honor and a privilege to work for him. He always saw the best in everyone, and he always remained faithful to his priestly vows. He always endeavored to put his people first.
    99% of the time this last point was good, but occasionally it created a blind spot in His Excellency. For example, he might be reluctant to make tough economic choices (like shut down a parish) even though the population in the diocese has long ago shifted and there was another parish across the street. (Keep in mind the Scranton Diocese was originally built along ethnic lines, which for the most part have faded over time, so it is not unusual to get up to four parishes on one block).
    Other times, it simply would not occur to him that one of his priests could be less- than-faithful to his ordination vows.
    Bishop Timlin was a good and faithful priest, but like every other bishop, he was not perfect.

  3. Thanks, Pete. That sounds like a fair assessment. I don’t want to issue some harsh judgment on Bp. Timlin’s actions based on other people’s opinions, but it does sound like he had a blind spot in this case.
    As an addendum: Tom Droleskey wrote about the SSJ in ’02 also, and among other things, he indicates that they weren’t all that committed to the Tridentine Mass either.

  4. Now if they could just suppress the various -heretical- orders, like the “Franciscan” nuns here in Rochester that practice Reiki,(wonderful, beautiful facility, if only the Church would take control of it!) or what some Salesians have decayed into.

  5. Is this the same society that oversees St John Cantius Parish in the Archdiocese of Chicago???
    i beleive they are the group that created the millenium monstrance as well if Im not mistaken?

  8. “Bubbles”: That’s not what Kevin Miller calls them. That’s what Catholicism, from the beginning (see, e.g., St. Ignatius of Antioch), calls them. The fact that some of them are corrupt doesn’t change the fact that they are – by virtue of their ordination and our baptism – our fathers in Christ. Any more than the fact that some people’s biological fathers are corrupt changes the fact of their being fathers.

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