Have we not seen this before: A reformer using abuse in the Church as an excuse to attack Her and make a name for himself?

Rod Dreher, another shallow Vatican II convert who never really got the Faith, has carved out a nice gig for himself as a professional ex-Catholic.  Absurdly enough, he is being lauded and feted by still-practicing Catholics around the world for his book The Benedict Option despite his public declarations that the homosexual priest scandal proves that the Catholic Church has deceived her members by claiming to be the Church that Christ founded with a promise of indefectibility.  For example: “I was naive about the Catholic institution, and saw in retrospect that I idolized it to a certain degree. Because I believed what the Catholic Church said about itself, I set myself up for a very big fall.”

Cardinal McCarrick and the Boys: Could he have been any more obvious? 

Author’s Note: Back on June 30, 2002, I wrote the following Remnant article on the now-infamous Dallas meeting of bishops (convened under the pretense of addressing the clergy sex abuse crisis). That utterly impotent meeting would go on to produce the now-laughable “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People”, drafted by — wait for it! — Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

At the Dallas meeting, Uncle Ted was allowed to make a mockery of the entire Conference by prancing around like a lady from "The View", pretending to care about victims of clerical sexual abuse while his brother bishops sat on their hands and said nothing about the biggest abuser of them all.

We know how that story ended.

The Benedict Option?
(Pope Francis asks Patriarch Bartholomew to “bless me and the Church of Rome” at the Orthodox Church of St. George in Istanbul.)

Editor’s Note: Anyone reading The Remnant for a period of time can attest to the fact that in these dark days of confusion we have long been committed to “uniting the clans” against the enemies of Christ’s Church whenever possible. Now more than ever before, those who can “pray the Creed with us, and mean it” (as the late, great Dr. William Marra used to say) must be considered brothers in arms. The following article pulls no punches. It is written by a diocesan priest, Father Richard Munkelt—an academic not given to the kind of pot-stirring polemics all the rage on social media. This is not a “spitting contest” with Rod Dreher—a well-known and talented writer with whom Father Munkelt has been acquainted for many years. Instead, this is a priestly tour de force on the fundamentals of Catholicism, closely following and critiquing Mr. Dreher's recent articles on the Catholic Church. We are publishing it not because we have some personal animus against Mr. Dreher, who left the Church over the clerical scandals, but rather because we seek his return to the fold, while encouraging others not to follow the dangerous and misguided path he’s taken.