A version of this was published in Culture Wars May 2007. This version can be viewed at Randy Engel’s website, Rite of Sodomy.
Book review on The Rite of Sodomy—Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church by Randy Engel; New Engel Publishing: Export, PA.; available at www.riteofsodomy.com )
By Rosemary Fielding
About fifteen years ago, Catholic writer and pro-life leader Randy Engel decided that withholding information from Catholics about the extent of the homosexual infiltration of the Church was not good. She had just seen her book—Sex Education—The Final Plague—altered when it was serialized by a major Catholic publication so that it would not tell Catholics what they did not want to hear—that “homosexual and pedophile” bishops existed in the Catholic hierarchy. That instance of selective censorship prompted Engel to conduct over a decade of research on homosexuality and the Catholic Church in order to write The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church. This impressive tome of some 1,200 pages (including thousands of footnotes) details “the growing threat posed to the Church and State by the Homosexual Comintern.”
Engel’s propositions and speculations about Church’s leaders are not uncharitable, but an attempt to uncover the truth about what has caused evil to prevail so powerfully against the mission of Church.
Her book makes clear to Catholics (who have ears to hear) that that if they want to help save the Church from the above-mentioned threat, they should be less concerned about saving the external image of the Church, or the reputation of beloved figures in the hierarchy, or their own illusions in general—and more concerned about saving the Church. The purely natural love of Catholics for the Church as an organization to which they belong must give way to supernatural love, and supernatural love exits only in the truth, however hard it is to acknowledge.
How and why are homosexuals a threat to Church and State? Engel’s book answers this question about extensively as it can be answered. The book deals with both State and Church; it deals with individual homosexuals and with the Homosexual Network; it deals with the past and the present.
Engel has taken a massive amount of information and organized it superbly. The book is compelling on many different grounds—history, sociology, psychology and the zeitgeist. Her main thesis concerns homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church, but she makes sure the reader understands homosexuality very well before embarking upon the sections on the Church.
Homosexual Behavior
The exposition of the current state of homosexual behavior and acts—which is situated about halfway through the book—reveals what homosexual propagandists “wisely stay away from…preferring to dwell on homosexual ‘rights’ instead of homosexual ‘acts.’” In the past, Catholics did not need to know this subject; now they do, for the very reason that if they do not, they will believe the homosexual propagandists. As Engel writes, “This chapter deals specifically with homsex behaviors. Its purpose is to illuminate not offend, although much of the material is by nature patently offensive to normal moral sensibilities.” Engel provides a wealth of information that she has culled from the literature that homosexuals write and publish about their lives, pursuits and purposes. She demonstrates with this material that individual homosexual behavior in the pursuit of sexual experiences is one reason for Catholics to consider homosexuality a threat to Church and State.
Pederasty and Pedophilia
Particularly alarming is the material on pederasty. The Collective “has had a difficult time shaking off the public’s perception of the predatory homosexual as a hunter and seducers of young boys, especially as pederast apologists like David Thorstad are wont to remind the Homosexual Collective that pederasty has been the most enduring and universal form of homosexuality in the recorded history of mankind.”
Pederasty is the new “sexual frontier,” writes Engel. Several ‘pseudoscientific” studies in modern times have directed at redeeming pedophilic acts. In spite of its attempt to redeem pederasty, a study by Theo Stanfort records that “in all cases, it was the pederast who introduced sex into the relationship. None of the boys had either the knowledge or the experience to initiate what were essentially advanced homosexual techniques.”
Engel establishes some important general characteristics involved in pederasty. These characteristics are especially important for discerning the extent of homosexual pederasty in clergy and bishops of the Catholic Church, and perceiving accurately the damage done to the “little ones” in the Flock whom the Shepherds have failed so abysmally to protect.
First, is the procedure for seducing the young called “grooming.” “The grooming process often seems similar from offender to offender, largely because it takes little to discover that emotional seduction is the most effective way to manipulate children.’”
Second, is secrecy. “’Secrecy is ingrained in the molester’s personality,’ and ‘dismantling that secrecy takes a long time,’ as writers like Leberg have reminded us.
Third, “habituated pederasts like Clarence Osborne can never get enough boys to satisfy their basic impulses any more than habituated homosexuals can find permanent satisfaction from their hundreds of anonymous sexual encounters. Osborne claimed to have had sexual relations with 2,500 boys, but there is no indication that that number was enough to satisfy his lust.”
Forth, “’the selfishness of child molesting men is ‘almost delusional’… His incapacity for empathy with normal children and their parents is at least ‘psychopathic’ and can be rightfully called ‘a circumscribed fixed psychosis.’” (Quote from Samuel A. Nigro)
Fifth, the victims are “objectified, exploited, and morally degraded and corrupted… the very core of their being had been changed forever and for the worse.”
Sixth, in a study done in Toronto in1964, significant differences were found between “pedophiles whose victims were primarily little girls” and “pederasts whose victims were primarily young boys or about to enter puberty.” “Homosexual sex offenders of minor children had at least twice or more the number of victims as heterosexual pedophiles… the nature of the abuse by the homosexual predator was more aggressive and orgasmic than that of the heterosexual pedophile… homosexual sex offenders were substantially overrepresented in the Canadian study.” Finally, “the homosexual sex offender… had the highest rate of recidivism.”
The Individual Homosexual and the Homosexual Collective
Engel summarizes much of the research that has been done on the causes of homosexuality. Her starting point is that “homosexuals are made, not born.” In other words, “there is at present no scientific evidence to support the theory that homosexual drives and desires are biologically determined.” However, that doesn’t stop the Homosexual Collective from using the theory of the “gay gene” to further their political gains.
In moving from the account of the individual homosexual to that of the Homosexual Collective, Engel emphasizes the fact that though the Collective serves many purposes for the individual homosexual, it operates primarily as a political force.
The Collective is simply made up homosexuals organized, funded and politically-situated to act as force for revolution. Individual homosexuals gain much from belonging to the Collective; in return, they support its agenda of revolution.
The Collective is a “movement that has constructed a significant ‘anti-culture’ built on sexual deviancy… including homosexuality, autoeroticism, transvestitism, fetishism, sadomasochism and criminal pedophilia and pederasty.” Engel quotes Father Enrique Rueda who writes that within this anti-culture, “the liberated homosexual can find religion, culture, recreation (cruises), entertainment, education and may other needs in institutions that are supportive of his needs.” (Father Rueda wrote the groundbreaking book on homosexuality in the modern Church: The Homosexual Network—Private Lives and Public Policy.)
Engel writes that “perhaps Wolfe best captured the essence of the function of the Collective in the life of a homosexual when he said, ‘In the gay subculture, the gay man can do collectively what he did alone as a child. …(It) helps him make the transition from ‘good little boy’ to sexual outlaw.’” The Collective also exists to make sure homosexuals stay homosexual. For instance, it strongly sanctions any homosexual who decides to leave the lifestyle or to seek psychiatric counseling to do so. Like all collectives, it has great power of “the group” to hold fast to its members, and it uses both the “carrot and the stick.”
Engel recounts the revolutionary roots of the Collective in the Mattachine Society founded in 1950 by Henry Hay, an actor and former member of the Communist Party. Heavily influenced by the dialectal materialism of Marxist-Leninism, “the Mattachine Society’s political strategies [were] decidedly Communist in flavor.” Like the Communists, it favored “front” groups, and like the Freemasons, its members were awarded Degrees (levels) of Membership and were sworn to secrecy. As a result, “the ideology that gives the Homosexual Collective its dynamism, and fuels the loyalty and fanaticism of its members is revolutionary in every sense of the word….Like World Communism, the Homosexual Collective desires to create a New Reality and a New Man…the implementation of the Collective’s agenda will require a complete transformation of Society.”
Fathers and mothers should be aware of one particular purpose of the Collective’s agenda: its political and public-relations battle to gain more recruits to homosexuality. “The Homosexual Collective recruits like the Army,” writes Engel. “Individual homosexuals proselytize and seduce new recruits.”
“Nigor, in his own inimitable style summarized the predatory nature of homosex when he said, ‘homosexuals colonize and recruit as if by “binary fission” both in and out of the workplace…’ At the collective level, he said, ‘Homosexuals infiltrate and metastasize, taking over and every group possible by a compounding of their cognitive defects.’”
“ ‘Man-boy love relationships are…a happy feature of the rebellion of youth and its irrepressible search for self-discovery. …Most of us, given the opportunity and the assurance of safety, would no doubt choose to share our sexuality with someone under the age of consent,’ Thorstad has repeatedly reminded his gay-lesbian audiences without fear of contradiction.” (italics mine) The Homosexual Collective’s political goals include winning that legal and social “assurance of safety” that would open the door for homosexuals to recruit boys and youth by seduction without fear of reprisal.
Engel reorients readers from the compassionate understanding of the individual homosexual—his gifts, his moral turmoil, his suffering, his personality and individuality—to the realistic assessment of the Homosexual Collective:
“Whatever mitigating factors contribute to the moral plight of the individual homosexual, they do not apply to the Homosexual Collective and its minions.
“It is either us or them.”
Homosexuality and the Catholic Church
Engel’s primary thesis is that homosexuality has become “intergenerational” within the Holy Orders of the Catholic Church, particularly within the college of bishops and the Vatican hierarchy, and, therefore, the Collective wields tremendous institutional power in the Church. “Intergenerational” plays itself out in that ordained homosexuals perform the “rite of sodomy” on their youthful victims, and then—having corrupted them—invite them into the Collective of homosexual priests. More specifically, it means that homosexual bishops make sure their homosexual clerical lovers/ friends/victims also become bishops.
Furthermore, the thesis proposes that this Homosexual Collective is one of the main agents, if not the main agent, of the revolution that has overthrown tradition, doctrine and liturgy. If you think there is something akin to a parallel Church, or an Amchurch or a pseudo-Church, or a Church that has suffered something akin to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers—or if you just think that something is terribly wrong in the Catholic Church—then Engel’s book aims to help you to understand how and why the hypocrisy and duplicity of our priests, and bishops, their bureaucracy and their other allies have reached such incredible extremes.
If revolution—the uprooting of the Cross—is the form cause that seeks to destroy the Church, then the Feminist Collective and the Homosexual Collective are the material cause of the revolution within the Church. Catholic ignorance of their workings only means the revolution will succeed more quickly and completely.
Engel also shows that the deconstruction of Church teaching is not the only danger. Our children are in danger. If institutionalized homosexuality is not completely eradicated—as in, shut down the seminaries and religious houses where it has been found, exclude homosexuals from the seminary or Holy Orders, and other firm measures—then there is little doubt that many instances of pederastic seduction and rape will continue. “The proselytization, seduction and recruitment of youth, has been the lifeblood of the homosexual sub-culture wherever and whenever it has emerged in human society. Clerical homosexuality poses no exception to the rule.” In fact, the “clerical overbody” that protects sexual predators has hardly been touched. It lives on, full of menacing power, protected by those holding high offices at the Vatican.
History Underlies Thesis
The biggest obstacle to Engel’s proving this thesis is that the institutional Church has fought to hide—and continues so—to hide any trace of the infiltration of the Homosexual Collective into the Church. This is not hard to figure out why. First, the official teaching of the Church condemns homosexual acts as intrinsically immoral and same sex attraction as “disordered.” Also, the 1961 Instruction on the “Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders” prohibited homosexuals and pederasts as candidates to the priesthood and religious life. The existence of a Homosexual Collective within the Church is a sign of a radical change within the Church, institutionalized lying and the most blatant kind of hypocrisy. Therefore, the cover-up will be ferocious and ruthless.
Cover-ups succeed. That is why they are done. And that is why Engel had to write a massive book of unimpeachable research to prove what could have and should have been simply admitted by the Shepherds of the Church, especially the Vicar of Christ, when the sexual abuse scandals flooded the media.
A powerful rhetorical tool is that of using the known to explain the unknown. Engel ultimately leads from the knowledge of other homosexual collectives in history to the understanding the workings of the Homosexual Collective within the Church, which, as noted, cloaks itself in secrecy.
The homosexual collective, for instance, argues that the only objections to homosexuality arise from religious, ie., Christian, beliefs, that have no place in modern democracy. “One need only examine the testimony given in the State of Colorado Supreme Court Case of Evans v. Romer, to understand that what the ancients believed concerning the morality of homosexual acts is still of import today,” writes Engel.
Engel’s section on antiquity, however, gives a preponderance of historical evidence that contradicts this tactic, and she concludes “as [Robert P.] George [Professor of Politics at Princeton University] concluded, [that] the condemnation of homosexuality by Greek philosophers, as represented by Plato, is substantially in line with the Catholic tradition we are about to explore.” Contrary to homosexual revisionist historians, the Greeks never normalized homosexuality.
This is an important point, for the Church teaches that homosexuality is a sin against the natural law, which is written in the hearts of all men. Any argument that weakens the natural law, also weakens the teaching of the Church, which is why those in the Collective fighting the Church’s teaching work so hard to advance the theory that the ancient pagan world had no sanctions against homosexuality.
The most powerful example of arguing from the known to the unknown concerns the section on the ring of British homosexual traitors from Cambridge, all Communists, who betrayed their nation to the Soviet Union for 30 years. The wealth of information collected from various trials and tell-all autobiographies sheds a tremendous light on the way the Homosexual Collective operates; this section works like a blueprint for making sense of the homosexual activity within the Catholic Church.
The story of the Cambridge Spy ring—Anthony Blunt, et al—is fascinating reading. The extent to which these homosexuals—some blackmailed by the Soviets—betrayed the Western world is almost incredible. “Each, in their own way, contributed to the wholesale destruction of the West’s intelligence services that hemorrhaged for more than 30 years. There is no question today that for Stalin, virtually every intelligence secret Britain and the United States had was an open book,” writes Engel.
Engel makes several observations that are applicable to the Church today. Perhaps, the most important is that “no effective action can be taken against the Homintern Network within the Roman Catholic Church unless that network is acknowledged and well understood. ‘Subversion and treason from within’ combined with ‘attack from without’ is as near perfect a prescription for disaster for the Church as it was for Britain during the era of the Cambridge spies.”
Almost equally as important is her observation that “there is a similarity between a secular traitor’s hatred of the Social Order and nation that nurtured him, and the homosexual priest’s hatred of the Roman Catholic Church with its moral absolutes and restrictions and authority figures. Once the homosexual priest or religious is absorbed into the Homintern, his allegiance and subservience to it supercedes all former loyalties. His devotion to his family and his faith is atrophied.”
Significantly, Blunt et al were recruited into the Soviet spy system before they joined the British Civil Service. It’s worth remembering that certain kind of men and women can happily embark on a double life; betrayal is a thrill to them.
And a third enlightening observation is that Catholics are similar to the British in their “sentimentality.” “Everybody knew that they were Communist,” wrote historian Rebecca West, “but very few people really believe it.”
Just so, writes Engel,
“everyone in the Catholic Church today knows that there are active homosexual-pederasts in the priesthood, religious orders, national hierarchy and the Vatican, yet very few people actually believe it. Not until the secular media started to expose actual court cases involving clerical sex abuse by Catholic clerics did Catholics begin to realize the real threat to the Faith and the faithful posed by the clerical Homintern. All may not be lost, however, if to paraphrase the words of Dame West, Church leaders are willing to ‘trade in’ their humiliations and wounded pride for ‘some much needed wisdom.’”
The Homosexualization of Amchurch
Engel’s account of the workings of the Homosexual Collective within the Church runs for about 700 pages.
Because Catholic leaders are going to cover up their homosexuality, Engel followed the advice of ex-Communist Louis F. Budenz: “Look at what they do, not at what they say.”
Thus, much of the evidence collected on the Collective is circumstantial. Circumstantial evidence is “evidence not bearing directly on the fact in dispute, but on various attendant circumstances from which a judge or jury might infer the occurrence of the fact in dispute. …circumstantial evidence is used in courts every day and ‘is often more reliable than eyewitness evidence.’” (quotation from Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton in their book The Rosenberg File on convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosnberg.)
Engel continues to explain that “throughout my investigation I have tried to back my findings with at least two, generally more, confirmations from reputable sources specializing in the subject under investigation. In cases where I was unsure of a deceased or living cleric’s complicity in the homosexual network, or when circumstances indicated that such complicity was either incidental or sporadic, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and eliminated his name from the text entirely.”
Furthermore, Engel explains, “I found the following guide used by French Intelligence in the 1930’s to weigh evidence in criminal cases to be both accurate and practical: I hear = rumor; I see = reliable; I know = absolute truth.”
Engel also attempts to show that the “prism of the political is the most important aspect of the homosexual movement” within and without the Church. Like a political party, it advances the cause of the group.
Engel succeeds on all accounts. The strength of this section is not the only the breadth of her research, but the strength of her documentation. Engel has not only given an extensive and up-to-date account of those priests and bishops already exposed as homosexual predators, but she also “outs” a few that were either unknown or much lesser known to Catholics, such as two very powerful Cardinals at the beginning of 20th century who are fingered as starting the line of intergenerational homosexual pederasts that has metastasized within the clergy and hierarchy of the Church. Any mere mention of some of them will invoke the common reaction of Catholics to the exposure of homosexual predators whom they particularly liked:
“One parishioner from St. Mary’s who was interviewed by a reporter for The Dallas Morning News after the Scranton story broke exclaimed that “He’s excellent with the young people.… They feel like they can talk with him.”
[To which Engel responds sarcastically] “Hmmmm. Let’s see. A pederast that is good with young people and makes them feel that they can communicate and confide in him! Absolutely astonishing!”
“What happens to a diocese when a bishop, the shepherd of his flock and father to his priests, turns wolf? And “How has Rome reacted to a bishop turned wolf?” Engel answers those questions in these chapters. The three chapters on the actual cases of homosexual pederasty among bishops, parish priests, and religious orders will enrage Catholics with the detailed account of the wholesale, ruthless betrayal of the flock. To read, over-and-over again yet another tragic story of children and youth corrupted, violated, and forever marred and scarred, is profoundly sad. Perhaps the most profound and disturbing conclusion to draw from these sections is that many bishops (and their bureaucracies) have turned against their Flock.
These bishops (and their bureaucracies) have performed criminal acts or protected those who did so. And yet, “for the record, each and every homosexual bishop, identified as such in this chapter, is in good standing, either as an active bishop or as a Bishop or Archbishop Emeritus, or has died in good standing. None of the ecclesiastic predators who have committed criminal acts against minor boys have spent a single day in jail. Nor has the Holy Father officially ordered a canonical trial for any bishop accused of sexual crimes or homosexual misconduct as a first step toward defrocking the offending bishop or relegating him to a strict and isolated monastic life. …For a bishop to prey on a young seminarian or priest placed in his care is an inconceivable breach of faith and trust. Yet Rome continues to tolerate these gross violations of trust with a minimum of fuss and bother.”
Contrast this attitude to that of St. Damian who wrote that the vice of sodomy “surpassed the enormity of all others,” and who asked “Almighty God to use Pope Leo IX’s pontificate ‘to utterly destroy this monstrous vice that a prostrate Church might everywhere rise to vigorous stature.’” (St. Damian wrote The Book of Gomorrah, a medieval treatise on sodomy.)
Did the Homosexual Collective infiltrate the Church because now, under modern lowered standards in seminary vetting, it gained easier access than ever before in the history of the Church to that which has always attracted homosexuals to the priesthood or religious life: plenty of money, insulation from women and access to lots of young men and boys? Or was the Collective a “useful idiot” of a larger effort (such as Communism) to destroy the Church? Engel touches on this issue, but can’t answer it conclusively. No doubt, access to the Vatican’s or somebody else’s archival material would be necessary to answer that question. But when she says that Paul VI navigated the “Church’s paradigm shift on homosexuality,” she amasses the proof, and her theory on why he did so is backed by evidence.
In general, this final section on homosexuality within the Catholic Church not only recounts much history, but also makes multiple cause-and-effect connections between the intergenerational infiltration of homosexuality within the Church, and the state of the Church as it is now. If a reader is ecstatic at the state of Church currently, or if he is appalled at the state of the Church currently—either way, he attains a great deal of understanding on how it attained its current state by reading this section.
She deals with what I think is an over-arching question: Where have the popes been in the deconstruction, betrayal and hollowing out of the Catholic Church since Vatican II? I appreciate Engel’s having the courage to raise the action or inaction of the popes when talking about the abandonment of the faithful to wolves, false shepherds, and dissidents. I appreciate the diligent effort she put into answering it. In spite of the fact that the story makes no sense without looking at the popes’ responsibility, many conservative groups will not tolerate a discussion of their role in allowing the decay of the Church. In this account, as in others, the popes since Vatican II come off very poorly in terms of disciplining the bishops and others under their authority.
I found that an appropriate commentary on the hierarchy and clergy of the Church comes from A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, edited by Benedictine Dom Bernard Orchard et al. Commenting on Our Lord’s words in Matthew 12:33, it says: “Nature knows no deception: from a good fruit one can argue a healthy tree. No so the Pharisees. From their customary pious discourses one would not guess at their inward corruption. They are as dangerous as a ‘brood of vipers.’ Let them reform inwardly, or at least show their corruption outwardly in speech.” “Phariseeism” can infect Catholicism just as it did Judaism. This book is a powerful argument that it has, and that many in the hierarchy have been tainted with it.
Engel discloses the social engineering strategies of the Homosexual Collective within the Church. Social engineering is the subversive manipulation of the common people by an elite group. A modern phenomenon, it relies on mass media, public relations, psychological manipulation, deception, interlocking directories, language manipulation, and the pseudo “expert.” The engineers’ motives are always hidden from those being engineered, and so there are always (in E. Michael Jones’ terms) the misleading exoteric reason given to the masses as opposed to the real esoteric reason shared by those in control. Social engineering successfully controls the masses’ emotions so that the ruling party can tear down and rebuild the culture with the minimum of fuss and according to the “invisible elites’” hidden agendas.
Her book successfully exposes the above strategies, as well as the most important of all, the successful management of massive amounts of money to make sure the agenda of the Homosexual Collective succeeds.
Money is one of the most effective and universal corrupter of the Church, and it has its place in this specific corruption. The Catholic Church is rich; and specifically, many parishes take in a lot of money. If parishes could not provide the money it craves, the Homosexual Collective would most likely clear out. Engel’s book makes the worldly, comfort-and-luxury-loving aspect of the homosexual lifestyle very clear. It is a lifestyle that depends on and often loves money and the good things of this world. The prelates, the bishops, the priests who were active homosexuals lived a life of marked and unusual comfort at the very least, and great luxury at the most. Some were fabulously wealthy simply from being clergy or bishops. Many were attracted to the lifestyle of other clergy living in great comfort and affluence (especially in Vatican City); and that played a role in seeking their vocations. They found they could get their hands on a lot of money, a lot of what money could buy. They had far more of the good things in life than most Catholics.
Take that away, and the attraction of homosexuals to the Church would no doubt dramatically fall off, even disappear. The Collective would go and get its recruits in a far more comfortable setting than a Catholic Church that actually manifested the poverty-seeking, “pilgrim Church” that the bishops proclaimed the Church to be at Vatican II. (The Fathers of Vatican II proclaimed in Christus Dominus: The Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church that the Bishops “should …give an example of simplicity of life.”)
This book is one more confirmation that social engineering has not only infiltrated, but has been institutionalized in the Church just as it has in government and education. The Church is being changed in order to change Catholics—the essence of social engineering. Like all exposures of a powerful and enduring network of lying, deception and ruthless power, it makes for a gripping and cathartic reading.
What is being engineered out of the reach of Catholics—and not just by this Collective, but by many forces in the Church—is an environment in which they can experience a personal love for Jesus Christ and in which they can come to know and obey what He taught—not what man teaches. Without this, Catholics will cease being Catholics. They will change with any program of social engineering—be it inside or outside the Church.
As Our Lord says, “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” The Kingdom is only gained by “dint of earnest effort,” says A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture of these verses. In other words, the Faith will be taken away if a person or group acquiesces in the loss. Social engineering is the modern way to force such “acquiescence.” In all cases of social engineering, the masses must fight to keep a hold on the truth. In particular, Catholics must fight very hard to keep hold of the Way, the Truth and the Life. They must make diligent effort to recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd. If we do not stay close to Jesus Christ, personally and as a body, to His mother and to the unchanging doctrine of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, we are lost.
© Rosemary Hugo Fielding