APURON...JUDAS...AND WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

By Tim Rohr

CRISIS MAGAZINE has published a very heart-tugging opinion piece titled "Bishop Strickland Becomes a Victim for the Church He Loves."

The author begins by describing an event, wherein, as a child, the author was audibly raped via a payphone, and then compares that experience to being "raped" as an adult by a similar loss of innocence in the Cardinal McCarrick case...and by extension, the recent attack by Pope Francis on Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas.

I do not share the author's sentiments given that by age 17 - or so - I had learned not to revere any man with a Roman collar. 

I could go on and on as to "why" - including my own experience of an attempted seduction by "a pastor," however, I do not care to - though I will share a link to this story.

As an aside, the McCarrick affair has mega-personal meaning for me, and here's why:

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At the time the McCarrick affair was exposed (August 2018), Pope Francis was "reconsidering" the March 18 DECISION by the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) which found a certain Archbishop Anthony Sablan Apuron GUILTY of stuff. 

It's all "Vatican-speak," which is the equivalent of "political speak" and designed to make us wonder. 

In the grand scheme of things, despite the horrors perpetrated by Apuron and many of his clerical cohorts under the very-ignoring noses of many of the children's own parents (a question yet to be asked or answered), Guam's "little problem," even though per capita it is the largest clergy sex abuse problem in the western world, Guam hardly registers on the Vatican-world radar, and I do not know if it ever will be. 

A tiny beach bungalow on the other side of the world

At the time the McCarrick story broke I was harboring in a tiny beach bungalow in the Virgin Islands -  pursuant to a legal agreement to "visit" my two youngest children on the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix where they had been functionally kidnapped and sequestered more than a year earlier.

I won't go into my personal drama here, but at the time, I was very aware that my "attack" on Guam's Archbishop Apuron would have major personal repercussions - and the loss of my family - and particularly my children - was one of them.

And while I felt somewhat exonerated in March 2018 after Apuron was found guilty of everything I had exposed here in JW (with the help of a very few), the reality was that Apuron's "army" went into attack mode and I was publicly crucified as a wife beater and child molester of my own children for the better part of the early weeks of May 2018. 

The bottom line for me...as I've stated many times - even publicly - is:

I will not leave Jesus because of Judas.

And it should be for you too:

Despite it all, Rohr said he is still a believer. “My faith wasn’t in Archbishop Apuron or father so-and-so,” he said. “You don’t leave Jesus because of Judas.” - Guam Daily Post, Aug. 19, 2019

Jesus, being God and the second person of the Blessed Trinity, knew who he chose when he chose Judas to be on of The Twelve. 

I don't want to get into the deeper "think" of all that, but my limited take is that Jesus chose a Judas for such a time as our own, when (some of) our own descendants of the apostles would betray us. 

So what!

Go to the cross with Jesus anyway. What else is there?