O'BRIEN...AGAIN

By Tim Rohr

In 2013, as things began to heat up in this archdiocese, I received a letter from Cardinal Edwin O'Brien, then the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem, of which I was a member. In fact, his name is on this thing:

The letter was functionally a "cease and desist order" if you want to remain a Knight. Read it here.

O'Brien didn't know it, but it was his letter that led to the outing of the Apuron sexual scandal. Here's why.

At the time of O'Brien's letter, the issue was about Apuron's treatment of Fr. Paul Gofigan and nothing yet had been alleged about Apuron's sexual abuse of minors. I thought it rather odd that someone would go to the Vatican to try to shut me down about the Fr. Paul thing. JungleWatch was hardly a thing in 2013. So the overkill of getting a cardinal in Rome to threaten me made me suspicious that I was on to something that Apuron and the Neocat brass were afraid of. So I stayed on it, and well, you see what happened.

I also found it strange that O'Brien went silent after I wrote him back and set out a barrage of facts about Apuron. I found it strange because he had the authority to kick me out of the Order but he didn't, making me think I had hit on something O'Brien thought best to leave alone. 

My suspicion would be validated when in 2018, Archbishop Vigano listed O'Brien's name in a letter outing compromised bishops. Read it here. 

By coincidence, I was in the middle of reviewing the O'Brien affair for a book I'm writing when I checked my email and came a cross a link to a substack article by a Catholic priest who was also threatened by Cardinal O'Brien for doing the same thing I was doing in 2013:

VINDICATED ONLY AFTER DEATH by Gene Thomas Gomulka