I'm thinking maybe I should not have gotten so deeply involved in answering a letter last week. It's not that I don't appreciate and thoroughly enjoy challenges like that, but, in this case I'm afraid I've unintentionally scandalized some very good people - members of my own church.

For those who may hate the Catholic Church, or wish to avoid news of its current crisis, please turn the page.

However, despite the fact this is not a religious newspaper, last week's letter prompted me to comment on what is already the biggest scandal in Catholic Church history - bigger even than the fourth century Arian heresy. Bigger because while Aryanism involved mostly a single heresy, the recent conflict in the church involves many. It effects far more than the one billion, four hundred million Catholics in the world today (2016 count).

"Cardinal Raymond Burke and Cardinal Walter Brandmüller have written an open letter to the presidents of bishops’ conferences attending this week’s Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse, calling on them to end their silence and return to upholding the divine and natural law." Letter (released February 19, 2019).

“A decisive act now is urgent and necessary,” the cardinals say, and call for an end to the “plague of the homosexual agenda in the Church, organized networks of protection, and a climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence.” (Letter of February 19, 2019).

World opinion today has retreated from historical, traditional Judeo-Christian ethics. Despite the horrendous damage that has been inflicted upon countless thousands of innocent children and young adults by sexual predators, pedophiles and aggressive homosexuals, we hear mostly sympathetic news of their activities. More than 80 percent of victims of this abuse are 15-years old or older. Even the law has been defensively twisted in favor of these groups, and supported by many of society's richest people who fly the world in search of their prey.

The facts finally being exposed are frightening. The Pope has surrounded himself with pedophiles and homosexuals, Cardinals and bishops, who have preyed upon children and others for decades. “The even public denial, by words and by acts, of the divine and natural law, is at the root of the evil that corrupts certain circles in the Church,” the cardinals continue. But “in the face of this situation, cardinals and bishops are silent,” they observe, and ask the Pope and bishops if they, too, will be silent during the Feb. 21-24 Vatican summit (which they were). The public disgrace of former-Cardinal McCarrick is what sprung this casket of stinking spiritual liability. But, his name was not even mentioned during this summit.

The central issue here focuses on the legitimacy of Pope Francis' election to the Papal chair. He is immediately complicit with the shielding of many members of this homosexual-pedophile gang. Most recent statistics reveal that nearly 90 percent of these sexual crimes are perpetrated by homosexual prelates and other members of the clergy. The problem goes back for decades, (McCarrick was a sexual predator for 50 years) and he propagated untold hundreds of eager sexual predators during that time. There is also an incredible Soviet Union connection which began shortly after WWII, which infiltrated sexual predators into the clergy for the purpose of destroying the Church from the inside. These facts are incontrovertible. A papal conclave is a meeting of the College of Cardinals convened to elect a Bishop of Rome, also known as the pope. Pope Francis has just appointed Cardinal Kevin Farrell to be the camerlengo, the person responsible for administering the Vatican conclave when the pontiff dies.

While not accused of sexual improprieties, Cardinal Farrell (no relation) lived with Cardinal McCarrick for 6 years. He states, during that time he never heard a word about McCarrick's crimes. This, and the fact that the Pope has already appointed nearly half of the bishops who will elect the next Pope, makes it probable the silence about sexual abuse will continue.

At the present time, the Catholic Church is set for another historic schism, and Pope Francis is the wedge. Cardinals Burke and Brandmüller are heroes here, and undeserving of the isolation and abuse from the protected group around Francis.

Just a note on the subject of this column. The sexual predators here have always been dogmatically condemned by the Church. What society thinks is irrelevant.