The Catholic crisis must be looked at in the broadest terms to fully grasp the magnitude

I flirted with Catholicism for a little over a year in the early days of my return to a sincere faith walk. Most of the Christian intellectuals I admired were Catholic: Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, the folks at the Acton Institute. More basically, I thought that the place to at least begin was the denomination that was, at the time Christ laid his hand on Peter's shoulder and declared, "Upon this rock I will build my church," the church, the sole network among those who had witnessed the events chronicled in the Gospels.

The unwavering nature of the rituals and carrying out of the sacraments also impressed me. I liked the idea that great care was taken not to let the Church's norms and conventions erode.

Alas, there has been, for some time, a faction of the worldwide Church that has been taking great care about something entirely different: keeping the wave of homosexuals interested in the priesthood under the tightest of wraps.

I went a different route in terms of church attendance and deepening of my faith, but I still pray that the Catholic Church can rid itself of the poison that threatens it like nothing has for centuries.

The current scandal had been educative. Not only have I, in the course of informing myself, learned of orders, bodies, and institutions of training and education I'd never heard of, but I'm learning of some key figures in the shaping of Vatican hierarchy that I was previously unacquainted with.

Take Cardinal Godfried Danneels, for instance:

Further serious concerns are being raised about Cardinal Godfried Danneels, one of the papal delegates chosen to attend the upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family, after the archbishop emeritus of Brussels confessed this week to being part of a radical "mafia" reformist group opposed to Benedict XVI.

It was also revealed this week that he once wrote a letter to the Belgium government favoring same-sex "marriage" legislation because it ended discrimination against LGBT groups.

The cardinal is already known for having once advised the king of Belgium to sign an abortion law in 1990, for telling a victim of clerical sex abuse to keep quiet, and for refusing to forbid pornographic, “educational” materials being used in Belgian Catholic schools.

He also once said same-sex “marriage” was a “positive development,” although he has sought to distinguish such a union from the Church’s understanding of marriage.

Just how powerful and extended is this Lavender Mafia? To begin to grasp it, I'd suggest starting with a piece currently up at The Federalist by Paul Rahe, a Hillsdale College history professor.  It's replete with links to other articles that you - and I - should read to get a fully-fleshed-out sense of the magnitude of this crisis.

Rahe shows that the problem has not been pedophilia nearly as much as perderasty:

As a report commissioned by the National Review Board of the American Catholic bishops and issued in 2004 revealed, something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and very few were, in the strictest sense, children. They were nearly all what we euphemistically call young adults. They were male adolescents on the younger side — at the age when boys as they mature can briefly be downright pretty.

What was involved was what its advocates call man-boy love: a sexual relationship between a grown man who serves as a mentor and a boy who is under his care or simply admires or stands in awe of him. The ancient Greeks, who practiced this systematically in the classical period, called this phenomenon pederasty, and I wrote extensively about it 26 years ago in the first part of my hardback book, “Republics Ancient and Modern” (the pertinent chapter can be found in the first volume of the paperback edition).

I also learned about one Gerald Fitzgerald, who had been trying to bring attention to the matter since the middle of the 20th century:

In the course of these investigations, a number of other things came to light. First, a priest named Gerald Fitzgerald — who in 1947 founded a small religious order named Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete to counsel priests who had difficulty with alcoholism, substance abuse, celibacy, and the like — had for decades been trying to alert the American bishops and officials in the Vatican (including Pope Paul VI) to the fact that priestly pederasty (which, he said, was unheard of before World War II) was a growing problem within the American Catholic Church. He had persistently tried to persuade the hierarchy to forbid the perpetrators’ supervision of boys and to laicize them, all to no avail.

In the mid-1980s, there was a high-level coverup of a report about perderasty in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana.

I also learned more about why Pope Benedict resigned:

A few years ago, we also learned that a host of high-level figures in the Curia were being blackmailed by their male lovers. I am told that Pope Benedict, who had by that time contracted Parkinson’s Disease, resigned his office in this connection because he knew there needed to be a purge and he feared that he did not have the physical stamina to carry it out. In his memoirs, Pope Benedict touches on the “gay lobby” and confesses to a lack of resoluteness. As everyone understood at the time, the task of cleaning house was to be left to his successor.

In the interim between Pope Benedict’s papacy and that of his successor, we received another indication of the depth of the problem. In the newspapers of Scotland, we learned that Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien, a cardinal and archbishop who was the primate of Scotland, had been buggering seminarians and young priests for years and nothing had been done in response to the complaints they had submitted to the Papal Nuncio. It was only when they went public in 2013 that the Vatican acted. 

And, now being armed with the facts about who and what Danneels was all about, I had a whole new sense of appreciation for the controversy about Francis's inauguration:

This disgraced figure stood on the balcony with Bergoglio after he was elected pope. He was chosen to say the prayer at the new pope’s inauguration. And there was joy in the ranks of those inclined to break the vow of celibacy.

And among the multitude of links Rahe provides, there's this one. Fortunately, he extensively excerpts from it:

If you want to get a sense of what such people thought, I suggest that you read “The Vatican’s Secret Life,” an article that appeared in Vanity Fair in December 2013. It is an eye-opener. Its author, Michael Joseph Gross, is not scandalized by what he found. He celebrates it and, tellingly, never once mentions, even under the guise of pedophilia, the propensity of prominent priests to indulge in pederasty. As Gross observes:

At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life. Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the Italian press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight journalist pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a ‘honeypot’ and entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual situations. (The cardinal vicar of Rome was given the task of investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)

There are at least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant denomination. There is the notorious monsignor nicknamed ‘Jessica,’ who likes to visit a pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of the innermost corridors of the Vatican. Whether he received this privileged access from some friend or family member, or from a client, is impossible to say; to see a known rent boy in black leather on a private Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.

I recommend that you read the whole article. The author interviewed a great many clerics in Rome, and makes it clear that they were delighted with the choice of Bergoglio and his selection of advisers.

They had reason to be delighted. Since his election, Pope Francis has done everything within his power to soften and subvert the church’s teaching concerning human sexuality. He put the Lavender Mafia in charge of the two Synods on the Family held in 2014 and 2015. They tried to push through their agenda; and, when the assembled bishops balked, they got a tongue-lashing from the pope, and he inserted in the final report without comment two paragraphs that had not received the requisite two-thirds vote. 

So there was a deliberate, orchestrated effort, as it became apparent that Benedict's term was going to end and create the opportunity of a wide-open transition,  to steer the Catholic Church toward deviation from Biblically sound doctrine.

The notion of stepping beyond the proper concerns of the priesthood also got a boost from Francis's coronation.

Secular socialists felt a sense of kinship with this high-level drift, as reported by George Neumayer at The American Spectator:

The Canadian socialist Naomi Klein has written about the propagandistic nest she and her friends have built at the Vatican. Klein readily acknowledges that for the pope environmentalism and socialism are one and the same. After one trip to the Vatican, she wrote that the pope agrees with her that “climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model.” In the pages of the New Yorker, Klein wrote about a giddy dinner at the Vatican with a roster of socialists who had burrowed into the Church:

My dinner companions have been some of the biggest troublemakers within the Church for years, the ones taking Christ’s proto-socialist teachings seriously. Patrick Carolan, the Washington, D.C.-based executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, is one of them. Smiling broadly, he tells me that, at the end of his life, Vladimir Lenin supposedly said that what the Russian Revolution had really needed was not more Bolsheviks but ten St. Francises of Assisi.

Now all of a sudden these outsiders share many of their views with the most powerful Catholic in the world, the leader of a flock of 1.2 billion people. Not only did this Pope surprise everyone by calling himself Francis, as no Pope ever had before him, but he appears to be determined to revive the most radical Franciscan teachings. Moema de Miranda, a powerful Brazilian social leader, who was wearing a wooden Franciscan cross, says that it feels “as if we are finally being heard.”

For [Fr. Sean] McDonagh, the changes at the Vatican are even more striking. “The last time I had a Papal audience was 1963,” he tells me over spaghetti vongole. “I let three Popes go by.” And yet here he is, back in Rome, having help draft the most talked-about encyclical anyone can remember.

In almost any other Vatican, pantheistic injunctions such as “Listen to the Cry of the Earth” would have been unthinkable. But in the atmosphere Klein describes — where churchmen quote the murderous Lenin approvingly — they flow easily.

The crux of what has happened is that there is an organized movement that wants an explicitly leftist Catholic Church. Keeping a lid on pederasty is but one aspect of it. That was necessary to squelch any objection to teachings about the supposed beauty and inherent dignity of all manner of human sexual expression. But these people also want to see the Church become focused on the climate and environment and economic inequality.

The fates of individual souls is pretty far down the list of concerns to these collectivists.