Of the more than 100 pieces of my writing that I have posted on the Radio New Jerusalem web site, one stands head and shoulders above the rest as being easily the most controversial. This is an essay I published back in January of 2008 titled, "The Church Possessed: The Homosexualist Revolution in the Roman Catholic Church." I guess the title itself suggests why this might be controversial, and if the reader also guesses that it has not gotten any less so over the past eight years, this too would be correct.

This essay is not controversial because it isn't true; to the contrary, it is controversial precisely because it is. In preparation for this column, I went back through and re-verified my earlier research and found it is all still there, albeit with some alternate sourcing necessitated by the increasing penchant for political correctness that has arisen over the past eight years. Back in the day, I also met off the record with a high level diocesan official, hoping I would be told that I had somehow gotten this all wrong, but learned instead that just the opposite was true. I have spoken frankly and openly about it with a number of priests who also verified the veracity of what I wrote -- including and especially the diabolic component. I have found the Sacrament of Reconciliation a good place to carry on these discussions, and I have been fortunate to have had some excellent confessors who have treated the seal of the confessional as working both ways, taking me into their confidence and being as open and honest with me as I was encouraged to be with them. And my point in discussing this in confession was based upon a serious desire to know that I was not seeking to hurt anyone in my efforts to understand -- and enlighten others -- as to why so many had been hurt by the presence of a rogue and predatory homosexual element within the hierarchy and the clergy of the holy Church of Christ. My point was and is that, while there are those that deny that this is the source of the clergy sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, it is easy enough to prove that it is. And the Church knows it.

"The Church Possessed" actually came about as the result of making a confession.

In the Diocese of Saginaw, where my wife and I had moved with our two school aged daughters in 2005, we were immediately confronted with what had all the appearances of an "anti-Catholic" Catholic Church. In our first Mass in Alma, eight year old Martha was trying to follow along in the little white missalette she had received from her godparents, and finally leaned over to her mother and me and whispered, "This Mass is screwy!" Indeed, the church was screwy. The kneelers were absent, and the life-like Italian corpus from the crucifix was broken and stuffed in a basement closet -- we would discover this years later. As Martha had pointed out, the liturgy was unrecognizable and when my wife, Jean, and I met our pastor, we were told that our traditional Catholic belief system wasn't welcome in the Church anymore. We were told that the Diocese of Saginaw was on the cutting edge of a "Spirit of Vatican II" new Catholicism, and we just needed some time to get used to it. And it was made clear that if we didn't want to do this, we were free to go somewhere else.

So we gave it a try.

I enrolled in the Assumption University Saginaw Masters of Pastoral Ministry program in the fall of 2005, and was immediately confronted with the homosexualist aspect in all of this. During my entrance interview with the nun who ran the program, to determine if I had the "right stuff," I was shown a statue of two women in ancient garb involved in what can best be described as an orgasmic lesbian embrace. I was told that the statue represented the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Elizabeth. Sister looked at me curiously, as if I was a chimp under study, then asked, "Do you find this offensive?" Fighting back my shock and gag reflex, I answered calmly, and with feigned innocence, "Why, no. Am I supposed to?"

With that I was pronounced fit and signed up for two classes, one in Christology and the other on the New Testament. The former argued that the Christ concept was essentially an invention of the Early Church Fathers, and the latter that the New Testament was constructed in such a way so as to reinforce the former. I managed to nearly get kicked out of school for arguing the point of Catholic orthodoxy, and would have if Sister hadn't been advised by a priest friend to just give me a "B" and not make a scholastic martyr of me. She was already in hot water with our new bishop, Robert Carlson, who had recently been sent to Saginaw to restore Catholic order. The Assumption University Saginaw program would be phased out and replaced with a more traditional Catholic education program. The story of all of this is told in an open letter I wrote to the Academic Vice President of Assumption University, which I called "A New Assumption?" My point here is to relate that during the time of the previous bishop, Kenneth Untener, to work in a parish ministry in the Diocese of Saginaw meant any lay person doing so was expected to receive an unaccredited "masters" degree in pastoral ministry or religious education, and the not so hidden dynamic in this was that to qualify one had to accept the homosexualist agenda behind it. And, like well-meaning sheep, many did.

Now if it had been just Jean and I to consider, we probably would have stayed put and rode this situation out to its conclusion. Bishop Carlson, who is now Archbishop of St. Louis, was making progress in restoring the Catholic Faith to the Diocese of Saginaw. However, my Assumption University experience had labeled me as a troublemaker among the remaining minions of the late homosexualist Bishop Untener, and they were now opposing tooth and nail the revisions of Bishop Carlson. This meant that our children, the aforementioned Martha and her eleven year old sister, Elizabeth, were targeted as being particularly in need of catechesis concerning the "new" Catholicism that was already in the process of being returned to a more traditional expression of the "old" faith under Bishop Carlson. The excellent faith formation that our girls had received in our first parish in northern Michigan, and in our second in south central Florida, was seen in Alma as "Catholic brainwashing" that needed to be reversed by rapid indoctrination into the new faith as expressed in the "Spirit of Vatican II." And so, after many months of bringing our girls home after their faith formation classes and explaining the reasons why the Catholic Church wasn't mean for insisting that only men could be priests, why the sacraments were really necessary, and why the traditional family structure and God given gender roles weren't oppressive, I decided we couldn't wait any longer for Bishop Carlson to catch up to our parish in Alma. Realizing the seriousness of what I was contemplating, I asked our pastor in Alma to hear my confession. He said he didn't believe in the sacrament, but we could have a talk. When I told him what we were contemplating, he said, "Take me with you!" We didn't do that, of course, but we did take our family out of the Catholic Church.

Never one to come up with a simple solution when a more complicated one will do, mine was to reconnect with some distant and long lost Mennonite relatives in the "Thumb" of Michigan. So we began a weekly trek of 100 miles each Sunday to attend the Conservative Mennonite Church near the village of Pigeon. This was actually good for a while, and while Jean and our girls were homesick for the Catholic Church, I was doing fine among the Mennonites until we celebrated our first communion service and found something very vital was missing. "Where's Jesus?" I asked. The answer: "Nowhere to be found." Nice people, nice church, just no Jesus. Supposedly, He was with us "in spirit," the way a dead relative might be. And when I was told that the Real Presence was just an old Catholic superstition, I realized that, while I had heard that at the Catholic Church in Alma, it didn't stop the Lord from showing up for Mass. I prayed fervently and saw Jesus standing in the doorway of a burning Catholic Church. "Come be with us," I said to Him. "Come stay with me," He replied. Suddenly, I wanted to go to Mass. I had to go to Mass. I wanted to go home.

But where was home? We certainly weren't welcome in Alma. The Lord quickly provided an answer when Jean was told of a faithful priest in the little town of Bannister, some 30 miles away. She called Father Wolfgang Striechardt to make an appointment to see him, and when she told him our circumstances -- that we wanted to come home to the Catholic Church -- his reply was, "How soon can you be here?" Within the hour, we were with Father Wolf in confession and were warmly welcomed back to the Catholic Church. When my reasons for leaving the Church tumbled out, and my confession ended with my new found realization of how much I needed the Catholic Church, Father Wolf suggested that maybe the reason for all of this had been my failure to see how much the Catholic Church needed me. At this, the tears started to flow. This had never occurred to me. In fact, I had spent the past two years being told exactly the opposite.

Jean and the girls were given more traditional penances, but as the instigator in this situation, Father Wolf told me that for my penance he wanted me to write down all of the reasons why I had left the Catholic Church and, when this was accomplished, we would sit down and discuss them. After two weeks of research and some marathon writing sessions, I presented him with "The Church Possessed: The Homosexualist Revolution in the Roman Catholic Church." This was clearly more than he had bargained for, and he asked for time to read my work carefully and to think and pray about how he would handle this. By the time we met again, I had posted the essay on Radio New Jerusalem, where it sat along side my other writings, including my written course work and the letter to Assumption University that had gotten me in so much trouble. Father Wolf reviewed all of this and then made a recommendation that surprised me: he thought I should become a deacon. I asked him, "That's kind of, 'Out of the frying pan and into the fire,' isn't it Father?" He gave me a sly smile and shrugged.

The person responsible for deacon formation for the Diocese of Saginaw during the time of Bishop Carlson was the Diocesan Theologian, a man named Dr. Ed Hogan. If you don't recognize the title, "Diocesan Theologian," it is because this is a somewhat unusual position. It was a position created by the bishop because during the 24 year reign of Bishop Untener, the "Spirit of Vatican II" nonsense had become so much the norm that it was necessary to "re-form" the laity in light of the true Catholic faith. Not an easy task, and one not accomplished without considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faithful so affected. I suppose, in retrospect, that I presented a complication Ed Hogan didn't really need. However, Father Wolf's recommendation of me, and offer to sponsor me in training for the diaconate, got his attention and he was very gracious to me on that cold winter morning we spent discussing all of this in his office.

When I arrived, Ed had logged onto Radio New Jerusalem and was intently reading "The Church Possessed." When I asked him what he thought of it, he replied that it was "very interesting." I got right to the point: "Can you tell me that I'm wrong about any of this?" He was straightforward right back: "No, you've got it right. I wish I could tell you that you're wrong. Some of your language is a little over emotional and you state some things a little too strongly, which is understandable given your state of mind concerning all of this, but you've got your facts rights."

We went on to have a very candid discussion of the current situation in the Diocese of Saginaw and finally Ed got around to the subject at hand: the diaconate. "If you feel a strong calling to a be a deacon," he said, "We can attribute that to the Holy Spirit and there is nothing you've done here or written that would preclude you from it. However, it would mean that your web site would come under the editorial control of the bishop's office and I can assure you that pretty much all of what you have here would have to come down. Here are my personal feelings on this: You are on the same page with the bishop concerning this situation and you are in a position as a layman where you can say and write things that he can't and wouldn't if he could. You may be of more service to the Church doing that than if you were a deacon. My personal approach to this would be to just go ahead and clean all of this stuff up right now and let the chips fall where they may. The bishop takes a more pastoral approach. He is willing to take more time, move more slowly and be more patient because his goal isn't to run those who have been led astray out of the Church, but reconvert them and bring them back into the true Catholic fold. He sees that as his duty as a shepherd and, I guess, when all is said and done, I can't really argue with it." I agreed that I couldn't either when it was put like that. And Ed finished with the most obvious observation: "And besides, he's the bishop. It really doesn't matter what you or I think." That was certainly true enough.

A few weeks later, Ed Hogan came up with his own version of, "Out of the frying pan and into the fire." I received an email from Tom Conklin at Catholic Family Service asking me if I might be interested in becoming Catholic Chaplain at the Saginaw County Jail. It seems I had come highly recommended by Ed Hogan.

I took the job and suddenly found myself in Saginaw. I became acquainted with lots of people who worked for the diocese, more than 80 volunteers from the various parishes in the city who did worship services at the jail, and lots of Catholic priests. I got so I could judge by the reaction to me when someone figured out that I was that guy who had written "The Church Possessed," and I was labeled a homophobe (or worse) by many, and there were those individuals who refused to even speak to me. But they were, in actuality, a relative few. Interestingly enough, I discovered that there were so called "gay" priests who were bothered little or not at all by what I had written, and one of these men proved to be someone I could always count on to go into the jail on short notice to hear a difficult confession. And a jailhouse confession can be brutal -- like that of the weeping man who had beaten his wife to death with a hammer.

In doing the math it works out like this: even if the estimate is true that only something like six percent of the clergy sexual abuse cases have been reported, and if the estimate is accurate that one third to half of all of the Catholic priests in the US are gay, then the truth is that the vast majority of gay priests are really just priests, and, in my experience at least, they are good people, some of our best pastors, and they are doing a good job at the hardest profession there is on earth. They don't deserve to be lumped in with those who have been the perpetrators of the heinous crimes we have heard so much about, and, especially given the demographics of the ongoing priest shortage, we ought to be grateful we have them. As I was told once, God doesn't call us to be heterosexual or homosexual, he calls us to be holy. Amen to that. Celibacy and orthodox Catholic teaching observed and upheld renders the question of sexual orientation moot. I'm not on a gay "witch hunt" within the Catholic Church and never have been.

However, this does not discount the reality of a homosexualist agenda promoted within the Catholic Church, like it is in the greater society at large, by a strident, shrill and highly vocal minority bent on imposing their malinformed and misinformed sexual agenda upon the rest of us as if it were the gospel truth -- which it isn't. The Gospel of Christ remains the gospel truth within the Catholic Church, and it is our solemn responsibility to our ever-present and sovereign Lord to assure that this always remains so. And it is our duty to our culture at large to be vigilant in standing up in public for this truth, as we should in church, even in the face of those both within and without who would point to us as homophobes, bigots and worse so as to persecute us as they imagine themselves to be persecuted.

The prophetic alarm bell I have been sounding since writing "The Church Possessed" is that the Catholic Church has spent the last 50 years dealing with the fallout of a crisis caused by those in our midst who hijacked the Second Vatican Council and claimed that there was somehow a "spirit," unwritten in any of the documents, that justified the attempt at turning the Church of Christ into the Church of anti-Christ. This is the unholy spirit of the satanic agenda that is driving this homosexualist revolution within the Church just as it is in the world. And this is also controversial not because it isn't true but because it is. It is time that those of us who deny this realize it, and it is time that those of us who realize it stand up in church, and in the public square, and say so. That is the message of "The Church Possessed," and that is the message of this column today. And the reason we should do this is not only because our Christian culture, traditional family values and future depend upon it, but because those who are so misguided and negatively affected in this, regardless of their protests to the contrary, are desperately in need of our help.

In the emotional aftermath of the recent tragedy in Orlando, these already turbulent waters became much more muddied. The shooter, Omar Mateen, was the creation of the attempt in postmodern America to create a societal synthesis out of communities as divergent as the LGBT movement and those following the ways of radical Islam. The confusion and conflict inherent in this for someone like Mateen, who found himself living and functioning in both of these worlds, created a ticking time bomb of anger and hatred that went off during the celebration of "Latino Night" at the Pulse, and resulted in over 100 casualties -- 49 of them deaths.

Given the scope of this tragedy, natural and basic human decency required the outpouring of love and support for the victims and their families that followed, and this was truly a beautiful thing. However, given the cultural, political and sexual nuances involved, it is also understandable that this initial outpouring would be skewed and affected by the political correctness of a society, trying as unsuccessfully as ours is, to find some kind of unity in the midst of such a profound and imposed diversity. As time tempers the pain and emotion in all of this, it should allow us the opportunity for a more measured, and genuinely more compassionate response, by embracing the individuals involved in the LGBT lifestyle as the independent and beloved human souls that they are. And as faithful Christians and Roman Catholics, we should see in this the spiritually correct response that trumps the politically correct response inherent in embracing instead the unholy agenda of LGBT movement.

The Catholic media response to the events in Orlando pretty much ran the gambit one would have expected. Father James Martin, the editor at large of America, posted a video on Facebook taking the majority of Catholic bishops to task for not using the opportunity of the Orlando massacre to recognize the LGBT community rather than just expressing their condolences to the individuals involved and their families. Father Richard Heilman then took Father Martin to task on Roman Catholic Man in an article titled, "Father James Martin's False Mercy." Father Heilman rightly points out that mercy extended in such a way that it ignores, or even condones, behavior contrary to Catholic teaching is false mercy. He then uses the parable of the Prodigal Son as an illustration. In this illustration, he writes that, while the repentant, wayward son is welcomed back home by his father, the father does not "...tell the son he is free to bring the prostitutes home with him." Father Heilman goes on to rant, "THIS is my Catholic Church!! This is what REAL mercy is all about. My Church has its loving arms WIDE OPEN at ALL TIMES, always ready to welcome those who want to be home. But, like the father, we are not saying, 'Bring the prostitutes home with you.'"

Perhaps the most controversial statement concerning the events in Orlando came from our own Bishop of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Robert Lynch. Bishop Lynch set off a furor, particularly in the conservative and traditionalist Catholic media, with these remarks on his personal blog:

Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, which targets, mostly verbally, and also often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence.

The Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, made these remarks in reference to Bishop Lynch's earlier statement in a June 20 homily celebrating the Fortnight for Freedom:

Yet, in our confusion and in our anger, we must be careful lest we make truth another casualty in the aftermath of this lone-wolf terrorist attack. And to blame a particular religion or religion in general for this atrocity would do just that.

CNN's Anderson Cooper rejects Pam Bondi's expressions of sympathy because she opposed same sex marriage. The New York Times editorialized that the victims were "casualties of a society where hate has deep roots." They weren't talking about ISIS's caliphate but America. And one bishop who should know better even opined, and I quote: "It is religion, including our own which targets…and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgendered people."

Where in our faith, where in our teachings — I ask you — do we target and breed contempt for any group of people?

I suspect that Archbishop Wenski knows Bishop Lynch's situation just like those of us in the Diocese of St. Petersburg do. Bishop Lynch is elderly and, as required at age 75, has already submitted his resignation to the Holy See and it has been accepted. Therefore, those in the media so self righteously demanding his resignation needn't bother. Rumor has it that he is in poor health physically and mentally, and the process of finding his replacement is well under way. At Mass our priests pray for, "Francis our pope and whoever our new bishop might be." It would seem most likely that these remarks were ill advised to begin with and, in retrospect, it might have been better if someone at the diocese had been able to exercise editorial privilege rather than have the bishop end his career on such a controversial note.

Bishop Lynch was, by reputation, one of the remaining homosexualist bishops. We moved to the Diocese of St. Petersburg little more than a year ago, and prior to this I attended Mass here on occasion when I came to this area to visit family. The homosexualist, anti-Catholic agenda that we encountered in Alma, and that led us to leave the Catholic Church, was reported in the Diocese of St. Petersburg in this 2007 Renew America article by Matt C. Abbott, but was never in evidence here in my experience -- which was, admittedly, very limited. As one might imagine, we have our share and perhaps more of "gay" priests here in the Diocese of St. Pete, and I've been around long enough now to have met some of them. Like I learned in Saginaw, they are good people, some of our best pastors, and they are doing a good job at the hardest profession there is on earth. The only sexual scandal I'm aware of on Bishop Lynch's watch involved the bishop himself and adult males and, while unfortunate and distasteful, this pales in comparison to the tragedy and horror experienced in such places as Philadelphia and Boston. In fact, Bishop Lynch's career in St. Petersburg has been more noteworthy for the scandals he cleaned up early on in his bishopric, and he openly and publicly encouraged anyone abused by priests to come forward and report it. Rather than sexual scandal, perhaps the most controversial event in his tenure as bishop was his questionable refusal to support the pro-life cause of invalid Terri Schaivo.

In "The Church Possessed" I referenced a 2005 article by Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things titled "The Truce of 2005." In this article, the late Father Neuhouse describes this "truce" as an unwritten agreement between the Holy See and the Catholic seminaries in the United States in which those homosexual candidates for ministry who were incapable of maintaining a celibate lifestyle would be weeded out, while those who were capable would proceed to ordination. Perhaps the truth behind the "Truce of 2005" that goes most unrecognized, and under appreciated by the faithful, was the demand by the Holy See that the liturgical abuses, and the denigration of the practice of the Catholic Faith as instituted by the homosexualist bishops, had to stop. Bishop Carlson didn't just show up by accident to fix this in Saginaw, and I'm sure it happened like this in other places, too. I don't know what went on in the Diocese of St. Petersburg at that time, but I do know that in my experience here it wasn't like Saginaw. And in our recent move, Jean and I have been received warmly in the Church and I would be remiss if I didn't express our appreciation and gratitude for this. Much is made of the "Francis Effect" and we should also be grateful for the "Benedict Effect" that returned us to a more holy practice of the Catholic Faith. Perhaps what the Church needed in 2005 was a truce, not a revolution, and perhaps what we have witnessed here in The Diocese of St. Petersburg, during the time of Bishop Lynch, was a more successful discovery of unity in the midst of our diversity as Catholics. If so, he is to be commended for that.

As for his recent remarks, and while Archbishop Wenski was right in providing the correct perspective that our Catholic faith and it's teaching breeds contempt for no one, the practice -- or better -- mis-practice of the Catholic religion too often does breed a de facto contempt for not only gays, lesbians and transgendered people, but people of color, immigrants, citizens returning from prison, the poor, and those in general who, by whatever standard and measure, are somehow deemed less worthy than the rest of us. This, of course, isn't unique to the Diocese of St. Petersburg, but it is particularly true among those of us in the older population that make up such a significant portion of the Catholic demographic here in the Sunshine State.

In the Catholic Church we must become as adept at walking the world's tightrope as is our Holy Father, Pope Francis. Regardless of the abuse he often takes in the Catholic media, he is aware of, and trying to eliminate, the "gay lobby" in the Catholic Church that has caused us so much pain and suffering, just as he is trying to eliminate the pain and suffering that plagues those who have suffered from the hardness of heart that plagues us all -- not only gays, lesbians and the transgendered but all who have been marginalized. If Catholics spent as much time praying for the Holy Father as they do criticizing him, perhaps this would happen faster.

People of good will are where you find them, and sometimes it's not where one expects, and the eternal truth will reveal one day that those we find in both heaven and hell will surprise us. In our attitude towards the Church and the world, we would also do well to remember that while Catholic teaching cannot be changed to accept gay marriage, and natural law cannot be changed because, well, it is natural law, our negative human attitudes towards those trapped in the sin, degradation and satanic tragedy of the homosexualist movement in the Church, and the LGBT movement in the world, can and must change. I know mine have. If we are to offer the holy alternative and healing that is life in Jesus Christ in His Holy Church to those who do want to escape this spiritually and physically destructive lifestyle (and there are more than we are led to believe), then there is no better resource to accomplish this than those priests in our midst already, who have overcome the pitfalls of same sex attraction, and so are best prepared to lead these beloved others, cherished in the sight of God, in doing the same. This may not be politically correct but it is spiritually correct, and if the world wants to call us "homophobes" for it, so what? And respect, love and basic human kindness to those who continue in this lifestyle is their right just as it is our privilege -- and responsibility -- to provide it.

What too many in our midst perceive as the foul smell of the poor, the downtrodden, and the sinful is, from heaven's perspective, the sweet smelling incense that carries our prayers to God. And we would, therefore, do well to realize that the biggest crisis facing the Catholic Church -- even bigger than the homosexualist revolution -- is that it wasn't those in the world Jesus was referring to when He said, "...in those days, the love of many will grow cold." It was the "good" people in the Church.

To quote from "The Church Possessed," it's like Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us!"

All Biblical quotes from The Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.