A Priest on This Show? Sacrilege!

Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News contributor and priest at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in downtown Manhattan, thanked Imus for inviting him on the show today to talk about the sexual abuse scandals raging in the Catholic Church. Or, as he called it, “a nice, sip-your-coffee type topic.”

News broke recently that a priest in Germany with a reputation for sexually abusing minors was continually reassigned to different posts within the Church instead of being removed, all under the leadership of then-Archbishop of Munich Joseph Ratzinger, who is now the Pope. When similarlyhorrific stories unfolded several years ago in the United States, officials in Europe were quick to dismiss them as “American problems.”

“I think it’s a human problem,” said Morris, contending that there has been a cultural tradition in the church to protect the institution over the safety of the individual. The Vatican, he believes, still has to answer the question of whether the Pope, as Archbishop, should have known about the abuse in Germany.

As a result of problems within the Catholic Church in this country, Morris explained that zero tolerance rules are now strictly enforced nationwide. “If any priest in the United States is accused of sexual abuse of a minor, he’s immediately removed from the ministry, immediately,” Morris stressed. The police are then informed, and the priest is forbidden to return to the ministry until the matter is resolved on criminal and civil levels.

“That is tougher than any other profession in the United States, as far as I know,” said Morris, who favors such a stringent approach because “It’s the necessary consequence of terrible, disgusting, criminal things that happened.”

But being a priest and all, Morris thinks that those who prey on kids, while “sick in the head,” are also in dire need of spirituality. “It doesn’t mean spirituality doesn’t matter anymore,” he pointed out. “They were sick. They needed conversion.”

Appearing with Bill O’Reilly last week, Morris parsed out his position on whether the children of a lesbian couple should be allowed to attend a Denver, Colorado Catholic school, since their parents’ outspoken homosexuality directly conflicts with Church principles.

“They didn’t kick the kids out of the school. They said, ‘If anybody in the school has parents who come out and are very publicly in disagreement with the basic teachings in the church…it’s not a good fit,” said Morris, clarifying that this rule did not apply just to homosexual parents, but to anyone who declares themselves “an anti-witness.”

O’Reilly’s argument had been that this rule should similarly apply to children whose parents were either divorced or married outside the Church. Asked how the discussion concluded, Morris said, “How does anything end with O’Reilly? Him with the last word.”

Amen, Father.

-Julie Kanfer