Not long ago, after reading another excellent article by George Neumayr, I remarked that someone should buy this worthy journalist a drink. Then I realised that only a couple of weeks later, I was going to to be in the US and could buy him one myself! So I contacted George, and he agreed to meet with me when I was in DC. We met at the Basilica - centre of so much ignominy and corruption - and followed up with an interview. This is the result:
It’s an honour to meet you, George; thanks for agreeing to do this interview with me.
Firstly, do you see any dangers among the Catholic journalists and bloggers who are so active at the moment exposing the corruption and heresy coming out of the hierarchy?
No, I think the danger is on the side of passivity and I think there’s not enough being said. Not enough resistance is being shown to a lot of the bad stuff that’s happening in the Church.
My perception is that the numbers speaking out are small: is that your observation, too?
It’s a minority of Catholics, but they’re very outspoken. But even a small, outspoken minority can have a disproportionate impact on the Church, especially with the power of social media behind that movement. A lot of these upstart conservatives know how to use social media in a way that the bishops don’t.
The bishops are coming to this without the same degree of understanding, I guess, so they’ve been caught unprepared for this social media revolution that has allowed people to confront them more easily. And it allows a resistance to be organised much more easily.
They seem to think that we don’t know how to google!
Right. We were just at the Shrine, and Monsignor Rossi - formerly the corrupt administrator there - many of his secrets were open to the public and easy to attain just by googling his name.
I just had to google and all these property records came up. And they indicated that he had properties - many properties - three, four, five properties. And one of them was in Florida in Fort Lauderdale and a very gay-friendly part of Fort Lauderdale. And I noticed on the property records that the co-owner of the condo is a guy named Andrew Hvozdovic.
I googled his name and it turned out he was a priest at a parish in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And so I then started asking people about this guy and it became clear to me very quickly that Rossi and this guy were - according to their reputations - both gay and were the co-owners of this condo in gay-friendly Fort Lauderdale.
The priest in Scranton I talked to said, "Oh, they're just an old gay couple".
Unbelievable!
And so that was a story that was very easy to get and Rossi didn't even bother to hide his tracks. And I suspect that the reason he didn't is that McCarrick had gotten away with so much for so long - even though his record was obtainable on Google too - so Rossi didn't feel like he needed to take any steps to hide his mischief.
He also had a beach condo in Atlantic city and then he had an apartment in DuPont Circle here in Washington DC, which is the gayest part of DC. It appeared that he had places in Pennsylvania at some point. He possibly had one in Ohio.
And then I started learning about things like this guy, Father Riedlinger, who I was told was a lover of Rossi's. Riedlinger could be found just by Googling the property records of Rossi. You could see that Riedlinger was once listed as living at one of Rossi's residences, the one in Atlantic city. In fact, his voting registration records indicated that he was registered to vote at that Rossi address in Atlantic City. So it’s these powerful bishops and clerics who think the faithful are too dumb to even Google them.
But, you know, McCarrick’s reputation quickly fell apart once people found out about the settlements that were given to a couple of his victims and all this was on the internet.
Richard Sipe, that psychotherapist, had written about this 15 years ago and I found a letter that he wrote to Benedict XVI about McCarrick on the internet. There was this letter sitting out there on the internet for years and years and years. And I remember telling people, "McCarrick's a gay predator".
And they'd say, " How do you know that? How? How dare you say that about our honored emeritus Cardinal?"
I would say to them, "Have you not read Richard Sipes letter on the internet?"
What year you would that have been when you first found out about McCarrick?
I was talking about McCarrick as a gay predator six, seven years ago, eight years ago.
That was even before Pope Francis came along on the scene.
Yes, even before that, I was telling people that this guy was a gay predator. In fact, I had gone to Vigano at the Papal Nunciature five years before. And I waited outside the Nunciature and it turns out that Vigano was sympathetic to me. I didn't know that at the time. But at any rate ...
This is THE Archbishop Vigano?
Yes. He was the papal nuncio under Benedict and then he continued until Francis came in about a year or two later. Francis sacked him and put in this horrible guy, Archbishop Pierre, who is in the tank for the gay mafia.
But anyway, I went to the Nunciature and said, "I'm going to wait outside until you give me a meeting". Vigano told his number two guy to go out there and talk to me and the number two guy said, "Come on inside and I'll listen to you. I'll hear what you have to say".
And so that happened. I went inside for 90 minutes or so and told them everything I knew about the gay mafia.
Did you meet Archbishop Vigano?
No, but I talked to the number two guy. I'm sure Archbishop Vigano got a report on what I said and he would have known everything I was saying, anyway. I had also discovered that Wuerl was living in Washington DC, in a penthouse on Embassy Row, that nobody knew about.
Tell us about Wuerl:
He was living in this huge, massive penthouse, which probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain. One night I was over there, just by happenstance, and a guy came out of his garage at 10:30 at night in a white Mercedes. And it looked very, very suspicious. I stopped the guy, he was a black man, maybe in his 50s and asked, “Who are you and why are you coming out of the Cardinal's garage at 10:30pm?”
He answered, "I'm the personal chef of Donald Wuerl".
And I said, "Oh, I didn't know that Donald Wuerl had a personal chef".
And he became defensive and said, " I'm an employee of the archdiocese".
And I said, "Oh, really? So if I call over to the archdiocese tomorrow morning and ask them about your employment status, they'll tell me that you're an employee?"
I called over the next day, but of course they wouldn't confirm his employment status - they'd never tell me either way. And so I was left to surmise that he was something. He might have been a personal chef or he might've been something more than a personal chef, I don't know. But it reeked of impropriety. So at any rate, I was mad about that, which is why I told the Nunciature about Wuerl’s opulent double life and that it was a disgrace.
Wuerl has been a double dealer for decades. His mentor was a pederast named Cardinal Wright, Cardinal John Wright. Wuerl was the personal secretary to, and the presumed lover of Wright for about 20 years. And it was Wright who taught Wuerl how to live a very posh double life within the church, and how to exploit the docility of the faithful. And the reason that Wuerl could overlook the character transgression so easily and cover up for them so easily is that he had done the exact same thing for John Wright.
So anybody who wants to understand Donald Wuerl has to look at that relationship he had with Cardinal John Wright. Randy Engel has written about how Wright was a pederast. Her book, The Rite of Sodomy, has a whole chapter on Wright and how he engaged in all sorts of misbehavior. And if people don't believe Randy Engel, they could go to a mainstream guy like Kenneth Woodward, who wrote about him in Commonweal about three or four months ago. Nobody was closer to the homosexual John Wright than Donald Wuerl.
Would it be true that this is not only a case of these sodomite clerics covering for each other, but that there are people in all the dioceses that are covering for them as well? Are threats being made to diocesan employees?
It's widespread. I don't know if it's in every diocese, but all the same problems exist and the bishops have been, in America at least, a self-selecting group. And so for decades you've had homosexuals selecting other homosexuals to serve in leadership positions and they all have dirt on each other. And so that's why you have so much stasis and so much silence - it's sort of like a mutually assured destruction kind of situation. So out of that comes this paralysis, this refusal to make any real reforms and changes within the church.
So yeah, I think it's extremely pervasive. The tentacles of the gay mafia are much longer than anybody realizes and they go all over the place.
Have you come across any links with Australia in your research?
Not recently, but I remember hearing about what was happening in Australia and the heresy in some parts of Australia was astonishing to me. It was even more sort of blatant than the stuff that we hear in the United States.
You were telling me that you grew up in a conservative family and that you attend the Traditional Latin Mass. Could you describe how important your faith is to you?
My faith is central to everything I do. I definitely believe that the purpose of this life is to know, love and serve God and to live with Him in the next. So I understand that this has to order my activities here on earth, including my journalistic ones.
Because I feel that the Church has fallen into the hands of a very corrupt group of people, I feel the need to use journalism to wrest the Church away from those people and put it back into the hands of God, as it were. That’s probably the highest priority for me - I feel like that’s the most important work I can be doing.
But because I've had to make a living as a journalist, I’ve also written a lot about politics. Even there, there’s an intersection between philosophy and religion and I feel that most journalists don’t see that. They don’t illuminate the points of intersection between politics and religion, so I've tried to show that underlying most political issues are fundamental questions about life; questions that touch upon the existence of God, about the existence of a God-given moral law.
I don’t think you can make helpful contributions to politics unless you have a worldview that’s rooted in God. I try to promote that in my journalism.
[This article first appeared at The Remnant]
