NEW YORK
Newsday
Sheryl McCarthy
Aug 15, 2005
Once again the mighty have fallen with a big ugly splat. If there ever was a case of poetic justice in the tumbling to Earth of a powerful guy, it was in the crash of Msgr. Eugene Clark, the rector of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral and Cardinal Edward Egan's right-hand man.
Clark's career imploded in an extramarital sex scandal after a wily husband caught him on tape, having an alleged sexual tryst with the man's wife. In pictures plastered all over the news, the portly, 79-year-old priest was seen entering and leaving a motel in the Hamptons with his much younger secretary, giving further credence to the saying that there's no dog like an old dog.
And there was the irony of it all. Clark was a grandstanding, judgmental, self-righteous man who blamed the recent sex scandal of the Catholic Church not on its own arrogance, self-servingness and immorality, but on homosexuals, a sex-saturated culture and liberals who campaign against celibacy. Yet here he was preaching one thing and apparently doing another. When the Bullies of Morality are brought down by their own vices, they deserve whatever public flogging they get.
Clark's outing as a hypocrite is a continuation of the Catholic Church's priest sex scandals. Pedophiles were allowed to prey on the innocents of the church because of a culture of priestly infallibility, institutional arrogance and contempt for ordinary believers. But these were mostly ordinary parish priests - sad sacks like Revs. John Geoghan and James Porter. Msgr. Clark isn't accused of molesting children, but belongs to a long line of priests who've had illicit sexual affairs with women. And he's a really big fish, who ran the most prestigious Catholic cathedral in the country.