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	Ex-Seminarian: Certain Clergy Have Embraced Demonology By Matt C. Abbott Renew America June 28, 2006 http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/abbott/060628 I received the following (edited) e-mail from Tom Barnes of Alexandria, Va. I am a left-wing lapsed Catholic whom you would not agree with theologically, but I read your column every time it is posted on the Web site for the National Catholic Reporter Abuse Tracker. I am very impressed with your research and writing style. You have a lot of good, solid things to say and your point of view is usually right on. I am 53, a grandfather, a retired Coast Guard warrant officer and retired federal worker. I was physically and sexually abused by nuns when I was a child, and later, as a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (I was pursued by a nun when I was a seminarian). My best friend from childhood is today a priest serving in Kentucky. He was the best man at my wedding and we attended high school and college together. I attended high school seminary my senior year and went to St. Charles Borromeo Seminary from my freshman year of college until the beginning of my junior year. I transferred to Mt. St. Mary's in Emmitsburg and got my first degree there. You are pretty close to being right most of the time, but you are just a tad off on taking a bearing on the problem as a whole. Your navigation is good enough to get you back to port, but you are just a degree or two off the beam on some issues, mostly on what is driving all of this sexual perversion among priests and bishops — and it ain't sex. It never was. It is power. The whole perverted sex thing with priests and bishops — and maybe with nuns — is about power, but even more than that, it is about demonology (in a psychological sense; I am not talking about theology here). You have to understand what the power of God does to the psyche of a human being who is accepted as a 'priest' by the people in the One True Church. He is, in the end analysis, a god. And he knows it. If he is emotionally stable and somewhat normal in his psychology he can rise above the abnormal psychology here that comes with being a god. If he is not, well, other things happen. When a young man enters seminary, even today, he spends a few years in awe of his surroundings, the priests on the faculty, the occasional visit by the occasional bishop, the attention he gets from other people, and the odd, new way his own family treats him now. He is, in reality, different from the person he was when he entered seminary. The entire world treats him that way. To make a very long story short, this one thing changes his psyche. If he is even a little bit 'off' in his psychology, he begins to see himself as others see him: godly, different, powerful, and, most of all, entitled. He is a priest or a seminarian and he is now entitled to the perks of that calling — and here is where the problem starts. What would those perks be? Whatever the faculty and mentors who are training him say they are. Period. And the training rarely takes place in the classroom. It is personal mentoring, usually taking place in the faculty wing of the seminary in the faculty member's room. Now, it can be holy, wholesome and completely open and Christian — or, it can be something else. Whatever it is, thqt is where the young man learns about the priesthood. End of story. Are you starting to see now how this continually gets passed down from generation to generation? 'Classroom training' in seminary is not where one learns to be a priest. One-on-one mentoring, usually in the faculty member's room, is where most of these 'priestly traditions' get passed down to the next generation of priests, and there is more to consider here. If the human psyche is willing to accept a special place in it for the Voice of God in the seminarian/priests' life and the perks that go with that, how much more powerful would you be if you split the difference and also became a priest of satan — in other words, a demonologist? I am not sure how many priests and bishops in the U.S. are in fact Black Mass participants or 'demon priests,' but I do know this: Child sodomy and forced child rape are sacraments in the demon church. So what I am saying is simply this: In my opinion, based on my own limited experience as a seminarian (from 1969-1972) in the Philadelphia area, I believe, at least to some extent and to some degree, demonology (in the psychological sense) is at the heart of this wave of perversion among Catholic priests and bishops. One very famous and powerful American cardinal from my days in seminary was even noted by Malachi Martin as a well known demonologist who held black ceremonies in the Vatican. I do not know if that is true or not. I have no idea. But I do know one woman about my age who claims he sodomized her in the seminary basement during a devil worshipping rite attended by priests. This could be true, or this could be fantasy in the mind of a dying woman. All I know is, she told me this completely unsolicited and she does not know who Malachi Martin is or what he wrote. She told me of an incident that would fit with the profile that Martin outlines in his novels. I have no facts. I cannot write a book or even an article. I moved on with my life after I left seminary and never looked back. But I hold five degrees — three of them are master's degrees — and I have 26 credits toward a PhD in Education, so I am no dope. And I have to tell you, even when I was a young man and a seminarian, I felt something was wrong with most of the priests I met. Not all of them, and even the ones I suspected of being grossly unbalanced, I could not really describe adequately what it was I feared about them. It was more of a 'feeling' than something I could elucidate. And it usually had nothing to do with sex. It was about some sort of soul-sucking, mind-wrenching perversion of the heart that they were involved in, a sort of psychological trap they seemed to be laying for us seminarians that I could never quite wrap my hands around. To be sure, there were odd incidents of priests hugging seminarians too long and for odd reasons. There were also all male costume parties at Halloween that I found disconcerting to say the least. But there was no overt homosexuality I can actually state that I saw or heard about. It was more like an aura, an enveloping attitude about some of the priests and selected seminarians. One of the most infamous child molesters in Philadelphia Catholic history, Father Jim Brzyski, was a year ahead of me in seminary. I remember him as a jovial, hale and farewell type who was always laughing and carrying on. I had no sense that he was the monster he apparently is — so much for my sense of insight. Priests and nuns get drunk on 'god' power in their psyche, they get bent, and their minds, their souls, their lives can take a very bad turn. And because they affect so many people because of who they are and what they do for an avocation, they can do tremendous damage to an entire community. That is without perverted sex even entering the picture. Once perverted sex enters the picture, a bad situation turns downright evil. Focusing on the sex is a start, but it is not the real story. The real story is that these men have literally sold their souls to the devil. They know it, and they would do it again if they had half a chance. CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.) Alexandria, Va. Matt C. Abbott is a Catholic journalist and commentator. He is a columnist for and/or contributor to RenewAmerica.us, TheConservativeVoice.com, MichNews.com, Catholic.org, Opeds.com, and Speroforum.com. He can be reached at mattcabbott@gmail.com.
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