Father John Corapi

Yesterday, Father John Corapi posted an announcement stating that he would no longer continue with public ministry as a priest. In this same eight minutes, he stated he would continue his ministry as a lay person, that you could buy all of his stuff for 50% off leading up to the 20th anniversary of his ordination, and that his new biography under his new moniker "The Black Sheep Dog" would be published soon. He also said that there was no way he'd get a fair trial as certain parts of canon and civil law were being thrown out the window.


I believe him in the lattermost of these claims. Priests who are accused of sexual misconduct in any form are often held to be guilty until proven innocent. It is this fear of accusation that results in priests becoming afraid to hear confessions, because they have to be alone in a room with someone and are bound from revealing anything that occurs and results in priests installing windows in their offices so that someone can always see what is going on inside at all times. Once accused they're removed from their duties and held in a limbo of sort until things can be investigated and processed; this is a pretty decent precaution. However, it only helps to perpetuate a stereotype that no less an institution than the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has disproven; that of the hordes of molesters waiting in the Church. A recent study by John Jay found that the rate of sexual abuse in the Church is less than that of public schools and the public at large by pretty large margin.


Yet the Church is not the biggest fan of transparency in these hearings. We get fed the canned stuff they give out for public relations and little else. This leads to detractors claiming things are being covered up and the faithful Catholics being frustrated as well. If anyone wants to see the sort of things that an accused priest might go through in the name of an "investigation" I'd recommend Father Andrew Greeley's fictional novel The Priestly Sins, in which the falsely accused main character's treatment is based entirely on actual treatment of accused priests.


There are three things that bother me about Father Corapi's statement yesterday on his end of things. Not the angry tone really that it takes, if he is falsely accused then he deserves to be angry. Twenty years of his life has been ruined. What bothers me first of all is that he is unwilling to fight for his priesthood. If you well and truly love something, then you fight for it with your very last breath. Furthermore, he doesn't have the right to give up his fight, he gave up that right the moment he laid prostrate on the floor before the altar and was ordained by Blessed Pope John Paul II in 1991. As the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once noted, "the priest is not his own". Instead it is the priest's duty to fight for his priesthood, because if he is to be the servant of the people and Christ, he cannot allow his own anger to get in the way of that.


The second thing that bothers me is his autobiography will be sent for publication soon according to the message. You don't churn out an autobiography in a matter of days or a couple of weeks; these things take time to prepare. It's going to be coming out under his new moniker too, "The Black Sheep Dog". This implies that he's been working on it since the allegations began, and would tie into my first point. Did he fall into despair and decide to just give up from the very beginning?


The third thing that bothers me about all of this is his new moniker itself. It combines "the black sheep", a title given to someone who people are ashamed of, or who acts out. This is usually reserved for the bad apple of a group. And then also the term "sheep dog". Which is an animal that is used to protect the flock from attackers. All in all, he's adopting a persona of a renegade out to protect his flock from outside the Church and possibly from the Church.


As for his guilt or innocence, it's not my place to judge. I don't know. I don't know the facts of the case. I don't know the accuser or the accused personally, nor do I know their hearts. We will most likely never know what led to the accusations, nor will we probably ever know the veracity of them. All we can do as Christians is to pray for John Corapi and his accuser, that God grant them peace.


His sermons helped me a great deal in understanding what the Catholic Church taught. He was charismatic to the extreme and he was very blunt. He didn't mince words and I could appreciate that, as I could appreciate how he could relate anything and everything back to Sacred Scripture in addition to Tradition. His oratory is among the best I have ever heard, religious or secular. But already I've seen that his announcement has begun to create divisions online between Catholics, and I fear that his decision will end up driving more people away from Christ and from the Church than it will bring people back to Christ.


To end this post, I think this quote sums up what Father Corapi should do, as well as other Christians.


Don't permit your misery or defeats to depress you. Rather let them be steps by which you descend the deep mine where we find the precious gem of holy humility. -- St. Paola Frassinetti