I did a blog post about Richard Rohr today at the Les Femmes site. (See him in the photo at right with his young friends.) It got me thinking once again about the grave injustice of allowing heretics like Rohr to scandalize the faithful, while Fr. Haley is out in the cold for daring to expose the homosexual cabal in Arlington. "Oh, he was a snoop!" some priests say. That is apparently the capital crime while being actively homosexual is a private matter. Frankly as a parent, I'd rather have my kids and grandkids in the company of a snoop than a homosexual -- or a heretic. Of course some priests are both. One certainly has reason to wonder about priests who advance the gay agenda. They are either homosexuals or homosexualists. In either case, they are a serious threat to the faith. I have to laugh (ruefully) about Richard Rohr giving workshops on male spirituality. Here's someone who advocates homosexuality and blesses same-sex unions. That doesn't show much understanding of what it means to be a healthy male. Beating drums and conjuring images of the native American sweat lodge appear to be his thing. A paragraph from a recent issue of the The Drumbeat newsletter describe a March 2010 "Gateway to the Temple Within" event:
So that's what being a male is? Lighting up the firepit? Hey, that must be why men do the grilling! It lets them experience the sweat lodge - especially if its 98 degrees out. But this goofiness pales in comparison to Rohr's attitudes on nudity and healing. Here's an excerpt from a presentation by Fr. Rohr at a New Ways Ministry Symposium in 1997 reported on by Stephanie Block. You remeber New Ways Ministry - the homosexual advocacy group run by Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent who were both censured by the Vatican. (By the way, I don't believe Fr. Rohr doesn't "encourage nakedness." Read the complete article. I doubt you'll believe it either.):Drumming called the group together in the sacred circle, around a fire bowl that burned constantly, symbolizing the fire within each of us that calls out to more than what is, that drives us toward what lies beyond us and beyond the immediate surface of the person or object in our gaze. This fire within calls us to embrace some deeper reality or truth within the people and things that attract us in life.
"The nakedness thing, I must comment on, is really uncanny to me. I could give a whole talk just on that. I never encourage nakedness, as such, but it always happens. I will normally have on the fourth day of a five-day retreat, a day where I send them out into the canyons or into the desert alone. I've prepared them for that day. A lot of men, and women too. I'm sure have never spent a day alone, in solitude. And then that night we come back and process: What happened in the canyons alone?Consider that Fr. Rohr gave this address at a homosexual meeting. Not surprising. I'm sure many homosexuals immediately signed up for a retreat. The "touching" ritual reminds me of the scenes in Brave New World with all the participants chanting "Georgy Porgy" over and over as they engage in a sexual orgy. (Do Fr. Rohr's "retreat" participants smoke peyote along with the rituals?)
"Well, there's always one who in that processing will raise his hand and, sort of with embarrassment, admit that when he got out there he took off all his clothes. And then there's chuckles all around the room — I can just predict it, it happens every time — there's chuckles all over the room. 'Oh! I did, too!' I did, too!' I did, too!' There's something about nakedness in the male psyche — and now I've studied initiation rites — it's universal. The boy always gets naked, as you see in the sweat lodges, too.
"And I think it's this desire to get rid of all this persona. All this stuff you have to live up to — you pay a big price for being a patriarch. And feminism has sometimes not been sympathetic enough with that. You pay a big price for having roles and titles and importance and power and significance and the male is just finding every way he can to take it off, to take it off. They always tell me they had to do it and it's amazing how often some wonderful things happen in this sitting there in the sunlight naked — exposed, as it were."
At times, nudity at the retreats is communal. ' 'We often have camp-fires, and I know some of you have been at these where it happens, so you know what I'm talking about. Always, always, there's some guys — I mean, is it in their hard wiring? — they'll strip and have to leap over that fire, burning their balls. . . .1 don't know what it is. They're the 'real' men, who can leap over the fire, naked."'
According to Fr. Rohr, this nudity occurs spontaneously. "This is not part of my agenda that they're supposed to . . . it's just that we have a fire, and then predictably men start doing the same old damn things, all again and again and again. There's this deep desire to get naked, to somehow, even risk nakedness in front of one another. To expose the self. That's really pretty archetypal. It shouldn't really surprise us at all, should it? I mean, that's really what all lovemaking is, of course — could you love me when you see me in my nakedness? Could I still be beautiful, could I still be attractive to you in my nakedness? Can you see it all and still be desirous of me?"
Fr. Rohr understands that many of the retreat activities may appear peculiar to an outside observer. "Certainly the outsider — and this happened one time — would think it's a homoerotic or homosexual group, and it's just not really the character of the group, as such, in a formal or holistic way."
One of the rituals done at some of Fr. Rohr's retreats is a healing ritual. "I give [the men] a talk on the body and I tell them to go alone and do a compassionate meditation on their body from head to foot. I give them all a foot and a half of red tape and wherever their body is holding a memory, a shame, a fear, a guilt, an anger — whatever — to wrap a little piece of that on their body. And then they come back and they sit in a big circle and I always say they look like a field of wounded soldiers. They're always very quiet when they come back. You can feel, like a self-massage almost. The pain came out when they touched each of those spots, I guess.
"And then beginning with the elders I lead them through an extended meditation. . . . I invite them to lie down in what is, for the male, the most vulnerable position — on his back. Then the other men surround them and cradle their bodies and especially touch and lay hands on and pray over those places where the man holds wounds...."
Given the high percentage of homosexuals at his retreats, it is conceivable that a good number of the participants' "wounds" are of a sexual nature. The listener is intrigued to consider the ramifications of this ritual. "[It] sounds like a rather simple, innocuous ritual — well, it blows them out of the water. It usually goes on the whole night. They don't want to stop. The man becomes their father that they never had; their father that they could never touch; their grandfather who died when they were a boy; their brother that they wanted to be friends with.
"Then when the older men are doing it to the younger men, it all, of course, reverses. But the tears just astound me. This readiness to cry and the readiness and the tears seem not be evoked by my words but by the touch itself, by the laying on of hands, by the communion, the connection that seems to happen there. And again, without any unnecessary encouragement from me, many of the men will invariably take off their shirts to expose the red tape, maybe on their chests."
But Fr. Rohr is still a priest in good standing - giving talks to parish staff, addressing audiences at Fordham and Trinity University in D.C.... while Fr. Haley is out living like a nomad in an RV. Go figure!
