One of the challenges of reading a book that is so perfectly stitched together - as we find here in Dr Richard Wagner's searing indictment of the Catholic Church and his role in it, is finding the choice morsels to highlight the the gripping twelve-plus-years of human degradation that pulled a one-time member of the Oblate community into sharper focus:
"As any clergy abuse survivor advocate will tell you, establishing an accurate historical record is essential for making his case; it’s also a painstakingly arduous task. However, Church internal documents are often “sub rosa”— put under the seal of ecclesiastical secrecy. The penalty for divulging these documents, or even alluding to them, is excommunication, the same penalty for breaking the seal of confession."
What follows then is the one-hundred-plus page accounting of one of the most damning indictments of the Catholic church as seen from the eyes of a single man - Dr. Richard Wagner - whose life, beliefs, everything he stood for and continues to stand for, because fodder for a corrupt church hell-bent on destroying him after producing a seminal work on the sexual nature of celibate priests entitled, "Gay Catholic Priests: A Study of Cognitive and Affective Dissonance," which not only earned him the label of pariah among the church hierarchy but the title of Clinical Sexologist, the first and only kind in the world.
"Those years involved great personal suffering for me, not only becauseof the process itself, which was a torment, but also because of the practicaltermination of my religious and priestly vocations and the consequent need toreshape my life entirely as a layman. The effect of those years was that all viablemembership in the Congregation, and indeed its very worth in my eyes, expired.Realizing as well that the leadership was determined that I should leave, my soleconcern then was to save my priesthood."
It is the commitment to truth, this un-blinding allegiance to that which is known that lead Wagner down a thirteen year journey of obfuscation, lies, cover-ups and other tools in the Catholic hierarchy bag of tricks that would force Mr. Wagner to have to constantly weigh whether he was going to do the right thing or do the thing that would protect his interests. And, yes, at every step of the way, knowing his faith in the Church was implacable, he choose to do the right thing and paid the highest price of all for it:
'Looking back, one easily sees the danger lurking in my success. It was all but inevitable that identifying myself as a gay priest while discussing a large sample of gay priests who were at once sexually active and critical of the vow of mandatory celibacy would lead many viewers to infer that I myself must be one of the sample.'
The non-fictional re-telling of the book reads like an international murder-mystery complete with a rogue cast of characters who will stop at nothing to bury Wagner's truth, all while hiding beind a cloak of church dogma - pulling and pushing Mr. Wagner until, at times, believing his future among the church was secure, only to find out soon after that that was not the case.
This is an academics book. And by that you will need to hone up on your Catholicism and the characters and systems in place that populate this cloistered world if you are to make the most of this fascinating tell-all. Richard Wagner has gone to great lenghts to paint a picture of malfeasance at the very core of the Catholic Church as you would be, as a a reader, doing yourself a great disservice by not educating y0urself on the lingo and terminology that pepper the book throughout.
One of the three or four best books I've read this or any year. A must read. (Mr. Wagner was kind enough to inlude his dissertation at the end of the book. I would strongly encourage you to read it whatever your background in social sciences may be.)
Secrecy, Sophistry and Gay Sex In The Catholic Church: The Systematic Destruction Of An Oblate Priest, Richard D. Wagner, PhD., 245pp., The Nazca Plains Corporation, 2011. You can order the book from Amazon.com right here.
