NOTE: This is another letter from Fr. Martin Stepanich to Dr. Thomas Droleskey, who since early November has been publishing an ongoing series of articles attacking our church, clergy, staff and school.
Attention: Thomas Droleskey, judge of bishops and priests.
Your disedifying December 4th reply to my November 30th letter disregarded most of what I said to you about the St. Gertrude issue, yet, curiously enough, you did piously confess to me: “Father, I am a sinner.”
But that’s all there was to your confession. Where was the confession of specific sins? Are you a sinner without sins? An innocent sinner?
You make it necessary for me to confess your sins, at least some of them, for you — until I can’t stand it any longer, but you still have to supply true contrition for your sins and a definite repudiation of them.
One very damaging sin of yours is the way you publicized on your Internet the disturbed situation that developed during the past many months at the traditional St. Gertrude the Great Church and School in West Chester, Ohio. You had absolutely no business publicizing anything about the SGG situation on your irresponsible Internet to begin with. Just a small amount of elementary good sense and charity should have told you to keep such things off the Internet and out of public view.
What has enormously increased your guilt before God, and before all genuine traditional Catholics, is the shameful way you have insulted and smeared and slandered the honorable names of the SGG clergy before all the Internet world. Just to take one sickening example, there is the way you maliciously and deceitfully accused the SGG priests of “using the charism of holy orders as a cloak for malice and deceit,” as well as accusing them of hiding their sins behind their Roman collars. And you have repeatedly and untruthfully portrayed them as liars. Is that what you call “Catholicism”?
In my November 30th letter to you. I put before you the outstanding example of St. Francis showing very great respect for all priests, even for those who, as he expressed it, would “persecute” him. He said that he in no way wanted to consider sin in priests, because of the grace of holy orders that is in them. But that meant nothing to you. You are just too far gone with your contempt for the SGG priests.
While maligning and down-grading the leading SGG priests you have exalted a young recalcitrant SGG priest, who was fired and dismissed for serious reasons. You took it upon yourself, with your non-existent judicial power, to pass condemnatory judgment upon the SGG priests, audaciously asserting that they had no just reason for firing their young assistant priest. You did not explain how you were supposedly in a better position than the SGG priests to know the merits and demerits of that young priest, and to know whether or not he should be retained or fired.
As things then turned out, the dismissed young priest took revenge against his SGG superiors by starting up his own no-name congregation of breakaway SGG parishioners, who had deserted their faithful Eucharistic Lord in the SGG tabernacle, and offering Mass for them in a secular setup.
And what was your reaction to all this? As you incredibly told me in your sorry December 4th letter, that rebel young priest was to you a “hero.” yes, that’s the word you used for him — “hero”! You thereby showed yourself to be a hero-worshipper at a juvenile level.
And not only that, but you undoubtedly had plenty to do, because of your internet trumpeting, with stirring up unstable SGG parishioners to turn against their SGG priests and getting them to run off, so as to be with the rebel priest. How many of those runaway SGG parishioners knew what they were doing?
You seemed to think that you came through with a stroke of triumph, and of victorious self-defence, when you told me that everything you have done in connection with the SGG issue has been done “under strict clerical supervision.” What you were really saying is that you were successfully using priests against priests. But there is no way any “clerical supervisor” could possibly approve of everything you were doing if he had known all the real facts of the SGG story, especially if he had known of your lowdown contempt and hatred for the SGG priests of God. It would, in fact, be no surprise if your clerical advisors have already found out how you have deceived them.
As for me, how do I rate with you? I know how I rate with you, because you made it very plain in your December 4th letter. After patting yourself on the back and most untruthfully declaring, “Every word of what I have published in this matter is true,” you give me a good whack with this categorical sentence of condemnation: “You are most wrong.” that’s how I rate with you. Not just “wrong,” but “most wrong.” And now re-read this letter of mine from the beginning and then tell me: ” You are most wrong.”
Since you ignored so much of what I told you in my November 30th letter, and did not even address the issues I brought up, there may seem to be little hope that you will pay any attention as I now repeat for your benefit what was really the best part of that letter of mine.
I told you that the real solution for the distressing SGG situation is in fervent and persevering prayer to God that he mercifully intervene and bring back to the SGG parish Catholic good order and unity and charity, especially due respect for God’s chosen ones in charge of the parish. The real solution is not on any Internet, especially not on your kind of Internet, but on the knees.
I know that many right-minded SGG parishioners are doing that very thing — that is, they are pleading with God on their knees to come and restore peace in their once peaceful parish. And I don’t doubt that many traditional Catholics elsewhere are also praying for the very same intention.
But, in addition to that, I recommended that a program of daily Holy Hours be organized for St. Gertrude the Great Church, so that every single day, if possible, at least one person, though preferably more than one, make a Holy Hour at a suitable time before the Eucharistic Lord in the tabernacle. May it please God to bring that about.
Though I could have exposed more of your beating around the bush and running around in circles type of self-defending logic, I will now let what I have written be painfully enough.
What you — “I am a sinner” — need to do now is to confess humbly: “Peccavi Domino,” that is, ” I have sinned against the Lord.”
And do yourself the pride-killing favor of looking into a fair-sized mirror and telling the one you see in that mirror: ” Tom, ole boy, it is high time that you wake up and get things straight about the St. Gertrude the Great issue.”
Father Martin Stepanich, O.F.M., S.T.D.
December 15,2009