Just a few days ago I learned of the sad news that Fr. John Corapi, probably the most famous Catholic priest in America, was embroiled in a serious scandal. The fact that he quit the priesthood as a result was a bombshell that has spawned a fervent debate in the Catholic blogosphere, but the controversy that led to his decision didn’t shock me as much as it once would have. This “rock star” priest once did the entire Church, including myself, a lot of good, but he has been off the rails a lot longer than most of his critics suspect. In recent weeks many one-time fans like myself have expressed their disappointment ar his hypocritical lack of humility, refusing just obedience to his superiors and committing other scandalous acts that Corapi himself once used to rail against – but his most serious delict to date is a descent into heresy, a crime that the old Father Corapi would have rather died than commit. For years now Corapi has gotten away scot-free with not only violating some of the Church’s strongest moral commands on a particular area of life quite publicly, but of falsely teaching others to do the same.
Corapi’s conversion story remains an inspiration for Catholics everywhere. He was a former Marine who later made millions of dollars in the Los Angeles real estate market, then lost it all to a cocaine addiction. After his fall he spent time in a mental institution and was homeless on the streets of L.A. for awhile, then enjoyed a profound religious conversion that led him to become a Catholic priest. After Pope John Paul II ordained him two decades ago, he became known as a staunch defender of orthodoxy and a mainstay on the Catholic TV network EWTN. That is where I saw him for the first time back in 2002 and 2003, when I first considered becoming Catholic. I still highly recommend his classic video series on The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which EWTN ran every Sunday night until the scandal broke in March; this was taped early in his career, when his teachings were still free of error and he still knew the value of humility. My conversion from atheism to Catholicism began with a wide variety of sources ranging from Ven. Mary of Agreda to the writings of G.K. Chesterton to the shining example of Mother Teresa and was completed in part by Corapi’s early teachings.
Earlier this month, his career as a Catholic priest ended when he resigned from his religious order, the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, following a variety of allegations that led the head of SOLT to consider him “unfit for public ministry.” He was accused of committing sexual improprieties ranging from texting racy messages to a woman in Montana to sleeping with a hooker, as well as falling back into his old lifestyle of drug and alcohol addiction. I am not going to speculate on the truth of those charges, since Corapi has denied them and the evidence has not been made public yet; I can see how it can easily turn out to be a story of an addict falling back into his past, or how he could easily be made the target of false accusations. SOLT claims he deliberately blocked their investigation through such means as offering hush money to witnesses and silencing one with a lawsuit, then ordered him, under his vow of obedience, to leave his Montana home and live with the other members of his order in Corpus Christi. Instead of cooperating, Corapi resigned from the priesthood because he claimed that he had no chance of defending himself under the Catholic Church’s present disciplinary system. His superiors at SOLT have made another charge that definitely sticks though, that of possessing a ridiculous amount of wealth. As stated in a press release on July 5, “He holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock, and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of the Society.”[1] Corapi has not denied the possession of all of this wealth, but has instead disputed whether a vow of poverty applies to him, since he negotiated a unique arrangement back in 1994 with the order’s founder, Fr. Jim Flanagan. The order has the right under canon law to change that arrangement, so his defense misses the point. He misses the mark in an even more damaging way though, because his entire pursuit of wealth and the manner in which he pursued it are both contrary to the Church’s teachings. Corapi used to brag about his unswerving loyalty to the teachings of the saints, but since the very beginning of the Church they have consistently given us a single warning: Christians shouldn’t be getting rich at all, especially a priest who gets rich selling religious merchandise to his flock. If Corapi had not begun to lean on his own understanding of the Church’s social teaching in recent years, he would not have fallen into this error.
Capitalism vs. the Catholic Church: A Two Thousand Year War
What I am about to say comes not from my own private interpretation, but is related second-hand from the consistent message of all of the saints, the church councils and the popes – which is typically the exact opposite of what today’s flaccid clergy teach. Regardless of how wealth is acquired, the love of it is a “very great sin,” in the words of Jesus himself. He paid this particular evil special attention, but vast sections of the clergy deliberately ignore this part of his message precisely because Mammon is the real god of Western civilization, particularly in America. That is why they constantly interpret many of the Biblical warnings against this sin in ways entirely contrary to the consistent teachings of the saints. The dire warning of Jesus in Mark 10:25 that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” was always interpreted as applying to all rich men, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to the average sermon today. Interpretations of other Biblical warnings about the evils of possessing wealth were also unfailingly much more radical than anything any right-wing capitalist would ever accept. St. John Chrysostom summed up the thinking of the Church in his Four Discourses, Chiefly On the Parable of the Rich man and Lazarus, which is widely available online at website like http://www.ccel.org. It makes the issue so clear that I won’t debate it all with any critics among my fellow Catholics, unless they acknowledge that they’ve read it through, as Father Corapi should have. One of Chrysostom’s chief conclusions was that the rich man in the parable went to Hell for not using his wealth in the right way and for merely ignoring Lazarus. This is a consistent thread through Christian writings on the subject from earliest Fathers of the Church to St. Thomas Aquinas to Ven. Mary Agreda and beyond; what Chrysostom says there is merely a synopsis of what his colleagues always thought: nobody can live high on the hog, whether or not they have taken a vow of poverty. “The more you have been given, the more is expected of you,” as Jesus once said. John the Baptist instructed those of us with two cloaks to share with the one who has none, which leads to equality; it’s simple math. Of course, the evil of not using wealth in Christian ways can be compounded if the wealth is gained through illicit methods, and as God says in Sirach 31:5-11, it is impossible to get rich without committing a sin of some kind. Chrysostom and his fellow saints were quite specific about some of the ways that property and money can be wrongly acquired, beyond blatant stealing. All of them are completely contradicted by the philosophy of capitalism, which Corapi never rejected. It became the seed of his downfall, for the root of all evil is money.
I go into this in greater detail in A Dream of Distributism, but it is possible to digest the list of economic evils the Catholic Church officially condemns down to what I call the Seven Deadly Economic Sins for the sake of convenience. Most right-wing capitalists can agree with the first two, theft and fraud, but would froth at the mouth if told they had to stop hoarding, underpaying, overcharging, engaging in speculation and charging interest on loans. Capitalism preaches that the “marketplace” - i.e. the will of those who have money and property - ought to dictate what customers pay for goods and how much workers are paid. Faithful Catholics, however, must believe the Church’s doctrine that they can only charge a just price and pay only just wages, not merely negotiate the best deal they can get for themselves. Right-wingers like to rightly remind us that homosexuality has been considered one of the “four sins that cry the heaven for vengeance,” along with murder, but conveniently ignore the other two: oppression of the poor and payment of unjust wages. That means the typical Republican employer who deliberately drives down wages is on the same level in God’s eyes as the homosexuals the Far Right hates so deeply. Hoarding goods in order to drive up prices, i.e. the crime of cornering the market through monopoly power, has likewise been condemned since the earliest days of the Church, for example in The Catechism of the Council of Trent. The sin of speculation, which means trying to get something for nothing by “buying low and selling high,” has also been consistently condemned since ancient times and is referenced in the Catechism, although glossed over. Usury was omitted from the Catechism, but not because it is no longer a sin, which is why Pope Benedict the XVI recently lamented the “plague of usury” spreading across the world. As I discuss more fully in A Dream of Distributism, more than a half dozen dogmatic church councils made infallible proclamations that taking any interest at all on loans is mortally sinful, with one of them decreeing that anyone who questioned this doctrine must be denied Catholic burial services. All of the popes until the early 19th Century consistently affirmed this commandment not to take interest in any form, then fell silent after the Holy Office issued a series of letters beginning in 1830 that seemed to legitimate the practice. In his pastoral letter Vix Pervenit, Pope Benedict XIV had already expressly denied the sneaky logic these documents employed, as did The Catechsim of the Council of Trent, but he and all the popes and church councils have been ignored ever since, even though under canon law their pronouncements carry more weight and those of the Holy Office. Various organs of the Church have been making billions off of ignoring their own mandatory commandments against usury and engaging in speculation in the stock, bond, commodity and other markets since then. These inalterable rules were swept under the rug in past generations along with other commandments not to overcharge, underpay and hoard goods to drive up prices, simply because they offended the rich, who use them as their chief means to extract wealth from everybody else. The same trick of ignoring unpopular doctrines rather than trying to change them (which God would never allow) is now being used by wayward clergy on the Left to legitimate popular sins like divorce, contraception, abortion, cloning and other sins that Corapi understands better. The neoconservatives don’t recognize the real social teachings of the Church because its reform program is far more radical than mere socialism, both of which are anathema to their real religion, the love of money. Most of what I just said, however, is a matter of Magisterial teaching that every Catholic must obey, regardless of how it affects their pocketbooks. These are not opinions I developed myself, but of the saints, the popes and church councils, which I am merely passing along. Anyone who disbelieves in the mandatory ones is a heretic and cannot take Eucharist without committing sacrilege, same as the heretics on the Left who disagree with the Church’s commandments on contraception, divorce, homosexuality and abortion.
The Church also has its own economic philosophy, distributism, which supports the concept of private property but insists on spreading it out as widely as possible among the population; this makes it contrary to both communism and capitalism at the same time. The neoconservative faction of the clergy either ignores it entirely or glosses over the many aspects of it that threaten the very foundations of capitalism, including monopoly and oligopoly power. It means replacing Big Business with small businesses, which would increase productive competition and give non-owners more choices of places to work and shop. Although it was first described in 1891 by Pope Leo the XIII and has been refined by such prominent Catholics as Dorothy Day, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, its principles are rooted in the consistent practices of the Old Testament and medieval Christendom, which successfully applied them. Chances are you haven’t heard of it, because it represents an even greater threat to the rich than communism. To the right-wing heretics within the Church, any talk of redistribution of wealth is labeled “liberation theology,” which is actually a very narrow heresy. These critics would be quite uncomfortable with our current pope if they actually read the documents he wrote condemning that heresy, in which he clearly stated the necessity of pursuing social justice and greater equality of wealth, except by Catholic means.
A False Teaching in the Making
For at least the last several years, Corapi has been breaking a lot of the above commandments against specific economic sins while simultaneously developing his own social teaching and passing it off as that of the Catholic Church. His foremost fault was to ignore the doctrine of just price and charge whatever the market would bear for his religiously themed merchandise. Because there was and still is much of great value in what he teaches about Catholicism, I wanted to see him in person when he made an appearance in Rochester roughly four years ago. I shocked to discover how high the ticket prices were. I can’t remember the exact price, but I think they were well over $25. I couldn’t afford it but scraped up the money somehow, then didn’t end up going in the end because I was sick that morning. At the time I gave him the benefit of the doubt and passed off the outrageous cost as compensation in return for hotel bills, the cost of travel and the like, but began to suspect he was charging whatever the market would bear for his services, regardless of the ability of his flock to pay. Soon afterwards, I went to his website and my worst suspicions were confirmed: the guy was charging ridiculous prices for merchandise like books, CDs and DVDs of his talks on various spiritual topics. At this moment, he is running a half-off special on his entire catalogue of merchandise before the website closes for good, but the prices are still sickeningly high. He's getting $45 for one DVD of a particular set of talks on St. Mary. Fifty-five dollars for a DVD about Fatima. One-hundred and twenty-five dollars for a "Sweet Sixteen Volume II" set of 16 talks on various topics. Two hundred and fifteen dollars for a "Spiritual Combat Pack," featuring a Cross in a position that might be blasphemous, tucked between an Army helmet and Army boots. There are dozens of items like this for sale at his slick website at prices inflated far beyond any minimal costs of disc production, recording, shipping, or website maintenance. If he really cared about the Gospel as much as he claimed to, he would sell all of these things as cheaply as possible – I’ve spent a lot of my time and energy over the course of my life writing a lot of apologetics and will probably never get compensated at all for them, except for the certainty of eventual persecution. He’s a big boy and can give his products away at cost, or completely free, like the rest of us. Doubtless he will say the St. Paul allowed preachers to charge for their services in order to support themselves, but St. Paul didn’t get rich by charging whatever he could get away with; in fact, he worked as a tentmaker to support himself, then preached on the side. It is now clear beyond a shadow of a doubt where all of this surplus was going: into Father Corapi’s cloistered playland in Montana, where he could enjoy his private boats and luxury vehicles, his hunting trips (he recently posed for a photo with a bear he’d killed for sport) and his handguns (at one point, he admitted to keeping one by his bedside at all times). Whether or not he relapsed into his old L.A. lifestyle is immaterial in comparison, because it is certain that he never left behind the worst part of it: avarice and the economic sins that usually accompany it. It was sinful of him to make money through speculation in his former life and it was a sin for him to charge whatever the market would bear for his products during his priestly life. Drug addiction and the mortal sin of adultery pale in comparison to this “very great sin” of loving money. To this day he brags about using his “business savvy” from the beginning of his days as a priest, except this time selling spiritually-themed things instead of real estate. As Jesus once said, “Sin, when fully grown, brings forth death.” I am certain he made honest efforts to kick his drug habits and adulterous ways before becoming a priest and may have succeeded, but this particular set of sins grew unchecked until it cost him his priesthood, as it should. Apparently, he has always been torn between the priesthood and his wealth. According to the author of a book about a medical scandal Corapi helped blow the whistle on several years ago,
“Corapi said that a long time ago he decided not to let himself get backed into a corner where the church could manipulate him with threats like denying him a pension or a home or an assignment. He worried that it would be a real test of faith for him if the church asked him to go live in a monastery and give up his worldly goods. ‘Hopefully, I would do it,” he said years later, with an inflection in his voice suggesting that he might not. When pressed, however, he conceded that he had superiors like everyone else and if they said, ‘You’re finished,’ he’d be finished. But when really pushed about what he would do if ordered to turn over his assets, he said he had concluded that because of his status – somewhere between a member of a religious order and a parish priest – canon law was ambiguous on this question.”[2]
The guy’s been making cold, hard business decisions all along about how much money he could make, such as selecting a standard $2,500 to $3,500 fee for each appearance, based on the calculation that parishes would gain another $8,000 to $10,000 in collections from his visits.[3] Jesus, of course, never charged Capernaum or Samaria for his appearances, nor did he collect a fee from admirers to meet him privately after his sermons the way Corapi has. In essence, the money from those collection plates went into his pockets to pay for his personal business empire and pleasures, not to defray expenses or keep him alive. He didn’t commit the even worse evil of simony, or the selling of spiritual things like baptisms and other sacraments, but he began to make a killing off of mixing religion with business. By doing this, he reinforced one of the most scandalous trends in modern Christianity, the commercialization of religion itself. I came face to face with the same evil a few years ago when a local pastor allowed a company to sell Catholic-themed merchandise right in the middle of Mass, in a deliberate attempt to increase sales. The whole back row of pews, which hundreds of parishioners had to walk between, looked like it had been turned into a shopping mall display case, full of Rosaries, jewelry and other goods being sold at ridiculous prices by a dolled-up saleslady. I ended up showing the priest, the company and the bishop a letter I received from the highest liturgical office in the Vatican condemning the practice in no uncertain terms, but the priest and the bishop simply balked. If it had occurred again, I was prepared to risk arrest by doing what Jesus did in the same situation: chase the moneychangers and merchants out of the Temple with a whip. Corapi might not approve of this severe liturgical abuse either, but he apparently doesn’t realize that trying to make a fortune off of religious education is in the same boat. If Jesus himself was angered enough by such an affront to resort to violence, what are we to make of someone who sells religious knowledge in return for a hefty profit behind his ordinary needs? He put his drop in the bucket to reinforce this nationwide symptom of decay, the misuse of religion for profit. He also gave credence to the stereotype that most of the clergy care for little except making lot of money and soaking up the vain adoration that some parishioners shower on popular priests. There is much truth to the accusation, because the priesthood is plagued with a lot of other sins besides the whole molestation scandal. A friend of mine who is a high-powered investment banker on Wall Street says that his greediest clients are Catholic priests, who shock even his jaded senses with their lust for wealth. I have seen other priests routinely brag at Mass about how much fun they had on their vacations to exotic places their parishioners could never afford – which is why I normally double whatever I would have put in the collection plate and give it to a real Catholic charity. When that income is used to subsidize the luxurious lifestyles of some priests, it amounts to stealing out of the collection plate in a very clever way. Our priests should not be living better than their lowliest constituents, whether or not they have taken a vow of poverty; some of them actually do take and honor real vows of poverty, and all of this scandal by the wayward majority merely makes them look bad too. Nor should our errant clergy be making money off of speculation, usury, market cornering, overcharging, underpaying and all of the other economic sins Jesus Christ himself has forbidden. Father Corapi has furthered this commercialization of religion while simultaneously engaging in the sin of charging more than a just price for the products on his website and for his public appearances.
He is also been flirting with heresy on the matter of the Church’s social teaching. Corapi’s doctrine has normally been spot-on, which is why faithful Catholics listened to him so often, but in recent years he seemed to be leaning more and more on his own understanding rather than citing the opinions of the saints. A case in point is a sermon he gave a few years about how “Fear is useless!” The sentiment sounds nice, but it is a false bit of fluff plucked out of popular culture, one that St. Thomas Aquinas directly contradicts; Father Corapi claims to be an admirer of Aquinas, but apparently didn’t learn his teaching that God gave us the emotion of fear for specific reasons, to be used in the right proportion, at the right place and and at the right time. It was this kind of fuzzy thinking and drifting away from the writings of the saints that ultimately led him into what I feared most years ago: crossing the line of heresy in the matters where he was morally weakest. If he really loved the saints as much as he claimed, Corapi would realize that Chrysostom and the rest of them taught that the mere possession of inordinate wealth can get one sent to Hell; if he really understood Sirach, he would know it is impossible to get rich without committing sin. If he was as devoted to the Magisterium as he once claimed, he would understand that some of his teachings on social issues directly contradict it. He certainly isn’t going out of his way to remind people about usury, speculation, hoarding, underpaying or his chief sin, charging unjust prices, even though these have been matters of Church doctrine since Apostolic times. Instead, he is apparently substituting the exact opposite, the “free market” drivel of the Republican Party, and passing it off as the Church’s social teaching. I refuse to pay the outrageous $45 fee for a copy of the sermon he gave in Cincinnati last year on social teaching, so I cannot help but imagine what else he said in it that directly flies in the face of everything the Catholic Church teaches about economic equality. Nevertheless, I have gleaned from the reports of others that it is merely just a repetition of the slogans of the Far Right – which means it is directly contrary to the mandatory teachings of the Church. After writing this essay, I was able to catch a twelve-minute teaser that Corapi posted online for the video and it was even worse than I suspected; almost every sentence that came out of his mouth was either completely false, even when pertaining to mere historical matters, while the doctrine he preached was less of a heresy than an outright, bold-faced lie. If you want a date for the time when Corapi’s fall began, we can trace it at least as far back as July 17, 2010, when he misused his authority to teach thousands of the faithful his own counterfeit version of Catholic social teaching at this conference. The subheading on the front of the DVD is “The Evil of Socialism,” but the Church has never made any such determination. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply lying. It said a century ago that communism, i.e. the complete subordination of all economic life to the state, was not compatible with Catholicism for a variety of reasons and that membership in the Communist Party was not allowed. Socialism is a completely different thing, which includes heavy regulation of business, an admixture of government ownership of business, progressive taxation, social safety nets and the like, except to an extent never before seen in America. The Catholic Church has never condemned any of this; in fact, it explicitly permits nationalization of key industries like the oil sector, which is common around the world but would be considered taboo in America. Although the Church has never released a document officially condemning capitalism by name, the whole of the Magisterium and the writings of the saints Corapi once admired actually clashes to a greater degree with nearly the entirety of capitalist philosophy. Apparently the talk devolved into thinly disguised bashing of welfare programs, with admonishments to the let those who refuse to work not eat – which the early Church Fathers most often interpreted as applying to the idle rich, not the destitute and downtrodden. Some of those on welfare are forced into it through no fault of their own, unlike Father Corapi, who ended up on the streets because of his own self-destructive habits. Now that he is back on top again, he has forgotten the kindness he was shown and has thrown in his lot with a group of people who have a seething hatred for the poor. Chrysostom teaches us that the rich man went to Hell merely for ignoring Lazarus, but the Republican right wingers Corapi has become so chummy with would have kicked him and said, “Get a job!” For sins of this kind, they will suffer just retribution in the next life.
An Angel Needs Two Wings to Fly
A lot of his fellow priests have also cast their lot in with the same group of people, including some I admire and have learned much from. I thank men like the old Father Corapi for speaking out forcefully on the certain important issues, ranging from the destructiveness of contraception to the horror of abortion to the need to respect the Eucharist by not taking it in a state of mortal sin (which he is, if he continues to pass off his counterfeit teachings on social justice as those of the Church). All these things and more need to be said time and again, but that is just the beginning of the evils our priests should denounce from the pulpit every day until they no longer exist. The so-called neoconservative faction of the priesthood may be doing us a service by staying true to the topics it knows well, but these clergy will fail in the long run to stop abortion, contraception or any other rampant sin unless they gain even greater understanding of the Gospel. That means appreciating the real virtues of the Left in terms of social justice, which many of them deliberately deny because their own personal weaknesses stem from the opposite vices of avarice and pride. Because the right wing is deliberately ignoring or outright fudging the Church’s social teachings, they will never manage to convince their adversaries on the Left of their sincere commitment to social justice. Instead, they look the other way when faced with the injustices perpetrated by right-wing economic policies, which starve 8 million people to death every year across the globe, or right-wing militarism, which led the murder of millions of innocent civilians in the Third World during the Cold War. Corapi heaps fawning praise on the American military all of the time but has never spoken a word about the many times it has been misused (to the detriment of our soldiers and our national security) to kill innocent civilians of the Third World by the hundreds of thousands, at the behest of Corporate America, in order to take away their property and hand it to the rich. Neocon priests like rightly recognize that their opponents on the Left really are allowing millions of babies to be killed each year through abortion, but their critics on the Left also recognize quite clearly that the neocons blithely allow millions of young lives to be snuffed out through unjust wars and unjust economic policies. What’s even worse is that by allowing corporate greed to go unchecked and allowing the spirit of competition to pervade our whole culture, the neocons are watering the very root motivations of the sins they abhor so much, such as abortion. Until both sides see that Satan has brought about this ingenious split between Left and Right, neither side will be able to act on its virtues. Catholicism is the loneliest place to be in global politics today, because we have no friends; both the Left and the Right are our enemies, who only differ in what kinds of murder they prefer to overlook. We are caught today between two enemies, one that is the party of avarice, pride and wrath, and one that stands for vices like intemperance, lust and envy. Those on the religious Left must learn something new about social justice: that abortion is the ultimate violation of their own principles. Those on the religious Right must learn something new about it as well: that the capitalist economic policies they preach about come from the Devil. The neoconservative priests I admire, such as Malachi Martin, John Hardon and Father Corapi v.1.0, remind me a bit of a joke G.K. Chesterton was once said of his friendly rival Bernard Shaw: They are like Venus de Milo, because what there is of them is admirable. It might be more apt to compare them to statues of angels which cannot fly because they are missing their left wings. A whole fresh field of Catholic knowledge awaits men of the same type of personality, if only they have the humility to learn something old to the Church but new to them. Because God is infinite, a Catholic can never stop learning. If they close their minds to learning truths they aren’t yet aware of, they run the risk of going backwards; as Jesus once said, “He who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.” We have just witnessed Father Corapi lose everything we all thought he had.
Ordinarily I would have written all this as fraternal correction and framed it as a positive gift rather than as a negative criticism, but Father Corapi is in a bad place where he won’t listen to anything else. Nevertheless, he can’t be allowed to publicly damage the Church in this way. He preached on the virtue of obedience, but disobeyed a valid command from the head of the religious order he vowed to spend his life serving. He claims to admire Padre Pio, who suffered severe administrative penalties because of a false accusation, but is not imitating him by following the directives of his superiors. He professes to love the Magisterium and the saints, but has completely ignored them when it applies to economic ethics, to the point of developing contrary teachings and passing it off as that of the Catholic Church. He claims to love you, but doesn’t mind charging you ludicrous prices for knowledge he could give away for free. He claims to love Jesus and Mary, but hasn’t mentioned them much in some of the talks he has posted recently on YouTube. He spoke for years about how much the priesthood meant to him, but has walked away from it. He may or may not have committed one-time sins like sleeping with a few women and taking drugs, but we know for certain that Corapi has been fleecing his flock every day for many years, whether he looks at it that way or not. He has not sold sacraments, but he has been selling spiritual knowledge at a hefty profit for a long time. He did an enormous amount of good in a short time for the Catholic Church, but can only do so again if he recognizes all of these mistakes and makes public penance for them all. Thanks in part to the teachings he provided in the early part of his career, I am convinced that our vast majority of disobedient bishops and priests need to do public penance as well for defying the Magisterium on a daily basis in innumerable ways – if they actually believed it, our clergy would warn people at each Mass not to take the Eucharist if they disagreed with the Church’s positions on any Magisterial topic from contraception to usury. If you use the Magisterium as a measuring stick, then the priesthood is in much worse shape than anyone suspects. We need men like Father Corapi back on the front line in order to fix the dire situation we’re in. That is entirely up to his free will though. He can choose to return to the priesthood, obey his religious order’s directives to live with them, sell off his unjustly gained financial empire and personal property, get rid of his concealed weapons (reality check: since when do priests carry sidearms?), do public penance commensurate with the public scandal he has given, plus possibly spend a good year or so in a monastery to cool off his cult of personality, relearn the virtue of humility and reflect on his mistakes about economic morality. If he doesn’t do these things, he will continue to cling to his own particular brand of heresy ever more tightly and lead his remaining followers out of the Church, just like every archheretic before him. Some of his former followers say he certainly looks the part of a sinister archheretic now, with his dyed black goatee, Harley Davidson jacket and sudden absence of religious symbols, which together project the image of Vladimir Lenin or Anton LaVey, not a humble Catholic priest. Unlike most of his other fans, I once paid him a compliment by voting for him for president; I also used to use his tale of rising from the depths of crack addiction to become the best-known priest in America to inspire some friends of mine who got addicted to drugs; I once considered his video series on the Catechism of the Catholic Church as perhaps the best English language instructional materials ever devised. Now I warn everybody I know to stay as far away from this false teacher, until he rejects not just his terrible recent mistakes but the ones he never repented of when he became Catholic, like his addiction to wealth. Yet if Father Corapi does all of these penances – which he might, because a person with his drive can never be counted out – then he can rise from the ashes like a Phoenix and do more good than he’s ever done before. His best days as a priest may be ahead of him, since a broken bone becomes stronger than ever once it heals. Nothing restores the human soul and public reputation better than an open admission of guilt. And if his fellow priests follow such a shining example of redemption, then the Catholic Church may also rise out of its current depths and become a more potent force in America life than it ever has been before.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] “Press Release Concerning Fr John Corapi from SOLT Regional Priest Servant,” July 5, 2011 – see http://soltnews.blogspot.com/2011/07/press-release-concerning-fr-john-corapi.html
[2] p. 61 Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry. Stephen Klaidman, 2007. Simon and Schuster – cited at http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=coronary+2007+book+corapi+inflection&btnG=Search+Books and http://te-deum.blogspot.com/2011/07/corapi-appears-in-video-caves-but-how.html
[3] IBID. p. 60
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