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Fr. Mark WhiteLifeSiteNews

(LifeSiteNews) — A priest whose bishop removed him from his pastoral duties and who is now barred from offering the sacraments — ostensibly due to blog posts critical of the Church’s handling of the clergy sex scandal — told LifeSiteNews that “a spider’s web of loyalties has gotten in the way” of the Church’s ability to competently restore the public’s trust in the Roman Catholic Church.

Fr. Mark White of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, has been put out to pasture by his Bishop Barry Knestout, who is now actively seeking to go further and laicize White for casting a much-needed spotlight on the Church hierarchy’s dealings with sexual predator priests and their victims.

“We Catholics just want to belong to a church that we can believe in where we don’t have to try to explain to people who say ‘It’s all just a totally corrupt organization of criminal child predators,’” said White in a video interview with LifeSiteNews’ Claire Chretien. “We try to say that it’s not, but we don’t have any convincing evidence.”

The Church’s ‘shadow world of knowledge about something very evil’

When the troubling news about now-disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick made headlines around the world in 2018, it struck very close to home for Fr. White.
As Archbishop of Washington, D.C., McCarrick ordained White, who then went on to be incardinated in the nearby Diocese of Richmond where he served as pastor at two rural southwest Virginia parishes.

After Archbishop Viganò published his explosive testimony about Pope Francis covering up for sex-abuser McCarrick in August 2018, White began using his blog to spotlight the Church’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the sexual abuse scandal, especially regarding the Church’s handling of the McCarrick revelations. He was, at times, critical of Pope Francis, and sometimes used strong language when pointing out the incompetence and culture of cover-up he witnessed in the Church’s hierarchy.

“I really wanted to understand what had happened with McCarrick since I was there at the time and didn’t know,” explained White in the video interview. “That was a very difficult thing for me to go through; to imagine that there was a shadow world of knowledge about something very evil that was on the other side of a very thin wall from me, where I was believing in something holy and sacred that I was committing my life to.”

“I appointed myself James Grein’s amanuensis [assistant],” said White. Grein was McCarrick’s first known child sexual abuse victim, who went public with his story in a July 2018 New York Times article. “Every time he would speak anywhere that summer or fall I would post a link to it on my blog.”

“And then when Archbishop Viganò released his testimony — which blew the lid off, [revealing] that this was fairly widespread knowledge in certain circles of the Church’s authority — I tried to process and understand that,” continued White. “I was really trying to find a way to keep going as a parish priest,” for the sake of his parishioners.

Bishop Knestout ordered Fr. White to shut down his blog in November 2019, and White obliged.

When the coronavirus pandemic brought an end to public Masses and sacramental life in general in early 2020, Fr. White sought permission from Bishop Knestout to resurrect his blog as a means of staying in touch with parishioners who were now isolated from the sacraments and from each other.

After receiving no response from Knestout, White went ahead and reactivated his blog, angering Bishop Knestout and prompting his seeming disproportionate response to White’s online musings.
White has been in the crosshairs of Bishop Knestout’s ire ever since.

The Church never reckons with the truth fully enough that we win people’s trust back’

“We’ve had a reconciliation program in our diocese but it has not resulted in any of the truth about these things coming out,” explained White. “We haven’t provided the kind of information as an institution that we owe to the survivors.”

“What I’ve been blogging about this whole time is, ‘Why can’t [the Church] just deal with this?’ It’s not like it’s that complicated,” said White. “We never reckon with the truth fully enough that we win people’s trust back.”

Contact information for respectful communications:

Bishop Knestout
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (804) 359-5661