On Cardinal O'Brien

People publicly sin - outside redressing any scandal and formal disciplinary procedures it's none of our business - they're sinners - just like us - they get themselves into all manner of trouble - just like us - they go to confession and get absolved - just like us. It's God's job to judge them...
Indeed it does include Cardinal O'Brien [and irrespective of what Pope Francis thinks he can arbitrarily do to his status I prefer to take the magisterial directive of Pope Pius XII which maintains a Cardinal cannot be stripped of the rank [or for that matter their place in conclave- but that's another issue] ]
For what exactly did His Eminence do?
Kiddie fiddle?
Cover up clerical kiddie fiddling?
Have a string of lovers?
father some kids?
was he shacked up with his long-term boyfriend or girlfriend?
was he having it away with another man's wife?
did he run a parish harem of bored housewives?
was he a frequenter of homosexual establishments?
did he parade round dinner parties and the Catholic social scene with his young foreign 'boyfriend of the month'?
or did he join with fellow priests in sex-holiday beanos to Mykonos or Morocco or Bangkok?
or cruise the gay online scene?
or go cottaging in the public toilets or Hampstead Heath?
...and do we really need to go through the string of clerics of all ranks who ARE guilty of all these things ??!!

No: he made a few unsuccessful drunken passes at known homosexual clergy when Maggie Thatcher was still PM. Yes a despicable abuse of authority - yes inexcusable behaviour...
BUT...
Ever been to a westminster metropolitan luvvie Catholic function where a young monk approaches you to tell you that a group of them are moving on to a gay sauna after this and would you like to join them? Or a Priest staying-over in the city overnight asks do you want a nightcap in his room?
Regulars at these events lose count as to how many times they have to decline the awfully polite offers for horizontal shenanigans by men and women, clerical, religious and lay..preying on anything with a pulse...like seventies swingers without the bowl of carkeys

Ask any cleric or ex-seminarian - even the ones who were never an oil painting - how many times some priest had 'tried it on' with them over the years...I think you'll be shocked.

But I think you'd be more shocked to discover that the clerics who engage in that sort of reckless feckless drunken stupidity are often the good men just having a wobble while staying on the rails - the real scoundrels and reprobates who are 'at it like rabbits' with anything with a Y chromosome would never do anything so risky.

As with all these things it's the predominantly innocent ones who fall off the wagon once or twice who get caught and go to the wall - the real reckless toe-rags get away with blue murder and never get caught

Had the Catholic media ever given us an opportunity to comment about the Cardinal O'Brien case you might have known my opinion regarding the farce and stitch-up of the poor man.
Malevolent clerical forces knew exactly all about the gossip of the few drunken fumbling passes made in the man's earlier years during a sort of mid-life crisis - all known about for DECADES!!!

But for major spiteful ulterior motives senior clerics and a few embittered vindictive professional laity conspired with gay activists to bring the man down.
..it was despicable..deplorable..obscene.
...and the way this new Pope of "Mercy" treated him was shameful and scandalous