Although Father Marko Rupnik’s According to the Spirit sheds little light on Pope Francis’s spiritual theology, it is both valuable and concerning as the written testament of a controversial priest whose influence has been significant in the life of the universal Church.
In 1975, Father Richard Ginder, a priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, published Binding with Briars. The book, though revolting at times, sheds more light on the clerical sexual abuse scandal than perhaps any other book has.
A 1954 article and a 1959 book jacket paint a picture of the priest’s broad influence on the Church in the United States. Father Ginder was editor of The Priest, My Daily Visitor, and The Catholic Choirmaster, associate editor of Our Sunday Visitor, a prolific author of pamphlets, and a widely syndicated columnist. For decades after his ordination in 1940, he was a conservative’s conservative, and thus he offered advice on how to “Crack Back at the Commies,” warned of “The Reds in Our Labor Unions,” and served on the national council of the John Birch Society. He was also consulting editor of the Maryknoll Sisters’ Catholic Children’s Treasure Box, which remains in print today.
Like many priests of his generation, Father Ginder blew with the wind. In Binding with Briars, Ginder, a former diocesan censor of books, assailed Catholic teaching on the Sixth Commandment as he chronicled his enthusiastic embrace of the theological dissent that erupted in the latter half of the 1960s.
Not surprisingly, that enthusiastic embrace was expressed in actions. His 1984 Pittsburgh Press obituary notes that “in 1969, he was arrested on morals charges after Pittsburgh police found photographs of teenage boys engaged in homosexual acts and diaries of his own sexual activities in his Squirrel Hill apartment. He pleaded guilty to the charges and for several years underwent psychiatric treatment.” The arrest and the guilty plea did not lead Bishop Vincent Leonard to suspend Father Ginder’s priestly faculties; that suspension came only in 1976, after the publication of the priest’s book and his television interviews, including an appearance on the The Phil Donahue Show.
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article adds that in 1978, Father Ginder was “convicted of sodomizing two 16-year-old boys” and “sentenced to up to four years in prison.” After he died in an automobile crash, 50 priests joined the future Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua at his funeral Mass.
Five decades after its publication, Binding with Briars still speaks to the Church today. If Catholic teaching on the Sixth Commandment—articulated authoritatively in our time in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 2331-2400)—is a gem with many facets, then those who, like Father Ginder, would take a pickaxe to strike at any of its facets should not be surprised if the inevitable cracks spread to the teaching enshrined in no. 2356, which forbids the sexual violation of another person. Like Lot’s wife in the Book of Genesis, Binding with Briars is a warning, a portent; it is a pillar of salt for our age.
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