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I happen
to be one of those happy Catholics … in the mainstream of
“moderate/progressive” theology, ecclesiology, and biblical studies, [who] is
a feminist (pro-life at that), hopeful for future development in the Church,
but who, despite all appearances to the contrary, is Catholic through and
through…. Sometimes I feel as if groups and individuals engaged in
apologetics see me as an even more urgent target than are Protestants. Amy
Welborn-Vining Gainesville,
Florida This Rock magazine, March, 1990 If you insist on using political
labels to identify Catholics, here’s the way it works: the “liberals” aren’t
interested in us because we make fun of them. The “conservatives” like us
until they find out our histories, because there’s no worse epithet – not “pagan,”
not “Protestant,” not even “heretic” – in a conservative Catholic’s
vocabulary than “ex-priest,” a word which comes with a “p” conveniently built
in so it can be virtually spit out of contemptuous lips. Amy
Welborn-Dubruiel Fort
Wayne, Indiana Commonweal, January, 2003 As its devotees state, it
is a parish unlike any other in America. It has no boundaries, no assigned
clergy, no Masses or devotions and no parishioners. It also takes up no
collections. But its fans call St. Blog’s Parish the wave of the future for
the Catholic Church in America because it the first circle of Catholic
writers in the world known as cyberspace. But then it wasn’t just America’s
Catholics who have been caught up in admiration about the expansive power of
the Internet. The demographic bulge known as the Baby Boom and their progeny
have been caught up in the endless adulation over the great potential in the
expansion of knowledge that an ever increasing number of web sites and blogs
are said to create. However, some observers have said that the creation of
celebrity on the internet and the fanning of causes such as the demonizing of
countries like Iraq before the American invasion of 2003 are just the clever
manipulation of traditional crowd psychology by unseen agents while appealing
to the viewers pride by telling them that they are getting cutting edge
information. Starting with the Baby Boomers, Americans became more concerned
of how their counterparts thought on any given issue and as economic
commentators Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin state in Financial Reckoning
Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century, “What has never
been fully realized is the extent to which-unlike any previous group in the
history of man-the boomers were subject to the madness of crowds on a
monumental scale. The boomers adopted every idea that appealed to them and
dumbed it down … broadcast it … vulgarized it … and took it up as they would
their favorite pop song.” Many blogs come and go but some are maintained by known
Catholic authors who have immense popularity and influence with people who
are always logging on for a debate or to find out what to think about things
that are happening in the Church and the world. A large number of these
Catholic blogs might be described as attempting to be politically
conservative and theologically orthodox. One of the best known of this type is
maintained by Catholic author Amy Welborn of Ft. Wayne, Indiana and is
presently titled Open Book. One of the initially curious facts about so amorphous an
undertaking as St. Blog’s Parish is that she is, by popular acclaim, the
reigning queen, and devotees are constantly checking with Amy to see how they
should view issues. According to a recent story about the prominence of
religious blogging on the internet and in particular the St. Blog’s web-ring;
God and the Internet by Jonathan V. Last, in the December, 2005 issue
of First Things, “in the world of Godblogs more than two-thousand
page-views per day makes you a fairly heavy hitter.” This article notes that Open
Book is currently getting twelve thousand daily hits and comments, as a
down-side to this phenomena which has been previously discussed in these
pages a tendency for these conservative Catholic blogs to quickly become
politicized in a Republican Party direction, become excessively
commercialized with the hosts hawking their books or speaking venues and the
fact that, with all the links to the same sources, they have in fact become a
giant echo chamber. The politicization of the Catholic blogs that Mr. Last
notes in his articles may not be due entirely to osmosis but due to the fact
that the Bush White House has been reported as having full-time personnel
devoted to cruising the blogs to shout down comments deemed
anti-administration. This was particularly evident in the efforts of the
shadowy figure of Michael Herndon a Republican city councilman from
Steubenville, Ohio who just happened to have worked for the Catholic outreach
arm of the Republican National Committee until he established the
catholicjustwar.org web site in the days preceding the American invasion of
Iraq in 2003 which featured an open letter signed by prominent American
Catholics which supported the “prudential judgment” in questions of war and
peace of George W. Bush and, implicitly, opposed the peace making efforts of
the pope and American bishops. It should be noted that with the passing of
time and the ephemeral nature of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and
the fact that the Bush administration either deliberately falsified the
intelligence or was totally incompetent it interpreting it, appeals to the
president’s alleged “prudential judgment” have subsided although patriotic
appeals to “staying the course in Iraq” still echo among some right-wing
Catholics. For a mother with two
small children and three older ones you have to admire Amy Welborn’s energy
which allows her to comment on a wide range of issues as well as write books
and articles on an almost 24/7 basis. As you might expect from a frequently
published authoress, in Open Book Ms. Welborn tells us of her new
books and articles and her increasingly frequent speaking engagements to such
stoutly orthodox groups as Legatus in various cities. In fact Amy Welborn is
getting quite a reputation as “the Catholic stay-at-home mom from the
Midwest” and favorably compared to such liberal Catholic females as the
never-married Maureen Dowd of the New York Times op-ed page. Ms. Dowd,
for all her later forays in liberal journalism, is one of five children of a
Washington D.C. policeman and did receive something of a Catholic education
at Catholic University there, as opposed to Ms. Welborn who attended the
state-related University of Tennessee, the only child of a professor there. The
creation of Amy Welborn as the Catholic anti-Dowd always features pejorative
comments to the frustrated fifty-something Irish maiden Dowd’s Manhattan life
being something out of the network drama Sex and the City to be
unfavorably contrasted to the savvy Catholic right-wing mother of five from
Fort Wayne. Apparently this contrast in Catholic female paradigms appears to
date to The Corner blog of National Review Online to Holy Week,
2002, March 27 to be exact, when conservative Catholic convert, Rod Dreher,
who was then working for National Review and seems to throw the loudest echo
in the St. Blog’s echo chamber, noted Amy’s response to Maureen’s take on the
priestly pedophile scandal. Rod’s exact statement was: I am on a Holy Week fast from Catholic scandal blogs, so I’m going to be a very good boy and not respond to Maureen Dowd’s asinine column explaining the Church scandal to us. Instead, I refer you to the takedown accomplished by the estimable Amy Welborn, who, as usual, makes more sense on the scandal than just about anybody. This Midwestern stay-at-home Catholic mom has her head screwed on straighter than the flame-haired “Sex In The City”-style scribe who has one of the highest-profile jobs in American journalism. And now, thanks to the almighty blog, Amy has a public voice. Or, more to the point, it
was Mr. Dreher who gave Ms. Welborn a public voice, at least as public as the
conservative Catholic world of St. Blog’s web ring is concerned. But the
favorable comparison to the “flame-haired Sex in the City scribe” when
describing Amy, due to the echo effect of the blogs immediately caught and
was most recently used, without attribution to its originator by another
leading Catholic author, pundit, and blogger on various and sundry topics for
a large community of readers. Mark Shea, at his Catholic and Enjoying It,
blog had this to say about Ms. Welborn on November 7, 2005, which just
happened to be the day before Ms. Dowd’s latest book Are Men Necessary?
When Sexes Collide was published: This seems as good a place as any to say something I’ve been meaning to say for some time. Three cheers for Amy Welborn. She is the anti-Dowd. I don’t mean simply that she also dislikes Dowd’s work and does a nice job critiquing it. I mean she’s one of my heroes, not only as a Catholic writer, but as a common sense Catholic thinker….Amy’s work as a Catholic writer is prodigious, first-rate, clear, and thoughtful … This is why she’s been so invaluable following the vicissitudes of the “Situation” as she tartly dubbed it in 2002. And this is why she remains such a rare treasure today….One of the things that I love best about Amy’s work is that you get to see it happening precisely in the context of family. You hear about her marriage. You watch the kidlets grow up … I could go on and on, but I just thought I would say out loud something I’ve bene [sic] thinking for quite a while: Amy Welborn’s [sic] don’t come along everyday. If you haven’t told her how much you appreciate her fine work, please do. She and her husband Mike Dubruiel have created a family that is making a huge and unique contribution to the life of the Church. Such people don’t come along every day. Now, as Rod Dreher and
Mark Shea are both converts to the Catholic faith they must be forgiven in
not understanding that every Irish Catholic family has a maiden aunt like the
Dowd family. Whether my late Aunt Monica would have generated as much
prurient interest from these guys about her suspected sex life is another
question altogether. However, their comments about how great a defender of
the Catholic faith and morals Amy Welborn is over a number of years should
make any reader want to make a determination of what positions she actually
holds. The results might be a little difficult to determine, more so than
learning that Mark Shea is a plagiarist. But the real story about how good a
Catholic in faith and practice Amy Welborn and her husband, Michael Dubruiel,
are is out there even if it lies hidden in numerous moves around Florida and
their ultimate reinvention as pillars of orthodoxy in Indiana.
What all good bloggers do
is to tell their readers when they have a book or magazine article published
in “dead tree format” as it is widely called. In this Amy Welborn is usually
no exception so it was puzzling for me to find out that such a well-known
author in her previous blog, In Between Naps, never told her reading
base at St. Blog’s, who would have known of her work at Our Sunday Visitor,
that she just had an article in the January 17, 2003 issue of Commonweal
titled My Husband the Priest. I find that strange; she tells her readers
about everything else she publishes, but throughout all of January 2003 she
never mentioned this article on her blog. It might have been helpful because,
from my experience, the devout Catholics who pick up Our Sunday Visitor
in the church vestibule usually don’t read the liberal Commonweal, and
for the woman whom her many supporters seem to find the Oprah Winfrey of
Catholic orthodoxy, it does show something of a split personality when it
comes to Church teachings. The link was first identified
by a commenter at Mark Shea’s web site when some ripping comment made by Ms.
Welborn echoed at his Catholic and Enjoying It site a few days later. That’s
the way things go in St. Blog’s Parish, or anywhere in cyberspace, Mark
comments on what Amy thinks or Amy comments on what Mark says and both wait
to see what Rod Dreher will say about a Church scandal or what alleged
Catholic gay activist Andrew Sullivan’s take on an issue will be, but never a
Pat Buchanan or a Joe Sobran. However when the Commonweal article was
mentioned there seemed to be a whole lot of somewhat devout Catholics in St.
Blog’s Parish who were incensed over big, bad Dale Vree of New Oxford
Review questioning sweet, little Amy’s rise to prominence as a writer and
lecturer on topics dealing with Catholic orthodoxy in an article from the
April, 2003 issue titled If Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right Would Three?,
which was written as a response to Ms. Welborn’s My Husband the Priest.
But it would seem from a review of the evidence that Mr. Vree was being very
circumspect in his criticisms, the fact of her divorce and annulment and her
second husband’s laicization are not the only issue. The timing of the events
leading to the breakdown of her first marriage weighs heavily in the question
of her orthodoxy. A Lot of Money
The Commonweal
article is written in Ms. Welborn’s jabbing style with a lot of homey
references to her marriage and children which Mark Shea finds so endearing;
however we find that this is Ms. Welborn’s second marriage and that her five
children are by two different husbands. She tells us that this “union of
souls” is the second marriage for two people in early middle age who both
bring a lot of “history” to their current relationship; although she thinks
it’s a “ridiculous position” for two forty-somethings to be chasing around
after toddlers. Tell me about it. As for her three children by her first
marriage she seems to have been psychologically able to reduce her ex-husband
to a “twice monthly check,” with the aid of a Decree of Nullity from the
Catholic Church. Unfortunately it appears
from the Commonweal article that her present husband, Michael Dubruiel
is not having an easy time psychologically dealing with his former
“marriage,” in fact he’s “haunted” about his former life to use his wife’s
term. It’s not three teenagers at the dinner table, it’s a box up in the
closet which contains, “his first chalice and paten stored … [with] his
sick-call set … with little containers of oil, a purple stole, and an empty
pyx. Just in case?” adds his wife. Amy does say he did give his vestments
away to a Brazilian seminarian, but still reads his office every day. The balance of the article
is about the problems currently encountered by Amy and Mike with uncaring
bishops and evil right-wing Catholics for, as Ms. Welborn states, “We’re
actually in a rather odd spot theologically. I guess you could call us
‘orthodox,’ Mostly. We’re both well schooled in modern interpreters of faith,
and have found them wanting, to say the least. You can tell by what books are
allowed to live upstairs and which are relegated to the basement.” But, as
with so many other guys who left the clerical state, Mr. Dubruiel found it a
little hard getting down off the pedestal. Here’s how his wife views the
priestly life, and perhaps, indirectly, his initial abilities as head of a
household: “priests work hard,
but priests are also given a great deal as well. They benefit from scads of
professional privilege, from dry cleaners to dentists. Doctors write
prescriptions for them in the sacristy after Mass. They are showered with
gifts-mostly booze or checks-at Christmas. Most of them have housekeepers,
cooks, and car allowances. They have the promise of being taken care of the
rest of their lives. So the priest who leaves, leaves all of that and faces,
perhaps for the first time, or at least the first time in a long time, the
pressures of real, practical responsibility with consequences, not only for
himself, but for others as well.” It isn’t just that
Jonathan V. Last finds “Godblogers” like Amy Welborn somewhat mercenary in
using their on-line religious writings to hawk their wares; she looks at the
priesthood from an economic perspective. It is obvious that she seethes at
the fact that her future husband was cut off by his bishop from pension and
health benefits for simply wanting to “legitimize a heterosexual relationship
in marriage.” Thus, when they see bishops keeping accused pedophile priests
on the payroll both Amy and Michael “seethe”; in fact it has “renewed his
sense of cynicism” from when he first departed the clergy and in her fueled
“rage”. This may help to explain
why her web site, Open Book, gives prominence to every story
concerning priestly misconduct and links to the SNAP organization. However, as both the
Dubruiels would wish to associate with the theologians who would write in his
current employer, Our Sunday Visitor rather than Commonweal and
who both “love shrines and relics and bizarre saints’ stories” and ordinary
parish life the economics of the priesthood seems to constantly trump its
theology for Amy Welborn: Leaving the priesthood is, of course, difficult on
every level. Unless you’ve obtained another professional degree in the
process, you’re stuck with one of the most useless credentials known to
humanity, even if you have three of them, as he does: degrees in religion. I
should know-I have one too. And, unfortunately, as “no
one offered to pay for any degrees to make him more employable after he left”
Michael was forced to seek employment in some endeavor related to the
Catholic Church, even if he’s in a gray area as his wife says, even the
office of lector is prohibited under Canon Law to laicized priests. Whether
priests departing the active ministry should be given funding to pursue an
MBA by their bishops or religious superiors as a matter of justice, Amy
doesn’t say. She also doesn’t examine the flip side of this question: should
the departing priest compensate the diocese for the education he has received?
It appears that they couldn’t
stay in their small diocese where everyone knew them and that many of his
former priest friends, in a most unbrotherly and unchristian manner, have
dropped him like a rock. Being the literary person that she is, Amy would
undoubtedly know the title of one of her fellow Southern writers, Thomas
Wolfe’s works, You Can’t Go Home Again. And there may be good reasons
why you have to start over somewhere else, but more on that later. As a former lector who got
a letter from the pastor when I concluded 11 years of service but, also, as a
31-year civil servant in the Defense Department approaching retirement age, I
find all this talk about pension benefits and health care that the Church
“owes” out of “justice” to its former clergy to be somewhat puzzling. Amy
Welborn has recently pushed the book on the childhood memories of Peter
Manseau titled Vows: The story of a Priest, a Nun and their Son. I was
hoping to read this book as background to writing this article but the ebook
download from amazon.com and my computer weren’t compatible. But the outline
of the story of the Manseau family is clear from the first chapter contained
at the web site, the father was a priest from Boston who ministered in the
Roxbury ghetto and who married a nun after being a priest for about eight
years and having been exposed to the “new theology” in the seminary. It
appears that the Manseau family left Roxbury and the author has childhood
memories of attending CORPUS meetings on Sunday morning where dad and his
fellow ex-priests could vent their feelings about the Church. Peter Manseau’s
mother, the former nun, did bring the three children to Mass in the parish
after the coffee table Eucharists celebrated by the angry ex-priests. One of
the things that the elder Manseau and his colleagues at CORPUS are angry
about these days, over and above the fact that the Church didn’t let them
back in the ministry after they married, is the economic justice that they
should be getting a pension for their years of service. The opening chapter
concerns the elder Manseau’s pilgrimage to the Boston Archdiocese’s
chancellery, after the removal of Cardinal Law to plead the CORPUS case just
as he had done with all the previous archbishops. Peter Manseau accompanied
his dad to his meeting and, in what must be evidence of the strange workings
of the Holy Spirit, after his upbringing among angry defrocked priests and
dabbling in Buddhism the young author is considering joining the Trappists at
present. While Amy and Michael may not be in total harmony with the radical
theological outlook of CORPUS, it would appear they have adopted their
outlook. In fact, if I may coin a technical term, groups like CORPUS, SNAP,
and VOTF (Voice of the Faithful) are bitch groups for people who have a chip
on their shoulders about something in the Catholic Church they don’t like and
nothing apparently will ever make them happy. I recently got an email from
the local VOTF chapter here in Philadelphia which was given prominence in The
Inquirer’s recent coverage of the pedophile priest scandal, ninety
percent of which involved adult males on adolescent males. It appears that
the Vatican delegation to investigate homosexuality in American seminaries
was due to arrive at the local St. Charles Seminary the Sunday after
Thanksgiving. VOTF sent an urgent email to all supporters to get out on
Lancaster Ave. that Sunday afternoon to hold up signs saying NO WITCHHUNT OF
GAY PRIESTS and attempted to get media coverage for the demonstration. Some
people you just can’t satisfy. But I do have word for the Manseaus and the
Dubruiels (Michael is also from New England originally and also had about
eight years of “service”) for that amount of time with an organization you
don’t get much of a pension, if the federal government is any guide. By the
way if you think my terming Amy Welborn as the Catholic Oprah is unfair, the
left rail of the Open Book site presently lists Vows as part of
her current reading and she has initiated a favorable discussion of it with
her readers. Unlike Ms. Winfrey, there is no book club, as of yet. As I said above Amy and
her husband Michael obfuscate their past but some facts are readily apparent
from their biographies at their respective web sites. They are both part of
the aforementioned Baby Boom Generation who “adopted every idea that appealed
to them” in the words of Bonner and Wiggins and as they were born in 1958 and
1960, respectively, Michael and Amy are at the latter end of that demographic
boom that produced that left-wing Irish hussy, Maureen Dowd and me a few
years prior in 1952. But some things stand out such that Ms. Welborn has her
undergraduate degree in history from the University of Tennessee and her
master’s in church history from Vanderbilt Divinity School. While she states
that her entire professional life has been either directly or indirectly in
the employ of the Catholic Church as a high school religion teacher in
Virginia and Florida, parish director of religious education and diocesan
paper columnist in the Sunshine State as well as the author of the many books
and articles on Catholic faith and practice already mentioned, she has never
attended any Catholic institution of higher education. The same cannot be said
for Michael Dubruiel. A native of New Hampshire, he enrolled in a college in
Jacksonville, Florida in 1976 but lasted less than a year and then spent four
years as an enlisted man in the Army. After discharge he enrolled in the now
defunct college division of St. Meinrad’s Abbey in Indiana, majoring in
philosophy and classical languages and then at St. Vincent de Paul Seminary
in Florida where he earned a Masters in Divinity in 1987, although he states
that he was “attending graduate school” for this period of his life. He would
also receive an M.A. in spirituality from the Jesuit Creighton University of
Omaha in 1992. It is interesting to note, in view of his apparent angst
over his career change in his thirties, that Michael did not attend a high
school seminary nor enter a college formation program at age eighteen but was
able to experience a different side of life as well as travel through Europe
in his Army years. His priestly formation, it should also be noted, did not
occur in the pre-Vatican II cloistered environment that produced the
rebellious clerics of the late ‘60s like Peter Manseau’s father; in fact his
training took place in the ‘80s when psychological maturity was being
evaluated and the life-long nature of a celibate commitment was being
explicitly emphasized in Catholic seminaries. Of course one could make a
counter-argument that Michael Dubruiel went from one form of regimented life
in the Army to another in St. Meinrad’s Abbey with only a change in the color
of the uniform. However, from Mr.
Dubruiel’s web site you would never know that he was ordained a priest of the
diocese of St. Augustine, Florida around 1987. That point is obfuscated
perhaps due to the fear expressed by his wife over the vindictive nature of
right-wing Catholics in the quote from the Commonweal article that
leads this essay. In an earlier version of his on-line biography Michael
Dubruiel states that he was “employed” by the St. Augustine diocese in two
parishes in the late eighties and early nineties, St. Catherine’s Orange Park
(1987-90) and the other in the university town that is the home of the
University of Florida, Gainesville’s Holy Faith parish (1990-92). It should
be noted that after the time I started my research into this story Mr.
Dubruiel has changed his web site resume and no longer mentions the fact that
he was “employed” by the diocese in these two parishes and the period 1987-92
is not discussed. There are other interesting facts from each of their web
based resumes and those that are would appear that Dale Vree was correct to
take issue with Ms. Welborn’s statement that her husband “did nothing wrong”
in his rejoinder to her article published in New Oxford Review. The facts of Michael Dubruiel’s return
to the lay state and Amy Welborn’s divorce and annulment did not happen in a
vacuum. Her Commonweal article would lead the reader to believe that
they met in a bar years after their respective Canon Law cases were
adjudicated. That perhaps is unfair, Amy and Michael are both devout
Catholics so they would more probably have met on a parish committee or at a
novena but they didn’t have to; they were collaborating on literary projects
in Florida when their prior states of life changed. In fact when the then
Father Dubruiel was stationed at Holy Faith parish in Gainesville the
Director of Religious Education was one Mrs. Amy Welborn-Vining and they
published at least one book The Biblical Way of the Cross which gives
a different grouping of the fourteen stations than is traditionally found
depicted in Catholic parishes (although the authors inform us that “in 1991,
Pope John Paul II introduced a new version of the Way of the Cross that
follows the more ancient practice”) and several articles from that
collaboration in the early nineties. Obviously these events are related as
reading all these web sources simultaneously will show. Now there may be no
problem with the close collaboration of a married woman and the parish
priest, but as we are now dealing with Boomers there were different results
than what happened due to the collaboration of Father Leonard Feeney, S.J.
and Catherine Goddard Clarke in Boston in the 1940s which eventuated in a
number of married couples taking religious vows as the Slaves of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary and deciding to raise their children communally. Of
course Feeney, Clarke and the rest of the Slaves had been excommunicated for
disobedience by the time the communal arrangements were made. Perhaps in her position as
Holy Faith’s DRE Amy Welborn-Vining received the initial issue of This
Rock magazine in 1990 which was issued by Karl Keating’s Catholic Answers
apologetics organization. Her letter from that era as posted in This Rock’s
web site and quoted in the introduction to this article, would appear to show
that even then she considered herself as a pro-life feminist,
“moderate/progressive” in theology and biblical studies and seemed to have a
big problem with right-wing Catholics who viewed the positions that she
espoused with more alarm than those held by Fundamentalists. In view of the
many changes her life saw in the succeeding decade, the Commonweal
article would appear to show that she still has a major problem with those
she calls conservative Catholics only now she feels they have it in for her
for having caused the fall of a priest. And this may be an accurate reading
of the available evidence. But even right-wing Catholics can applaud a
life-long support of the pro-life cause as evident in Amy’s writing and The
Gainesville Sun on December 29, 1990 interviewed a local Right-to-Life
official, Amy Welborn-Vining, concerning increased police surveillance of
pro-life groups in response to abortion clinic bombings. The diocese of St.
Augustine, while the oldest in Florida and the first place where Spanish
missionaries said Mass in what was to become the United States of America in
the 16th century, has two major centers of Catholic population. One would be
the megapolis known as Jacksonville which has expanded its boundaries in
recent decades to include most of Duval County. However, while it now is the
most populous city in Florida, a major basis of its economy is the transient
Navy personnel who man the numerous shipyards and airbases there. It is a
Catholic population that Father Dubruiel, with his military background, could
have no doubt successfully ministered to. The other center would be the
parishes of the equally transient college town of the Florida Gators,
Gainesville. A recent visit by the author to Holy Faith parish in that town
took place at night on a cold November night (this is northern Florida) when
the modern church, parish center, and hall were closed; the parish doesn’t
have a Catholic school but the cluster of parishes does support Catholic
education. While I don’t know what
Holy Faith was like 15 years ago, from its web site you can say it’s quite
typical of the modern, involved parish. By this is meant there are plenty of
“ministries” to go around among the parishioners who want to get involved and
there was a “ministry fair” after all the Masses on a weekend in October to
sign up volunteers. If Gainesville is typical of the college towns around the
country there are plenty of highly educated, middle class folks in the parish
of pleasant one-story ranch houses in the surrounding neighborhood who would
fill these jobs and most probably are connected with the university as
faculty, staff or employees of spin-off local foundations that feed off the
school. In fact, in the early ‘90s, Holy Faith parish was the site of a
Catholic version of a Great Books seminar, with one of the priests and a
laywoman leading a discussion of such Catholic authors as Graham Greene,
Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and J.F. Powers and Georges Bernanos whose Diary
of a Country Priest has the protagonist receiving absolution from a
defrocked married priest. Indeed the diocesan paper, The St. Augustine
Catholic November/December 1992 (pp. 10-11) said that this discussion
group was: “a unique form of
catechesis. Most parish adult-education focuses on communicating abstract
ideals to its participants or engaging in a vaguely conceived faith-sharing. But
novelists whose characters are struggling in their faith journeys bridge the
gap between abstraction and real life, and the stories they weave provide a
solid basis for exploring issues of faith. Since they deal with complex
issues in subtle ways, however, it is important to have a facilitator who is
knowledgeable about the Catholic faith.” And who would have been more knowledgeable at Holy Faith in
leading this group in discussing “characters who are struggling in their
faith journeys” than the Director of Religious Education, Amy Welborn-Vining,
and Father Dubruiel, who by the time of the publication of this article was
on the staff of the seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida? One begins to wonder
if her life story in this era might have been titled Desperate Catholic
Housewife if it had been made into a television drama; move over Maureen
Dowd. Spiritual Director
Based on Michael
Dubruiel’s resume on his web site he was an assistant professor of homiletics
at St. Vincent de Paul Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida during the years
1992-94, teaching courses in homiletics, spirituality and theology and
serving as a spiritual director. While this follows the receipt of his
masters in spirituality from Creighton University, it also immediately
follows his brief stay in Gainesville and collaboration with Mrs.
Welborn-Vinning and involves a posting outside his diocese. A review of the
current web site of the seminary shows no equivalent position and one is
forced to wonder if Father Dubruiel was parked in south Florida after
something disrupted his stay at Holy Faith parish. While at the seminary he
continued to publish articles on spirituality in various Catholic publications
either in collaboration with his future wife or alone; and interestingly one
was in Dale Vree’s New Oxford Review. In 1994 Michael Dubruiel
started teaching theology in a Catholic high school in Tampa and resided,
according to a public records check, in an apartment in Lakeland, Florida. Amy
Welborn-Vinning was also in motion during this period and started teaching
the same subject at a Catholic high school in the Orlando diocese; at least
one of her Prove It books would have the imprimatur from that diocese’s
bishop. For her the public records show a relocation of her residence from
Gainesville to two locations in Lakeland, one of which was two tenths of a
mile from Mr. Dubruiel’s apartment. The record isn’t clear but it may have
been during this period that the bishop of St. Augustine terminated the
medical and pension benefits of Ms. Welborn’s future husband. Michael
Dubruiel, in what may have been an attempt to escape from the economic orbit
of the Catholic Church, states that he spent part of 1998 in Hollywood
writing a screenplay for NBC entertainment for which he was paid but the
drama was never produced. Early in 1999 Michael accepted the position with Our
Sunday Visitor and moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, the destination that Amy
followed him to after their marriage at St. Joseph’s Church in Lakeland in
June, 2000, the paperwork of their annulment and laicization having obviously
been completed. Amy has written movingly of the importance of travel on
interstates as milestones of our lives’ events, for her it was Interstate 75.
Both she and her husband would have driven north on I 75 from Lakeland to
Fort Wayne through the site of their former lives in Gainesville, a few miles
from Holy Faith Parish. Now I’m a Boomer myself
and I well remember the Lord’s injunction in John 8:7 about casting the first
stone at the Dubruiels, even if their reinvention of themselves concurrent
with a move to a different section of the country is rather typical behavior
of our generation. But it needs to be said that being conservative in
theological, political, or economic terms is not exactly the same as living a
moral life in the light of the Gospel. It is easy to educate yourself that
what has been taught in most religion classes offered by Catholic institutions
of this country has little to do with what the Church has always and
everywhere taught. I well remember what I was taught in Catholic high school
and college in the years following Vatican II, and the only reason I kept my
faith was that my father was something of a working-class intellectual and
had purchased some books from the Catholic revival authors back in the
thirties and I came across The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam in
the basement of our row house early in my college years. I could see for
myself that what I was being taught as cutting-edge Catholic thought was
merely professorial spin based on articles in Commonweal and America.
In this I was fortunate as I didn’t lose the faith as many of my
contemporaries did. It appears that Amy and Michael came to the same
conclusions for themselves some years later. Unfortunately, I made the
mistake of becoming a political conservative in the National Review
mold as a reaction to the religious and political liberalism I was learning;
this too was a mistake that many young Catholics made before me and, sadly,
still are making if the young folks who maintain web sites at St. Blog’s
Parish are typical. The problem is that maintaining a conservative ideology
in theological and political terms trumps attempting to live a life in
harmony with Church teachings. This will lead you for a big fall with the
sexual revolution raging all around you, even for right-wingers. However,
there are a lot of Catholic conservatives who hang out at St. Blog’s web
sites who basically said when the Dubruiels’ history was revealed with the
link to the Commonweal article in the discussion at Mark Shea’s blog:
hey, what’s the big deal? She has an annulment, he’s got a laicization
decree; of course they can be conservative Catholic icons. Well, it seems that
they’re forgetting some people, namely Amy’s ex-husband and her children by
him and by Michael Dubruiel. What will the kids say when they grow up? Are
they going to maintain the practice of the Catholic faith into adulthood or
will they think it’s optional like marriage and religious vows? The public
records check on Amy Welborn’s migrations show that she lived in Blacksburg,
Virginia, another college town, prior to relocating to Gainesville, Florida
in 1988. It would appear that she was married to a man who had obtained his
doctorate in statistics from Virginia Tech and then went south to teach at
the University of Florida in that year. About a decade later he would return
to Blacksburg to become the chairman of the statistics department at V.T. His
undergraduate degree is from the University of Tennessee, Ms. Welborn’s alma
mater. It would appear that his interests are in statistical process control
pioneered by Dr. W. Edwards Deming and has written a textbook in statistics
for engineers. Most interestingly, for me, is the fact that around this time
Deming’s Total Quality Management was being implemented across the board in
Defense Department bases like those in nearby Jacksonville. However, whether
we use the much-abused left-brain/right-brain dichotomy, graduate level
statistics is somewhat different from spirituality. While the professor
doesn’t respond to emails, if he is Amy Welborn’s ex-husband, what would he
say if he spoke out someday? What would he say of Amy and Michael’s “family
that is making a unique contribution to the Church,” in Mark Shea’s words? What
did he feel about his ex-wife taking his kids out of town to be near her
boyfriend and reducing him to a “twice monthly check’? What are his feelings
toward the once Father Dubruiel? Would he say he was the cuckolding curate of
Gainesville? But there are all types of
scandals in the Catholic Church these days, although we only seem to be concerned
about priests buggering the altar boys. And that may be the biggest scandal
of all: the death of scandal among Catholics since the end of the Second
Vatican Council. And this is a problem that should haunt all of us Boomers as
there hasn’t been a priest ordained, a religious who professed final vows or
a couple who married in the past four decades in this country who didn’t know
in the back of their minds that when the going got tough they could get out
of their commitments with the paperwork supplied by the Church. So it is much
easier to throw stones at the hierarchy for mishandling the pedophile priest
crisis in Catholic parishes. But, then, not all the pedophiles in these
Church scandals were priests and not all of the people responsible for the
mishandling of these cases were ordained. A case at Holy Family Parish,
Gainesville, Florida will serve as an example. The story on p. 2B of The
Gainesville Sun for August 8, 1995 was titled “Three years later, parents
told of sex offender at church.” The story related to the fact the
parishioners at Holy Faith were told of the fact that one Kevin Williams,
then twenty-two and a University of Florida student had been arrested over
two years before for seven counts of lewd and lascivious assault against a
pubescent boy when he served as a church volunteer. The parents were just
then being told of the plea agreement about the contact that started in a
parish religious education class and the assault which took place on a
church-sponsored cruise. Mr. Williams was given probation and the parish and
the diocese appeared to be stonewalling the irate parents. Most interestingly
is the fact that the person who was the Director of Religious Education at
Holy Faith when Kevin Williams was used as a volunteer in the religious
education program was at that time starting a new life further south in the
state and so not mentioned in the Sun’s story. As Amy Welborn is part
of the conservative Catholic crusade against Church cover-ups of pedophile
scandals the obvious question is what did she do in her years as DRE in
Gainesville? Did she have oversight responsibility for Kevin Williams, who
was an older teen when the assaults took place at a parish sponsored event? Where
was Father Dubruiel at this time, what was his responsibility for youth
religious education in the parish? Were Father Mike and Amy too busy with
their Catholic Great Books discussion group to see what the young man was
doing with the younger kids? Were they too involved with each other to see
what was going on at Holy Faith? Is this why so many of the Church Fathers
said lust darkens your mind? So maybe we should start examining the
background of our crusaders against clerical hypocrisy and cover-ups and find
out if they have skeletons in their closets. Gainesville, Florida might be a
good place to start. And when Mark Shea comes into your parish to teach you
about the Catholic faith be sure and ask him which National Review writer
he’s currently ripping off. It might be interesting as one of the most famous
editorials in that magazine, dating from 1961, expresses the opinion of the
voice of American conservatism regarding Catholic social teaching. It was
titled Mater Si, Magister No. Thomas J. Herron is a frequent
contributor to Culture Wars. Share |
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