Dr. Taylor Marshall, a popular Catholic author and board member of Catholics for Trump, offered some advice for defending good priests against attacks from the Church hierarchy in a recent episode of his podcast.
“Fr. James Altman is a hero,” said Marshall, referring to a recent video produced by Alpha News in which Altman, pastor of St. James the Less in La Crosse, Wisconsin, states that “you cannot be Catholic and a Democrat.”
“It’s a phenomenal video. It’s done with true pastoral care. You can tell when the man speaks, he loves souls. He wants souls to go to heaven and he even says there is a hell and you can go there,” Marshall continued.
He said his concern is that Altman is “under attack by all these heretics on social media — heretic priests.”
“Fr. James Altman is not generic. He names names. He says James Martin. He says Archbishop Gregory. He’s for real,” said Marshall.
“How do we protect and defend these good priests? Let me tell you something that you may not know,” he continued. “I talk to priests every week, every day. Lots of priests watch this channel – hundreds, hundreds of priests. I talk to them, and you may not know this, but they get calls from their bishops all the time.”
“They get called into the bishop’s office,” he said. “Or they get phone calls from fellow priests saying, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know that I heard in the chancery they were talking about you. Something might be coming down the line against you.’”
“These are the phone calls and interactions that these good priests have every single week. Let me tell you something: that’s a grind. That grinds you down.”
Marshall said the laity needs to encourage these priests because “they get beat down and they give up.”
“They need to know that they have a huge, huge support among the laity,” he said. “Also, when it comes from the pressure above, from the chancery and the diocese, we lay people need to explicitly say: ‘Don’t you move father. Don’t you discipline him, suspend him, take him away, silence him.’
He also encouraged lay people to put the Church hierarchy on a “financial interdict.”
“You get zero dollars, zero pennies, nothing. You are under an interdict. If you touch these good, anointed men, and try to silence them and close their mouths, you will be under a financial interdict. If you go after them in canon law and try to suspend them, we will raise millions of dollars, we laymen, and we will defend this priest,” he said. “These bishops are sometimes so bold against these priests because they know that they don’t have any backup, or that they’re alone.”
Watch the full episode below:
