Peyton called Deshotel’s actions against him “very malicious”, adding that he has seen no indication the diocese ever sought to excommunicate any of the more than 40 priests and deacons whom it has included on the organization’s list of credibly accused child molesters. Among those on that roster is Gilbert Gauthe, who pleaded guilty to abusing numerous boys before being sent to prison in the mid-1980s in a case that is widely considered to be “patient zero” of the US Catholic church’s ongoing clerical molestation scandal.

“It’s totally unnecessary,” Peyton said of his excommunication, which was first reported by the Lafayette news outlet KADN. “And I’m afraid it will make abuse victims and their families afraid to come out.”

[…]

“[This] has deeply shaken my faith and trust in the institution to which I have dedicated a significant portion of my life,” Peyton said in his resignation email to Deshotel, which was shared with the Guardian. “This decision is not a rejection of my faith in God or my commitment to living a life guided by Christian principles. Instead, it reflects … a desire to distance myself from an institution that, currently, falls short of the values it professes.”

[…]

“That’s not Christ-like,” Peyton said. “That’s … a fancy way of the bishop … telling me to go to hell.”

Will they learn the right lesson? I doubt it.

One of the reasons that we have problems with the far-right is that they keep getting fucked over by institutions (just like the rest of us), but they fail to see the writing on the wall. They ascribe the reasons to Woke, Trans People, Diversity, Whateverthefuck. They rebel against society rather than rebelling against the system itself. The system stopped working for me. Something broke the system. Rather than, The system stopped working for me. The system is bad.