CATHOLIC MATTERS
Rev. Marcel Guarnizo:
Pro-Shutdown Never-Trumper
June 9, 2020
After eight years I'm revisiting the subject of Rev. Marcel Guarnizo. In 2012, after Fr. Guarnizo got national attention for refusing communion to a lesbian, I was more interested in the scanty curriculum vitae of this Moscow priest who popped up in DC. I asked a question that every priest who is living outside his own diocese should be able to answer satisfactorily: Why are you here, Father?
Catholics and chanceries have a right to know. Historically, troublemaking priests were not only transferred from parish to parish, they moved from diocese to diocese and even from country to country.
Laurence F.X. Brett, who was the writer/editor of a scripture study guide I worked on, was a priest of Hartford, CT, but mysteriously submitted his writing/editing from Baltimore and St. Maarten in the Caribbean. The management of the scripture study guide never wondered about this. It turned out that their writer/editor was a fugitive from justice and among the worst ephebophiles ever.
I return to Fr. Guarnizo because:
1. A busy web page
For a posting that should be a cobweb page by now, my 2012 piece about Fr. Guarnizo still receives a noticeable number of hits, even though Fr. Guarnizo has appeared little in the news since 2012. Back then I speculated that Guarnizo's associates at the Eastern-Europe-focused organizations he's involved with, would want him to keep a low profile. He has.
Since the yet-to-be-concluded story about Bugger Theodore McCarrick broke in June, 2018, Fr. Guarnizo has gotten a bushier mane in his lionization from Church Militant (1) which portrays him as being punished by the "gay-friendly" Archdiocese of Washington for denying the lesbian communion. Church-Militant omits the facts that Guarnizo is not a priest of the Washington archdiocese, that he was acting without the chancery's knowledge and that in ADW, the bishop decides who gets communion or not.
Gay-friendly diocese or no, these are reasonable rules. How would Guarnizo fans like it if James Martin showed up in Bishop Thomas Paprocki's Springfield, IL, presided at Masses without Paprocki's knowledge or permission and gave the Precious Body to pro-abort politicians?
2. Pro-shutdown never-Trumper
In checking up on Fr. Guarnizo's web tracks, which consist of few-and-far-between pawprints, I discovered that in 2016, Fr. was among those who considered Donald Trump unfit for public office. In a March 31, 2016 piece (2) on townhall.com, Guarnizo argued that Trump has a narcissistic personality disorder and hoped that "The Electoral College and its delegates...would not be doing a disfavor to democracy by electing someone other than Trump."
Granted, no one would have predicted that Donald Trump would be the most pro-life president ever, but in 2016 no pro-life Republican would even imagine that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would personally address the March For Life.
How would Guarnizo fans like it if James Martin showed up in Bishop Thomas Paprocki's Springfield, IL, diocese, presided at Masses without Paprocki's knowledge or permission and gave the Precious Body to
pro-abort politicians?
The following also makes me wonder if Fr. Guarnizo wants to prevent not just unrepentent lesbians from receiving the Holy Eucharist but most Catholics as well.
In an April 27, 2020 Media Research Center's CNSNews commentary (3), Guarnizo doesn't show eagerness to restore the widespread receipt of communion. He splits hairs taking Bishop Peter Baldacchino of Las Cruces New Mexico to task for accusing New Mexico's governor of limiting religious freedom. The NM chief exec is not limiting the freedom of religion, Guarnizo corrects, but the freedom of association.
Further, the level of religious worship that Bishop Baldacchino wants, receipt of the Eucharist, can still be legitimately considered by the state to be non-essential under ordinary political understandings of what is essential and non-essential in emergencies. From a theological standpoint, the Holy Eucharist cannot be considered comparable to anything in this world on the scale of essential/non-essential.
And here we Catholics -- well, some of us, anyway -- have been taught that receiving the Body of Christ is essential. It's real food, necessary for our spiritual journey. The Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith or, as I will tell you in another essay, the most important thing that happens on earth.
Did MRC's Brent Bozell bother parsing Guarnizo's piece before publishing it or did he just pass something from a guy he knows from Arlington County, Virginia Catholic circles?
Fine distinctions aside, our bishops should be catapulting everything they can, kitchen sinks, dead cats, the severed heads of hostages at the several states and their local tyrants to get us back to Eucharistically feasting like it's February 2020. The bishops should have gone to court the first day the first governor announced the first shutdown.
Does it not occur to Fr. Guarnizo, with his Eastern European connections, that leftist tyrants may wear a guise of legitimacy in their war on religious faith? Communists in 1960s Poland used to shut down Catholic school buildings by declaring them unsafe or unhygenic.
I have no animus against Fr. Guarnizo, at least no more than I do against the Opus Dei and Legionary/Regnum Christi web-spinners who knit their sticky threads in the DC and Arlington dioceses. Someone of them has hurt me once with meddling; none of them can hurt me twice.
Endnotes
(1) Church Militant's pieces mentioning Guarnizo are:
Christine Niles, Deserting Christ, churchmilitant.com, Oct. 29, 2019.
Bill Donahue: I Knew About McCarrick,, churchmilitant.com, Aug. 7, 2018.
(2) Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, "Trump is Simply Not Well," townhall.com, March 31, 2016.
(3) Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, "Mass Gathering Limit, 'Non-Essential' Designation Are Not Assaults on Religion," Media Reasearch Center, CNSNews, April 27, 2020.
For Further Reading
I Didn't Know About McCarrick -- Why It's Plausible
Manhating Catholic Style
About Neal J. Conway
