In a weekly message titled “The Lady (Doth) Protest Too Much, Me Thinks,” Father Theodore Rothrock of St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church said the church must oppose the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as Antifa, groups he referred to as “serpents in the garden.” He encouraged parishioners to carry the “message of peace.”
“The only lives that matter are their own, and the only power they seek is their own,” Rothrock wrote. “They are wolves in wolves clothing, masked thieves and bandits, seeking only to devour the life of the poor and profit from the fear of others. They are maggots and parasites at best, feeding off the isolation of addiction and broken families, and offering to replace and current frustration and anxiety with more misery and greater resentment.”
Rothrock went onto question whether civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglasss would have marched in the streets or “see value in the obliteration of our history to rewrite a future without the experience and struggles of the past.”
He also criticized the destruction of monuments and statues across the country. He called the mass protests that have followed the death of George Floyd more destructive than the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than half a million people worldwide.
“Their poison is more toxic than any pandemic we have endured,” he wrote.
Newsweek reached out to the St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church for comment but did not hear back before publication.
A newly formed group called Carmel Against Racial Injustice, which is dedicated to raising awareness of injustice in the surrounding areas, has called on the bishop of the Diocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana to remove Rothrock from church leadership.
In a statement made to its Facebook page on Monday, the group said it is “deeply saddened by the fact that the church leadership did not condemn the statement and saw fit to allow its publication.”
The group also reposted Rothrock’s message, which has since been taken down, and called on parishioners, members of the community and other religious leaders to denounce Rothrock’s position.
Carmel Against Racial Injustice plans to peacefully protest from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. outside the church this Sunday calling for Bishop Timothy Doherty to remove Rothrock.
“Silence is the action of being complicit in injustice,” the group wrote.
Doherty has publicly criticized Rothrock’s comments and stated that they do not align with his own stance on the protests which are a “way to elevate voices for fairness and justice.”
Doherty noted that pastors do not submit messages to him for approval, but he expects Rothrock to address the problem in his Sunday message nonetheless.
“I expect Father Rothrock to issue a clarification about his intended message. I have not known him to depart from Church teaching in matters of doctrine and social justice,” Doherty said in a statement on Tuesday.
