Journalist George Neumayr asks the question of the morning: “Why is Obama’s Secret Service head working for Cardinal Wuerl?”

Recall that Cardinal Wuerl was the former Archbishop of Pittsburgh named in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report for failing to adequately stop his priests from homosexual molestation. Neumayr notes:

“Wuerl met with the pope on Thursday [August 30] and Francis wants him to determine his future by consulting with his priests,” a source close to the chancery informed me earlier this month. I broke that story on Twitter, then waited for the scandal-besieged Wuerl, who has emerged as the Cardinal Law of 2018, to return from Rome. I had heard that he was planning to meet with his priests on Labor Day at Little Flower parish in Bethesda, Maryland for a 5 P.M. meeting, with a cookout to follow.

Cardinal Wuerl in 2015 (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

With his career fate in the hands of his priests, the now-Cardinal Wuerl of the Washington, DC archdiocese apparently wants to make sure they are not reached by outsiders like Neumayr, who has been attempting to monitor Wuerl’s movements, lest he flee US jurisdiction, where he may face criminal liability. Neumayr continues:

For Wuerl, this priestly confab was an exceedingly important event and he wasn’t about to let a gadfly journalist like me spoil it. As I saw Wuerl’s aides and what looked like to me some sort of crisis management team (serious-looking gentlemen, crisply but casually dressed) congregate in Little Flower’s parking lot, I walked toward them. They glanced at me nervously. One man finally walked toward me and said that the event was “closed” to the public. I said that I was a Catholic who wanted to pray in the church and that I had a canonical right to do so. He told me that he would need to “check” on the matter and we exchanged our names. His name: “Mark Sullivan,” he said. Do you, I asked him, work for the archdiocese of Washington, D.C.? He passed himself off merely as a Little Flower parishioner.

He returned momentarily, reiterating that the church was “closed” and that I needed to leave church property. His manner was polite and smooth and he looked a bit crestfallen when I told him that I found his answer unsatisfactory. Within minutes of our chat, six Maryland police cars arrived. The cops who arrived were friendly enough and permitted me to stand on grass belonging to an adjoining school not far from the parking lot.

Mark Sullivan turned out to be someone Neumayr recognized, after a moment:

Who, I wondered as I killed time until the priests arrived, was this “Mark Sullivan”? He looked awfully familiar. Fortunately, I had sent out a Tweet about our chat moments after it, which jogged my memory later and led one of my astute sources to say excitedly, “Is that the Mark Sullivan who was Obama’s disgraced Secret Service head?” My source had heard that he attended Little Flower parish.

I googled Obama’s Mark Sullivan and compared him to the man with whom I spoke. Yep, they were one and the same. I nearly dropped my phone as a chill went up my spine and the dawning realization hit: Obama’s Secret Service honcho had become Cardinal Wuerl’s.

What made the discovery even more alarming was the subsequent harassment I received from security goons clearly working for Cardinal Wuerl, with whom I have had multiple encounters in August and September. Are all these goons working for Sullivan and the private security firm GSIS, of which he is a principal and co-founder? It looks like a real possibility.

Sullivan was cashiered as head of the Secret Service following a scandal that revealed Secret Service agents had engaged prostitutes in Colombia at the 6^th Summit of the Americas, bringing them into hotel rooms that had classified documents relating to the itinerary of the president.  Prior to that scandal, he had taken heat but somehow was not fired after using his Secret Service agents to guard a personal friend.

The nexus of a cardinal disgraced over a sex scandal and a former Secret Service head, also disgraced over a sex scandal may be a harmonic convergence of some sort, or it may be merely a commercial transaction. Neumayr recounts some other disturbing aspects of his visit to the gathering. It is well worth a read. My impression is that tectonic plates are moving within the Roman Catholic Church, which is, after all, the oldest organization in the world, and also, by most metrics, the largest.