The World Isn’t Killing the Church. The Bishops Are.

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Not racist

Not racist

Christopher Manion has had quite enough of Catholic leaders using Holy Mother Church and her faithful for their nefarious political schemes.  Not only do they pretend their agenda is noble rather than lawless and evil.  They smear the true and obedient members of the Church as murderous bigots!  Why on Earth must we pretend that these robed men are our Apostles?  They’re nothing like Christians.

Millions of Americans, including many Catholics, were stunned when Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Catholic Archbishop of New York, attacked opponents of illegal immigration as “nativists” in a recent and widely-circulated column in a liberal New York tabloid.

Unfortunately, Cardinal Dolan’s outburst represents a long line of liberalism on the part of America’s bishops — a position based not only on their “Social Justice” leftism, but because the welfare state which they celebrate doles out over a billion dollars a year to their Non-Government Organizations (Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Migration and Refugee Services, and so on).

And Cardinal Dolan is not alone. In fact, he is merely echoing his colleague in Los Angeles, Archbishop José Gomez. Gomez routinely attacks opponents of amnesty for illegal immigrants, accusing them with a string of strong epithets. In turn, he is merely echoing his fellow bishops in his native Mexico, who frequently rise to condemn “the arrogant, xenophobic, and racist attitude of the United States” (to which Abp. Gomez adds “bigotry”).

Is it ‘racist’ for Ireland to prefer mainly to be comprised of Irishmen, for Italy to prefer Italians, Germany Germans and Japan Japanese?  How about some deference toward Christian backgrounds?  Is that immoral?  What about Muslims?  How about criminals?

Must we choose between being fools and the enemies of our Bishops?

Nonetheless, the notion that all Caucasian Americans are guilty until proven innocent goes far to explain Cardinal Dolan’s unctuous condescension as he recalls his days as a teacher.

Any college student, he implies, knows that to oppose amnesty for illegal aliens (a term he refuses to acknowledge, by the way), or to demand that they follow the law (including the Ten Commandments) is nativist, backward — and anti-Catholic.

This unwarranted assertion cannot go unchallenged, since it is both unjust and counter-factual. Counter-factual because many Catholics are among the millions of Americans who oppose Obama’s program to import as many Third-World immigrants, legal and illegal, into the United States as possible.

Moreover, many of those same immigrants are not Catholic.

It is unjust because the Cardinal implies that anyone who disagrees with him is nativist — as though support of amnesty for illegal aliens were a requirement of Catholic Faith and Morals. This grievously overstates the matter.

What is required by Catholic Faith and Morals goes unmentioned: the doctrine on contraception and other sexual sins contained in Humanae Vitae.

Yet, in 2013 Cardinal Dolan bragged on national television that he has “only rarely, in my 37 years as a priest” taught the truths of that genuinely Magisterial document.

What is it that induces our bishops to ignore the Church’s timeless teachings, and instead browbeat us with their political preferences disguised as moral imperatives?

Well, as my father used to tell his Notre Dame Law students for thirty years, “if you take the first bribe, you may as well take the rest.”

So permit me ask a parallel classroom question to those that Professor Dolan shared with his college students years ago.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB for short) and its subsidiaries, as well as individual Catholic dioceses, receive over a billion dollars a year from the U.S. taxpayer.

Now, consider: Cardinal Dolan has exuberantly announced, on national television, that America’s bishops want to be Obama’s “cheerleaders.”

Can it be that our beloved bishops have — unconsciously, of course, just like the Cardinal’s target audience of “nativist” lay Catholics — could it be that our bishops have been bribed into silence by that billion dollars a year?

And could it be that our beloved bishops – who have watched more than thirty million of the faithful become “former Catholics” — could these prelates actually support amnesty because they want to keep the pews filled while they please their government paymasters?

These are merely questions, of course, not unjust accusations.

It seems today that the Catholic Church has no bishops, no shepherds.  That is the only reason that the flock is scattered and lost.  A bishop is not a bishop if he shows contempt for his faithful flock, as Cardinal Dolan certainly has, and teaches an anti-doctrine in place of the truth.

We are not Aaron’s Israelites dancing around the golden calf and the Cardinal isn’t Moses with the tablets.  We are humbly following God into the desert while this jolly prelate fires arrows with Pharaoh’s army.  Sorry to be noninclusive but he’s just not one of us.

 

 

 

Cardinal Dolan Runs for President

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What’s so funny?

Timothy Dolan, Cardinal of New York, has taken to the Washington Post to assassinate the character of the leading Republican presidential candidate just because he holds a position with which most of the country agrees.

During those happy days decades ago when I taught American religious history to university students, I spent a chunk of time in class on the ugly phenomenon called nativism, defined by the scholar and author Ray Allen Billington as, “organized, white, Protestant antagonism toward the Catholic immigrant.”

I’ve seen the cardinal chuckle and blab.  He doesn’t strike me as the type of man to have had happy days decades ago.  Cardinal Dolan is a climber.  He couldn’t have been too satisfied teaching history.  Apparently he was also one of those who presented history mainly in terms of groups and grievances.

It flourished in our country during the 1840s and 1850s — actually becoming a popular political party, the Know-Nothings — and appeared again, in the 1870s, as the American Protective Association; in the 1920s, as the KKK; and during post-World War II America, as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

From what I understand the KKK was a murderous group which terrorized black people.  Not two paragraphs in and a Catholic bishop has condemned an entire country as killers. I detect some disparity between the cardinal and the everyman.  Dolan doesn’t have to endure the effects of illegal immigration like the rest of his poor flock.  He just has to keep those federal Catholic Charities funds rolling.

These nativists believed the immigrant to be dangerous, and that America was better off without them. All these poor degenerates did, according to the nativists, was to dilute the clean, virtuous, upright citizenry of God-fearing true Americans.

They were Protestants and wary of Catholics.  They weren’t Nazi’s trying to preserve a master race.  It was a culture shock.  Catholics brought poverty, gangs, Mafia and other bad things they’d never had to endure.  Most disastrously Catholics have always voted poorly, ushering in city bosses, high taxes, redistribution, and other unconstitutional government.  It wasn’t a purity thing, but it’s not like it wasn’t messy.  It’s not that Catholics didn’t fear God but they were certainly less ‘American.’

There’s nothing upright about leftist politics.  Even today, unfortunately, Catholics don’t vote like Baptists and their bishops don’t really want them to.

(Among other American minorities, it must be said, Catholics like me often drew the ire of nativists.)

I made the point to my students that nativism never really did disappear completely, but was a continual virulent strain in the American psyche, which would probably sadly show up again.

Liberals are always finding ‘virulent strains’ out there which must be eradicated from our minds.  Who’s calling people dirty now?

This point my students would not buy. “Father Dolan,” they would say, “there’s no denying that this bigotry was there in our past. But, come on! Who could ever believe now that immigrants are dirty, drunken, irresponsible, dangerous threats to clean, white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America! Those days are gone.”

I wish I were in the college classroom again, so I could roll out my “Trump card” to show the students that I was right. Nativism is alive, well — and apparently popular!

Oh that’s funny, my ‘Trump card.’  Yes, those must have been happy days back when Father Dolan was teaching.  He’s just so jolly!

“Who could ever believe now that immigrants are dirty, drunken, irresponsible, dangerous threats to clean, white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America!”

Does Cardinal Dolan hate white people and Protestants?  It sure sounds like it.  Donald Trump was not saying that all immigrants are dirty, drunk, and dangerous.  He was saying that too many of them are, so therefore the border should be ‘legally’ controlled.  People understand this but Dolan shamefully abuses his vital Christian role to ‘correct’ them about it.

From here the Cardinal repeats himself, explaining how we don’t value any immigrants at all, ever, because they’re people, I guess.  He even uses the word ‘enlightened.’  Whenever you hear that, think darkness.

I am not in the business of telling people what candidates they should support or who deserves their vote. But as a Catholic, I take seriously the Bible’s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament.

What a pile from the chancery!  Is it possible that back in those bad old days a few prescient souls imagined uncontrolled immigration might leave us with an America full of religious leaders like this?  When will the Lord give us Catholics for bishops instead of these dishonest elitist FrancisChurch shills?