{"id":4594,"date":"2015-08-02T04:48:21","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T08:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=4594"},"modified":"2015-08-02T07:12:05","modified_gmt":"2015-08-02T11:12:05","slug":"cardinal-dolan-runs-for-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=4594","title":{"rendered":"Cardinal Dolan Runs for President"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

What’s so funny?<\/p><\/div>\n

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

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, \u201corganized, white, Protestant antagonism toward the Catholic immigrant.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve seen the cardinal chuckle and blab.\u00a0 He doesn’t strike me as the type of man to have had happy days decades ago.\u00a0 Cardinal Dolan is a climber.\u00a0 He couldn’t have been too satisfied teaching history.\u00a0 Apparently he was also one of those who presented history mainly in terms of groups and grievances.<\/p>\n

It flourished in our country during the 1840s and 1850s \u2014 actually becoming a popular political party, the Know-Nothings \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From what I understand the KKK was a murderous group which terrorized black people.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Dolan doesn’t have to endure the effects of illegal immigration like the rest of his poor flock.\u00a0 He just has to keep those federal Catholic Charities funds rolling.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They were Protestants and wary of Catholics.\u00a0 They weren’t Nazi’s trying to preserve a master race.\u00a0 It was a culture shock.\u00a0 Catholics brought poverty, gangs, Mafia and other bad things they’d never had to endure.\u00a0 Most disastrously Catholics have always voted poorly, ushering in city bosses, high taxes, redistribution, and other unconstitutional government.\u00a0 It wasn’t a purity thing, but it’s not like it wasn’t messy.\u00a0 It’s not that Catholics didn’t fear God but they were certainly less ‘American.’<\/p>\n

There’s nothing upright about leftist politics.\u00a0 Even today, unfortunately, Catholics don’t vote like Baptists and their bishops don’t really want them to.<\/p>\n

(Among other American minorities, it must be said, Catholics like me often drew the ire of nativists.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Liberals are always finding ‘virulent strains’ out there which must be eradicated from our minds.\u00a0 Who’s calling people dirty now?<\/p>\n

This point my students would not buy. \u201cFather Dolan,\u201d they would say, \u201cthere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wish I were in the college classroom again, so I could roll out my \u201cTrump card\u201d to show the students that I was right. Nativism is alive, well \u2014 and apparently popular!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh that’s funny, my ‘Trump card.’\u00a0 Yes, those must have been happy days back when Father Dolan was teaching.\u00a0 He’s just so jolly!<\/p>\n

“Who could ever believe now that immigrants are dirty, drunken, irresponsible, dangerous threats to clean, white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Does Cardinal Dolan hate white people and Protestants?\u00a0 It sure sounds like it.\u00a0 Donald Trump was not saying that all immigrants are dirty, drunk, and dangerous.\u00a0 He was saying that too many of them are, so therefore the border should be ‘legally’ controlled.\u00a0 People understand this but Dolan shamefully abuses his vital Christian role to ‘correct’ them about it.<\/p>\n

From here the Cardinal repeats himself, explaining how we don’t value any immigrants at all, ever, because they’re people, I guess.\u00a0 He even uses the word ‘enlightened.’\u00a0 Whenever you hear that, think darkness.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What a pile from the chancery!\u00a0 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?\u00a0 When will the Lord give us Catholics for bishops instead of these dishonest elitist FrancisChurch shills?<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[605,601,602,603,606,604],"class_list":["post-4594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-candidate","tag-cardinal-dolan","tag-donald-trump","tag-illegal-immigration","tag-nativism","tag-president"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4594"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4626,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4594\/revisions\/4626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}