What’s Going On in the Catholic Church?

FRONT ROYAL, VA — 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”).

Cardinal Dolan’s predecessor prelates resonated this calumny in their 1979 Pastoral Letter on Racism, Brothers and Sisters to Us. There they proclaim that only Caucasians can be guilty of the “subtle” sin of “racism that permeates our society’s structures and resides in the hearts of many among the majority” [emphasis added].

This sin is so subtle, in fact, that it is “anonymous” – “each of us” is guilty, but most of us don’t even know that we’re sinning!

Of course, this contrived notion defies the Church’s teaching, clearly explained in the Catholic Catechism, that a mortal sin must be “committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent” (CCC No. 1857).

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. In coming weeks we’ll take a closer look.

In the meantime, we should all pray for our bishops. To paraphrase LBJ, they’re the only ones we’ve got.

The original post can be found at this link.

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