And my mother-in-law wonders why we don’t go to church anymore

I wish I believed in hell so I could tell Timothy Dolan where to go.

[The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States’] opposition to same-sex marriage took a significant and startling turn on September 20th with the issuance of a letter from New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to President Obama in which Dolan urges the President to end his administration's "campaign against DOMA, the institution of marriage it protects, and religious freedom."

In the course of the letter, Dolan emphasizes that he is not alone in his disappointment with the President. He writes, "The content of this letter reflects the strong sentiment expressed at a recent meeting by more than thirty of my brother Bishops who serve on the Administrative Committee of our episcopal conference. I know they are joined by hundreds of additional Catholic bishops throughout our nation." His implication is that if the President does not reverse his stance regarding DOMA, he can expect the bishops to campaign against him when he is up for re-election. There are 430 bishops who lead 195 dioceses, or districts, in the US.

So the bishops will campaign against Obama, will they?  To elect which Republican as President then?

The one who had his record of remorseless executions cheered at the debates?  The Church is against the death penalty, supposedly.

That would be Rick “The Executioner” Perry, whose front-runner status has gone wobbly in the knees after several stumbles, not the least of them being that his stand on immigration is not as heartless as the Right Wing base of the Republican Party requires its heroes’ to be.

The Church’s stand on immigration is supposedly that the nation needs to be more open, welcoming, tolerant, and inclusive.

Tom Tancredo, one of the Republican Party’s most aggressive know-nothings wrote his own letter to his fellow Republicans appealing to their inner yahoo:

Dear Friend,

I need your help getting the word out on Rick Perry. Right now Perry is the Republican frontrunner for president– we can’t let him win! When it comes to immigration the man is George W. Bush’s clone! If Perry gets to the White House we’ll be back to fighting massive blanket amnesty for illegal aliens. You can count on it!

Tancredo used to be a Catholic but he left the Church and turned against it because he was seeing too many brown-skinned people who didn’t speak English in the pews around him.

Tancredo’s a racist and the Church holds that racism is a sin, but Dolan’s not writing any letters to Republicans running for President warning them not to listen to racist demagogues like Tancredo that I’ve heard about.

Poverty in the United States is on the rise and the Church has strong views on what governments are supposed to do about helping the poor which boil down to help them.  But it’s the Republicans who are demonizing the poor and working from all directions to cut off all government aid.  The plan is to increase the number of poor people, particularly old poor people, old poor sick people by ending Medicare and Social Security, but along with them are already being added many children who are getting kicked off state Medicaid rolls.  If the Church is really looking for something to threaten President Obama and the Democrats over it should be that they’re not doing enough to oppose this.

For that matter, if the Church is looking for reasons to criticize the President, two words: predator drones.  And, although he’s winding it down, he’s still waging a war in Iraq that both Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Ratzinger publically, unequivocally, and continually opposed.

I don’t know where to begin to get into the Church’s stand against the kind of corporatist capitalist Randian economic utopianism all good Republicans champion these days---“Selfishess is the greatest virtue!” isn’t the lesson of any of Jesus’ parables the nuns taught us in grade school.  Ayn Rand despised religion generally, Christianity in particular, and she didn’t spare Catholicism her contempt.  Her chief disciple in Congress is Paul Ryan, who is Catholic!  Has he received any letters from his bishop?

While we’re on it, the Church is pro-labor and pro-Union.

Have Scott Walker and John Kasich and any of the other union-busting Republican governors heard from Dolan?

New Jersey Governor and National Press Corps darling Chris Christie has pretty much taken himself out of the running for the Republican nomination by making it clear he doesn’t feel like cravenly tying himself up into political knots like Mitt Romney, repudiating the good things he’s managed to do, renouncing beliefs he’s held all his life, and swearing he’ll support nonsense and insanity in all GOP-approved forms to get the nod.  Statements like this won’t help him with the Right Wing base:

I’ve always believed that people are born with the previous disposition to be homosexual…So I think if someone is born that way it’s very difficult to say that it’s a sin…I believe we can have civil unions that can help to give the same type of legal rights to same-sex couples that marriage gives them.

Chris Christie is Catholic, so Dolan has more grounds for expecting him to care what the bishops think, and so I expect that if Christie does lose his mind and decide to get into the race, Dolan will write him a letter, one adding that “Besides your needing to toe the Church line on homosexuality, you must also repudiate your own party’s platform on the issues of torture, immigration, poverty, and the death penalty.”

I won’t hold my breath.

Of course, this isn’t about anything but the American bishops’ hatred of sex of any kind that isn’t intended to get women pregnant and their desperate need to scapegoat homosexuals for the crimes of the child molesters the Church hid and protected for decades.

I’m writing my own letter.

Dear Archbishop Dolan,

May I respectfully remind you you’re the archbishop of New York, one of the most Catholic states in the nation.  You can’t throw a cruet in any direction without hitting a Catholic, and what can gay people do in New York that they can do in only a few other states?

Lot of clout you got there, bish.

Comments

[actor212]

Time to tax the church.

[moe99]

I wish I could send this to my 87 year old Catholic mother and my sister who does annual pilgrimages to Medjugorje in Yugoslavia (the BVM was sighted there a number of years ago). But for them, the only issue is abortion. Everything else fades in comparison.

[KC45s]

As moe99 says. The Church, as we all know, has opinions on every topic under the sun. But it seems to act only on those related to sex. You'd think the men in charge had sex on their minds all the time. But why would they? Hmm...

[KLG]

Excellent, Lance. Thank you.

@KC45s: Methinks they get it on their hands a lot, too.

[Jan Rogozinski]

You are absolutely correct that a well=thought=out RC "Social Doctrine" was created between 1890 (Rerum Novarum) and the 1960s.

Note also that Jesus frequently condemned the rich using very strong language. (Where do they get "Jesus meek and mild." I guess they've never read the Gospels.)

But he never said one word about homosexuality. As to straight sex, his attitude seemed to be that it's best in marriage, but that sexual promiscuity, although a sin, is a trivial and very mior sin compared to the sin of voting Republican or Teabagger. As proof, I reference the Samaritan woman at the well. Also the woman taken in adultery. Notice he did not "forgive" her, he sent her away, saying "stop that!" But he also abolished the Jewish scriptures on adultery. Similarly, he abolished the Jewish scriptures on divorce, which he absolutely forbade.

The best one can say about Dolan and the other RC bishops is that they are "cafeteria Catholics." They pick and choose, and leave 95% of traditional Church doctrine behind. I have zero respect for them.

[Diane]

Try being a woman in the Catholic church. No say in anything, but expected to toe the line.
I have been a Catholic for 55 years. I was also a Commissioned Lay Minister. That's as far as I could go as a married woman. Not because I wasn't smart, devoted or religious enough, it is just because I was a woman.

The church is so hung up on abortion and homosexuality. It appears that there are no other issue that they will deal with. I can no longer tolerate or support this institution. It is wrong on so many levels and the sex abuse scandal was the last straw for me.

[Molly, NYC]

Diane: Interesting thing about women in the Church.

You know that "visitation" the Vatican foisted on American nuns a few years back?

As you surely must have guessed, it's not because American nuns are particularly rowdy.

Turns out that over the last few decades, while priests were saying mass and freaking out about sex and trying to see how prissy and ivory-tower they could be, nuns were running schools, hospitals, nursing homes, etc.

As a result, while the dioceses are mostly broke, some women's orders now own schools, hospitals, nursing homes, etc.--often with hefty endowment funds and other assets. In fact, non-diocese sisters are pretty much the only branch of the Church who do have a few bucks.

(Which is why, if you really need help and you go to Catholic Charities, what you'll get is advice on your sex life--Catholic Charities is run by the local dioceses and talk is free. Whereas the Sisters of Providence--who run some of the best hospitals anywhere--might be able to hook you up with, say, an oncologist.)

The "visitation" is basically the ecclesiastical equivalent of a thief casing a property he wants to ransack.

(I almost wish they'd try--the nuns would kick their saggy asses so hard they'd be tasting shoe leather.)