February 27, 2001
The vestigial aftereffects
of both Original Sin and our own actual sins incline us to
sin. The Catholic Church has long categorized seven sins as being
the deadly trees from which all other sins branch out in our lives.
Pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, gluttony, and covetousness are
the seven deadly sins. Although they are separate and distinct
from each other, it is nevertheless true that they intersect with
one another.
It is no exaggeration to state that the
capital or deadly sin of Pride is the queen of all sins, as it was the sin of Pride
that Adam and Eve committed in the Garden of Eden when they disobeyed God
by eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Ultimately,
each sin we commit is related to Pride in that we place ourselves and our
disordered desires above a love of God and the teaching He has deposited in
Holy Mother Church. “Pride goeth before a fall.” Indeed.
Sadly, it is frequently the case that the
rich and the powerful believe that they are exempt from God’s
immutable laws. Usually, although not always, the rich and powerful people
who believe that their money and fame exempt them from all moral truths have
come by their money and power deceitfully; at the very least, they have come by
it by participating in the cultural or commercial promotion of sin for their own
profit and empowerment.
To wit, most of those who have made a
great deal of money (and have thus acquired a good deal of fame) in the
entertainment industry during the past 30 years have actively participated in
undermining the objective moral truths that can be known with certainty by the
use of reason and that have been revealed definitively in the person of the
God-Man and taught in His Name and on His authority by Holy Mother Church.
Almost all aspects of contemporary music, TV, theater, motion pictures, books,
magazines, and other media outlets exist to promote the glorification of a
relativistic and atheistic view of the world. Indeed, much money is made by
those who promote direct attacks on the very tenets of the true Church,
enabling addle-brained fallen-away Catholics to have a forum to express their
contempt for the very means our Lord instituted to help them to get to Heaven.
Similarly, those who acquire political
power come to believe that they are exempt from God’s laws, as I wrote
in my column of February 13, “The Powerful Never Learn.” Many
of our own people use their political careers to promote the nonexistent
“right” of women to slaughter their unborn children. Others, such
as Joseph Mondello, the Republican Party boss of Nassau County, Long Island,
New York, actively recruit pro-aborts to run for office on their party’s
line as pro-lifers. That was a role that Sen. Alfonse D’Amato performed
quite boldly from 1990 until his self-inflicted defeat elevated Democratic Rep.
Charles Schumer to the Senate in 1998. However, Mondello and
D’Amato are still considered Catholics in good standing, perhaps largely
because they contribute generously to their local parishes. The same is true of
former Rep. Rick Lazio, who is a parishioner in good standing in his parish on
Long Island even though he, like New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
supports the destruction of our Lord mystically in the persons of unborn children
by means of abortion.
The phenomenon — becoming more
common — of Republican Catholic pro-aborts’ trying to cover their
sins with the blood money they contribute to the Church rests on the
long-standing receptivity given by one parish after another to Democratic
pro-aborts. Indeed, Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd’s blood-money
contribution to St. Joseph’s School in North Grovernorsdale, Conn., was
so important to Norwich, Conn., Bishop Daniel Hart in 1996 that the
parish’s temporary administrator, Father George Parker, was told he
was not in the running to be the parish’s permanent pastor after he
returned Dodd’s blood-money contribution. Blood money talks. It talks
loudly.
True, blood money has always talked in
the Church. Fallen men have made up the human element of the Mystical Body
of Christ in the Church Militant from her very beginning. Some have resisted
temptation and scaled the heights of great sanctity. Others, however, have
succumbed to the blandishments offered by the rich and the powerful. The
Church is divinely founded and maintained. She will last until the end of time.
The fact that she has survived for nearly two millennia despite the bad example
given by the weak men who have composed her human element is one of the
negative proofs for her indefectibility. Nothing that was merely of human
origin and composition could possibly have survived the repeated efforts of
those in prominent positions of ecclesiastical authority to scandalize the faithful
and aggrandize themselves. And, too, each of us plays a role in the undermining
of the Church. Each one of our sins wounds the Mystical Body of Christ and
inclines us to sin all the more. None of us is exempt from responsibility for the
state of the Church and thus of the world. That having been noted, however,
those men are directly responsible for their own actions who do give bad
example by succumbing to the blandishments of the rich and the powerful to
pervert the Faith or elicit what is in effect a Church blessing for moral evils.
It was not so very long ago that many
pastors looked the other way as their Mafioso parishioners became wealthy by
plying their evil trades. Mafia chieftains were given full requiem Masses when
they died. They were married with special honors. Many of their children were
baptized in private baptismal ceremonies. After all, some of the pastors
rationalized, they had no direct knowledge of how their parishioners made
their money. Pastors of souls thus accepted blood money from blood suckers and
merchants of eternal death who made money by profiting from the weakness of
others and by tempting people into lives of abject evil (especially through
prostitution and pornography and gambling). To his credit, the late Terence
Cardinal Cooke, Archbishop of New York from 1968 to 1983, put an end to
Masses of Christian Burial (as they are now called) for notorious public sinners
such as Mafia chieftains.
Unfortunately, many in the hierarchy are
still catering to those among the rich and the powerful who have come by their
money or power illicitly. Enter Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los
Angeles.
Cardinal Mahony has been very friendly
to the monied forces within the Democratic Party. As should be reasonably well
known by anyone familiar with my writing, I am a critic of the Republican Party,
pointing out over and over again that most of its so-called pro-life
officeholders are not pro-life at all. They are simply less pro-abortion than some
other politicians, and they have absolutely no intention of putting their political
careers on the line to try to defend the sanctity of all innocent human life
without exception. However, the Democratic Party is institutionally committed
to the promotion of the very thing that caused our Blessed Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ to suffer once in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy
Cross (and which wounds His Mystical Body today) — sin — as a
matter of public policy and established “constitutional rights.”
How can a person say he loves our Lord and yet promote the very thing that
caused Him to suffer His horrible death by Crucifixion on the wood of the Holy
Cross? It is one thing to sin and to express sorrow for it in the Sacrament of
Penance. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly, worse yet to promote
it under cover of law, which is what the Democratic Party does in its national
and state platforms.
Cardinal Mahony has not only looked
the other way at all of that. No, he has done far more. Cardinal Roger Mahony
has close friendships with powerful men in the Democratic Party, some of
whom felt close enough to him to importune him to write a letter in support of
the pardon application of a convicted drug dealer (whose father is a major
donor to the Democratic Party and to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles). How
interesting it is to note that a Prince of the Church does not care to recognize
that those who donate to the fully pro-abortion political party have the blood of
the innocent on their hands. To do their bidding in any way is to do the bidding
of the Devil himself. However, modernist cathedrals and modernist
catechetical conventions do not get funded with the contributions of the
ordinary schnooks in the pew alone. Those thirty pieces of silver must be
accepted if the destruction of reverence in worship and integrity of doctrine is to
be accomplished in the desired lavish style.
Cardinal Mahony expressed shock when
the full facts of the drug dealer’s pardon story became known. He was
particularly incensed that former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who
is still working for the now-beleaguered 43rd president, misled him about how
his letter in support of the pardon application would be used. Why the shock,
your Eminence? If you lie down with pro-abortion dogs and take their money,
you are going to wake up with the dirt left by their pro-abortion fleas.
Cardinal Mahony was the first bishop in
the United States to endorse President-elect Bill Clinton’s decision in
November of 1992 to seek to change the military’s long-standing policy
concerning practicing homosexuals and lesbians in the military. He had Clinton
speak from the pulpit at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral on Palm Sunday one
year. According to news reports, in 1996 his functionaries in the Los Angeles
archdiocesan chancery office were involved in helping illegal aliens register to
vote so that they could vote for the pro-abortion Catholic Loretta Sanchez
against the pro-life Robert K. Dornan. Mahony even went so far as to bestow
Papal honors on two purveyors of indecency and filth in the media —
Rupert Murdoch, a 33rd-degree Mason, and Roy Disney. Nothing like a little
blood money from those who have produced motion pictures and TV programs
glorifying sin, eh? And that is to say nothing of how Mahony has used the
money of ordinary Catholics to try to “de-Europeanize” the
liturgy, which has been the subject of many commentaries and analyses in the
past few years.
Cardinal Roger Mahony has no one but
himself to blame for the embarrassment he is suffering at present. He does not
care to learn the simple fact that those who support the promotion of sin under
cover of law are unfit to hold any office — and that they should be given no
quarter in the Church whatsoever. Many are the good and sincere people who
have come by their money honestly, people who want to use the treasure God
has bestowed upon them for the promotion of reverence in worship and
integrity of doctrine. How sad it is that those good people are mocked and
reviled as reactionaries while the supporters of the baby-killing political party
and soul-killing entertainment fare are honored as great supporters of the
“progressive” Church. Says a lot right there, doesn’t it?
Naturally, the fact that Bill and Hillary
Clinton, who promised to run the most ethical administration in history, sold
everything they could to the highest bidder should come as absolutely no
surprise. They are base, coarse, vile, vulgar, greedy, prideful human beings who
believe in all utter arrogance and righteousness that they can do whatever it is
they want whenever it is they want with complete and total impunity,
responding with indignation when forced to answer questions about their
corrupt practices. During the entire course of their lives they have done only
that which comes naturally to them. (It would be highly ironic if one of
Clinton’s own pro-abortion U.S. attorneys, Mary Jo White of the
Southern District of New York, turns out to be the one who forces the crooks
from Arkansas and Chappaqua to finally face a jury of their peers for the first
time in their lives.)
However, even though scandals are part
of the Church’s history and are sewn into the fabric of fallen man, it is
nevertheless true that each man is responsible for his own actions and that
those in positions of ecclesiastical authority have a special obligation to avoid
even the whiff of scandal and favoritism. Cardinal Mahony, who claims to be
an advocate of the poor and the downtrodden, certainly likes to hobnob with
the rich and the famous who help subsidize and perpetuate the culture of death
in this country, and export it around the world. Now he has no one to blame but
himself for his embarrassment at doing the bidding of blood-sucking pro-aborts;
and nothing to blame but his own desire to ingratiate himself to all of the wrong
people in high places for all of the wrong reasons.
In a consistory on February 21, Pope John
Paul II created 44 new cardinals. I hereby propose that a special un-consistory
be held to remove the cardinalate red hats of those bishops who have proven
themselves to be enemies of the Cross of Jesus Christ. The red blood that stains
the money in the hands of Roger Cardinal Mahony cries out to Heaven for the
removal of his red hat.
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