Griffin Internet logo
Griffin Internet Syndicate

Blood Money Talks
by Thomas A. Droleskey
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.


This column is distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate.
Copyright © 2001. All rights reserved.

To subscribe to columns by Thomas Drolesky, write
Griffin Internet Syndicate
or go to the Subscription page.