Here Comes Nobody - Maureen Dowd

[cbayer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/dowd-here-comes-nobody.html


By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 19, 2012 189 Comments


WASHINGTON


I ALWAYS liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing.

I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ”

So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.

It was tough to top the bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Law, the former head of the Boston archdiocese, fled to a plush refuge in Rome in 2002 after it came out that he protected priests who molested thousands of children.

more at link

[patrice]

1. And where is the dogma on these issues that these male autocrats are supposed to be

standing on?

And WHY have they been missing in the struggle on so many other issues, such as war?

[MADem]

2. In Boston, Law is known as Cardinal "Above The" Law.

He is probably responsible for a good chunk of the exodus from the "universal" church in New England.

I'd love to read the article but I have a shitty connection and it keeps hanging. I will try again later.

[cbayer]

3. I sometimes have trouble loading NYT as well, particularly on high demand days like Sundays.

Worth the read though, when you get a chance.

Speaking of Law, there is evidence that he is behind the recent attacks on american nuns - settling an old score, it is rumored.

[MADem]

13. I'm out of the country, and the net service is sketchy.

Having a good day today; I'll give it another go!

My favorite four of that article are these:

But the craziness continued when an American priest, renowned for his TV commentary from Rome on popes and personal morality, admitted last week that he had fathered a child with a mistress.

The Rev. Thomas Williams belongs to the Legionaires of Christ, the order founded by the notorious Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, a pal of Pope John Paul II who died peppered with accusations that he sexually abused seminarians and fathered several children and abused some of them.

The latest kooky kerfuffle was sparked by the invitation to Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, to speak at a graduation ceremony at Georgetown University on Friday. The silver-haired former Kansas governor is a practicing Catholic with a husband and son who graduated from Georgetown. But because she fought to get a federal mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptives and morning-after pills, including at Catholic schools and hospitals, Sebelius is on the hit list of a conservative Catholic group in Virginia, the Cardinal Newman Society, which militates to bar speakers at Catholic schools who support gay rights or abortion rights.

The Society for Truth and Justice, a fringe Christian anti-abortion group, compared Sebelius to Himmler, and protesters showed up on campus to yell at her for being, as one screamed, “a murderer.”sa

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/dowd-here-comes-nobody.html?_r=1

Incredible!!! I remember that a bishop in Ireland did that mistress and kid thing as well about fifteen or twenty years back...and around that time, I lived in a town in Italy where the parish priest's housekeeper's son was the very spit image of the parish priest himself!

Those guys need to join the real world, or risk complete self-destruction. I think a few smart-ass ex-priests should form an "American Catholic Church" that has most of the bells and whistles, doesn't regard Rome as infallible, permits women to be priests, allows priests to marry whosoever they might want, and does what Jesus did on the topic of homosexuality (he didn't have a THING to say on the subject, so apparently it didn't trouble him). They could buy up a bunch of these churches that the Church outta Rome is selling off at fire-sale prices owing to having to pay off all those molestation charges, they could even buy up a closed seminary or convent or three, and start up their own version of "The Faith." I'll bet they'd have people beating down the doors to get in --- there are a lot of people who like the rituals and the sacraments and the liturgical flavor, they just don't like the angry, red-faced men telling women to spit out those kids no matter what, to put up with shit, to Be Second Class and LIKE It. An empowered, social-justice centered, equality - focused "American Catholic" (as opposed to "Roman Catholic&quot church would sell like hotcakes in this country, I think...! And I'd not be surprised if Rome came crawling, looking for ecumenical association and a few buck-a-roos, heretical POVs notwithstanding, before very long!

[DonCoquixote]

4. Crap like what Dowd speaks of

Is what turned me from a would be Jesuit priest to an Agnostic. Sadly, the church will really need to bleed gold before she thinks of reform.

[cbayer]

6. Then again, I have found the Jesuits to be the most challenging of authority among the catholic

orders.

One of my favorite books is "The Sparrow". If you haven't read it, it's about the first manned mission to another inhabited planet. The mission is led by Jesuits.

Anyway, that's off-topic, but I thought you might be interested.

[pinto]

8. And a reputation for intellectual challenge in education.

The common line - When your ask a Jesuit prof a question, his answer is a question.

[cbayer]

9. Exactly. I never knew many well until I moved to New Orleans.

The men who had been educated by the Jesuits were some of the best men I have ever had the pleasure to know.

[rug]

5. Here are excerpts from Cuomo's speech.

[pinto]

7. Good read. I've always liked Dowd's style of writing, its clarity.

[daaron]

10. As always Dowd is spot on. She's my fav for a reason.

Nothing to add, but plenty to take away.

[Goblinmonger]

11. Where has she been all her life.

So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.

This is nothing new in the Catholic Church.

And I think her quoting Joyce as a supporter of her position on church is a little bizarre, to say the least.

[laconicsax]

12. +1

[rexcat]

14. ditto...

well stated!

[AlbertCat]

15. +3

Nothing new is right!

The only thing really new is the expectation of religious institutions to get an obvious seat at the political table... out in the open. That mixing religion directly with governing is doable. Thanks GOP!