By DEXTER DUGGAN
Cartoonist Pat Cross did a Halloween drawing of three witches over their boiling cauldron checking a recipe book for ingredients they put in, like “the toe of a frog, the tongue of a dog.” But, “What about the fingers of a decapitated baby?”
The third witch, reaching toward a bag held by a woman stepping into the scene who’s wearing a pink Planned Parenthood shirt, says, “They just arrived.”
Just after Halloween, Cross drew another spooky topic. He depicted New York’s Timothy Cardinal Dolan with the stereotype of a little good angel and a bad angel on his shoulders.
The good angel with his harp looks shocked while the bad angel with his pitchfork laughs merrily as Dolan says, “Sure, he has sanctioned the murder of millions of babies, but who am I to deny Joe Biden Communion?”
Cross had in mind the aftermath of the October 27 incident when a Florence, S.C., priest, Fr. Robert Morey, refused Holy Communion to bad Catholic Joe Biden on a campaign swing because of the Democrat’s openly proclaimed, unrepentant support for permissive abortion.
During a subsequent sit-down interview on Fox News, Dolan muddled the situation when he could have provided clarity. In a segment more than three minutes long, Dolan didn’t once cite the strong but limiting language of the pertinent canon 915 against a person “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin.”
Even many Catholics, to say nothing of non-Catholics, may not be acquainted today with the relevant rule, and certainly not when the media fog descends.
The New York cardinal not only allowed but encouraged a confused Fox host Brian Kilmeade to chase down winding paths about spotting in line and denying Communion to domestic abusers, robbers of senior citizens, bank robbers, and mobsters. Kilmeade suggested a priest faces the Communion line and tells potential recipients either, “You get off,” or, “You can stay.”
Incredibly, Dolan told Kilmeade, “You got it,” and “Way to go, Brian.”
The cardinal went on to say, “If only saints could receive Holy Communion, we wouldn’t have anyone there.” And that Communion is “medicine for the soul, it’s an act of mercy, it’s intended for sinners.”
It could be argued that Dolan himself had encouraged this direction of comment by saying earlier, “I personally can never judge the state of a person’s soul. . . . I’m not there as a tribunal, as a judge. . . . I’m there as a pastor, as a doctor of souls. . . . My job is to help people . . . make a decision on the state of their soul and the repercussions of that.”
Coincidentally, canonist Edward Peters, posting at The Hill political site on October 31, skewered the type of misdirection encouraged by Dolan while never mentioning him. Peters wrote:
“By far the reddest herring employed by Catholics against the enforcement of objective criteria for sacraments is that recited by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, late of Washington, which implies that withholding Holy Communion requires a minister to peer into the soul of a would-be recipient and judge it unworthy. Nonsense.
“To confuse the private examination of one’s conscience as envisioned by canon 916 with the recognition that some public acts warrant public consequences under canon 915 is to show either ignorance of or indifference to well-established Catholic pastoral and sacramental practice,” Peters added.
“Whether the Biden episode is a pastoral one-off or portends a turn in Church practice is impossible to say,” Peters said. “What one can say is that the results achieved by largely ignoring canon 915 have thus far been meager.”
Also during the Fox interview, Dolan conceded that the South Carolina priest “had a good point” about denying Biden Communion, but “I wouldn’t do it.”
Dolan is hardly the only prelate to seem to fear the wrath of Democrat Party leaders and big donors to the Church for holding seriously sinful Catholic politicians to account in public.
An editorial writer for the longtime grimly pro-abortion Los Angeles Times posted on November 2, “What the ensuing discussion has made clear is that the Roman Catholic Church has no single position on whether a politician who supports legal abortion should be denied the consecrated bread and wine that Catholics believe to be the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Actually, the Church has only one position, as expressed in canon law, but Catholic prelates traditionally at home with liberal Democrat politics have striven mightily to obscure this clarity in order to benefit Dem pals.
One need only recall Dolan at New York’s Al Smith dinner that raises funds for charitable work, just before the presidential election in 2016. Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton sat just to Dolan’s right and GOP nominee Donald Trump to his left on October 20. Dolan smiled broadly and roared with laughter as the evening proceeded. He seemed to think nothing was amiss.
However, just the previous evening in Las Vegas, at the third presidential debate on October 19, Clinton affirmed her backing for permissive abortion and same-sex “marriage,” lied about late abortions as she supported them, and said she’d put new justices on the Supreme Court to enforce the continuation of these leftist policies.
In other words, Clinton would do all she could to keep clamped onto the nation direct grave violations not merely of Catholic doctrine but also of traditional secular U.S. and non-U.S. law and morality.
Moral Decline
In a world that always must confront the battle between good and evil, both in individuals and societies, the U.S. and other nations have been on a definite moral decline in recent decades, pushed along by the elite.
Just back in 1996, the cardinal of New York at the time, John O’Connor, wouldn’t allow President Bill Clinton to attend the Al Smith dinner because he had vetoed a congressional bill against partial-birth abortion.
For the cardinal to sit and guffaw with Bill as this slimeball ran for re-election after endorsing sucking out defenseless babies’ brains would have meant disgrace all around.
But moral decline continued so that, by 2016, Hillary could endorse not only this but also something unthinkable in 1996, “gay marriage,” and still be welcomed to Cardinal Dolan’s mirthful table.
Is it that Dolan and like-minded hierarchs are indulgent of all sorts of gravely sinful public behavior because they want to reach out with their forgiveness? Or do they indulge mainly the aberrations celebrated by leftists who confer social acceptance, while still reacting sternly against what the left abhors?
Imagine, for instance, that Hillary had evolved differently and favored torture over a period of a few days and then certain death not for large preborn babies but for border-jumping illegal immigrants.
Just envision that she told a debate audience that because of the large-scale defiance of the United States’ national sovereignty, it would be necessary to strongly discourage all illegal entry by first subjecting any detained invader to prolonged torture, followed by painful execution.
No trial would be necessary, just as no legal proceeding is required before executing the babies. And just like the babies, the illegal immigrants’ arms and legs would be torn off.
Could you imagine for one second that bishops and cardinals would be at pains to demonstrate their respect by inviting Hillary to their high-profile public functions? And that any Catholic renegades like her were unquestioningly to be received into the Communion line under the theory that if they’re there, they’ve already responsibly examined their consciences?
As appalling as this sounds in any civilized society, it’s exactly what the pro-abortion Bidens and Pelosis and Cuomos protect, defend, and promote every day, and what the rest of us are expected to regard as acceptable and noncontroversial and definitely not meriting exclusion from Communion.
Cardinal Dolan and his fellows may feel comfortable extending their unwanted mercy to these particular unrepentant villains. One doubts that the good angels on their shoulders, harps and all, agree.
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