Clerics’ Kicking The Can Comes To The End Of The Road?
By DEXTER DUGGAN
In 2016, at the March 30 White House Easter prayer breakfast, then-Vice President Joe Biden said once again that he was “a practicing Catholic.” Biden, however, fully adhered to the Democratic Party’s platform of the Culture of Death.
As I wrote in the lead story for the hardcopy issue of The Wanderer dated for April 14, 2016:
“Biden actually is a strong backer of massive permissive abortion of defenseless infants, ‘same-sex marriage,’ compulsion of religious believers to act against their consciences, embryonic stem-cell research, and other instances of opposition to basic beliefs for practicing Catholics.
“By proclaiming his Catholic fidelity,” I added, “Biden — and other politicians like him — gravely misleads the nation.”
I contacted the media relations office of the Archdiocese of Washington, headed by papal adviser Donald Cardinal Wuerl, within handshaking distance of the White House, to ask for a reaction to Biden’s scandalous statement. I said that Biden’s “public opposition to foundational Catholic moral teaching belies” his claim of fidelity.
The media office promptly replied on April 4, 2016, “Thank you for reaching out to us. The Archdiocese of Washington declines comment.”
Later in 2016, as August began, Biden personally officiated at a “same-sex wedding” at his residence for two male White House staffers.
On August 8, 2016, I pointed out to Wuerl’s media office that Biden “conducted the ceremony himself, which is directly contrary to Catholic teaching, yet he says he is a practicing Catholic. What are the plans of the archdiocese to correct this action by Vice President Biden?”
The media office promptly replied that the “archdiocese does not comment on individuals and their pastoral relationship to the Church,” but pointed to an August 5, 2016, statement by three officials of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The USCCB statement didn’t name any politician, but tiptoed that “When a prominent Catholic politician publicly and voluntarily officiates at a ceremony to solemnize the relationship of two people of the same sex, confusion arises regarding Catholic teaching on marriage and the corresponding moral obligations of Catholics. . . .
“Let us pray for our Catholic leaders in public life, that they may fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to them with grace and courage and offer a faithful witness that will bring much-needed light to the world,” the statement said. “And may all of us as Catholics help each other be faithful and joyful witnesses wherever we are called.”
They said giving witness to the faith “will only grow more challenging in the years to come.”
Dominant media hadn’t raised a ruckus over Biden advancing the pro-homosexuality agenda, so many people may have had no idea whom the USCCB statement meant. With a “let us pray” admonition, the USCCB seemed to hope the scandal could be wished away.
While martyrs for the faith “should be joyful,” I wrote, “there would have been no need to make . . . faithful Catholics into martyrs if their shepherds had shown considerably more wisdom and courage. But not even a whisper of excommunication had come from Church bureaucrats who certainly had that penalty at hand. Just one surrender after another to secular aggression.”
The hardcopy issue of The Wanderer dated for August 18, 2016, reported Biden’s marrying scandal, which was followed up in the next issue, dated for August 25, where I noted: “It seemed to suffice that all would be well with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as long as politicians followed liberal political checklists.”
I added, “Indeed, in 2004, when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome, soon to become Pope Benedict XVI, sent liberal Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, instructions that openly defiant, unrepentant Catholic politicians must be denied the Eucharist, McCarrick stuck the instructions into his drawer and gave the U.S. bishops a watered-down version of what Ratzinger had said.”
The temporizing Wuerl and now-disgraced and demoted abuser McCarrick — where have we heard those names recently as the latest sex-abuse cover-up scandal has exploded in the U.S. Church? Even various faithful Catholics who traditionally would defer to episcopal authority are saying bishops who’ve kicked the can down the road no longer can be trusted, and laity must become involved in or take control of oversight that works.
If clerics thought their advocacy of liberal media priorities would immunize them from criticism from that quarter, they’re instead being told, “Thanks, doormats, for popularizing our agenda, but we don’t need your help anymore.”
Decades have slipped past as bodies like the USCCB dodged on non-negotiable moral issues, the insolent reception of the Eucharist, and defiant homosexuality’s “normalization,” while relentlessly advocating for Democrat-approved priorities like higher federal spending and massive illegal immigration that instead were open to more than one morally acceptable solution. So here we are today.
Everyone is a sinner, but repentance is offered to all. Does the latest exposure of pastoral and hierarchical shame reveal some bad consciences rather than repentance? Was the push to impose liberal politics on Catholic laity an effort by the morally compromised to avoid self-examination while shifting blame for bad intentions to innocents in the pews?
Exposing sex abuse involved the removal of some costumes. More than red faces are bared.
