Our Elites Hate America. Do Our Bishops?
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Sixty years ago Bill Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale, describing how the professors and administration at his alma mater had betrayed so profoundly the Christian foundations of the college and the American principles that had flowed from them.
Fifteen years later, in 1978, future Congressman John Leboutillier wrote Harvard Hates America. This time around, the betrayal of the intelligentsia had matured into ripe, outright hate.
Time had taken its toll, and, since those tumultuous 1970s, the Catholic hierarchy has come to share some common sentiments with those Ivy League elites.
The 1970s were a dark time for the American Church’s leadership. A precious few bishops did dare to defend Humanae Vitae, but the majority of their colleagues were too busy, mired in the slop of the sexual revolution, the collapse of the priesthood, and the disgraceful spectacle of “Call to Action” (CTA) dissidents (Dr. Brian Clowes once observed that forty percent of CTA activists worked in chanceries, the USCC, or the bishops’ NGOs).
Clearly, most bishops didn’t attend Harvard or Yale, but the ideological trickle-down theory applies quite readily when it comes to hate and ignorance, especially when it combined with Cardinal Bernardin’s socialist theory known in Church circles as “Social Justice.”
Things haven’t gotten much better in the past fifty years. Recent events at Harvard and Yale indicate that their decline has not only continued but accelerated. They hate America even more today.
It’s fair to ask: Do our Catholic bishops hate our country too?
Joe Biden certainly does. His mental impairment goes way back — as far, perhaps, as his weight-lifting accident in the Senate Gym and his subsequent brain surgeries in 1988. Today, his “man of the people” parody has evaporated to expose an aimless, spiteful bully who’s mad at almost everybody most of the time.
Catholic Joe targets especially those Americans who do not respond well, shall we say, to his demands that we unite to support his increasingly bizarre mandates and destructive forays into policies foreign and domestic.
Of course, it’s Joe’s handlers, from “Dr. Jill” on down, who are running the country.
And they’re running it into the ground.
That seems to be OK with many bishops. There’s an America out there that they hate, and it’s the same Deplorable America that Joe Biden hates. They won’t even defend parents whom Biden’s goons brand as “terrorists” for defending their children enrolled in government schools.
America’s hierarchy refuses to defend the family, and with it, Humanae Vitae. Equally devastating, they ignore the defense of the Eucharist, by winking at canon 915 while turning their backs on it.
But none of that really matters, we are told, because our bishops envision a “Next America” that they hope to build on the bones of the old.
They don’t like today’s Americans. We’re “racists,” “bigots,” “xenophobes,” and “nativists.” They envision a better tomorrow, embracing Hispanics as a preferable population to create a better future.
Alas, their dream hasn’t quite turned out the way they planned.
A Footnote From History
In a 2010 address to the Napa Institute, Archbishop José Gomez coined the “Next America” brand. Gomez presented “an idealized image of Mexican immigrants” when he said they “will bring a new entrepreneurial spirit of hard work to our economy,” we wrote at the time.
Mexican immigrants “are not afraid of hard work or sacrifice,” the archbishop said, and “the vast majority of them believe in Jesus Christ and love our Catholic Church. They share traditional American values of faith, family, and community.”
Well, that didn’t last long. Three years later, at the eighth annual conference of The Catholic Association of Latino Leaders (CALL), Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput admitted defeat.
In remarks reported by the National Catholic Register, Chaput revealed that the bishops had hoped that a strong Catholic faith among Latinos would pull the United States back from secularization and immorality.
But theirs was a false hope. “I think Archbishop José and I probably underestimated the ability of American culture to digest and redirect any new influence that comes from outside our borders,” he said. “The idea that Latinos, simply by their presence, might restore the moral tenor of our public discourse is a delusion.”
Did Archbishop Chaput’s wake-up call give our bishops cause to pause in their race toward a “Next America”?
No. His profound admission changed nothing. The bishops had driven fifty million Catholics from the pews since Vatican II, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted to exchange the faithful they had for a more grateful, more reverent Hispanics, and they laid an egg.
Instead of looking in the mirror, they doubled down, and cheered on the Obama-Biden effort to import more illegal aliens by the millions.
And what about America’s “moral tenor”?
Forget it. As our friend Pat Buchanan puts it, “Open Borders Biden Is Remaking America.” And the bishops are helping him.
Consider: America’s illegals come from some of the world’s most corrupt cultures. Virtually all have paid huge bribes to Coyote Cartels whose sex-drug-cash-and-criminal trafficking has killed hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
But hey, so what? The bishops’ NGO’s get federal billions. They secretly sneak their illegal “clients” by night into unsuspecting communities all over the country, and they cash their government checks.
Well, what about morality? Do they try to convert their clients to the Rule of Law and the Ten Commandments?
No. They don’t even bother to tell them not to steal or to lie. Let’s face it — isn’t that what got them here?
A New Theology For
The “Next America”
“Racism has rightly been called America’s original sin. It remains a blot on our national life and continues to cause acts and attitudes of hatred, as recent events have made evident. The need to condemn, and combat, the demonic ideologies of white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and racism has become especially urgent at this time. Our efforts must be constantly led and accompanied by prayer — but they must also include concrete action” —USCCB’s current website.
For more than forty years, the USCCB has pushed a dubious theology teaching that American whites — and no one else — are born with what they call a “second original sin.”
Somewhere in our ancient past, a white Eve bit the forbidden fruit, and the rest is history.
Don’t laugh, they’re serious.
So serious, in fact, that they can see little else.
After George Floyd died in Minneapolis, America’s bishops had finally found a cause that united them with the country’s powerful elite combine. Prelates by the dozen issued pastoral letters. Anti-racism homilies abounded.
BLM’s violent riots killed dozens, destroyed thousands of jobs, and ruined the livelihoods of millions, especially blacks. Yet our shepherds cheered on Black Lives Matter, even revering the group like a new generation of prophets.
When BLM was exposed as a massive cabal of corrupt con-men, not one bishop apologized.
And no bishop has come forward to condemn the black gangs that routinely murder thousands of other blacks in Democrat cities throughout the country every year.
Of course, none of them bothers to condemn the racist massacres in Waukesha, New York, and Dallas either.
Meanwhile, Biden’s disasters destroy America at a desperate pace, and our bishops and their permanent bureaucracy are all on board.
Except for abortion, of course. But it’s on that very issue that our bishops have a consecrated duty to act.
And they don’t.
Instead, they wink at canon 915 and do nothing.
They won’t defend the Eucharist and they won’t defend the family or the faithful from Biden’s destructive ire.
But wait — maybe they’re just trying to be popular.
Well, if that’s the case, maybe tying themselves to Catholic Joe wasn’t the best plan after all.