In recent days, various prominent Church leaders have turned up the volume on a number of political issues.
On Oct. 14, Fr. James J. Martin, S.J., wrote on his popular Facebook page how happy he was “to join in the Eucharistic Procession yesterday, which began at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and processed through Midtown Manhattan, and which was organized by the Napa Institute. . . .
“It was wonderful seeing so many people, even people who might not agree on everything, united around Jesus Christ. At one point, I was invited to carry the monstrance, which was deeply moving. I always try to be a carrier of God’s grace, in whatever way I can, but carrying Christ, really and truly present in the Eucharist, down Broadway, will be something I never forget. Isn’t it wonderful that Christ can bring us all together?”
Together, indeed. But not everyone on the side of the road was cheering.
Our friend Austin Ruse contributed a terse yet welcome rebuke in Crisis Magazine. Addressing Fr. Martin’s “Slippery Tales,” he called them out: “His stories are what Mark Twain would call ‘stretchers’ and I would call, well, lies,” he wrote.
“In a recent interview with JD Flynn at The Pillar, Martin offers several anecdotes along these lines, that homosexuals hear relentless condemnation from the pulpit. Does this claim strike you as even remotely true?”
Short answer: It’s a lie.
“And then Fr. Martin tells the story of the famous photograph of him blessing two homosexuals holding hands while a reporter and a photographer from The New York Times just happened to be there in his living room.
“Martin insists the whole thing was utterly spontaneous and that it didn’t even occur to him that The New York Times might run a story about it and run the photograph. Does this sound even remotely true to anyone? Fiducia Supplicans comes out, Martin’s gay pal Jason messages immediately and says, can I come by with my ‘husband’ for a blessing? Sure, Martin says, knowing full well The New York Times would be there. And golly, then the blessing appears in The New York Times!”
“Live not by lies,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells us, but Fr. Martin marches on, beaming. But he’s playing a role in a procession under a different flag.
And he’s not alone.
Another Chicago Fire?
Blase Is Blowing Smoke Again.
On Oct. 17, Vatican News published the complete text of a lecture delivered by Chicago’s Blase J. Cardinal Cupich, exalting his predecessor, Joseph L. Cardinal Bernardin, on the 30th anniversary of his death as “an example for the Church and the world.”
Hey, wait a minute. Wasn’t USCC insider Joseph Bernardin the D.C. “Big Guy” who got then-Fr. Cupich appointed to the Vatican Nunciature in Washington in the late 1970s? Our late friend Jim Hitchcock, a brilliant Catholic historian, describes in Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation? how the USCC mushroomed after Vatican II, contemporaneous with Notre Dame’s Land O’ Lakes Declaration (1967), the widespread revolt against Humanae Vitae (1968), and the Stonewall riots in New York (1969), where homosexuals burst “out of the closet” around the same time that a lot of them began sneaking into the hierarchy.
Underlying it all was the federal funding explosion that followed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-1960s that hollowed out the cultural foundations of the American family, and our hierarchy’s once-revered “charities” along with them.
On Sept. 30, 2025, Pope Leo was asked for his opinion on the awarding of a prize to Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who supports legalized abortion, by Cardinal Cupich, archbishop of Chicago. “I’m not very familiar with the particular case,” Pope Leo said, according to Vatican News. “I think it is very important to look at the overall work a senator has done during, if I am not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate . . . it is important to consider many issues related to the teaching of the Church.”
“He underlined that, saying, ‘I am against abortion’ while supporting the death penalty is not truly pro-life, nor is agreeing with the inhumane treatment of immigrants in the United States,” Vatican News added.
Is It Over Yet?
We now hear that Cardinal Cupich plans to bestow the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Nostra Aetate Award on Chicagoan Michael Sacks. Sacks has reportedly donated over a million dollars to Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortions causes, sources in the Windy City report.
Sacks is scheduled to receive the award at an Oct. 29 fundraiser for the formation of future Catholic priests.
LifeNews reports that when Illinois Right to Life President and CEO Mary Kate Zander voiced her concerns about the award to Cupich, the cardinal responded by suggesting that opposition was motivated by the donor’s Jewish faith.
There you go. Complaints about our haywire hierarchy have long been called “racist” or “homophobic”; now, we’re apparently all “anti-Semites.”
At press time it was uncertain whether Sacks would follow Sen. Durbin’s lead and quietly refuse to receive the award.
It’s curious that “this hapless bench of bishops” († Fabian W. Bruskewitz, bishop of Lincoln, 2002) seems more intent on silencing defenders of the Church’s timeless teaching than on confronting the marauding Modernist monsters intent on destroying Holy Mother Church.
It indicates a spiritual desiccation that wounds the soul and debilitates the intellect.
Here we are in election season, and throughout the country, bishops are ignoring Catholic teaching, while pounding the table for their radical political agenda.
In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Catholic Conference (WCC) has not taken a position on the proposed Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a ballot measure that would amend the state’s constitution to say that the government cannot “order the closure of or forbid gatherings in places of worship,” even in times of emergency.
The proposal is a response to the closing of churches during the Covid lockdown.
“Read that again,” wrote one local Catholic. “The Wisconsin Catholic Conference is officially neutral on a proposal to forbid government shutdowns of churches. This year the WCC has looked favorably on proposals for federal tax credits for scholarship-granting organizations, occupational credentials for DACA recipients, Medicaid coverage for prisoners, and crypto kiosks. But not on a proposal to ensure that churches stay open.”
And finally, some common sense from our friend Richard A. Viguerie, a longtime Catholic pilgrim and pioneer for freedom:
“Sharia is the exact opposite of American constitutional liberty,” he writes. “It enshrines cruel and unusual punishment in law, makes women and non-Muslims second-class citizens, encourages pedophilia, mandates slavery and sex-slavery. . . .”
“And this, and so much more,” as our friend J. Alfred Prufrock puts it.
We might take the occasion to recall that when we say, “In God We Trust,” we don’t mean theirs.
And for good reason: In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court found, in a unanimous opinion, that “This is a Christian nation” (Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 [1892]).
William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, warned us that “Those who do not govern themselves by the laws of God will be ruled by tyrants.”
Our God. Not theirs.
