by Pa Rock
Hypocrisy Hound
There are two institutions that never let me down on a slow news day. If I feel the need to rant, I have to look no further than to the Republican Party or the Catholic Church. Indeed, as often as not, those two groups verge on being indistinguishable.
The Catholic Church has been in the news a couple of times this week, and, as usual, its leaders have been going out of their way to embarrass themselves.
Last Friday Archbishop Raymond Burke, the head of the Vatican's Supreme Court and the former Archbishop of St. Louis, took the University of Notre Dame to task for inviting the President of the United States to speak at its spring commencement. Burke said that the invitation was "scandalous," and he went on to accuse President Obama of pushing an anti-life and anti-family agenda.
This isn't the first time that this clown (Burke) has stuffed both feet in his mouth. In 2004 he stated that he would not give communion to presidential candidate (and Catholic) John Kerry due to Kerry's support of abortion as a public policy. In 2007 he made a similar threat to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani for the same reason. He also ran his pious mouth after the confirmation of Catholic Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services because she, too, supports the choice of abortion in public policy. He said the Sebelius confirmation was "the source of deepest embarrassment for Catholics."
Archbishop Raymond Burke said that if Catholics are not willing to stand up for the church's teachings, "we are not worthy of the name Catholic."
You know what, Ray? It's a shame you were born in the twentieth century and had to miss the Catholic glory days of the Spanish Inquisition! You're a real sweetheart - spewing all of that venom at exceptional public servants! Where was your outrage over the pedophile priests? Obama isn't one one-hundredth as scandalous as your pervert priests who took sexual advantage of little boys and girls! (And don't think for a minute that the sexual abuse has stopped. Child molesters never change!) Sebelius is not half the embarrassment that you are? You are shameless for not turning your wrath on your robed brothers who were routinely destroying the lives of little children.
But Burke is not the only prominent Catholic to be out of sync with his Church and the world in general.
Today Pope Benedict XVI was in the Holy Land visiting Israel and the Palestinians, and he managed to offend most of his hosts. The Pope went to the site of a holocaust museum in Jerusalem but didn't go inside. The problem: he is promoting Pope Pius XII for sainthood. Pius was the Pope during World War II and a Nazi appeaser who turned a blind eye to the holocaust. If the Pope had ventured into the museum he would have encountered a plaque pointing out the treachery of Pius XII.
Pope Benedict is a sad religious leader who is too damned old to be running a used car lot, much less a worldwide religion . He, too, would have been much happier burning heretics in the Spanish Inquisition. Oh, for the good old days - back when people really got religion - or suffered the consequences!
