Archbishop Raymond Burke Is Not Worthy of the Name Catholic

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!

Of Fear and Lizard Brains

This past Tuesday, March 4, marked the 75th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inauguration as President. It was at the height of the Great Depression and times were bad. But on that day in Washington D.C. all those many years ago, FDR took the reins of power from Herbert Hoover and assured the country that government would, once again, be the servant of the people. In his inaugural address, he told America that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!"

What a difference seventy-five years makes! Now we have a President who uses fear as his prime motivator. Fear Iraqis, fear al-Quaida, fear Castro, fear Chavez, fear immigrants, fear your government, fear, fear, fear! Fortunately for the world, and America in particular, George W. Bush is quickly becoming irrelevant.

But fear works - and now Billary has picked up the banner. Seventy-five years to the day after FDR reassured us that fear was all we had to fear, Billary won the Texas primary by using her sleazy red phone commercial stressing the need for us to fear anyone but her answering the President's red phone at 3:00 a.m. Arianna Huffington of "The Huffington Post" referred to this red phone tactic as appealing to our lizard brains, the most primal part of the human brain - the one we employed when we were still in the caves - long before the advent of rational thought.

What's wrong with focusing on ideas? Why can't we be free to judge candidates on their vision for America, instead of on their ability to slime? Bill Clinton said (in 2004 while campaigning for John Kerry) that if one candidate offers you hope and the other offers you fear - go with the one offering hope. He was right. The only thing we have to fear is the politician who is trying to scare us from seeing the world as it could be.

No third term!