photo above: New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan celebrates Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral April 12 during the coronavirus pandemic. (CNS/Reuters/Jeenah Moon)
WN: The article highlighted below shows American Catholic leadership in relation to Trump and his party to be deplorable–abominable. Though Hilary Clinton was the wrong messenger, she got the message right: Trump supporters are indeed TheDeplorables. And the Catholic leadership is as deplorable, when one contrasts Jesus with them (the only valid kind of comparison). As the writers indicate:
Certainly, it is without precedent that the leadership would cozy up so cravenly to a president whose most consistent attribute is an uncontrollable propensity for lying, continuously and about everything. He is dangerously disconnected from reality and is defined by characteristics that normally are condemned from pulpits.
The Bishops are reminiscent of the behaviour of Catholic leadership during the brutal Belgian colonization of Rwanda that began in 1916.[mfn]Please see: Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They’re Told To. The article ominously underscores this danger.[/mfn] The Catholic Church in the interests of religious hegemony (sound familiar?: a host of White American Evangelicals for the same reason are likewise in bed with the Narcissist-in-Chief) were prime movers towards what became ultimate genocide. Mahmood Mamdani writes:
Let us recall that there was no single institutional home, no mortuary, bigger than the [Catholic] Church for the multiple massacres that marked the [1994] Rwandan horror. After all, but for the army and the Church, the two prime movers, the two organizing and leading forces, one located in the state and the other in society, there would have been no genocide . . . Rather than a passive mirror reflecting tensions, the Church was more of an epicenter radiating tensions” (When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Mahmood Mamdani, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002; pp. 232-33; p. 226.)
Trump is without question the most consistent world leader narcissist (and that over a lifetime!) the world has seen for many years, in impact possibly ever? Given his Commander-in-Chief role, and his abject failure with reference to the coronavirus, in the former instance responsible for mass slaughter in many parts of the world (following a long Presidential pedigree), in the latter his self-centred inaction leading so far to tens of thousands of preventable deaths, Catholic Bishops (and their Eveangelical counterparts) in support of such Monstrosity sadly reserve for themselves a special place in hell–as the saying goes.
Without a whimper from any of his fellow bishops, the cardinal archbishop of New York has inextricably linked the Catholic Church in the United States to the Republican Party and, particularly, President Donald Trump.
It was bad enough that Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York and Sean O’Malley of Boston, joined by Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, currently also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, participated in Trump’s phone version of a campaign rally on April 25. With hundreds of others on the call, including Catholic educators, the bishops were once again masterfully manipulated. They previously gave Trump certain campaign footage when they delivered Catholics to his speech at the March for Life rally in Washington early in the year.
Now Trump will have Dolan’s language from the call, telling everyone that he considers himself a “great friend” of Trump, for whom he expressed mutual admiration as “a great gentleman.” The cardinal went on to say that he was “honored” to lead off the comments on the call.
The whole cringe-worthy exchange (yes, Trump did self-describe as “the best” president “in the history of the Catholic church”) was made worse the next day when Dolan provided more campaign footage from inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in announcing that the president was “worshiping with us,” purportedly livestreaming the Mass at the White House.
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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