The vestigial after-effects of both Original Sin and our own actual sins
incline us to sin. The Catholic Church has long categorized seven sins as
being the deadly trees from which all other sins branch out in our lives.
Pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, gluttony, and covetousness are the seven
deadly sins. Although they are separate and distinct from each other, it is
nevertheless true that they intersect with one another. It is no
exaggeration
to state that the capital or deadly sin of Pride is the queen of all sins,
as
it was the sin of Pride in the Garden of Eden which was committed by Adam
and
Eve when they disobeyed God by eating of the fruit of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil. Ultimately, each sin we commit is related to
Pride in that we place ourselves and our disordered desires above a love of
God and the teaching He has deposited in Holy Mother Church. "Pride goeth
before a fall." Indeed.
Sadly, it is frequently the case that the rich and the powerful believe
that
they are exempt from God's immutable laws. Usually, although certainly not
always, the rich and powerful people who believe that their money and fame
exempt them from all moral truths have come by their money and power
deceitfully, or, at the very least, they have come by their money and power
by participating in the cultural and/or commercial promotion of sin for
their
own profit and empowerment.
To wit, most of those who have made a great
deal
of money (and have thus acquired a good deal of fame)in the entertainment
industry in the past thirty years have been active participants in the
promotion of the undermining of the existence of objective moral truths
which
can be known with certainty by the use of reason and which have been
revealed
definitively in the person of the God-Man and taught in His Name and on His
authority by Holy Mother Church. Almost all of the aspects of contemporary
music, television, theater, motion pictures, books, magazines, and other
media outlets exist to promote the glorification of a relativist and
atheistic view of the world. Indeed, much money is made by those who
promote
direct attacks on the very tenets of the true Church, enabling
addle-brained
fallen-away Catholics to have a forum to express their contempt for the
very
means our Lord instituted to help them to get to Heaven.
Similarly, those who acquire political power come to believe that they are
exempt from God's laws, the subject of a commentary in last month's Christ
or
Chaos ("The Powerful Never Learn"). Many of our own people use their
political careers to promote the nonexistent "right" of women to slaughter
their unborn children. Others, such as the Republican Party boss of Nassau
County, Long Island, New York, Joseph Mondello, actively recruit pro-aborts
to run for office on his party's line while insisting they are pro-life
themselves, something that former Senator Alfonse D'Amato did quite boldly
from 1990 until the point of his self-inflicted defeat at the hands of then
Representative Charles Schumer in 1998.
However, Mondello and D'Amato are
still considered Catholics in good standing, perhaps largely because they
contribute generously to their local parishes. The same is true of former
Representative Rick Lazio, who is a parishioner in good standing in his
local
parish on Long Island even though he, like New York City Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, supports the destruction of our Lord mystically in the persons of
unborn children by means of abortion. And this increasingly more common
phenomenon of Republican Catholic pro-aborts who try to cover their sins
with
the blood money they contribute to the Church has been built on the
longstanding receptivity given by one parish after another to Democratic
pro-aborts.
Indeed, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd's blood money
contribution to St. Joseph's School in North Grovernorsdale, Connecticut,
was
so important to Norwich, Connecticut, Bishop Daniel Hart in 1996 that the
parish's temporary administrator, Father George Parker, was told he would
not
be considered as the parish's permanent pastor after he returned Dodd's
blood
money contribution. Blood money talks. It talks real loud.
True, blood money has always talked in the Church. Fallen men have made up
the human element of the Mystical Body of Christ in the Church Militant
from
her very beginning. Some have resisted temptation and scaled the heights of
great sanctity. Others, however, have succumbed to the blandishments
offered
by the rich and the powerful. The Church is divinely founded and
maintained.
She will last until the end of time. The fact that she has survived for
nearly two millennia despite the bad example given by the weak men who have
composed her human element is one of the negative proofs for her
indefectibility. Nothing that is merely of human origin and composition
could
possibly survive the repeated efforts of those who have held prominent
positions of ecclesiastical authority to scandalize the faithful and to
aggrandize themselves.
And, too, each of us plays a role in the undermining
of the Church. Each one of our sins wounds the Mystical Body of Christ and
inclines us to sin all the more. None of us is exempt from responsibility
for
the state of the Church and thus of the world.
That having been noted,
however, those who do give bad example by succumbing to the blandishments
of
the rich and the powerful to pervert the Faith and/or to receive what
become
in effect a Church blessing for moral evils are directly responsible for
their own actions. It was not so very long ago that a lot of pastors
looked
the other way as their Mafioso parishioners became wealthy by playing their
evil trades. Mafia chieftains were given full requiem Masses when they
died.
They were married with special honors. Many of their children were baptized
in private baptismal ceremonies. After all, some of the pastors
rationalized,
they had no direct knowledge of how their parishioners made their money.
Pastors of souls thus accepted blood money from blood suckers and merchants
of eternal death who made money by profiting from the weakness of others,
if
not tempting people into lives of abject evil (especially through
prostitution and pornography and gambling).
To his credit, the late Terence
Cardinal Cooke, Archbishop of New York from 1968 to 1983, put an end to
what
are now called Masses of Christian Burial for notorious public sinners such
as Mafia chieftains.
Unfortunately, many in the hierarchy are still
catering
to those among the rich and the powerful who have come by their money or
power illicitly. Enter Roger Cardinal Mahony, the Archbishop of Los
Angeles,
California. Cardinal Mahony has been very friendly to the monied forces
within the Democratic Party.
As should be reasonably well known by anyone familiar with my writing, I am
a
critic of the Republican Party, pointing out over and over again that most
of
its so-called "pro-life" office-holders are not pro-life at all. They are
simply less pro-abortion than other politicians, and they have absolutely
no
intention of putting their political careers on the line to try to defend
the
sanctity of all innocent human life without exception. However, the
Democratic Party is institutionally committed to the promotion of the very
thing which caused our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to suffer once
in
His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross (and which wounds His
Mystical Body today)-sin-as a matter of public policy and established
"constitutional rights."
How can a person say he loves our Lord and yet
promote the very thing which caused Him to suffer His horrible death by
Crucifixion on the wood of the Holy Cross? It is one thing to sin and to
express sorrow for it in the Sacrament of Penance. It is quite another to
persist in sin unrepentantly, worse yet to promote it under cover of law,
which is what the Democratic Party does in its party's national and state
platforms.
Cardinal Mahony has not only looked the other way at all of this. No, he
has
done far more than that. Cardinal Roger Mahony has close friendships with
powerful forces in the Democratic Party, some of which felt close enough to
him to importune him to write a letter in support of the pardon application
of a convicted drug dealer (whose father is a major donor to the Democratic
Party and to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles).
How interesting it is to note
that a Prince of the Church does not care to recognize that those who
donate
to the fully pro-abortion political party have the blood of the innocent on
their hands. To do their bidding in any way is to do the bidding of the
Devil
himself. However, modernist cathedrals and modernist catechetical
conventions
do not get funded with the contributions of the ordinary schnooks in the
pew
alone. Those thirty pieces of silver must be accepted in order to
accomplish
the destruction of reverence in worship and integrity of doctrine in lavish
style.
Cardinal Mahony expressed shock when the full facts of the drug dealer's
pardon story became known. He was particularly incensed that former White
House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who is still working for the now
beleaguered former forty-third president, misled him about how his letter
in
support of the pardon application would be used. Why the shock, your
Eminence? If you lie down with pro-abortion dogs and take their money, you
are going to wake up with the dirt left by their pro-abortion fleas.
Cardinal Mahony was the first bishop in the United States to endorse then
President-elect Bill Clinton's decision in November of 1992 to seek to
change
the military's longstanding policy concerning practicing homosexuals and
lesbians in the military. He had Clinton speak from the pulpit at St.
Vibiana's Cathedral on Palm Sunday one year. His functionaries in the Los
Angeles archdiocesan chancery office are alleged by press reports to have
been involved in helping illegal aliens to register to vote in 1996 so that
they could vote for the pro-abortion Catholic Loretta Sanchez against the
pro-life Robert K. Dornan. Mahony even went so far as to bestow Papal
honors
on two purveyors of indeceny and filth in the media: Rupert Murdoch, a
thirty-third degree Mason, and Roy Disney. Nothing like a little blood
money
from those who have produced motion pictures and television programs
glorifying sin, eh? And this is to say nothing of how he has used the money
of ordinary Catholics to try to "de-Europeanize" the liturgy, which has
been
the subject of many commentaries and analyses in the last few years.
Cardinal Roger Mahony has no one but himself to blame for the
embarrassment
he is suffering at present. He does not care to learn the simple fact that
those who support the promotion of sin under cover of law are unfit to hold
any office-and that they should be given no quarter in the Church
whatsoever.
Many are the good and sincere people who have come by their money honestly,
people who want to use the treasure God has bestowed upon them for the
promotion of reverence in worship and integrity of doctrine. How sad it is
that those good people are mocked and reviled as reactionaries while the
supporters of the baby-killing political party and soul-killing
entertainment
fare are honored as great supporters of the "progressive" Church. Says a
lot
right there, doesn't it?
Naturally, the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton, who promised to run the
most ethical administration in history, sold everything they could to the
highest bidder should come as absolutely no surprise. They are base,
coarse,
vile, vulgar, greedy, prideful human beings who believe in all utter
arrogance and righteousness that they can do whatever it is they want
whenever it is they want with complete and total impunity, responding with
indignity when even forced to answer questions about their corrupt
practices
.
They have done that which has come to them so naturally during the course
of
their entire lives. (And it would be highly ironic if one of Clinton's own
pro-abortion United States Attorneys, Mary Jo White of the Southern
District
of New York, turns out to be the one to force the crooks from Arkansas and
Chappaqua to finally face a jury of their peers for the first time in their
lives.)
However, even though scandals are part of the Church's history and are sewn
into the fabric of fallen man, it is nevertheless true that each man is
responsible for his own actions and that those in positions of
ecclesiastical
authority have a special obligation to avoid even the whiff of scandal and
favoritism. Cardinal Mahony, who claims to be an advocate of the poor and
the
downtrodden, certainly likes to hobnob with the rich and the famous who
help
to subsidize and to perpetuate the culture of death in this country (and to
export it around the world).
John Paul II created forty-four new
cardinals in a consistory on February 21, 2001, the subject of a commentary
in the late-May/mid-June issue of Christ or Chaos. I hereby propose that a
special un-consistory be held to remove the cardinalate red hats of those
bishops who have proven themselves to be enemies of the Cross of Jesus
Christ. The red blood which stains the money in the hands of Roger Cardinal
Mahony cries out to Heaven for the removal of his red hat. For he has no
one
to blame for the embarrassment caused by his doing the bidding of blood
sucking pro-aborts than himself and his own desire to ingratiate himself to
all of the wrong people in high places for all of the wrong reasons.