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.