U. S. Catholic Conference's Clueless New Leader

I previously noted the unfortunate signal from the American Catholic Church in the form of the election of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan as the new Conference president. I'm not alone in my condemnation of the move towards reactionarism James Carroll, a columnist for the Boston Globe and Distinguished-Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University, has a pretty scathing piece in the San Francisco Sentinel which describes the American hierarchy as "willingly turn themselves into mascot-lobby for the Republican Right." With the pampered, corrupt, and thoroughly hypocritical hierarchy moving increasingly in an opposite direction from most American Catholics, one can only hope that more of the laity will vote with their feet and flee to the Episcopal Church and the ELCA which offer largely the same liturgy without the poisonous bitter queens in dresses. Here are some highlights:
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“My major priority,” New York’s Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan said at his election last week as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “would be to continue with all vigor I can muster what’s already in place. It’s not like we’re in a crisis.”
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Hello? The Catholic Church not in a crisis? The moral authority of the Roman Catholic hierarchy is at its lowest ebb since the Inquisition. In the United States, the once-influential bishops have willingly transformed themselves into a mascot-lobby for the Republican right. “We bishops are the teachers,” one insisted this week, yet not even conservative Catholics actually take them seriously: Think of those right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court who uphold the very same death penalty the bishops condemn. Vast populations of Catholic laity—not just liberals—are ashamed of the global episcopate for its persistence in enabling priestly sex abuse.
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That continues even now as the world’s Cardinals gathered in Rome on Friday for yet another do-nothing red-hat session on the abuse crisis. . . . . Catholic professional groups openly defy the hierarchy, as, for example, the Catholic Health Association did by supporting President Obama’s health care reform legislation, probably providing decisive Catholic legislators with just enough cover to vote yes. Even as the bishops met this week, the National Coalition of American Nuns denounced their silence about the scourge of suicides among young gays—yet what could bishops say, since their ferocious opposition to marriage equality is a pillar of gay demonization? No crisis? The same issue of the New York Times that featured Dolan’s election carried news of a growing movement of alternative, lay-run Catholic churches in the Netherlands and Belgium, where one priest said, “Something is beginning to crack.”
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But Dolan’s job, in sync with the mission given to every bishop by Pope Benedict XVI, is to reverse the changes of Vatican II—or what is left of them after the triumphal reaction of the last three decades. Cruelty is sacrosanct. . . . Timothy Dolan’s job is to put the best face on the reactionary hierarchy’s slow motion act of self-destruction. The surest sign of this crisis is the jovial conviction that there is no crisis.