Boycott the Bishops, Part 1: Cardinal Dolan & the Bishops Have Been in the Tank for Trump From the Start
It is a great understatement to say that the institutional Roman Catholic Church is not known for its transparency, and that it tends to grant access, disproportionately, to those who work in Catholic institutions and who are variously bound by devotion and obedience. For an institution that so often finds itself under scrutiny for illegality and wrongdoing, limiting access is a smart move. Making information available on a kind of need-to-know basis is one of the many ways the institutional church holds onto Catholics, while alienating them, possible.
How does this work? The best example I can think of is the way the “liberal” and even more “moderate” and conservative officials and clerics in positions of power handle LGBTQ+ Catholics. Here’s how it goes: Magisterial teaching holds that LGBTQ+ people are “disordered,” but that Jesus loves everyone. In practice this translates thus: ‘We want you to come to mass, to tithe, to eventually turn away from sin,” but we won’t consecrate your marriages. Not only that, but we will also l use your tithing money’s to support practices that discriminate even in secular legal contexts against you and all LGBTQ+ persons, Catholic and not.’ This is done in a ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ spirit, which is in, in this context, erroneous, vile and itself sinful, because being gay is not a sin, love is not a sin, and bigotry is a sin. The institutional church should not, in this, have it both ways.
This is how U.S. Bishops managed their immigration optics. In U.S. cities, especially those designated as sanctuary cities, immigrants traditionally receive a good deal of help from Catholic dioceses and parishes, and tend, once they are established, to be robust tithers. Immigrants are often more obedient and doctrine-compliant, in part, perhaps, because they are more in need. They often make extraordinary sacrifices to support Catholic schools — this, during a time when Catholics born in the United States are fleeing them. While the U.S. Bishops were vocal about immigrants just before Trump was elected, but the public support for migrants at the U.S. border the bishops began to wane once Trump was fully installed in the Oval. The U.S. bishops were beginning to see their shot to have a president who would overturn Roe, and they weren’t going rock that boat.
While individual clerics and some Catholic groups were vocal, the U.S. Bishops were quieter than they ought to have been about Trump’s wall, Trump’s regular spouting of racist remarks, his breaking up of families, his losing track of children who were removed from their parents at the United States/Mexico border, and his incarcerating minor children in detention camps. The U.S. bishops released statements, but they had a perfunctory feel, and there was most certainly a feeling among most “liberal” and progressive Catholics that the bishops were insufficiently forceful in this. They were. Because Trump was, and is currently, their man.
Trump has been the U.S. Bishops’ candidate of choice since 2015. That’s why clerics were permitted to stump for him at the diocese and parish levels. That’s why the U.S. bishops let that maniac grifter Frank Pavone run amok. The Bishops may publicly denounce Catholic lunatics like Pavone, but they want him out there literally stumping for the incumbent. Now that Trump is bungling the Covid 19 crisis, executing a kind of genocide in his own nation, through incompetence, stupidity and negligence, the possibility that he will lose the 2020 election has become a reality. Dolan and the multimillionaires for whom he fronts, will do all they can to help Trump be re-elected.
With the presumptive candidate, Joe Biden, being a Catholic; with Catholic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo being Catholic and sometimes channeling, almost systematically (that’s a a pun!) his philosophical, Aquinas-loving Catholic sire, the big-business loving, power-drunk United States Bishops are newly forced to worry that their religious-liberty-save-the-preborn-babies-AND-our-free market incumbent, Trump, won’t win. Increasing the degree of difficulty is the fact that the presumptive Democratic nominee is a “cafeteria Catholic.” Further complicating matters is the daily presence of “Cafeteria Catholic” governor out there on television every day who look and acts like a president making the incumbent look like an imbecile by comparison. (Dolan has been gunning for Andrew Cuomo for years, all the while making nice.) But Trump is the Catholic alt-right’s imbecile, and he is willing to stack the court with right wing Catholic extremists.
Timothy Dolan is smart enough to know Trump’s chance of winning isn’t good, but even if Trump loses, Dolan will have an enormous feather in his biretta. He will be the American prelate who tried.
May 4th, 2020
