Cardinal Mahoney

Cardinal Mahoney should not be going to Rome to help select a new Pope (Cardinal to be deposed in abuse suit. Boston Globe, February 16, 2013: A2).

The Cardinal has a clear conflict of interest. He has failed his flock. He might well be induced to vote for a Papal candidate who promises not to discipline him.


Sent to Boston Globe

Catholics and Marriage

Dear Editor:

I agree on constitutional grounds that the Catholic proponents of the marriage amendment have the right to an up or down vote in the issue in the Constitutional Convention next week (Bishops push for a vote on marriage, Boston Globe, October 31, 2006; B1, B5). However, I hope the amendment is voted down.

Why would the Church try to destroy the families of our gay friends and neighbors?

In any case, why would anyone listen to the Catholic Church on any family value issue? This is the Church that protected pedophile predator priests for many years. This is the Church whose Cardinal called down the Wrath of God on the media for publishing allegations of the pedophilia that was on going in the Church -- talk about taking the word of the Lord in vain!

No, on family issues, the Catholic Church deserves to stay in the purgatory of irrelevancy for the next two dozen years.

Catholic Church and Gays

Date: September 14th., 2005
Sent to but not published in the Pilot (The Newspaper of the Boston Catholic Hierarchy)

Why is the Catholic Church so insistent on removing the civil rights of its fellow citizens?
Surely, to be consistent in its belief that nothing good can come out of gay people (see its witch hunt against gays in the seminaries despite the fact that pederasty has no relation to homosexuality), the Catholic Church should whitewash and cover up the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- a marvellous testament to the glory of God and produced by a gay person!

Senator Santorum

Date: July 17, 2005
Sent to but not published in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Senator Santorum has been getting a very bad press in the Boston newspapers. He has been described as being insensitive to the victims of priestly abuse and as being stupid for linking that abuse to the liberal culture of Massachusetts. I have a different perspective on his words.

I believe that we should be truly sorry for Senator Santorum. Here is a devout Catholic (or so we are told) who is struggling to reconcile his belief that the Church can do no wrong with his knowledge that Priests in his Church have engaged in the most horrendous of sins (harming little children) and that their acts were facilitated by their supervisor, Cardinal Bernard Law. In trying to deal with that dissonance, he is projecting blame on to the liberal culture of Boston.

Of course, it does not work: priestly abuse of children seems to have been universal in the Catholic church from Newfoundland to San Francisco. Cardinal Law, in my view the true villain, was no Massachusetts liberal. Cardinal Law's decision to turn a blind eye to the actions of the pedophiles came from his misguided sense of duty to the institutional Church rather than choosing to be a good shepherd to his flock. It had nothing to do with liberal Massachusetts.