Last week Cardinal Donald Wuerl lodged a complaint against me
with my editors at TAS, via his communications director,
Chieko Noguchi, after my
article, “Cardinal Wuerl’s Dereliction of
Duty,” appeared.
This is pretty much what I expected. Wuerl is notoriously
thin-skinned about sharp criticism from orthodox Catholics. And
since he likes to operate in the shadows — confrontation is “not
his style of pastoral ministry,” he told a reporter in 2007 — he
had his paid PR agent do the dirty work for him. Say this for Tod
Tamberg, Cardinal Roger Mahony’s former spokesman: he at least
wrote
a straightforward letter to the editor denouncing me after I
criticized the former Los Angeles prelate. Two, actually. In the
first, Tamberg dismissed me as a “medievalist,” which should give
you a sense of the low esteem in which Mahony holds the age of
Aquinas. In the second, Tamberg accused me of sloppiness while
botching the spelling of my last name.
But as I say, at least he put pen to paper. Ms. Noguchi,
perhaps reflecting the style of her boss, prefers to create
troubles for me by phone.
Go ahead and do damage to me in this city, Cardinal Wuerl.
I don’t care. I will not surrender one inch to PC prelates like
yourself who punish dutiful priests while pandering to the enemies
of the Church.
This moronic controversy, triggered by a self-described
practicing “lesbian Buddhist” who effortlessly mau-maued Cardinal
Wuerl into a craven apology and trumped-up “administrative leave”
order to Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, is a grotesque farce beyond the
satirical imagination of Evelyn Waugh.
I petition the Holy See — if anyone happens to read
TAS there — for urgent relief. This scandal is sickening.
Cardinal Wuerl has damaged the reputation of a faithful priest,
exposed the Holy Eucharist to sacrilege, scandalized confused
congregants, and handed a propaganda victory to forces of
secularism that seek to destroy the Church in America.
Knowing Cardinal Wuerl, he will probably write to allies
at the Vatican after this column appears. That was his practice in
Pittsburgh, where he served before arriving in D.C. In 1994, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Wuerl, whenever he
saw criticism of his heterodoxy appear in a conservative
publication like the Wanderer, would move into
action:
If The Wanderer or a letter-writer attacks him, Wuerl
doesn’t wait for Rome to send him an inquiry. He immediately writes
to the appropriate Vatican office, enclosing a copy of the Wanderer
article and full documentation on any diocesan program in
question.
This ”shows that our teaching material here is absolutely
orthodox. But the second purpose is to show that there are a lot of
irresponsible statements made, and they need to be accepted as just
that,” he said.
Wuerl doesn’t believe that Vatican officials take The
Wanderer and its like seriously.
”I have never received an inquiry from Rome based on that
type of accusation. If (Vatican officials) were taking it
seriously, I think they would raise some questions,” he
said.
But not all bishops are as savvy as
Wuerl, said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit
political scientist who makes his living studying the
bishops.
“Wuerl is sophisticated. He understands the Vatican, he
knows who to talk to. The bishop who has never worked in Rome
probably doesn’t know which office to respond to — and the people
in Rome don’t know him. Wuerl is known and respected in Rome. When
(conservative pressure groups) start accusing him, they lose their
credibility,” Reese said.
Did you notice the source of that last quote — Fr. Thomas
Reese? He is the openly heterodox Jesuit ninny who had the gall to
say that Wuerl should send Fr. Guarnizo back to the gulag. “If I
was Cardinal Wuerl, I’d buy him a one-way ticket to Moscow,” the
Rolodexed Reese said to a purring press.
Perhaps non-Catholic readers of TAS, who have
stayed with this column up to this paragraph, are wondering why
they should even care about Wuerl’s fiasco. Isn’t this just one
more tedious sectarian squabble in the Church? I agree with you
that it is boring, but it is not trivial. As pretentious as it
sounds, these skirmishes form small battles in a larger war that
affects everyone. Both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans, whether
they realize it or not, benefit from a free and orthodox
Catholic Church for a very basic reason: it stands as the
era’s last major barrier to the triumph of the coercive secular
state.
The capitulations of the Wuerls to the atheistic agitprop
artists of the age — the “lesbian Buddhist” at the center of this
controversy stands as a symbol of them all — hasten the
disintegration of that barrier. Without it, the coercive state will
simply replace God, and all Americans will wake up one day to find
this pitiless secular deity on their doorsteps, red in the tooth
and clause of Obamacare, ravenous for their freedom.
