Foot-Shooting

If Bishop Kicanas didn’t have enough problems today, it turns out that the Rainbow Sash Movement (the craziest of Catholic heretics) has endorsed him, suggesting that:

We understand Bishop Kicanas understands that Bishops are privately changing their position because input is bubbling up from the pews of our parishes in support of such issues as Gay Marriage, and Pro Choice.

The not to distant past situation at Notre Dame was an attempt on the part of some fundamentalist Bishops to make a hard turn to the right in general, and the Tea Party in particular. The end goal was to turn Catholic support away from President Obama. Bishop Kicanas voice during this difficult situation called for moderation, and listening.

Leaving aside RSM’s nearly-unreadable grasp of the English language, the group seems to be suggesting that (a) there are a group of bishops who are secretly pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, and that (b) Kicanas is either sympathetic to, or at least not fiercely opposed to, this camp.  This is probably not the message Kicanas was hoping for on the eve of his (probable) election to USCCB president, and it’s accompanied by an unpleasant juxtaposition of a picture of Kicanas and a picture of a rainbow sash.

You would almost expect this to have been a press release issued by someone who truly hated Kicanas — it smears other bishops (including Archbishop Chaput and and Dolan, by name) as “Fundamentalist,” suggesting a grasp of Fundamentalism about as strong as their grasp of English (hint: the term doesn’t just mean “bad”).  And as the quoted potion of the release shows, RSM’s lens of this all is strictly political. The only reason that Catholics might oppose abortion, or gay marriage, or a pro-choice president speaking at the flagship American Catholic university, or reform of the CCHD, or any other thoroughly Catholic concept,  is because they want the Catholic Church to be more like the Tea Party, and because they hate Obama.  There’s no sense of Jesus Christ being the Truth, and having imbued one Institution with that Truth once and for all.  Everything’s up for grabs, and everything’s political.

In other news, supposedly-Fundamentalist Tea-Partier Archbishop Dolan gave a homily last week dedicated to Servant of God Dorothy Day, the radical Catholic social activist who Glenn Beck famously derided as a “Marxist.”