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	The Case of the Kidnapped Cardinal By Raymond Schroth NJ.com March 20, 2008 http://blog.nj.com/njv_ray_schroth/2008/03/the_case_of_the_kidnapped_card.html Perhaps you remember the story, reported here some months ago, of how President Bush, kidnapped by Iranians, was interrogated in Tehran for two months, after which he confessed to a long list of crimes, from starting the Iraq War to assassinating John F. Kennedy. His captors maintained that he was not torturned, since they merely followed the methods of the CIA. A similar story broke recently in Los Angeles. Roger Cardinal Mahony, longtime LA archbishop, was kidnapped by a conspiracy of liberation theologians and flown to a secret camp in Ciapas, Mexico, where he was put on public trial, televised worldwide, for his sins. The interrogation was brutal: they showed him filmed testimony from the victims of sexual abuse where he had covered up the crimes by shifting abusing priests from one parish to another. The jury of retired Latin Amreican bishops found him guilty, and the judge condemned him to "become a Christian." At that, the Mexican army burst into rescue the Cardinal and klled everyone else. Back in LA the impact of the experience sunk in. Mahony realized that, by playing the role of a CEO controlled by big LA money interests who had paid for his 190 million dollar new cathedral, he had forgotten how to be a pastor of the people. He set out to bring the church to the public, moved into a tiny apartment, approved of women and married priets, went in with Michael Moore to do a documentary on the new, independent American Catholic Church. In the course of the turmoil, Pope Benedict XVI turns out to be a reasonable man, and on the last page the Cardinal is . . . But I don't want to ruin the story. Cardinal Mahony is, of course, a novel (Humble-bee Press) -- part satire, part editorial -- by veteran Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser, in which the fictionalized Mahony is a symbol, a metaphor for what, in Kaiser's vision, the church most needs. Fundamentally it is a traditional conversion story, a fairy tale about the prince who disguises himself as an ordinary person -- like Shakespeare's King Henry V, who, hooded, converses by the campfire on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, as the plain soldiers raise questions about the kings who lead their citizens to death in a dubious cause. Or, more appropriately in this case, the "prince and the pauper" theme in several Mark Twain stories, where rich and poor exchange identities and the rich guy, confronted with social injustuce, realizes what a fool he has been all these years. American Catholics are disposed to respect their bishops. But when the bishops lag behind the other religions and the rest of the secular society on a major public moral issue, we wonder. As I reported two weeks ago, a group of ecumenical religious leaders sent President Bush a letter, already circulated in another form, which called upon him to sign, not veto, the bill which would require the CIA to accept the same limitations on torture as the U. S. Army. The Catholic Church held back from signing the group protest, and, I am told by their spokesperson that Francis Cardinal George, head of the American bishops, sent a private letter to Bush on that topic. Bush vetoed the bill. I have checked the Catholic Press Association website for the last month looking for any mention of the Cardinal's protest letter. A purely private letter to a president is useless as a moral teaching device. We already know that Bush favors water-boarding and other forms of "interrogation techniques" condemned by international law and basic natural law, to which the Church is supposed to be devoted. Only a public protest educates the public and puts political pressure on the president to change his course. The American Catholic hierarchy does not seem to want to confront Bush on torture. If they did, I would be reading anti-torture articles in the Catholic papers on my desk -- the Brooklyn Tablet, the Newark Advocate, and Catholic New York -- bishops and cardinals would call press conferences and send letters to be read from the pulpit. But somehow torture is not a big moral issue? And this is Holy Week. In the rituals of the church, Jesus is arrersted after dinner with his friends, dragged before courts, slapped with false accusations, beaten, stripped naked, whipped, crowned with thorns, and ridiculed by his accusers as he dies on the cross.
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