UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Headline at USA Today site yesterday: “SF Prelate Jokes about DUI Charge at Installation.”
Because what’s funnier, after all, than operating a vehicle when you’re drunk? At night. On busy streets in a major city. With your elderly mother and a yet to be identified young man in the car.
Ha ha ha funny.
As someone who lost a good friend to a drunk driver several days after that friend retired–a drunk driver who had previously killed a teenager in another lethal accident when he was driving while intoxicated–I tend to hear these “jokes” with a certain revulsion in the pit of my stomach.
So. We American Catholics now have an archbishop of a major American city, San Francisco, who is not only arrested for DUI within weeks before his installation, but who has the temerity, the unmitigated gall–the total lack of grace and class–to joke about his criminal actions and his arrest.
But we also have a sitting bishop in another major American city, Kansas City, who’s still sitting there on his episcopal throne, undisturbed in his exercise of office, after his criminal conviction for protecting a priest in his charge who possessed child pornography. As Patrick Wall rightly observes in his latest posting about Finn and Kansas City, we American Catholics appear to be living in a church of bishops gone wild.
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