UNITED STATES
Esquire
By Charles P. Pierce
Don’t you just hate it when you’re all set to go on a really cool vacation, and you’ve got the flights booked, and the room facing the ocean reserved, and the wine is already chilling in anticpiation of your arrival, and then something comes up at work and gets all in the way?
Cardinal Dolan is one of two American cardinals who are being deposed in sexual abuse lawsuits this week, and who plan to travel to Rome next week in advance of the proceedings to elect the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, who stunned the world last week with the announcement that he was resigning effective Feb. 28. The other American is Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the retired archbishop of Los Angeles. He is expected to be deposed on Saturday in Los Angeles, and he has been under fire since the court-ordered release last month of 12,000 pages of internal church files revealing his role in shielding accused priests from the law.
Dolan’s bad enough. He’s been the point cleric in the phony “religious freedom” campaign against the Affordable Care Act because it is oppression on a Diocletian scale to allow the Presbyterian scrubwomen in the employ of Catholic institutions to get ladyparts medicine of which several dead popes did not approve.
(I am not kidding, one of the arguments that poor, dithering Paul VI actually took seriously prior to publishing Humanae Vitae, the justifiably ignored encyclical banning artificial birth control, was that, if he took the advice of his own commission and reversed the Church’s policy, then he would be intimating that many of his defunct predecessors were…wrong! The Faithful would be scandalized! Actually, the Faithful ignored a claque of meddling celibates went right on fking without the possible transmission of life — which is to say, for the fun of it.)
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