However, sometimes the administrators of our Church fail so gigantically that we absolutely, positively have to go after them, "hammer and tongs," just for the sake of God's Church.
In the past, I have publicly blasted the bishops and priests on the Church for running a 50-year-long operation in which bishops, with written recommendations, would send priests known to the bishops to be highly promiscuous boy-grabbing gay wolves to unwary parishes where, again and again and again, they would grab and seduce new young male victims and engage in anal and oral copulation with them.
Well, it's time to go after them for something else.
By focusing-in on the sins of Peter, the New Testament prepares us for the fact that the leaders of God's Church would be the same kind of evil morons who end up running everything else.
But sometimes these guys just make you want to scream.
I am Roman Catholic, of course, but my wife is Jewish.
Years ago, before the Church dissolved St. Gregory's Parish in Magnolia, New Jersey, the pastor Msgr. Edward Korda, knowing that I have a Jewish wife, put his hand on my shoulder one Sunday as we prepared for Sunday Mass in the sacristy (where I was his lector) and came close to me and in a furtive manner and with a quiet voice he said something like, "Do you think that the Church can survive with so many damn Jews running so many of our social institutions?"
I was astonished. I thought, "This guy left his brains back in Nazi Germany!"
When the Church is even a little bit anti-semitic, it connects itself to this achievement of the European Christians who went along with the Nazi program ...
I answered, "Monsignor, do you really think that I am going to conspire with you against my Jewish wife, her Jewish family, and the Jewish community? Nope. After Mass, I'm going home and tell her what you just said to me!"
Well, it just happened again.
At midnight Mass on Christmas, 2014, Fr. Mark Cavagnaro, pastor of Our Lady of Hope Church in Blackwood, New Jersey, gave a homily on how the coming of Jesus in the humble context of a manger in the rural outskirts of Bethlehem is analogous to the marvelous Eucharist in the humble appearances of a little wafer of bread and wine.
He introduced that subject with what I call "a two-gift skit." In his little one-man "skit," he had two wrapped "gifts." One was a beautifully wrapped box, that contained only a pencil. The other was a cloth bag, that contained a marvelous gold watch.
Here is how his "skit" began, as best as I can describe it ...
"Look!" he said, "Here are two gifts just given to me, in this box and in this bag! Let me open them, right here, at Mass! First, I have this beautifully-wrapped box. The wrapping paper is wonderful. In fact, I think that the colors of the wrapping paper on the box look like the colors of Hannukah!"
And then he opened the box and what was inside? "A pencil," he said with a disappointed tone of voice as he held up the pencil.
In other words, Jews are cheap, and he got the pencil from a cheap Jew. I and my wife and our children all heard it and apprehended his meaning. I thought, "What???!!! WHAT???!!! Has he flipped???!!! What is he doing, inserting anti-semitism into a Christmas homily???!!!"
Here is the kicker: As Fr. Cavagnaro publicly implicitly reviled Jews to a church packed with about 1,000 Catholics attending Mass, apparently for no good reason except the pleasure it gave him to cultivate hatred for Jews, about 20 yards to his left my Jewish wife was sitting in the church choir, where she had been working as one of Fr. Cavagnaro's singers at Mass for a year.
She has been doing this because she loves God, she loves me, and she loves people.
In addition to singing at Mass once a week, my wife attends choir practice on Monday nights, and practices virtually every other night of the week.
My Jewish wife's Catholic family and a Catholic daughter-in-law were all sitting in the pews, watching proudly as she sang her heart out for Fr. Cavagnaro.
And then they heard Fr. Cavagnaro, like some Nazi supporter, sneeringly implicitly revile her and her Judaism out of the blue!
I felt like saying, "What? Priests aren't emptying the churches out fast enough for you with homosexual assaults on boys? You want to speed up the exodus even faster with anti-semitism?"
God save us and the Church from these morons leading it!
Rise` is getting so good at understanding the way I operate and at trusting in God to make sure that that which appears bad for God's people is frequently turned-around by clever God into becoming a rat-trap for evil that she detected that I didn't say something about that Mass, in my article, on purpose, so that God could do His work. i apologize that I can't tell you about it. here, until I get confirmation that the trap caught the rat.
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