Readable NCR Article!

Will he deliver? Archbishop Cordileone.

If there is one chap among the degenerated crowd of the so-called National Catholic Reporter (aka the Fishwrap) who can be read, it is Mr John L Allen.  Whilst it is not clear why the man still writes for said Fishwrap (we must all live some way, I suppose) it is clear he is used by the NCR to smuggle the idea that they be, in a way, Catholic. Which is, of course, tragically wrong.

Be it as it may, Mr Allen has an interesting contribution about some new (arch)episcopal nominations in the US, which have lately fallen on the more conservative side.

This can obviously not have been the work of the Pope, as the good man sees his German Bishops and Cardinals openly embracing heresy every day without even moving his Kleinfinger. Neither seems this to be the work of Cardinal Ouellet, as under his tenure there has been no notable improvement in the average quality of the appointments (and already there are rumours Monsignor Gaenswein will be pushed upstairs; I wonder what his pastoral credentials are). Similarly, Cardinal Dolan must be clearly excluded on the ground of his now abundantly proved cowardice in the face of the enemy.

It seems, therefore, at least realistic that Mr Allen is right when he says Cardinal Burke, who is also a member of the Congregation for bishops, might have been the driving force behind the recent, rather pugnacious US appointments, and it is clear particularly the appointment of Cordileone to San Francisco is an indication of some storm taking shape above the Bay.

Having said that, I would wait before uncorking the champagne, because Cordileone (who is not entirely immune from criticism himself, at least if his positions on death penalty and illegal immigration are the ones Allen implies) might well show he has less of a lion’s heart (Cordileone can be read as an archaism or dialectal expression for Lionheart in Italian) than expected. Whilst there is no doubting the fundamental soundness of the man (I have written about him in the past, and am glad there are still (arch)bishops like him; he is also a stout friend of the Mass of the Ages), whether he will have the guts to do what there is to do in the San Francisco’s circle of hell is a different matter altogether.

In my eyes,  the Archbishop of San Francisco is expected to excommunicate Nancy Pelosi and those like her if he wants to really set the pace, and leave a mark whilst doing it; nothing less will, in my eyes, do and nothing less could create that huge media echo which alone can force the American Catholic to look in the mirror and decide whose side they’re on.

Will the new Archbishop have the guts to do it? I doubt, and I would be very glad to be surprised.

Will the Archbishop be able to be really effective without recurring to the extreme measure of the excommunication? I doubt that too, and whilst he might partially succeed in some way, I think criticism which falls short of publicly severing Mrs Pelosi’ public tie to Catholicism will not have the effectiveness we need.

In short, I do expect Cordileone to have a different tone than his very ineffective and weak predecessor (Archbishop Niederauer; another Benedict XVI’s appointment and carved out of the same wood), but I doubt he will be willing to deliver the all-out fall-out Mr Allen seems to indicate with his  supposed “no retreat, no surrender” stance.

Cardinal Dolan is already working actively at the retreat & surrender preparations should the need for it arise, and I somehow can’t imagine  Cordileone marching almost alone (Chaput come to mind; Vasa of course, a pupil of Bruskewitz; but not many others) on the path of orthodoxy.

We shall see. For the moment, I do think we’ll have Nancy Pelosi wreaking havoc in San Francisco for as long as we will have sodomite masses in new York; courtesy of Cardinal Dolan.

Mundabor