The Bishop's Butter

And the Remarginalization of the Immigrant Church

All Bishops work for and in strict obedience to a Foreign Sovereign who sits in a Foreign Government in a Foreign Country: the Holy See- a very small country with a population less than the size of the District of Columbia in central Italy. They should dictate our US national health policy? Don't get me wrong, I love most of them and especially love all things Italian- but get serious.

The notion that the Bishops speak from an untainted neutral non-interested perspective is at best interesting. The Bishops run multimillion dollar businesses called Parishes in this country. They buy health insurance for their employees, they run million dollar church renovation projects, they exist on investments from properties and donations-and large monied donors get special treatment, considerations and preference. They are part of guilds and clubs and parish councils. They can get people disinvited as speakers, kicked out of parishes and dictate what policies should be. Bishops can be viewed as front men for the hands that feed them; The large monied donors tend to be folks who profit off the current status quo in industrial and economic policy. They got rich that way. There is a built in natural leaning toward preservation of wealth -so as to not bite the hand that feeds you. Bishops know on which side of the bread they can scrape the butter.

By coming out with statements that can be construed as flatly intellectually suspect such as there is insufficient protection for the unborn in the Health Care legislation in order to 'kill the bill' which attempts an entire reworking of the health care status quo, when others flatly disagree with the wording and intent, raises serious questions regarding what the real motivation of the Bishops might be and whom they are catering to. In short, they marginalize themselves.

Recall that Benedict, while Cardinal Ratzinger, interjected himself in an American election by writing an Op Ed for the Wall Street Journal to protect the status quo in favor of Bush's re-election stating essentially that anyone who voted for Kerry was a "co-operator with evil" because of the abortion question in 2004. We know now that a vote for Kerry would have likely spared the lives directly of thousands of US soldiers in Iraq, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqis, and saved the mental health and limbs of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and billions lost in the treasury as we borrowed from the Chinese to debt finance the war-a posture that is now killing our economy. Did Ratzinger at the time do a comprehensive monetary, fiscal policy analysis regarding war finance, did he see war intelligence, did he know that there was a basis morally for the Iraq invasion? No- he just took one issue and determined that the greater 'evil' was the abortion question. Bush should never have been re-elected (some believe that he wasn't really and it was trompe d'oeil of computerized voting finagling and classic suppression tricks in the Rove play book.) Ratzinger at the time should not have interjected himself into the election with such an ill-conceived piece, designed to throw an election by tilting the catholic vote.

The American people are not as easily duped this time. The church has marginalized its authority by the insane sex scandals bankrupting entire diocese in America, the pathetically lame response to it (just get mad dog women insurance defense attorneys to get the settlement numbers as low as possible and make the insurance companies pay for it) refusal to look honestly at basic policies that are in direct disobedience to Scripture and the Spirit (see note on married priests below) and other abusive actions
taken to protect the institution at the expense of it's mission and mandate, and in some cases, it's own people.

Here is where you can hear the angels chanting "Thank God for the Jesuits."

The conclusion- take the Bishop's statements for what they are- statements by employees of a Foreign Government that should have the same weight as if employees of the Embassy of Spain or Bulgaria issued a statement saying "We don't think the language says x,y, or z." OK. You are entitled. We Do. NEXT.

The Bishops; Far from infallible.
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/pope-apologizes-to-irish-catholics-and-orders-vatican-probe/19407680