As a young boy, I lived less than one block from our local public grade school. Since I could walk there each day, this meant that the only time I boarded a school bus was for the once-weekly ride to St. Ann’s Catholic Church for “release time” education classes, where I would learn about the tenets of my faith.
Like many young men, I served as an altar boy, participated in CYO sports and summer camps, rounding things off with one year at a Catholic high school. Suffice it to say that the lessons learned through these experiences provided clarity about what was right and what was wrong, and a template within which I could, ideally, make right choices.
Being much older now, it is looking more and more like that time spent memorizing the Ten Commandments and absorbing the Church’s teachings on appropriate behavior was a waste of my time.
Yes, things have changed over the years in the Catholic church … I often think of George Carlin’s response upon learning that we could eat meat on Friday: “What about all the people doing time on the meat rap?” Carlin was a comedian, of course, but there was nothing humorous in Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s recent observation that Donald Trump “takes his Christian faith seriously.”
What the hell? I mean … really … what the actual hell?
Was Dolan talking about THAT Donald Trump? The man whose personal choices and actions over the years have left many of us slack-jawed? Is this the individual who Dolan would hold up before the faithful as a paragon of virtue?
One way to measure a person’s character is to consider whether we can comfortably tell a child … “be like him” … or “be like her.” In the case of Donald Trump, how many of us can say that? Given what we know of his character, I suspect that few of us … with the obvious exception of Cardinal Timothy Dolan … would be able to point to Trump as a moral touchstone for our children.
This screed, by the way, has nothing to do Trump’s politics or policies … those have been, and will continue to be, discussed at length and with great vigor elsewhere. Instead, this is about a Catholic leader lauding someone who he sees as a moral icon worthy of emulation, while many of us are left to wonder at how far the Church has strayed from what we understood to be its teachings on rightness and morality.
I realize that both my knowledge and practice of religion are rudimentary and even elementary. I do not, after all, possess the wisdom or intellectual horsepower to make a nuanced theological argument about those things I have believed to be bedrock principles of the Catholic Church. Apparently, I have a lot to learn.
At some level, Cardinal Dolan’s identifying Donald Trump as someone who “takes his Christian faith seriously,” is but one more example of Catholic leaders being, at the very least, poor judges of character. As evidence, one need look no further than the many pedophile clergy who were recruited, trained, ordained and then assigned to priestly duties where they sexually abused children before being transferred elsewhere to continue their evil deeds.
There is a word for those among us who profess to have particular moral beliefs but behave in ways that are not sincere. That word is hypocrite.
Shame on you, Cardinal Dolan.
DanBonBooks 