{"id":3158,"date":"2006-04-13T08:24:37","date_gmt":"2006-04-13T08:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/critiquing-cardinal-mahony.html"},"modified":"2006-04-13T08:24:37","modified_gmt":"2006-04-13T08:24:37","slug":"critiquing-cardinal-mahony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/critiquing-cardinal-mahony.html","title":{"rendered":"Critiquing Cardinal Mahony"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Enterprise Online:<\/a><\/p>\n

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But a Cardinal ought not to regard himself as an ordinary political actor. Mahony ought to have thought about two other consequences of his gesture. First, by implicitly comparing the Church to those at whom the law is really directed, he gives the brazenly cynical traffickers in humanity moral and political cover. They\u2019re simply humanitarians, they can say, just like their brothers and sisters in the Church. Second, by loudly encouraging defiance of this law, he\u2019s undermining respect for law altogether, as well as for the regular process by which law is made. If in fact he and his colleagues recognize the rights and responsibilities of sovereign nations, then they should be careful to acknowledge and uphold the legitimate role of legislators, as well as the duty of citizens to obey the law.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Don\u2019t get me wrong. I don\u2019t mean to deny that there is a higher\u2014or natural\u2014law, in the light of which ordinary legislation can be judged. I\u2019m quarreling with Cardinal Mahony\u2019s cheap tactical deployment of it, and the casual defiance of law that it inevitably encourages.<\/p>\n

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Neumayr:<\/a><\/p>\n

Mahony’s de facto calls for civil disobedience on immigration would be more persuasive if it could be demonstrated that he understood the natural-law basis for the distinction between a just and an unjust law. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence of this; indeed, it is ironic that a famously modernist bishop like Mahony, who normally treats the concept of natural law as a pre-Vatican II relic<\/a>, suddenly cites it when justifying illegal immigration.<\/p>\n

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And anybody who thinks Mahony is a sincere advocate for civil disobedience should talk to protesting pro-lifers: Squeamish about getting too close to them, Mahony won’t even let them collect signatures for ballot propositions on his parishes’ property. Notice, too, that he now speaks of compassion as more important than law \u2014 but when common sense and basic compassion dictated that he cooperate with the authorities in protecting children from pedophile priests, he didn’t, arguing that his understanding of the law didn’t technically require cooperation. <\/p>\n

Michael Baker, an ex-priest caught molesting children, has testified<\/a> about Mahony’s hypocritical brand of I’m-above-the-law clericalism, recounting that after he offered to turn himself in to the police, Mahony’s chancery lawyer said, "Should we call the police now?" And Mahony’s response was, according to Baker, "No, no, no." Mahony then assigned Baker \u2014 over the subsequent 14 years \u2014 to several parishes near schools and children. <\/p>\n

….<\/p>\n

Standing against the law, in other words, comes easily to Mahony \u2014 not because he grasps a higher law, but because his self-indulgent liberalism is essentially lawless. His left-wing clericalism means that he can ignore justly enacted positive laws with the same casualness with which he ignores inconvenient parts of canon law. <\/p>\n

I had to laugh when I heard last week that he in effect called on Los Angeles Catholics to "fast" and "pray" that amnesty be extended to illegal immigrants. This is a cardinal who normally considers such practices ultramontane burdens \u2014 a cardinal who waives Holy Days of Obligation when they fall too close to Sunday, because he doesn’t want the faithful to suffer the agony of going to church twice within three days. Yet to advance his chic liberalism he will harness the power of old-time piety and invoke weighty Catholic language he usually dismisses as too sectarian. The Church, he proudly harrumphs<\/a> against a phantom threat, "is not in a position of negotiating the spiritual and the corporal works of mercy" \u2014 a phrase I’ve never heard him utter before<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Enterprise Online: But a Cardinal ought not to regard himself as an ordinary political actor. Mahony ought to have thought about two other consequences of his gesture. First, by implicitly comparing the Church to those at whom the law is really directed, he gives the brazenly cynical traffickers in humanity moral and political cover.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCritiquing Cardinal Mahony - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/critiquing-cardinal-mahony.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Critiquing Cardinal Mahony - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"American Enterprise Online: But a Cardinal ought not to regard himself as an ordinary political actor. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}