Personal Aside: Cardinal Roger Mahony Puts Priest Who Refused Communion to Pro-Obama Kmiec on the Carpet…”I Needa Pay Raise!” Jones and the Suffering Needy.

Roger the Dodger.

Roger Cardinal Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, has called the priest who refused to give Communion to pro-Obama Catholic Douglas Kmiec, on the carpet. As many who read this site know, Kmiec, law dean of Pepperdine University, has been dining out with the mainstream media through self-generated publicity since a priest turned him down for Communion because of Kmiec’s support of Obama who not only is pro-abortion but killed the Born Live bill in the Illinois legislature. The bill wold allow babies born alive as result of botched abortions the right to receive nourishment and medical care. By killing the bill, Obama contrasted himself from other pro-abort lawmakers in the U.S. Senate who voted for the same measure. Obama and his wife Michelle, also a lawyer, have stated they favored killing the Born Live bill because they fear it would begin a drive to repeal legalized abortion.

Kmiec who parlayed great legal expertise into a top Justice Department job under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, was passed over for the Supreme Court by both administrations. He surfaced first as a supporter of Mitt Romney for president but when Romney pulled out, changed direction and endorsed Obama. Some of his old law colleagues at Notre Dame law school and Catholic U say the switch was due to his driving ambition to go to the Court, hoping that Obama would name him and that he would be confirmed by a Democratic senate. After announcing his support of Obama, Kmiec was the featured speaker at a dinner of Catholic CEOs in Ventura, California, near Pepperdine. But at Mass prior to the dinner, the celebrant refused to give him Communion. A line following Kmiec stood waiting as the lawyer-professor said, “I think you’re making a mistake, Father” to which the priest said “I don’t think so.”

Kmiec’s wife ran sobbing from the church which caused other wives to whimper sympathetically--but Kmiec turned the refusal into a favorable story about himself with the mainstream media by disclosing it to E. J. Dionne, a pro-abort Catholic columnist for “The Washington Post.” The Dionne story was later picked up by National Public Radio Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg (the reporter who very nearly brought down Clarence Thomas with the Anita Hill story). On NPR Kmiec was interviewed and portrayed himself as a kind of Thomas More in reverse, being pilloried because of his support for Obama.

Now Los Angeles’ liberal prelate has written to the priest summoning him to the chancery to explain his action. Like the late Joseph Cardinal Benardin whom he venerated, Mahony has linked pro-life with other non-related liberal actions. Bernardin performed a signal work for liberal Democrats when he devised, with true Machiavellian savvy, the concept of the “seamless garment.” His staff, far more conversant with biblical analogy than Bernardin who was never educated in a Catholic school until he went to the seminary, took the portion of John’s gospel (John 19-23) where the soldiers cast lots for his garment so they would not have to tear it since “the tunic was seamless, woven in one place from the top.” Bernardin’s chief liberal dialectician and top ideological lefty who turned the USCCB from a trade association of bishops to a supremely politicized liberal force, Fr. Bryan Hehir a staffer at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, took the biblical notation and made it a liberal crusade.

He concocted the theory that he could weaken the strength of the anti-abortion injunction by tying it to a host of liberal goals and calling the entire linkage “seamless.” He took (a) nuclear freeze and (b) anti-death penalty and fused them with (c) pro-life. Ergo: Democratic presidential and congressional candidates could claim a “pro-life” score of 2 out of 3. Hehir was later rewarded for his labors by being named a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award conferring on him a great deal of money tax-free from the MacArthur Foundation run by liberals. He is now, fittingly, chairman of the Department of Divinity at Harvard University.

Following the Hehir model, Roger Mahony, tall, stoop-shouldered with a face adorned by a perpetually glistening anchor-man smile, switched the formula. Since nuclear freeze was off the table, he added immigration rights in addition to anti-death penalty. This fit his immediate political needs since he needed to distract the media from sexual abuse of children in Los Angeles by embracing a cause liberals would rally to. Thus he prepared to fight a House bill that would tighten immigration standards. Mahony, who was born in Hollywood, was shocked…shocked, I tell you!... as a boy of 12 when his father’s poultry processing plant in the San Fernando Valley was raided by law enforcement agents looking for illegal immigrants.

Using Bernardin’s “seamless garment” with pro-illegal immigration as a pretext, Mahony vowed a campaign of civil disobedience in 2005 against the Sensenbrenner-King immigration bill in the archdiocese’s 288 parishes which dealt with illegal enforcement only. Thus the prelate who decided what immigration law he will reject and instructs his flock to disregard is out to punish the priest who concentrated on his right to deny the Eucharist to one who espouses not just abortion but who endorses a candidate who has denied dying babies nutrition and medical care.

In moving to the immigration issue, Mahony (called “Roger the Dodger” by his detractors because he has retained professional p. r. firms to scatter sand in the eyes of those dismayed by his laxity in punishing sexually abusive priests by changing the subject in order to burnish his liberal image) said—unfortunately for him—that since “the sexual abuse thing” has passed and the church has been made safe for children, its leadership can focus on other social issues.

Wha--? The church has been made safe for children? All the while, Mahony had directed a strident legal battle against the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office which has fought for access to the archdiocese’s personnel records to probe possible felony child-molestation charges against as many as 100 priests in Mahony’s diocese. He has fought against access all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court refused to hear the appeal and the archdiocese was forced to comply with a subpoena for letters to former priests and notes from counseling session conducted by the church. Charges have been repeatedly made that Mahony knew that one Oliver O’Grady, a priest who sexuallyu abused children including a 9-month-old baby was a chld molester but failed to keep him away from children. Not long after Mahony, then bishop of Stockton, moved O’Grady to a parish 50 miles east from Stockton where he continued to abuse children, Mahony was promoted to archbishop of Los Angeles. On July 16, 2007, Mahony apologized for abuses by priests after 508 victims reached a settlement worth $660 million.

There is a marked difference between Mahony and the archbishop of Chicago. Here failure to pursue sexually delinquent priests has been a scandal as well—culminated by the promotion of all those who approved or winked figuratively…and literally… at Daniel McCormack. But Mahony is not skilled at parsing, concocting hair-splitting non-distinctions, because he does not have two doctorates. So he must resort to other diversionary tactics like p. r.

One such tactic employed by Mahony to diversify his image in several ways to distract media from the sexual abuse carnage was to build a new cathedral to replace the smaller Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, irreparably damaged by a 1994 earthquake. Called the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, it was designed—not surprisingly—of post-modern architecture so it stands out much as the James R. Thompson center does in the Chicago loop.

The 12-story-high building occupies 5.6 acres and includes a plaza, several gardens and waterfalls with the elaborate rector, the residence of—guess who? Roger the Dodger. It comprises 58,000 square feet, the main sanctuary is 333 feet long, purposely one foot longer than Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Roger’s way of giving the bird to the citadel of the east. A classmate of mine from Saint John’s—a liberal graduate from the classes of Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB-- did a lot of the architecture. The church is composed of acute and obtuse angles; contemporary statuaries of saints portrayed as sticks with ping-pong balls for eyes are replete.

Ah and the appointments. The main brass doors cost $3 million apiece. The altar is a giant slab of Rosso Laguna marble costing $5 million. And then we get to—ta-tah!—the cardinal’s throne $150,000. It must be said that visiting bishops’ thrones also cost $150,000 each so Roger is a democrat with a small “d” as well as capital “D.” Oh yes, each bronze chandelier cost $150,000. The new cathedral, built to change the subject and elevate Roger the Dodger, cost $189 million including a $39 million overrun. It is noteworthy that the Catholic Worker movement, dedicated to the poor, picketed the cathedral because it represented so much excess. Didn’t bother Roger the Lodger.

From his august $150,000 throne can Roger the Dodger excoriate those who are unfeeling about illegal immigrants’ rights. It is to this enormous palisade that Roger the Dodger…a Prince of the Church… called the errant priest who dared to deny Communion to a defector who is hustling Catholic votes for Barack Obama.

You ask: is this Church divine? It has to be--to survive people like Roger the Dodger as it has so many others before even Thomas Cranmer.

“I Needa Pay Raise” Jones.

While the supine Chicago media trembles rather than criticize his porcine, trough-groveling excesses, the Democratic president of the Illinois State Senate, Emil (“I Needa Pay Raise”) Jones, this gravely-voiced ex-sewer worker who is Obama’ political godfather is engaged in starving Illinois social services rather than call his membership back to Springfield. Why? Because to do so would put Senate Democrats on the spot, forcing them to either vote for their exorbitant pay raise or turn it down.

Thus in only one social service agency alone, there will be a reduction of $4 million beginning next Monday with the hardest hit being the poor seeking detoxification treatment and recocovery. More than 13% of trained workers will have to be furloughed, hundreds of deserving clients will have to be turned away despite the fact that there are from 200 to 300 on waiting lists on any given day.

It matters little to the insultingly arrogant “I Needa Pay Raise” Jones who will wait it out in Chicago, his comfortable living and that of his wife fortified by the taxpayers…and ratified by a deceived, bloc, one-party electorate which is as brow-beaten and hoodwinked as those who were by Papa Doc and Idi Amin. And the sad part is that given the bloc, lock-step, mindless voting in Chicago, this usurper will be enabled to spend his entire life at the tax-dollar slop bucket while far away the cool, Redeemer of Our Uninformed Lives, Lord of the Seas whose political godson he is…The One who has said “we are the change we have called for!”—use of the royal “we”… spins his gossamer tale to a bug-eyed media, all the while The One is unconcerned with his Big Daddy’s appalling degradation of the legislative process.