Personal Aside: Burris Should Resign but He Won’t…They Kicked Burke Upstairs but He Won’t Shut Up! Former St. Louis Archbishop Needles U. S. Bishops.

Burris Won’t.

Watching the nervous, perspiring Roland Burris gesticulate before news conferences convinces me that he should resign…but he won’t. Gov. Pat Quinn should urge Burris to quit…but he won’t. Reason: the monolithic black voting bloc which pulls enormous weight in the party would not stand for it. If Quinn said that, the Reverend Jesse Jetstream would be on stage in a minute shouting rhyming couplets…and the blond white, wanna-be black priest Michael Pfleger would be there as well.

Who should run on the Republican side for the Senate in 2010? Should be Peter Roskam.

Burke Won’t Shut Up.

Just as a legion of U.S. presidents have been bedeviled by the inflexible federal bureaucracy whose bottom line is to endure and persist, Popes have often seen their wishes altered by the in-place curia…an institutionally impervious cushion of undesirable fat which all too often smothers pontiffs’ intent. No sooner was Saint Louis’ Archbishop Raymond Burke making great headway in his archdiocese and building an enviable record in behalf of authentic Catholic leadership than voila he was “promoted” to the Vatican. The Roman p. r. factory made it sound like he was installed at the right hand of Benedict with something known as the prefecture of the Apostolic Signatura—which few had heard of—but it turns out to be a glorified marriage court…the only advantage being that in good time the occupant gets a red hat.

It is a measure of the alacrity and fastidiousness with which the Curia handles its duties that thus far there has not been a successor to Burke in Saint Louis. Odds are that the delay is to let the vigor and refreshing candor of Burke be forgotten until the successor…a parsing, on-one-hand-then-the-other…is named. If they name a gutsy one, scratch the foregoing: but don’t count on it.

But from his berth in Rome, it is to his credit that Burke won’t shut up. Not long ago he put out an interview with LifeSiteNews.com that singled out a document issued by the U.S. Catholic bishops…and you know who heads that magnificent assembly…which Burke says is responsible for misleading 54% of Catholics who voted for the “most pro-abortion president” in U. S. history. The jibe by Burke is right so far as it goes but since relatively few Catholics go to Sunday Mass…directly attributable to the lethargy of the bishops and insouciant priests…whether a dull, parsing document is responsible is problematic. But there is no doubt that the document reflects the heavily perfumed hand of the most politically liberal of the bishops, a friend of the Kennedys, one who willfully withheld the gist of Ratzinger’s letter on pro-life, withheld it in order to protect his Democratic buddies: Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, retired of Washington, D. C.

It doesn’t matter that McCarrick is retired. With the unutterable weakness of the bishops’ organization he’s a lively liberal Democratic mole who has a lot to say and who deftly shaped the document while the leadership was fastidiously pursing its lips and talking like doctoral candidates. You have to hand it to McCarrick who is an old-line lefty ideologue and who totally outclasses and outmaneuvered the bishops’ leadership. In watering down the draft, he worked with the bishops’ number two—Bishop Gerald Kicanas. Kicanas, of Chicago, an ex-Quigley and Mundelein administrator, is noted for saying to the “Sun-Times” that he was more worried about Dan McCormack’s excessive drinking than his fooling around with boys…adding that if he had to do it all over he’d still ordain McCormack who is serving time in prison for child abuse. Everyone associated with the McCormack scandal in the Chicago archdiocese was been promoted in Chicago…Kicanas moving up to auxiliary bishop, then to Tucson, then to number two in the hierarchy of U. S. bishops.

As someone noted for the use of balanced, nicey-nice ecclesial language reflective of his two Ph.Ds once said “it makes you want to weep.”

What did the straight-talking Burke say about the document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” that was distributed during the 2008 election? He cited the fact that the piece said that under certain circumstances a Catholic could in good conscience vote for a candidate who supports abortion because of “other grave reasons,” so long as they did not intend to support that pro-abortion position. This is exactly the rationale that the Kennedys…Bobby and Teddy…employed when they paid off two hireling theologians to rationalize how to square Hyannisport with the social left as outlined in “The Faithful Departed” written by Philip Lawler.

The bishops’ document “led to confusion” among Catholics, said Burke. “While it stated that the issue of life was the first and most important issue, it went on in some specific areas to say `but there are other issues’ that are of comparable importance without making distinctions,” he said. He cited an article by a priest and ethics expert of the Saint Louis archdiocese, Msgr. Kevin McMahon, who analyzed how the bishops’ document actually contributed to the election of Obama terming its proposal “a kind of false thinking that says “there’s the evil in the taking an innocent and defenseless human life but there are other evils and they’re worthy of equal consideration.”’”

Burke continued, “But they’re not. The economic situation or opposition to the war in Iraq or whatever it may be, those things don’t rise to the same level as something that is always and everywhere evil, namely the killing of innocent and defenseless human life.”

Sitting in his high-domed office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at liberal, secular Georgetown University where he is a counselor, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick is right at home among the Georgetown intelligentsia.