Thoughts While Shaving: Remember, Keep Your Hands in Prayerful Fold While the Basket is Passed for CCHD…Bowing and Scraping to Royalty…Hynes vs. McKenna—a Dead Heat in Boring.

Hands Folded—And Away from Your Checkbook.

Shortly a plea will be made from all Catholic altars in the archdiocese in behalf of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development…together with the attest that the CCHD has repented its Alinsky-supporting ways. Don’t believe it. The attitude to take when the basket is passed is prayerful with your hands clasped together and eyes uplifted in prayer that someday our hierarchy may come to understand what true social justice is: that it is not supporting malcontents striving to upend the system but the truly helpless: like the unborn who should be first and foremost in any crusade to remedy inequity.

There are two charities that I have been involved with. Both help the poor and dispossessed to help themselves. One is Catholic-sponsored. It is called The Port and I taught English as a second language there. It serves for the most part Hispanic families—not only providing the sustenance for living but also training the poor on computers so they may be able to get jobs. Not a hotbed of revolutionary thought—just imparting self-service to the poor. The second is not a Catholic charity although it was founded by a Catholic priest—Haymarket Center which equips people to fight insidious addiction to drink and drugs and which serves as a haven for pregnant women and their toddlers…giving them shelter…seeing that the pregnant women deliver drug-free babies.

There are many outlets for the CCHD if it wishes to find them.

Obama’s Deferential Bow to Royalty No Mistake.

Once not long ago Barack Obama was caught by the photographer doing a slight bow to Middle Eastern royalty which was excused by his press staff. This time…in Japan…there was no mistake—almost as if Obama decided to stick it to the American people: “Catch this! I’m going to bow from the waist in as exaggerated a deferential motion as I can without falling on my head.” It is the equivalent of giving an uplifted finger to our traditions of republican (small “r”) virtues.

Hynes vs, McKenna Would Lull the Fireside to Sleep.

There is very little chance of this happening, I suppose, but if the primaries produced the twin candidacies for governor of Dan Hynes and Andy McKenna, the electorate would have to be served with heavy fortifications of no-doze. Both are roughly the same age—bland, unexciting. Both are the sons of powerful men: Hynes is the scion of Tom Hynes, longtime Cook county assessor and former president of the State Senate and McKenna is the son of Andrew McKenna who has been at one time or other chairman of everything—Schwartz Paper, McDonald’s Global, the Tribune, Notre Dame. Andrew McKenna, Sr. is loathe to give his kid reign over his empire so he has set aside a pot of money to allow young Andy to have some playthings. Old Man Hynes has nurtured his kid…from seeing that he was campaign manager for Bill Clinton here to state comptroller.

If a race between the two eventuated, I would, of course, vote for McKenna since he has not done what Hynes has done and stiffed his Church’s theology on abortion while maintaining his affiliation. Old Man Hynes was a pro-lifer. The kid is not only a pro-abort but has come out for gay marriage.

All the same, God grant we won’t have to make that choice.