new depths of shallowness

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Apr 24, 2005

I once heard a man memorably described as "veneer all the way through." It would be hard to find a better characterization of Andrew Greeley, who has a uniquely reliable talent for mistaking the eternal for the transient and vice-versa. Listen to him on Ratzinger:

Women -- and not just in the United States -- are very angry at the church. It is no exaggeration to say many of them, devout Catholics to the core, will tell you they hated John Paul because he hated women. If the new pope wants to win them over, he will have a very hard sell on his hands. Similarly gay and lesbian Catholics will find it difficult to forgive him for his comment that they are "objectively" disordered.

His comment?

Greeley's breezy reductivism goes far to explain why liberals are liberals. They really think popes and bishops invented sexual morality ex nihilo just to irk them; that they're free to say anything they wish; that if some people find a traditional doctrine offensive only a gratuitous desire to insult could prompt a clergyman to repeat it.

Note that Greeley not only trivializes the teaching but gets it wrong, repeating the bit of boilerplate dishonesty that pretends the Church judges the homosexual person disordered, where in fact the disorder is the homosexual inclination. Here's the text:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

If the important thing to communicate is that the Church is wrong, obviously, it's captious to ask that one get the "comments" right.

Simply a pretext for ill-natured amusement? It would be, but for the fact that Greeley's "devout to the core" bernardinistas continue to control our ecclesiastical apparat, when de facto they have left the Church in all but salary. Not that they don't wax indignant should their loyalty be impugned ("Hey, I cash my paychecks, don't I?").