danger: feeble & irrelevant loners!

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 25, 2004

Eugene Kennedy warns us against the alarming trend of erratic independence among U.S. bishops, against a rising tide of doctrinal evaporation, against men so timid and unimaginative as to break ranks entirely with the regiment that earned us the Dallas Capitulation:

While Bruskewitz struts and frets in this brief moment on the stage, the important thing is to notice he is standing alone, that no other bishop has aligned himself with his erratic position, that he is, as he advertises himself, out of step with the bishops who are trying to manage their way through the greatest crisis in American Catholic experience. ...

Bishop Andrew Burke of LaCrosse, Wis., might as well be speaking to the dairy herds that graze in his diocese when he proposes to deny the Eucharist to Catholic officeholders who support the "pro-choice" position.

Just to make it plain: the important point about Bruskewitz is that he is alone. By himself. And if you remember what you learned on the playground in the seventh grade, you know alone is a bad place to be. It's so bad, in fact, that Kennedy changed Raymond Burke's name to Andrew to mitigate Burke's disgrace. To imagine that abortion -- I mean, of course, the "pro-choice" position -- is morally serious enough to imperil communion is a stance so ludicrous as to be audible only by Morlino, Ratzinger, Wojtyla, and other slow-moving ruminants.

Thanks, Prof, for clearing that up for us. Incidentally, as your memory of Macbeth seems a little fuzzy, I wonder if you've read Jean Rostand:

It is terrifying to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.