Shoutin’ Bill Donohue Circles the Wagons

Turns out that when somebody gets upset because a priest with a legal agreement to never be around minors is allowed to be around minors, that’s not because they care about the safety of minors.  It’s because they are sinister lefties who want “to bring down a bishop–any bishop”.

Kevin O’Brien opens a can of whupass on this nonsense. Rebecca Hamilton then delivers some well-deserved kicks to the corpse of this nonsense as she describes the bishop’s action to a T: straining at legal technicality gnats and swallowing the camel of child sexual abuse.

Donohue’s behavior here is Exhibit #349873987 in what I call the Faithful Conservative Catholic Anti-Charism of Discernment.  With a sort of preternatural persistence, a huge percentage of the Faithful Conservative Catholic subculture seems to batten on the wrong side in controversy after controversy–Maciel, Euteneuer, Corapi, siding with Michael Voris when he suggests good bishop Mulvey is part of a shadowy gay conspiracy to destroy Corapi, attacking the bishops of Medjugorje, laboring for years to defend torture and war crimes, comparing Randian corporate stooge (and now gay adoption supporter) Paul Ryan to St. Thomas Aquinas(!) and denouncing all who would not vote for pro-abort Romney as enemies of the Faith, defending the shocking behavior of Bp. Finn and now this.  And they do so with the cocksure certitude that they are “defending the Church from enemies”.  And more often than not, it’s massively wrong, not just a boo boo. And massively wrong in a way anybody of common sense could see. And when the hero of the Faithful Conservative Catholic is shown to be massively wrong, the Faithful Conservative Catholic learns nothing and remembers nothing and the next time he manages to side with the wrong side again and blame it all on shadowy forces trying to destroy the Church and never take responsibility for all the other times he was massively wrong.

The amazing thing is that, typically, the people sounding the alarms are, themselves, conservative Catholics like Kevin and Rebecca.  They speak because they love the Church.  And for gratitude, they get told they “aren’t really Catholic” by excommunicating Inquisitors with a sort of anti-charism of massive wrongness who can’t seem to hear themselves.

Fool me once, shame on me.  Fool me over and over and over, and it’s time to do a system diagnostic on the subculture of Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM].