So What’s Wrong with Cardinal McElroy?

A few weeks ago, Pope Francis elevated Bishop McElroy of San Diego to Cardinal, and all billy ned broke out in right wing Catholic commentary. 

I’m so Okie-centric that I didn’t have a clue what the ruckus was about. Also, I wasn’t all that worried about it. My attention was more or less focused on my family and current events in the larger world. 

The Church has become an on-going pie-throwing fight. Catholics are always and forever attacking other Catholics for not being Catholic enough. I kinda tune most of it out, since it’s almost always either a made-up outrage designed to further right wing politics or some superficial and trivial something based on a neurotic need to control the mass. 

Anyway, the Catholics who tend to go off on other Catholics went ballistic when the pope elevated Bishop McElroy to Cardinal McElroy. A lot of this came from people I’ve learned to see as people who use faith as a political hammer to drive the vote to the GQP.  So, without thinking about it overmuch, I assumed that the flapping and yapping was somehow or other about politics. But I was far more focused on the last two shootings, the war in Ukraine, and OU Women’s softball to really pay much attention.

I gathered that Cardinal McElroy must have said or done things that offend GQP Catholics, but I also knew that’s a pretty easy thing to do. There was a time when I got into this stuff a lot more than I do now. But after the Kavanaugh confirmation, I changed.  I tend to view the attacks from right wing Catholics on everybody else as sectarian non sequiturs that are backed by money interests.

I didn’t know what Cardinal McElroy had done to offend the crazy means in the Church, and I didn’t much care. I focus more on things that I can affect, and that is most decidedly not who becomes a Cardinal in the Catholic Church. 

Then, last night, this story came across my news feed. It’s an interview that Bishop McElroy gave to America magazine about a year before the Pope made him a cardinal. I don’t know if the things he says here are the whole of why GQP Catholics are so upset about newly-minted Cardinal McElroy. But it certainly shows why he wouldn’t be welcome in their clubhouse. 

It’s an interesting read. 

I used direct quotes from Cardinal McElroy in the posting below. The bolding is mine.

From America Magazine: 

… I believe that abortion, climate change and racism constitute the three greatest claims on the consciences of Catholics at this moment.

… We are a nation of immigrants, we have to have a significant number of people from other countries that is not simply based on their resources, skills, talents but that allows people of different classes, different social backgrounds, different nationalities to come into our country and to become citizens of our society. And the same thing with the refugees. We have to move back toward [previous] numbers of immigrants and refugees that we take in, and we haven’t been doing [so] in the last years.

… I think we have to have a massive new initiative within the church in the United States on the question of climate change. This means engaging the church at the national level but also at the local levels, too. 

… The continuing failure of the church in the United States to devote concentrated attention to climate change is a tragic reflection of the power of our national culture of climate denial to mute the mandate of the Gospel to care for our common home with a sense of urgency and depth.

…In recent years, major figures and programs within EWTN have reflected with ever greater prominence a systematic oppositional tone to many of the major priorities of this pontificate, often accompanied with caricature and scorn. The continual attention to the worldview of Archbishop [Carlos Maria] Viganò, the despicable treatment of the Amazon Synod, the not so subtle efforts to paint Pope Francis as theologically deficient and doctrinally suspect, when amplified by the largest religious media empire in the world, have become a source of disunity and distortion within the life of the church which can no longer be ignored.

It is essential for the leadership of the network (EWTN) to decide whether or not it truly wishes to pursue its mission cum Petro et sub Petro (with Peter and under Peter).