Raymond Cardinal Burke, a 1950s Roy Cohn/Francis Spellman wannabe, the voice of the shrinking conservative wing of the Catholic Church in America, is silenced, at least for now. It will be hard for him to comment on the disgraceful state of affairs in the world, and in the United States especially, while he rests sedated with a breathing tube down his throat. In true hypocritical fashion, the Catholic Church wants everyone to pray for Burke. I won’t be doing so. However, may I suggest an alternative: if you are the praying sort, pray for the victims of Cardinal Burke’s total, complete, unyielding arrogance and stupidity. The man who denied COVID was a threat and then said the vaccine had a microchip in it is quickly succumbing to a threat he said didn’t exist. Irony thrives at times like this.
Look at the picture of Raymond Leo Burke in his red satin and ermine finery, the picture of everything every actual Queen and every nasty old Queen has ever wanted to be. This is Raymond Burke. This is the man Catholic Conservatives in America and throughout the world hold up as their model, and for some Catholic priests who have a hard time keeping both feet in the closet, he’s their raison d’etre. And why not? What will they do if their leader, their role model, passes away from a disease he denied was dangerous, and at other times, debated even existed? The Holy Water fonts will be filled with the tears of those who followed his hopeless and eternally lost cause. I can see the churches covered in Victorian mourning dress now.
I am a victim of clerical sexual abuse. I lived the horror of it up close. The pandemic of sexual abuse is alive and well in the Roman Catholic Church, and men like this Roy Cohn-era relic say, out loud, it’s “because of the gays in the priesthood,” which is as fanciful as saying COVID isn’t real. They can’t be serious. Men in dresses primping up the aisles of glorious stained-glass cathedrals, escorted by young seminarians who look like something out of Brideshead Revisited while everyone in attendance bows to them – these are the men, men like Burke, who blame homosexuality for the pandemic of pedophilia running throughout the Church. These are the men who say COVID isn’t real and the vaccine is a scam. Lies. Like so much else of what the Church says: LIES. Long discredited lies that never had a basis in reality.
The Conservative Catholics and their leader, as he breathlessly waits to leave this world and ascend to the next, want us to believe – truly believe – that COVID will be both cured and prevented by prayer, that the government that doesn’t tax them and gives them enormous power is actually out to get them, that if we could only get rid of the gays we would be done with pedophilia and sexual abuse of minors in the Church.
The hypocrisy is revolting, nauseating, and just plain disgusting. The culture of Spellman and Cohn still exists, still thrives, denying reality and throwing victims of all stripes under every bus they can find. Those who lead that culture just wear a different big red dress, but underneath the finery is the same rot that’s always been there. Somewhere, there’s a choir rehearsing “Goodbye Norma Jean” as they wait for Burke to breathe his last.
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