Expected him before this. Poll on his credibility, anyone? But they do make splash for a while.
Throw mud or drag out and put between covers what main streamers have been pushing for months, some sticks.
Catnip for Beltway, as Fox hostess Dana Perino said.
It’s Drudge’s main headline for the nonce. (In fact, I just looked, and it’s been demoted.)
All will pass.
First of all, apart from the Vigano accusations, if Francis did not know about the deposed cardinal, why didn’t he?
He’s the chief executive of a major international organization; and one of its most prominent operatives, of international renown, has been demoted to private-citizen status, sent apparently to a monastery.
Busting a cardinal is a very big deal. Francis was apparently shocked and amazed when he found out about it. When was that?
The guy had presumably been vetted, was considered trustworthy and loyal to Francis. What went wrong?
Asked about it, he administers a stunning no-comment and recommends silence for all concerned in one of the most stunning I’m-above-all-that performances since what a prominent Middle Eastern governor pulled off some 20 centuries ago.
Is Francis trying to make Hollywood executives in the Weinstein case look like shouters-from-housetops by comparison?
Francis, won’t you please either come clean or disprove the nay-sayers, to put our hearts at ease? Please?
Question is: Are we to believe Woodward? At least no deathbed interview with this one. I don’t think there is.
Second question: In view of mainstream reporting since he got elected, what’s new about this, as reported?
Third question: Who cares, in view of our booming economy and at least some activity to solve the Iran, N. Korea and other problems, not to mention his huge success in judicial appointments etc. By their fruits you know them.
The success story whose origins very few dare to name.
American manufacturers are on a roll: Business conditions surged in August to a 14-year high, according to a a survey of industry executives.
The Institute for Supply Management said its manufacturing index jumped to a 14-year high of 61.3% last month from 58.1% in July. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had forecast the index to total 57.9%.
Readings over 50% indicate more companies are expanding instead of shrinking.
In 14 years! A biggie.
via MarketWatch
So shut up about it.
As for the beauty of silence, on the other hand, consider Cardinal Sarah’s The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, keeping mind that as one of Francis’ cabinet members — with liturgy as his portfolio — he has been rebuked publicly and privately by him on several occasions.
Why Francis puts up with him is explored and explained here.
. . . . the same who is subject of the hugely successful musical, for what that’s worth.
[A] constitutional framework that bids Congress shrink from ousting a president confronts a party that lusts for the chance. Which vindicates a warning from Alexander Hamilton.
Impeachment, Hamilton warned in the Federalist papers, is bound to “agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties.” It would “enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence and interest.”
Hamilton feared that the decision would be “regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
See how the founders talked?
It would be a first in our history, as we know. Worth it, you think?
In 2002, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York was hired by the “full body of Catholic bishops of the United States” to “conduct research, summarize the collected data, and issue a summary report” on clergy abuse in the Catholic Church.
The report, titled “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010,” revealed that 81% of victims of Catholic priest abuse were male, and that 78% were pubescent or post-pubescent boys between the ages of 11-17 (51% were between ages 11-14, 27% were between ages 15-17).
The remaining 22% were between 1-10.
Even as we look at it this way: perps were a minority of same-sex-attracted priests. So it’s a telling datum that you can cite without condemning or impugning the majority of them.
Question, however: To what extent were they less likely than others to report the perps? Assuming reporting was at all common, which is surely the rub.
Plain talk from the Anglican crossover, established 2012 by Benedict:
Bishop Steven Lopes, the ordinary of the US ordinariate, has said he doesn’t believe his fellow-bishops who profess ignorance of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s wrongdoing.
In a homily delivered on Sunday 19 August, Bishop Lopes said that one kind of response to the McCarrick revelations was “not good enough. It’s the parade of cardinals and bishops who have rushed to the television cameras, clutching their pectoral crosses, saying, ‘I knew nothing.’
“I don’t believe it, and I am one of them.”
One of the youngest, as it happens, of “the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter . . . equivalent to a diocese, created by the Vatican in 2012 for people nurtured in the Anglican tradition who wish to become Catholic.”
