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| Today's Los Angeles Times |
Whoa, those Catholic bishops are threatening to excommunicate president-elect Joe Biden!
Thank you, Fr. Randall Balmer, for calling this hypocrisy to our attention in today's LA Times.
The bishops were thrilled with Trump's win in 2016, and this year Jose Gomez, Archbishop of the US, congratulated Biden immediately as did Pope Francis.
But then Archbishop Gomez needed to attend the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, where his rank and file were grumbling about Biden's support of US law that women can have access to abortion--a law confirmed by the Supreme Court.
Apparently these bishops don't believe in the Constitution, which declares a separation between church and state. It's not okay for a Catholic president to uphold the law of the land if that law conflicts with church laws.
The archbishop "declared that the president-elect’s support for abortion rights presents the church with a 'difficult and complex situation,'" writes Balmer.
So difficult a situation that the bishops need a task force to reflect on what to do. Or at least Gomez deflected these perturbed priests into a task force, a place familiar as the graveyard of much righteous anger.
Did they set up a task force on anything Trump believed or did?
His paying a woman to keep silent or separating mothers from babies at the US border didn't need a task force.
I guess they figured Trump wasn't Catholic, so he wasn't their problem. But they stayed on good terms with him--he was helping them out with judges appointed to the Supreme Court.
What would Jesus do? What would he say to bishops who rarely excommunicate their own priests who abuse children--but get high and mighty about this new president?
We need look no farther than Matthew 23:27--
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness."
