NEW YORK
New York Daily News
Neil Steinberg
A bad week for local adulterers. New York-born four-star Gen. Kevin Byrnes was kicked out of the Army, months before retirement, for an affair with a civilian. Laura DeFilippo, the married secretary of Msgr. Eugene Clark, saw her life go splat all over the front pages. And Clark, who insists he's innocent, is quitting St. Patrick's anyway, to ... ah ... avoid the taint of ... ummm ... a wrongly accused man.
A good week, however, for the media jackal pack. We thrive on this sort of thing. My role, at this point in the scandal, would be to try to find an unbruised spot on the monsignor's reputation so I could deliver a fresh kick - my inclination would be to wonder just how a priest ends up with a $2 million vacation home in Amagansett, L.I., which seemed to have slipped under the outrage radar (ignoring the vow of poverty just doesn't raise eyebrows the way ignoring the vow of chastity does).
But frankly, my heart isn't in it. A complex mechanism, the human heart, and not just because it has all those valves and chambers. Things happen. Mistakes are made.
The strict no-fun clauses of Catholic doctrine - no contraception, no marriage for priests, no foolin' around for everybody else - is normally ignored or mocked in the media. But let a priest stray from holy writ, and suddenly we're the Spanish Inquisition, checking souls and passing judgment. It doesn't make sense.
Posted by kshaw at August 14, 2005 08:24 AM