UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Bully Bill Donohue’s gloating remarks about his insider information vis-a-vis the U.S. Catholic bishops and their current campaign to bully SNAP are not getting good press coverage in the blogosphere. I’m referring here to the statement that the Catholic League director made yesterday in Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times article about the attempt to bully SNAP through hardball legal tactics in Missouri, where Bishop Robert Finn is now facing criminal indictment.
As my posting about this yesterday (to which the first link above points) noted, Donohue told Goodstein that “the bishops have come together collectively” to fight SNAP (and, implicitly, the survivors of clerical sexual abuse SNAP defends), though he can’t give Goodstein specific names of bishops about whom he’s speaking. As I stated, though the USCCB media spokeswoman Sister Mary Ann Walsh denies any such concerted effort of bishops to collude in bullying SNAP in Missouri, I’m inclined to think Dohonue is boasting about insider information he really does have, since he clearly works hand and glove with the USCCB, and, in particular, with the USCCB president His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan, with whom Donohue shares an office building.
Donohue does the dirty work the U.S. Catholic bishops don’t want the public to see, so that they can pretend their own hands are clean.
And so, in a piece yesterday entitled “The Hierarchy Re-Abuses the Sex-Abuse Victims,” Andrew Sullivan notes that it’s increasingly difficult to support the institutional hierarchy of the Catholic church these days, and zeroes in on Donohue’s ugly boasts to Goodstein, noting,
Donohue is a thug. But he is for the hierarchy what Hannity is for the GOP base. And the line about “altar boys”? Sometimes, you realize that for some Catholics, nothing has changed since the revelation of the mass rape of children, altar boys often a prime target.
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