Cardinal Misrule
Make sure you’re sitting down. Maybe cover your mouth if you’re in a public place. The human body isn’t made to laugh as hard as you’ll laugh at the headline in The Hill today. Here it is: Cardinal Dolan: Trump ‘Takes His Christianity Seriously.’
Steady. That’s what I call a lump of coal in your stocking.
No, it’s not you. It’s them. You, like many Americans may feel as though you’ve fallen into a fourth-dimensional paradox as continued belief in objective truth and reality, and right and wrong makes you feel like a quaking lunatic.
When it comes to this Christianity business, I was thinking wouldn’t it be nice if there were some kind of guidance sheet, or maybe a whole book, you could call it something like The Bible, where you were told all of the things you were not to do if you were a ‘follower of Christ.’ The man the arch-right-wing Cardinal assures us ‘takes his Christianity seriously’ has done all of them, done them many times over, and done them gleefully, brazenly, proudly, loudly, and without remorse, conscience, or even notice.
The CV, the resumé of the person at the center of Christianity reads: Man of peace, humility, acceptance, love, and humanity. I would actually feel better about the Cardinal had he intended to mock the Messiah and everything he symbolizes, if the Cardinal had simply been making a blasphemous ha-ha. But sadly, no. He actually meant it.
He said it on Fox News to another stalwart of reason and uprightness, Maria Bartiromo. Oy.
No doubt any reader of this Substack is very well-informed, so there is no need to type the full list that includes the convictions for sex assault and financial cheating, and a lifetime of deceptions, vulgarity, greed, hubris, lack of charity, lying, venality, callousness, cruelty and every other vice one learns as a child in Christianity 101 one should strive not to commit. Such would be the length of the full list that I almost surely would fail to complete it by New Year’s Day.
If the point needed emphasis, which of course it doesn’t, I might mention something about nominating a mean drunk and sexual pest to lead the Defense Department and a statutory rapist with a heavy hooker habit as the nation’s top law enforcement official. The political party of loud, performative religiosity had not so much as a twinge of moral revulsion at any of this, and for the most part have championed the nominees.
During Bartiromo’s interview of the Cardinal, there was this exchange, which began with the Cardinal noting the escape of the bright, orange assassination target from the assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania:
“It’s hard to explain, other than it was God’s work,” Bartiromo said.
“Yeah, you know, I think of, Maria, I think of Ronald Reagan and John Paul II,” Dolan responded. “Both survived assassination attempts very close to one another, and when the two of them met for the first time, Ronald Reagan said to Pope Saint John Paul II, ‘Mother Teresa told me that she thinks the Lord spared me, because the Lord has somethin’ special in mind for me.”
Presumably, according to this bizarre cherry-picking of ‘God’s work,’ John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and every American soldier killed in combat had it coming to them.
Here at This Is (Not) A Baggy Pants Farce we know a farce when we see one, and this confab between the ecclesiastic to the right of Goering, and the psychiatrically exotic Bartiromo was pure, distilled farce. Put it in your egg nog.
In any case, if you find a measure of mental and emotional composure over these coming holidays, please drop me a line and tell me their precise location. We’re completely out of stock here.
Haha, my friends.