Cardinal George v. Sun Times

Don Wycliff agrees that the Chicago Sun-Times headline, “Pope launches global campaign vs. gays,” justified Francis Cardinal George’s sermon Sunday to explain what the Pope had actually said about homosexuality. Wycliff admits that it was proper for George to explain that the Holy Father simply stated what has been held by every pope for two thousand years, that marriage is a lifelong union of a man and a woman who enter into a total sharing of themselves for the sake of family.

Cardinal George versus the Sun-Times

Neither church nor state has any authority to change that definition because it arises from nature, and any government that claims the authority to change this law becomes totalitarian. George said the Sun-Times engaged in anti-papal propaganda and in doing so laid the ground for a persecution of the Catholic Church: “Disdain for and hatred of the Pope are sure signs of anti-Catholicism.”

In an interview with Wycliff, Cardinal George said “This has not been a culture and a society friendly to the Catholic Church.” He said the Catholic Church is a teaching church and calls people to conversion which goes against the grain of present American society that has elevated personal freedom to the status of its highest value, and thus religion seems to be a threat to this freedom.

While Wycliff may not fully agree with George, he at least gives Cardinal George the benefit of presenting his case. A Sun-Times Friday editorial admits they may have over reacted in the headline, but that they are not anti-Catholic. What they don’t like is the Vatican trying to block the evolution of sodomy as a civil right. They write: “While we are sometimes critics of Catholic politics, that doesn’t make us enemies of Chicago’s Catholics.”

George: New Morality Is False

But to give credit where credit is due, in the same issue with the editorial, the Chicago Sun-Times presents the full text of Cardinal Francis George’s last Sunday’s sermon (also available at the Chicago Archdiocese website). In it George says there has been a concerted effort over the past years to shape public imagination and opinion into accepting same sex relations as normal and morally unexceptional. Holding another idea is called homophobia.

Morality, the Cardinal says, is now based on desire and has replaced true morality based upon truth. The Sun-Times has bought the lie and twisted the true teaching of the Church that is based on natural law and the divine positive law. The Pope is not declaring war on gays, George explains, but on the sin of Sodomy, a sin that has always cried out to heaven as unnatural and against God’s plan for mankind.

George explains that he has written a letter of apology to Pope John Paul II for the Sun-Times attack on Rome. It is obvious that Cardinal George is ashamed of the Chicago-Sun Times. The Cardinal’s talk as reprinted in the Sun-Times points directly to the inspired truths protected by the Holy Spirit and residing in the Catholic Church, whose head is the vicar of Christ.

The Conversion of Judge Bork

At age 76 Judge Robert Bork has become a Catholic. He was moving in this direction for a number of years, is married to a devout former nun, Mary Ellen Bork, and has been advised by three interesting priests. After writing Slouching Toward Gomorrah in 1996 he was told by one that it was very Catholic.

Tim Drake, writing in the National Catholic Register, Aug. 10-16, asked Bork whether he thought America is closer to Gomorrah since the Supreme Court’s Lawrence sodomy decision. Bork said we may already have passed the city limits. More on this in his next book, Coercing Virtue.

Bork says the culture war is international and that locally the Supreme Court has decided to take the side of the intellectual elite and is forcing its unholy views on the lower courts. We don’t think the lower courts need much forcing.

In the same issue — the story on the conversion of actor Bob Hope to the Catholic Church a few years ago.