Last Sunday, to pep up his homily, a visiting monsignor regaled our Long Island congregation with an anecdote about how he had recently learned, at the cost of bruised ribs, just what a firm-grippin’, bear-huggin’ guy good old Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, actually is.
The Church previously did not inflict such incontinent showmen on America. All Americans deserve better. American Catholics need shepherds, not sellouts.
Dolan's liberal-politicking and backslapping as New York's Cardinal Archbishop reflects the decline of Catholic dignity that has followed the liberals' beloved Vatican Council II, the Catholic front in the Cultural Revolution. Pre-Vatican II prelates operated politically at times, but they did so with discretion. Dolan's manner combines the gravitas of a huckstering revivalist with the decorum of a Democratic National Convention delegate.
This week, things got worse: NY Cardinal Dolan: Washington Should Join Church in Welcoming Immigrants, by Cathy Burke, newsmax.com, October 18, 2013.
This Catholic Christian is not in the habit of referring to Princes of the Church disrespectfully, but Dolan is unworthy of any American's—and any sentient Catholic's—respect. Instead of looking at America today and asking what would be best now and in the future for it and for the American Catholics whose shepherd he is appointed to be, Cardinal Dolan looks at America as though it were still 1880.
Dolan and too many Ellis Island-descendants firmly believe that if their forebears had not arrived America—the “Nation of Immigrants”—wouldn’t exist. From their false premise follows an equally false conclusion: America can only thrive with a never-ending stream of immigrants. Just don’t look too closely at who they are, what they are likely to achieve, or what they really believe. Because America is immigrants!
Of course, this ignores the fully-functional and naturally growing nation that existed in North America, founded and settled by British colonists, well before Cardinal Dolan's ancestors came to the United States.
Why, after all, did they leave Ireland for America? Most Irish emigrants were not in search of a "howling wilderness" to settle, and they did not find one on the Atlantic's far shore. Young Tim Dolan must have been dozing in the back of class while the nuns tried to teach him American History in grade school—as surely they did. But all this well-documented history is now apparently beneath the notice of the lavishly degreed Dolan and irrational immigration enthusiasts like him.
Dolan demands that Washington (he means, but won't say, Americans who pay taxes) make immigrants “feel at home” in America—even though America is not their home and has neither room for them nor money to pay for their social costs.
Be it ingrained liberalism, rosy memories of the "immigrant experience," or sheer Irish-American perversity in the Kennedy/Biden style, or all three, Cardinal Dolan is willfully blind to the plainly visible effects of the influx of “diverse” immigrants and illegal aliens since 1965: tens of millions of unassimilable foreigners; the degradation and decay of American culture and the confusion of American identity; above all, the ever-growing power of the Left—votes for socialism (and secularism) increase in direct proportion to number of immigrants admitted—to suppress opposition and complete its demolition of the historic American nation that had evolved by 1964.
So much for the social conservatism that Cardinal Dolan is supposed to espouse.
Instead, Timothy Dolan chortles witlessly about how, "with help from the church and other institutions, our country has done a remarkable job of transforming immigrants from other shores into Americans, helping them become full members of our culture and communities."
Maybe that was true, if not as true as Dolan believes, of the Irish and other European Catholic ethnics whose ancestors arrived back in the day. But why should this mystical transformation happen to the mass of mestizos, many of them already irredentist about America, swarming in from Mexico and the rest of Latin America?
How likely is it with religiously triumphalist and culturally hostile Moslems from such enlightened lands as Pakistan and Somalia. Or with the many East Asians and Indians who are openly contemptuous of America’s founding culture?
With limited exceptions, essentially none of these groups shares the Western cultural inheritance that is America's birthright—nor any particular desire to adopt it as its own.
Americans, as Cardinal Dolan would no doubt join his Al Smith Dinner guest Barack Hussein Obama in demanding, must re-order their lives to foreigners' preferences—not the other way round.
Cardinal Dolan compounds his offenses by citing outright lies from a source he surely knows is a pro-Hispanic propagandist, saying:
“By the third generation here, recent Pew studies have shown, Hispanics are achieving education and income levels comparable to the native-born population…In part, these results are thanks to the vibrant civic and religious institutions that welcome them.”
Anyone who troubles himself to observe recently-arrived Hispanics in action knows perfectly well that is nonsense. As does anyone who has reviewed any of the several studies showing that Hispanics in America, Mexicans—by far the most numerous—in particular, have generally regressed in education and income over time in America.
For his blind allegiance to a failed experiment at the expense of those he is meant to serve, Cardinal Dolan stands condemned as a High-IQ Idiot.
And for the abuse of his high office that his reckless immigration advocacy represents, again to the detriment of the Americans he should serve, topped off by his flagrant dishonesty, Timothy Dolan stands condemned as an Anti-American oaf.
