Demoted Cardinal Raymond Burke has long been The Poster Boy for conservative bishops obsessed with gays, sex, and abortion.
Now we learn: there’s more.
Burke is obsessed with manly men.
Doing manly things.
In manly ways.
With men.
Men “respond to vigor and precision and excellence,” says Burke.
“Manly discipline” is required to be an altar boy, says Burke.
“Men need to dress and act like men,” says Burke, who’s known for dressing himself in vestments of silk and … lace.
Oh my.
Altar girls have so overrun once manly man liturgies, says Burke, the manly men who would otherwise be priests are appalled and repelled.
I could go on here. But it’s now like shooting fish in a barrel.
Burke, clearly, has lost it.
“Liberal Catholics sometimes depict the Church hierarchy as a bunch of repressed weirdoes whose knee-jerk discomfort with women and sex infects the Church’s teaching about those topics,” said a Crux commenter to the Religion News Service story Wednesday detailing Burke’s attack on parishes infested with altar girls, plus women — like locusts in the biblical plagues!
Said the Crux writer, “Cardinal Burke does not exactly help dispel that notion.”
I’ll say.
But Burke’s story juxtaposed Wednesday with Pope Francis’ latest ode to motherhood, well, it was just too much.
I read the pope’s mothers-are-indispensable-martyrs speech. I cringed.
Do we she-devils have no legitimacy on earth, save procreation?
Mothers are generous, tender, sweet, quiet, all-sacrificing and all-suffering doormats. That was the thrust of Francis’ message.
What about women who aren’t mothers, like nuns?
“Be a mother and not an old maid!” Francis, incredibly, told nuns from around the world in 2013. That was before he admitted his suspicions of “female machismo,” compared Europe — unfavorably — to a “grandmother who is no longer fertile and vibrant,” and characterized female theologians as “strawberries on the cake.”
I could go on here, too. But I’ve made my point.
I just can’t imagine why anyone thinks the Church has a problem with women. Can you?
