Two days after a kissy huggy licky speech from Cardinal Sodano about petty gossip not getting in the way of Joe the Pope’s mediocre rule and lack of compassion for the victims of clergy abuse, Joe the Pope is about the appoint the first active Opus Dei Archbishop of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is the largest Catholic archdiocese in the United States with an estimated five million members, 70 percent of which are Hispanic.
Archbishop Jose Horacio Gomez of San Antonio Texas has been named Coadjutor Archbishop of Los Angeles, co-ruler so to speak until Cardinal Mahoney retires at 75 in February.
The European press are mentioning the fact of Gomez’s active membership in Opus Dei. One British news site alleges his appointment as revenge on Hollywood for The DaVinci Code. Whatever.
Pope's 'revenge' as LA gets Opus Dei bishopBenedict XVI's choice comes after Colombia Pictures depicted Opus Dei as a secret society of murderous monks who, according to author Dan Brown, were trying to cover up the truth of Jesus's secret affair with Mary Magdelene.
The appointment will give Opus Dei enormous influence in the American Church and Vatican, and is the most senior appointment for a member of the group.
Gomez holds both conservative and progressive viewsHe denounced one Catholic university when it invited then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to campus, because she favored abortion rights, and another when it invited a Benedictine nun, because she had advocated the ordination of women. Under his reign, a local Catholic high school ended its relationship with an organization that raised money to fight breast cancer, because the same organization gave grants to Planned Parenthood. After a 17-year-old lay advisory commission created by his predecessor suggested that gay marriage might be a human rights issue under one reading of the church's teachings, Gomez disbanded the commission.
I went line per line in the L.A. Times article and there is no mention of Opus Dei. Are they waiting for another article to investigate Gomez’s ties to this new vanguard, Sea Organizaton type, Jim Jones Kool-Aid brigade commune, New-Jesuit army to keep the RC faith pure. Or has the L.A. times scrubbed the story and self censored itself so typical of the American MSM these days?
Joe the pope likes him. Jose surely won’t listen to petty gossip about child abuse.
In San Antonio, critics have alleged that he failed to address abuse allegations forthrightly and failed to hold accused clergymen accountable for their actions. In one case, a clergyman who was accused of sexually abusing a teen was permitted during Gomez's tenure to live in a parish residence next door to an elementary school and a day-care center, said Barbara Garcia Boehland, the San Antonio chapter director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
SNAP has written several times to Gomez seeking an apology and more direct confrontation of abuse allegations but has heard nothing, Garcia Boehland said. She said her son, Eduardo Ramon III, was violated by a priest as a boy; he committed suicide at age 20.
The selection of Gomez, she said, made her question how determined the Vatican is to root out and end abuse in the church.
"Elevating him is not being tough on people who know," she said. "There is going to be more hiding of priests. Gomez is good at that."
Just when you thought that the RC church would be turning to a Vatican III to purge itself of its sex sins and misogyny, the trend changes. The trend now in the United States is to turn dioceses over to strangers not originally from the diocese. No doubt these new conservative politician outsider bishops are making plans for a Council of Trent II to add another six hundred pages of rules and dogma to the computer data base of faith.
Good-bye to all of Los Angeles’ Catholic progressive programs.
So it goes.
