In the space of one week, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York and Cardinal Francis George of Chicago warned audiences of the prevalence of anti-Catholicism.
At his September 27 homily at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Cardinal O’Connor said “Some of the filthiest shows and movies today are attacks on the Catholic Church. I will not dignify them by naming them. But nobody can be fooled.” He then unloaded with, “In my personal judgment the Catholic Church, its teachings, its efforts, its agencies, are under stronger attack today than in my entire, by no means brief, lifetime of more than 78 years. We can not just sit and be silent.”
On October 2, at Benedictine University in Lisle, Cardinal George said that “anti-Catholicism is a socially and an intellectually respectable prejudice among much of the cultural elite in this country.” He stressed that while the Catholic Church did not seek to co-op American culture, it was a legitimate goal to create a culture “which will be rich enough to provide means for expressing the Catholic faith and others as well in culturally distinctive fashion.”
Quite naturally, all of this resonates well with the Catholic League. We simply can’t improve on Cardinal O’Connor’s words: “Once there was a cry, ‘Workers of the world, unite.’ The cry came from the wrong sources perhaps. I think we would have to cry today, ‘Catholics of the world, unite.’”
Many thanks to Cardinal O’Connor and Cardinal George for sounding the right alarm at the right time.
