““The Pope has a bigger agenda. He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going down a rabbit hole on this.” Hey now, stop it with your concern about pervy cardinals, and bishops rogering seminarians. Don’t you know we have borders to open?” Well, the problem with this kind of well-deserved snark is that Cupich is ultimately going to be proved right. His ideological confederates will find a picture of a crying non-white child, get it to appear everywhere you look for a week, and the conservatives will agree immediately that opening the borders to these kids *is* the right thing to do. This is the playbook, it has worked for years, and there’s no reason for him to give it up now. It’s just like the Democratic Party — they understand that they actually have to deliver every once in a while on at least some of the things some of their base values, and in exchange, their base doesn’t actively chuck them overboard. Such an arrangement, at least a little beneficial to both parties, doesn’t exist on the conservative side of things. Just as conservatives leap to vote for a party that despises them and their interests and tells them as much to their face (at least until very recently), so do conservative Catholics keep meekly taking their sons to have pederast priests put wafers on their tongues every Sunday–because that is the Christlike and conservative thing to do, the civilized/civil thing. Since being Respectably Conservative now today means that you tolerate your leaders actively s***ting on you and your interests and particularly the interests of your children, why should the bishops even bother trying to appeal to the conservatives as opposed to the liberals when dealing with these issues of sexual abuse? The bishops see clearly what lots of us can see — that Respectable Christian conservatives will let you put their children’s interests and values last or even actively work against them, while liberals are much more transactional. Cupich is acting perfectly rationally.
Matt in VA
