Squatting While Catholic
On papal evictions, church traditionalists & cardinals gone rogue.
It’s tough out there for a padre.
Retired Cardinal Raymond Burke, a prominent critic of Pope Francis, is being pushed out of his Vatican-subsidized apartment after a handful of archangels not on the lease were found living there.
Who would do such a thing? Where else is he going to find an affordable two-bedroom, two-bath with coffered golden ceilings and a double-helix winding staircase?
Yes, the pope is expected to evict Burke for being, how do I put this, a tramas putidas. (Believe me. It sounds more polite in Latin.) He will also be stripped of his retirement salary, 401(k), Medicare, weekly Zumba classes and reciting off-color jokes in mixed company.
Luckily for Burke, there’s another man of the cloth looking for a roommate. A few weeks ago, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, TX was removed from his post following a thorough investigation into his governance and leadership.
(This guy has 174K followers on Twitter/X and every other post includes a picture of the Crucifixion. Dude. It’s ADVENT. You’re supposed to be posting pictures of SANTA.)
Apparently Burke was a source of “disunity” in the church and disagreed with the pope’s mission of reaching out to marginalized communities such as LGBTQ people, women and the unbaptized. Plus Francis supports divorced and remarried Catholics to once again receive holy communion, which has basically ruined it for everyone.
Due to his fraught relationship with the pope, Burke became a hero to the self-described “Rad Trads,” or radical traditionalists. Seriously? The “Rad Trads” sounds like some lame acapella group that only performs Imagine Dragons sets.
Unlike Francis, who prefers a more modest public profile, Cardinal Burke occasionally wore a long train of watered silk, velvet gloves and extravagant brocades that once prompted Vatican officials to ask him to “tone it down a bit.”
Watered silk and velvet gloves. I don’t even know where to start.
Burke also embraced the conspiracy theory that Covid vaccines were being used to implant microchips “under the skin of every person, so that at any moment, he or she can be controlled regarding health and regarding other matters, which we can only imagine as a possible object of control by the state.”
(Burke subsequently contracted Covid. But at least he escaped mind-controlling microchips enabled by deep state surveillance.)
What is with these people? If anything we should be BEGGING people to join the Catholic church, in the same way that my high school begged students to join drama club so they could finally make a musical adaptation of Death of a Salesman. (I auditioned for Willy Loman.)
Let’s be honest. It’s time to call the wayward Catholics back. Like those two-time Easter-Christmas holiday Catholics. With church leaders like Cardinal Burke and Bishop Strickland in the news, the lobbying won’t be easy. We should start with shorter sermons, optional signs of the peace, Rosary & Wine happy hours, and a much more attractive congregation.
Here’s the thing: The Catholic Church needs to return to the glorious old days when it robotically controlled the huge generation of Baby Boomers. They can start by returning recitation of the Mass to Latin, rapid-fire delivery in a language no one understands. Father Bonfiglio could say Mass in 20 minutes in Latin. The altar boys timed him. And bring back the doughnuts. And it was fun to attach a tissue to your hair with Bobby pins. Was it a mortal sin for women not to cover their heads in church? And we protest the burka as being too restrictive? Really — a burka is not nearly as humiliating as a wad of Charmin’ worn on the head.
I thought this article was going to be an instructional about camping. Guess I’ll go see what the Presbyterians are offering.