The Week's Catholic Key

I received my Catholic Key for December 2, 2005 on Friday. Wouldn't you know it, a diocesan newspaper "buries" big news from the Vatican, the new instruction on homosexuality in seminary applicants, on pages 12-14. Front page is a picture of hungry heathen children and an article on "Catholic" Relief Services work in Pakistan following their earthquake. Naturally, the article is on the response of "nongovernmental" organizations, begging government funding.

Hey folks, if it's tax money you're asking for and spending, it was taken by force or the threat of force, not given. In that case, you may be doing "social justice," but YOU AIN'T DOIN' CHRISTIAN CHARITY!!!

Ahem, I've said it before. I'm sure I'll say it again. The Key still stinks. Other articles include:

• Maryknollers (the lefty nuns who've, of course, kicked the habit) still mourning the death of their sisters who were murdered (presumably while meddling and peddling for the Sandinistas) in El Salvador in 1980.
• Two more articles on "Catholic" Relief Services work in Pakistan.
• An article mourning the fact that health care hasn't been federalized 60 years after Truman first proposed that Big-Brother take it over.
• Two articles against the death penalty, one of which is by some clown trying to confuse people with "Pro-life must include protecting poor, opposing war,"
• An articles on antiwar protests at Ft. Benning,
• The usual movie reviews from the USCCB film office. Naturally, the film version of Rent, was not rated "O-morally offensive." It was rated "limited adult audience," and Bernadin's boys on the USCCB staff buried any sodomy judgment in a subjective clause in the middle of the review: "while the dissolute lifestyles of some of the characters take second place to the overriding themes of love, connection and fellowship."
• The bishop's column on stem cell research.

In other Key news, it was relayed to me by a friend of a friend that Albert deZutter, the editor, complained in a published interview with an academic journalist studying the Catholic diocesan press that his publisher, Bishop Finn, is somehow censoring him, because he reviews deZutter's editorials before they run and corrects them to conform to Catholic teaching (and deZutter is apparently refusing to run the corrected editorials). (If you can point me to that published interview, please do). It's obvious that a publisher's control of the contents of his own publication isn't "censorship," of course, but claiming that it is censorship is effective, because so many people are too stupid to see that.

The friend-of-a-friend posed for a luncheon discussion, the questions "why is deZutter doing this?", and "why is Finn tolerating it?" There are several possible answers for the first point--mine is simply that deZutter's a dissident doing the devil's work. My theory is that he's holding out with Finn until he finally gets fired, which will impress Satan's little helpers in the "progressive Catholic" press, and help him get his next job. It's as good as any other. The second question, "why is Finn tolerating it?", is a tougher one. I don't know. The Bishop's done a number of things right--replacing the key chancery staff, holding the Corpus Christi procession, ditching McBrien, unplugging the "New WHine" program. Why won't he take decisive action here? Maybe he has something bigger up his sleeve, like abolishing the Key entirely, in which case it doesn't make sense to replace the editor right now.

A world without the Catholic Key? Wouldn't that be great?