by
Joseph D. O’Shaughnessy
In Washington, D.C., yesterday, a group of well-schooled (apparently in racism and intolerance) Covington Roman Catholic high school punks, wearing their Fascist Red Trump hats, courageously gathered in front of and around a small group of Native Americans performing an ancient native chant, jeering and spitting and making racial slurs.
These young punks were wandering the Washington area creating havoc, prompting a black group to respond, and then, when a small Native American group, chanting on the mall, stepped between them, nonviolently, the young punks turned their attention to the totally non-threatening group and attempted to ridicule them, not understanding, from their backgrounds of hate and prejudice, that this indicted them, not the Native Americans who, prevented from moving forward, simply stood their ground with dignity.
We have known for a long time that the Roman Catholic community are made up largely of hypocrites. A fully 98% say that they do or would use contraception although the Catholic Church, and its pedophile-littered clergy forbid it. It is estimated that as high a number as 80% of unmarried pregnant Catholic women, married Catholic women who want no more children or married Catholic women who conceive through adultery have had abortions–despite the church’s strong rulings against it and huge “pro-life” political contributions.
Is it surprising that a Neo-Fascist Roman Catholic Church, especially one in the American South, a church known for supporting nationalist dictators and their hit-squads in Central America and Argentina, where tens of thousands of poor Catholics were murdered in soccer stadiums or literally taken out over the ocean and dropped, alive, from military planes? Or that Roman Catholic bishops in those areas who supported the people were murdered and the church did nothing? Is it a surprise that a group of Roman Catholic parents encourage their sons to wear the White Racist paraphernalia, the Trump hats worn by the thugs at his rallies and in Charlottesville that encourage racism and anti-Semitism?
Isn’t it clear that a segment of society, one that has in recent decades become more affluent from a vital U.S. education system that provides education to all other students while Catholics have their own private school system, drawing large number of needed students from the general population…a student population which is the basis for economic educational decisions? When Catholics pay for their own educational system, which is their right, they subtract from the overall magnitude of the system, raising costs for public schools. We should expect nothing less than a morally superior…rather than the recent clearly more inferior product.
The Covington incident and other examples of recent Catholic bigotry and religious segmentation from the broader society make us wonder whether this current Catholicism has any relationship to that faith that built strong ties to the workers. Or does it have any longer a relationship to the humanitarian spirit that built public health facilities in the form of private Catholic hospitals, staffed and run by nuns, and a clergy that built strong support for Civil Rights.
As their children showed, Covington Catholics have, for some as yet unknown reason…perhaps simple greed, perhaps cowardice in facing bigotry, perhaps simple ignorance…become the arrogant, intolerant citizens that we see expressed in the hate-filled faces of their children and in the newly revived Trumpian-intolerance for blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, the poor, the elderly and, yes, Native America.
They have supported cringing cowards against authentic war heroes for President. Resulting in wars that left the Middle East in chaos, as well as millions dead or maimed, including 4500 American military lives and 30,000 permanently damaged American veterans–for not one good reason nor any good outcome.
We must not have religious fanatics involved in our politics. It cannot be some strange, born-again billionairess with plans of incorporating Medieval religious standards into public education. But neither can it be, no matter how many million votes they possess, racist, bigoted religious zealots, raised and educated in morality by pedophile priests whose ideals match those who express hate as their religion rather than true Christian love for one’s fellow
Star Covington Athlete an Accused Rapist.
And what are the parents and the teachers at Covington teaching their boys (it is an all-male school)? Well, we know the outcome of one such individual. Jake Walter, former Covington Catholic basketball star. He raped and sodomized an 18-year-old girl, according to the Boone County Sheriff’s department, who arrested him on three felony accounts. Has anyone at all from Covington Catholic come out and condemned this accused rapist, the details of the rape and sodomy so vile and reprehensible as to be unrepeatable?
Is this what Catholics want their schools to produce–rapists and bigots, and Neo-Fascist youth movements parading as schoolboys on an outing? Where were the supposed chaperones? Apparently cheering and shouting and urging the students on in their many red Trump MAGA caps and clothes with Neo-Fascist slogans.
Let’s face it. We have a country.populated by groups who, for political reasons, have abandoned generations-old traditions of brotherhood and fallen into ignorance and intolerance. One of these groups is the Catholic Church…a tax-free organization, which, after the federal government, is the largest landholder in the United States. Are churches given tax-free status to educate children in racism and hatred of their fellow man? Perhaps they should not only pay taxes now, but higher taxes. The old Catholic hospitals are now for-profit hospital chains that not only do not cater to the poor but do not even allow Middle Class patients if their health insurance premiums are not paid up. It is true that Catholic Charities does good work, but that is an organization made up of volunteers, people who somehow have retained their Christianity in the face of Roman Catholic support of Fascists.
It is time that we decided whether we want to raise a new Fascist Youth movement under the auspices of churches or whether we want to return to a secular America, as founded by the Deists who believed that church and state should be separate but that American government should be based on the principles taught by Jesus Christ….love thy neighbor as thyself.