A respondent, William McAleer, addressing National Catholic Reporter's discussion of Archbishop Charles Chaput's defense of excluding children of same-sex couples from Catholic schools:
In these exciting times, what with the pope whipping himself, children raped in churchs everywhere, the popes brother slapping singing children, chaput (R-DEN) has to try harder than ever to stay in the limelight.
Indeed. There is at the bottom of everything Chaput does a discernible whiff of babbitry, the kind of mindless, oily, preening boosterism one expects more in a small-town Knights of Columbus hall than the chancery of a large diocese. In Chaput, the apotheosis of parochial Republican American "values" as Catholic "values" is made perfect and complete.
While claiming to represent countercultural purism, he and the businessmen who have bought his power seat in the church work night and day to turn the American Catholic church into a good ole boys' club utterly captive to Republican ideology. Watch for the day when those cronies have succeeded in buying him an even higher power seat in the church: if you think you've already seen babbitry strutting and fretting its hour on the stage, wait for the spectacle that will unfold when Cardinal Charles Chaput tells us how it's really to be done in Catholicville.
