Last Saturday Senator Ted Kennedy was laid to rest from the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, with the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston presiding, although not the main celebant.On his blog Sean Cardinal O'Malley defended his decision to preside, and thus also to NOT deny a Catholic funeral to the most consistent and vociferous proponent of abortion and homosexual marriage among Catholic politicians. The intercessory prayers, which the senator apparently wrote, suggest he had no repentance on these matters.
The Cardinal is clearly a man motivated by charity and pastoral sensitivity. Caught between the admiration of his flock for the senator and the scandal of the man's political positions and actions, he chose not to alienate that flock and the extended Kennedy family, and to extend a fatherly hand to all, including the departed senator.
Okay, he's the pastor of that dicoese and it was his decision to make. However, how did it get to this point, where the justifiable "scandal of the truth" is less important than the authentic scandal of upholding those in error. I would argue that the fault is not this Cardinal's alone, but every Archbishop, without exception, who has pastored the archdiocese over the lifetime of the Kennedy political dynasty. These archbishops, and the priests with Kennedys in their parishes, have not only tolerated the evil political positions, and example, of the Kennedy clan, but not reprimanded the theologians who counselled them from academic chairs within the archdiocese. Had pastoral authority extended the medicinal hand of a loving father to the Kennedys in the 60s, or even the 70s, the pernicious error that one can opposed Church moral teaching with impunity would not have produced the Bidens, Pelosis and the other Catholics in government, the majority of whom seem to identify a far left agenda with Catholicism. In some real sense, this failure is also the father of the dissolution of Catholic identity in the United States and political cohesion in support of authentic Catholic social and moral teaching.
So, perhaps it was understandable that this was not the time or place for the Cardinal to cause an uproar. However, Sunday was a new day and the future will tell whether he and his successors can reverse the pastoral failures of the past 40 years. Otherwise, Ted will have been the one to have successfully completed a revolution in Boston. The events of the last 10 days suggests that Ted's revolution is FAR along.
St. Thomas More pray for Boston!
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