This cardinal seems to think so…
His Eminence James Francis Cardinal Stafford speaking last week at the Catholic University of America, criticized President-elect Barack Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,” and campaigning on an “extremist anti-life platform.”
As reported in the The Tower, the student newspaper for the Catholic University of America:
“For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” Stafford said, comparing America’s future with Obama as president to Jesus’ agony in the garden. “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake.”
Cardinal Stafford said Catholics must deal with the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” by beginning a new sentiment where one is “with Jesus, sick because of love.”
The lecture, hosted by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, pertained to Humanae Vitae, a papal encyclical written by Pope Paul VI in 1968 and celebrating its 40 anniversary this year.
Stafford also spoke about the decline of a respect for human life and the need for Catholics to return to the original values of marriage and human dignity.
“If 1968 was the year of America’s ’suicide attempt,’ 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion,” said Stafford, an American Cardinal and Major Penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary for the Tribunal of the Holy See. “In the intervening 40 years since Humanae Vitae, the United States has been thrown upon ruins.”
I have Catholic friends, and I know this Cardinal doesn’t speak for them. But he speaks for a lot of them, and these are the same Catholics who organized themselves against gay marriage and helped pass Proposition 8.
Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them or their perceived plight.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
What is their plight Elvis? The very definition of plight seems to entail suffering, pain, and evote sympathy.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Amazing… By the way, our 1968 “suicide attempt” also included the burgeoning use of birth control (newly available at that time in the form of “the pill”). I’m not exactly sure where Cardinal Stafford has been living for the past 40 years but I don’t feel that we are on the brink of collapse (my words) as he suggests. Thank you for pointing out that this Cardinal (whose name I did not know until today) does not speak for all Catholics. I suspect he doesn’t speak for most Catholics actually. Look to Europe - France in particular - where Catholicism has survived the negative population growth rate brought about by peoples’ reluctance to have more than 1 child. Personally, I believe that apocalypse is brought about when institutions become so steeped in the past that they lose relevance. To quote Mr. Spock, they “outlive their usefulness.”