I’ve been out of sync with the US news cycle and, so, I’m catching up. What I’ve read about these Catholic kids at the March for Life in what we might call the “Covington Matter” is horrifying.
The old Latin phrase in cauda veneno… the (scorpion’s) poison is in its tail…, meaning that the really important point is generally found at the end of a letter, applies to Fr. Rutler’s look at the ruthless and feckless virtue signalers who have so mistreated those kids. Fr. Rutler does a good job of framing the players, especially irresponsible “journalists”. (Yes, the scare quotes are ever more appropriate as members of that guild commit self-slaughter.) Then he gets to the Bishop of Convington.
Our Lord condemned “virtue signaling” in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Temple. “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like this sinner.” There are Pharisees in every corridor of society, but they find a most comfortable berth in the Church. So it was that the very diocese of the Covington students, without interviewing them or asking for evidence outside the media, promptly threatened to punish them. There was no reference to the hateful racism and obscene references to priests chanted by the cultic Hebrew Israelites as they threatened those Catholic youths. Instead, bishops issued anodyne jargon about the “dignity of the human person” without respecting the dignity of their own spiritual sons. The latest advertisement of the Gillette razor company portraying examples of “toxic masculinity” did not accuse any bishop, but only ecclesiastical bureaucrats would consider that a compliment. Pope Francis, off-the-cuff and at a high altitude in an airplane, once asked, “Who am I to judge?” There might at last be some application of that malapropism to shepherds who jump to judgment and throw their lambs to the wolves of the morally bankrupt media in a display of virtue signaling and in fear of being politically incorrect.
Infamous Scribblers: Virtue Signalers on the Warpath
Newsessentials Blog 
Posted on January 24, 2019
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