Double-Shot of Shea

First off, Mark reports that one of our sembloggers -- Matty Molnar, a seminarian of the archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas studying at Mundelein Seminary -- was killed the other night in a car accident. His blog has been turned into a tribute site; it's almost haunting as before the news broke, he had gotten comments that his most recent post was his best one... Downright eerie.

Alongside that, Shea's been extremely tough on the Bushies in the wake of Katrina, and he's got a long, fluid study of what differentiates civil leadership from ecclesiastical....

The fact is, many Catholic conservatives seemed to find it *far* easier to call the Pope an incompetent or even a traitor to the Faith at the slightest provocation ("Levada to the CDF? Perhaps Ratzinger was only *pretending to be orthodox!" said one memorable member of the Star Chamber) than to acknowledge the teensy-weensiest faults on Bush's part. Consequently, I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to educate people on JPII's conception of his role and the Tradition's teaching about same, since so many people seemed uninterested in learning about that before declaring his papacy a tragic failure. Conversely, to an audience that found it extremely easy to produce excuses for Bush's manifest failure to lead during Katrina, I again offered facts which made this thesis somewhat difficult to maintain.

So: I've disagreed with John Paul and I've disagreed with Bush. Many of my readers were eager to agree with me about JPII and demand that I not only disagree with, but condemn him. This I refused to do because I couldn't see sufficient grounds for it. I still can't. Meanwhile, many of these people are now eager to disagree with me about Bush and to regard the slightest criticism as "Bush hatred". I have no idea why.

Wow. And that's Mark Shea talking -- no Anthea Butler, he.

I always knew I was onto something when I spoke of the base's adherence to "Archbishop Bush"; no mean coincidence that he actually did have a Cathedral-Basilica at his back for the speech last night, eh?

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