Letter to Cardinal Dolan: Don’t Turn Your Back On The Gospel
Eminence,
“We need you more than ever”, you told President Trump publicly on May 30, 2020, in New York.
As a Catholic, I cannot endorse your statement. And I was shocked to hear that Cardinal Dolan will open the Republican National Convention.
As a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, you have taken sides, whether you like it or not. And you are on the wrong side of the Gospel: the Pharisees who sent Jesus Christ to the Calvary. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.” (Matt. 23).
In case you overlooked it, Joe Biden is Catholic and has been accused by Trump to have no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God. “He’s against God.”
“As a priest, one of my most sacred obligations is to try and respond positively whenever I am invited to pray. Prayer is speaking to God, offering Him praise, thanking Him for His many blessings, and asking for His intercession; That is why I have accepted an invitation to pray at the Republican National Convention.” You told for your defense.
It is all about Donald Trump
You are taking the side of those who intend to elect a man who has been suspected of pedophilia with Jeffrey Epstein. He supported Ghislaine Maxwell who was providing girls to this rapist and his friends. You are turning your back to the millions of women who have been abused and found the courage to speak up: the “me too” movement was mocked by Donald Trump as very dangerous for powerful men. He did it to defend Brent Kavanaugh who was clearly accused of rape. Don’t you understand that Catholics are wondering whether you really got a measure of the amplitude of the sins of the Church? Are you on the side of the abusers?
You are cautioning an assembly that will elect a President that attacked the papacy: the U.S. president highlighted an endorsement he received from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal envoy to Washington D.C. who in 2018 took the extraordinary step of calling on Pope Francis to resign.
Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me (Matt.25)
This country has lived through almost three years of destruction of the fabric of the Gospel: Jesus Christ is on the side of the least
At a time when “black lives matter” this President made a mockery of the Bible at St John’s Church, for his own political show after crushing peaceful demonstrators in Washington D.C. Mariann Budde, the outraged Episcopalian Bishop of Washington DC, said that everything is done to inflame violence.
The number of separated families exploded under Donald Trump has created outrage across the country. Have you heard the cries of the children calling for their parents put in a cage where they were jailed in a concentration camp? Why were they jailed by his administration and often themselves victims of sexual abuse?
You cannot ignore that this administration has increased inequality and poverty. That the mismanagement of the coronavirus was most harmful to the less wealthy.
Policies: climate change, the wall and immigration…and racism
You personally, by praying at the Republican convention this year, will give your blessing to Trump’s denial of climate change. Pope Francis said that political leaders and others who denied climate change reminded him of a passage from the psalms about man’s stubbornness. “Man is stupid, the Bible said,” he said. “It’s like that when you don’t want to see, you don’t see.” He gave Trump a copy of his encyclical letter on climate change. This is Church teaching.
“A person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” the Buenos Aires-born pontiff said when asked about Trump’s now-infamous promises to erect a wall, aimed at keeping Mexicans out of the U.S.
Trump called the Pope “disgraceful”. But do you remember the mass celebrated at the Mexican border by the Pope at Ciudad Juarez?
Needless to say, the White House policy on immigration was strongly condemned by the Catholic Church. You did write about it. You, Cardinal Dolan, said you were “not in the business of telling people what candidates they should support or who deserves their vote. But as a Catholic, I take seriously the Bible’s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament.” Did you depart from your own ideas?
Mr. Trump called African countries “shitholes” several times, and used other “racist” language when he was talking to representatives of the African Union. Racism is anti-Christian. It is your own parishioners who needed to petition you last month to be more forceful about racism. It did not come from you.
You, Cardinal Dolan, said you admire Trump’s leadership on helping religious communities recover from coronavirus. While 75% of the American people disavow his incompetent and heartless treatment of the virus, you must be the only one in the Catholic Church.
Please step down from the GOP convention
You are too smart not to know that your presence sends a partisan message. “Please speak truth to power and refrain from giving even the appearance that bishops have their hands on the scales in this election,” was the reaction of catholic organizations.
Did you get donations for this appearance?
It is still time to do the right thing and withdraw from this decision.
