KARMA

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

I guess it’s no secret that in the exchange of clergy between Rome and Canterbury, the Catholics have rolled the Anglicans again and again. The Anglicans send the Catholics Pro-Bowlers like George Rutler, Jeff Steenson and others while receiving Rome’s practice squad rejects in return. Plus Matt Fox who is in a class by himself.

But what goes around comes around and the piper wants his scratch. Seem that Catholics are going to have to read and hear a lot from a prominent and bitter ex-Catholic. Searching Google News a bit ago, I discovered well over 200 articles on Alberto Cutié including this one from Religion News Service(which ENS naturally picked up):

The Rev. Alberto Cutie saw a lot of things in his 14 years as a Catholic priest while church officials looked the other way: priests who got caught with prostitutes, priests who lived with their gay partners, and men of the cloth who kept one bed in the rectory and another with their mistress.

Take this quick ethics quiz. I look out the window of my second-floor apartment and see a man being brutally assaulted down on South Elm Avenue. I should:

(A) Say, “Someone really needs to help that guy!”
(B) Call 911.

Al? When you allegedly saw all this stuff, did you yourself ever do anything about it? Did you ever go to any of these men and admonish them about the lives they were leading? Paul said that that was one of the things the Church is supposed to do. And the Church is not the bureacracy, Al. It’s you, it’s me, it’s all of us.

Yet when he was caught by paparazzi canoodling with his girlfriend on a Miami beach in 2009, Cutie was booted from his rectory, dropped from his insurance plan and told he would no longer receive a paycheck.

Which pissed Al off big time.

The scandal only intensified his disillusionment with a church he now describes as “incompetent,” “inhumane,” “merciless” and an “ideological dictatorship.”

“The church doesn’t need my help to tarnish its image,” Cutie said in an interview from his new office at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection near Miami. “The institution has done plenty to tarnish its own image.”

Particularly since this whole thing has always been all about gittin’ sahm.

“My life was all about work, but there was something in my life that was missing, a big empty hole: intimacy,” he said. “And I would ask whether (celibacy) was really God’s rule and what God wants or a man-made rule and what the church wants.”

It’s missing in a lot of our lives, Al. But that doesn’t mean that we invent ex post facto justifications for the way we deal with it.

He also struggled with church teaching against homosexuality, divorce, women’s ordination and denying Communion to non-Catholics.

Sure you did, Al. You sure spent a lot of time publicly defending doctrines you now claim you “struggled with.” Kind of makes you a hypocrite, a liar or both.

While Cutie protects the names of many in the church, he directs his harshest criticism at retired Archbishop John Favalora, who he describes as cold, rigid, arrogant, aloof and “disconnected and uninterested in my life.”

As I asked before, Al, did your rectory have a telephone? If it didn’t, that would have been easily remedied. Did you ever pick up the phone and call the Archbishop or anybody else, for that matter, and, well, talk about these alleged concerns and struggles of yours? Because if not, this has nothing to do with personal doubts about Catholic teaching and everything in the world to do with gittin’ sahm.

Al? I’m not Catholic but I would imagine that stuff like this happens all the time. It seems to me that your best possible course of action would have been to MAN UP, go to the bishop, request laicisation, give Leo Frade a phone call, marry your girlfriend, raise your daughter and get on with your life.

The thing not to do is to invent a back story about all these “doubts” you’ve had for years and years and, oh by the way, did I happen to mention what a hellhole the Roman Catholic Church is, write a book about it and then give interviews to anybody with a digital voice recorder, a microphone or a TV camera.

Because that makes you look like a real wuss, Al.

As you can see, Al’s already started making TV appearances. That’s his “Good Morning America” interview up top there. If you don’t feel like watching it(it runs a little over 7:30), here’s a transcript. And Get Religion has a piece on the coverage so far.