PUB GRAB

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

When it brought Alberto Cutié on board, the Episcopal Organization acquired an attention whore with easily as much game as Gene Robinson:

In a controversial book being released Tuesday, Roman Catholic-turned-Episcopal priest Alberto Cutié lashes out against his former church, calling it “misogynistic,” ‘‘disconnected” and an “institution that continues to promote old ideas.”

Writing at length for the first time about his fall from the Archdiocese of Miami, Cutié vehemently defends his decision to leave the Catholic church and shares his increasing disenchantment with it over 14 years as a priest.

Do any of you buy any of that? Neither do I. Those phrases quoted above are too cliched, not something that an actual human being would ever come up with on his own. They sound like Cutié(or his ghost writer) merely repeated someone else’s lines.

And as I’ve said before, my problem with the guy was never that his brain wrote a check that his heart couldn’t cash. My problem is that he refuses to man up about it. To me, that sounds for all the world like some douche trying to blame his wife for the fact that he’s sleeping regularly sleeping around.

But more revealing are Cutié’s words about his former church, one which he strongly defended for years as the archdiocese’s most popular representative. He once headed Miami’s Catholic radio station, penned an El Nuevo Herald advice column and hosted a popular Telemundo talk show.

Secretly, Cutié writes in the book, he had come to doubt much of the church’s teachings as early as 2003, after several run-ins with church hierarchy and after a growing disillusion with “bishops too concerned with their own images” during child sex-abuse crises.

Nice job blowing a HUGE hole in your argument, Al. Because you’ve just declared that you were lying before but you’re not lying now. So why should anyone anywhere believe anything you say about anything at all?

In several passages, Cutié blames the church’s celibacy policy for the dwindling clergy pool and the child sex-abuse scandals. He also accuses church leaders of being hypocrites and says they tacitly accept secret homosexual and heterosexual relationships among priests but disapproved of his because it became public.

I’m certain that an Episcopalian helped Al write this thing. Because that right there is a pitch-perfect rendition of the Episcopal left’s “At least we’re honest about it” defense.

While shying away from referring to most local church officials by name, Cutié hurls several insults at the man who led the archdiocese during the tabloid scandal, former Archbishop John Favalora.

Comparing him to “an aloof CEO” with a “cold and rigid approach” who was “disconnected” from parish-level happenings, Cutié says he and Favalora rarely spoke before or during the scandal, except for one 19-minute meeting after news broke of the photos.

As the last of Alberto Cutié’s credibility floats gently away on the morning breeze. Al? Did your rectory have a telephone? If it somehow didn’t(hard to believe considering what a big star you were), you could have gone to a local 7-11 and bought yourself a little disposable cell phone for not a lot of jack.

If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that the Archbishop’s residence had a phone and I’m almost positive that the Archdiocesan offices, where the Archbishop worked, had and still has phone service. So if you had all these concerns that you claim you had, you could have raised them with the Archbishop whenever the mood struck you.