The land of saints, scholars, and heretics

It hasn't taken long for the New Holy Roman Empire to go on the march, with Benedict XVI handling the spiritual side, and the Emperor Dubya marshalling the secular forces. In a sign of the loons that now occupy influential positions in the American Catholic Church, Hibernia is in the crosshairs of the crusade -- Irish President Mary McAleese in particular. It's not like we're huge fans of Mary Mac at this blog but the idea that her planned speech next month to graduates at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia represents some kind of threat to Church teaching is laughable. But no-one is laughing:

[Irish Times, subs. req'd] An influential US Catholic group is trying to stop President Mary McAleese from making a speech at [Villanova]. The Cardinal Newman Society, which lists 10 US archbishops and bishops as advisers, says the President is not in line with Catholic teaching and had directly contradicted statements by the new pope, Benedict XVI ...

The group, which claims 16,000 members, has said the President had "angered the Irish bishops by her advocacy for homosexual rights and women priests". The group issued a statement listing her alleged transgressions, including a 1997 article in the Tablet, in which she compared defenders of the male priesthood to "Communist Party apparatchiks hawking redundant clichés".

It also lists a 1995 Dublin seminar on women in the church, in which the future president "responded with scorn" to statements by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) that women should never be accepted into the priesthood.

Just one sign of the lunacy represented by this protest is that a society named after Cardinal Newman, who promoted higher learning for Catholics, thinks that college graduates will be harmed by hearing a short speech from this woman. What, in God's name, are they afraid of?