A Letter to the Archbishop

His Excellency, the Most Reverend Joseph W. Tobin

Archdiocese of Newark

171 Clifton Avenue

Newark, NJ 07104-0500

Dear Archbishop Tobin,

As lifelong, faithful Catholics it grieves us tremendously to write this letter to you. However, in light of the recent revelations regarding Cardinal McCarrick, we feel that this letter is necessary.

We originally did not want to believe that the allegations brought against the Church by investigative journalists in 2002 were true. How could shepherds of Christ’s faithful possibly behave in this way? These allegations stated that high level leaders in the Church were aware of predatory abusive homosexual behavior on the part on numerous parish priests. Instead of reporting such abusers to the civil authorities, these bishops transferred the offenders from one parish to another after “treatment” at miscellaneous psychiatric facilities. The abuse, which primarily began in the 1960s and 70s, continued until the scandal came to light sixteen years ago.

There were many public apologies in front of the cameras and in front of victims groups. Policies and procedures and other bureaucratic maneuverings were established ostensibly to resolve the problem of these predatory homosexual priests. Promises and private pay-outs were made, and the Church moved on.

But it really didn’t.

With the McCarrick revelations, it appears that the entire leadership in the Church is corrupted. To the average layman or laywoman, it now looks as if our bishops, our archbishops, and our cardinals do not really want to solve this problem. They do not want to rid the Church of this evil. Why? After sixteen years they cannot truly plead ignorance, can they? It’s being reported that McCarrick’s revolting lifestyle was an “open secret.” He was promoted from Newark to Washington DC and then elevated to cardinal. He was allowed to stay at a seminary in retirement. How could this have happened? It is also being reported that several priests protested McCarrick’s advancement at every stage and were rebuffed and hushed up.

Why?

Is it that our bishops do not want to do what is necessary to rid the Church of this festering cancer, or is it that they can’t do what is necessary? We’ve also seen it written that McCarrick is one of many, and that many, if not most, priests, bishops and cardinals are prone to blackmail. A cloud of fear has descended upon the Church hierarchy – fear of saying the right thing, fear of reporting what was known by who when it was known, fear of airing out these “open secrets.” Is this the case, Your Excellency? Can it be Church leadership has lost sight of its goal – to shepherd Christ’s people – and has now allowed itself to become complicit in the evil of a minority, if indeed it is a minority?

These are questions the laity want answered, and the longer it takes for honest answers to come forth, the worse Church leadership will appear in our hearts and minds.

It is clear that the evil of sexually active clerics preying upon and abusing those without power must be completely eliminated from the Church, and that our bishops and cardinals must do a complete reversal of their past behavior in order to do this. It may entail mass resignations. It may entail installing a special prosecutor to ferret out these evildoers. But it must be done and it must be done now.

Sadly, it is our conviction that until a visibly authentic change in direction regarding this scandal is manifested, it would be best for us to channel our discretionary charitable giving to other avenues. Until the Church makes progress towards a true repentance – metanoia – in thought, word, and deed to the problem of the McCarricks in the priesthood, until such a time, no further funds will come from our family. We will also encourage other faithful Catholics to divert their giving to more responsible charities to the best of our abilities.

Respectfully yours in Christ,

Mr. and Mrs. Hopper

* * * * * * *

Letter to be mailed out and emailed to our Archbishop later today, with our real names of course.

Will post his response, if / when I receive one.

Feel free to customize and copy and send out to yours.

Starve the Bastards Out

Since last February not a single cent of my family’s hard-earned money has gone to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church run by a cadre of revolting creepy perverts who enthusiastically look the other way while things like Cardinal Theodore McCarrick destroy the lives of countless young men.

Now, we’re not the Rockefellers. In the grand scheme of things, my family’s giving slides more down the scale toward the widow’s two mites than the Pharisees sitting in the front row of the temple. When our finances were good we gave $100 a month to the Church via automated payments. When they were tight, like they are now, it was more discretionary and those payments stopped as we returned to cash in the envelopes. Something on the order of $25 a month; last year we gave around $300.

So none of the princes of the Church will take notice of our decision. Don’t think my parish priest will, either. But Someone will, and has.

And like our refusal to purchase any official NFL gear for my girls this past Christmas (perhaps $100 or $200), this small withholding is more a symbolic protest than anything else. Actually, it’s not a withholding, but a transfer. With the death of the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham in February, we’ve set up an automatic $25-a-month deduction to the Billy Graham Ministries in lieu of any giving to the lecherous cowardly cretins running the Catholic Church.

I wholeheartedly encourage you to do the same if you are Catholic.

Give elsewhere.

Please, give elsewhere.

And write your bishop stating your intentions.

Cutting the purse strings is the only thing these vermin will take notice of. Not parishioners, not the laity. Not investigative reporters. Certainly not the Pope, who seems to have no interest cleaning out this predatory homosexual infestation, this gay deep state. Perhaps they have something on him. They all have something on each other. Every single bishop and cardinal is blackmailable by someone. That’s the only reason why in the fifteen years since the scandal broke only the barest minimal legalistic maneuverings at reform have been done. Blackmail: that’s the only reason a slime mold like McCarrick was able to rise despite the open secret of his homosexual abuse over the past sixty years, and it’s the only reason why the bastard will never be defrocked.

Starve them out.

Do not give one cent until they are all gone.

All of them.

The Daily News

Yesterday it was announced that the New York Daily News would cut – lay off – it’s editorial staff by 50 percent, something like forty jobs lost. Other media and liberal politicians are decrying this move (an effort for the company to stay profitable) and tarring it with the usual blah blah blah: greed, injustice, and money must now be spent to keep the staff at full level.

It’s all b-s.

Society’s changed. The way we get our news has changed. It’s the old horse buggy versus automobile thing. People are laid off all the time. Just ask yours truly, whose been laid off three times in a six year span in an industry extremely overdue for an overhauling.

Plus, it’s a neat dose of schadenfreude to watch ostensible leftists advocating leftist policies getting upsmacked via the marketplace’s invisible hand. Keep unionizing and raising that minimum wage, fellas.

But it’s also sad in a way, for me, because I have a soft spot for the Daily News.

Now, I can’t remember the last time I read the newspaper, let alone actually paid for it. Must be at least twenty years or so. I remember reading it on vacation in a hotel room in Lake George sometime in the late 90s, but only because someone probably picked it up on a breakfast run. Yeah, it’s been a while.

But way, way back, in the dog days of 1979, my parents bought a subscription and I read through it every day that entire summer.

It became a sort of highlight for me. I would trot off to art school in the morning, walk the six or seven blocks back home at noon, and there the paper would be, on the couch or on the side table, with a headline screaming out at me. I knew nothing really of the world outside the front door – my world was basically my school and family. There was no internet, no cable TV (well, there might have been, but only with twenty or thirty channels, not four hundred), and my main interest was reading gnarled science fiction paperbacks.

So I would thumb through the Daily News, feel the texture of the pages, the ink on my fingers, scan headlines and devour, cautiously at first, anything and everything that seemed interesting. I started following one of the comics – was it Gasoline Alley? – that branched off in strange directions (I wasn’t into comics). I did the Jumble puzzle every day, the crossword being too difficult. And at the end of my daily investigation, I would peruse the sports pages where I began to understand box scores and the frustration of being a Met fan.

I knew it was the summer of 1979 because that’s when Skylab fell to earth. I remember the breathless, dramatic buildup as the Day approached. Trying to scare us by not seeming to scare us, to keep those circulation numbers up because where would it fall??!! Turns out it broke apart in the atmosphere and littered the Australian outback (not Point Nemo), but let me tell you – I spent long nights worried and wondering if the roof of my house could keep out a hunk of metal the size of a school bus.

The other piece of drama the Daily News revealed that summer was the death of Lord Mountbatten. Now, I had no idea who he was or why he was assassinated, but I recall being filled with a deep, profound sadness after reading the article. I remember a picture of his yacht, pre-explosion, and one of post-explosion debris. Turns out he was an English World War II hero who went into politics and was killed by an IRA bomb on his boat. Doesn’t seem a fitting conclusion for such a life.

Thinking about it now, the subscription must have been a trial basis, because I don’t remember reading the newspaper after that summer. The big Iranian hostage crisis would have happened two months later, and my faithful informed friend was not at my side shrieking headlines at me every twenty-four hour news cycle.

Daily News, I enjoyed that little part of life we shared, that one summer, and in some small and not-so-small ways you expanded my horizons.

Summer Readings

What’s Hopper been reading lately? Why the scarcity of book reviews at this site?

Well, something shocking’s happened. For the first time in nearly twenty years, I went ten days WITHOUT READING ANYTHING!

Yeah, my unshakable sickness confined me that week-and-a-half to the wasteland that is TV. Hard to read when you’re coughing up a lung every three minutes and can’t get comfortable in any position. So instead of science fiction, military history, philosophy, or any other literary weirdity, it’s been Impractical Jokers, the occasional Tucker Carlson, and Yankee games with my oldest daughter.

That being stated, I have read stuff outside that ten-day period.

I did a second-run through of Homer’s Iliad June 15 to July 10. Not as earth-shattering world-shaking as when I first read it (and reviewed it, here). As a matter of fact, instead of morbid fascination and admiration, I felt morbid disgust. Went from, “Wow, imagine if men like this still populated the earth” to “Thank God men like this do not populate the earth, at least in large numbers.” The cruelty, the taunting, the shoulder shrugging at gore, the placing of honor, bravery, and courage on a pedestal with love, kindness, and mercy as a footstool, well, it was off-putting to say the least. Sure, there is a place for honor, bravery, and courage. But it must be – has to be – tempered with those values Christ taught and emphasized.

Still, though, America 2018 could use a pinch of the Homeric. Or perhaps a whole tablespoon.

After making my way 44 percent through PKD’s Exegesis, I had to put it on hold. Extremely interesting, this “garage philosophy” of a great, if perhaps mentally troubled, science fiction writer. So much so that I went and purchased a copy of it, with a self-promise to pick up where I left off at page 400 sometime in the near future. And I also plan to do a short post on what I’ve gleaned from his visions and explanatory noodlings in the next couple of days. If you come here for the weirdness, you’ll get plenty o’ it in that post. I’m actually excited thinking about what I’m going to write regarding The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. I know I’ll enjoy it.

Been doing a drunken-walk through the Bible, too. I have a couple of versions of the Good Book in my possession; each one yields a different perspective. Right now I’m using a Protestant “Men’s Devotional” Bible, and in the past three weeks I’ve read through the Gospel of Mark, the Letter to the Ephesians, Deutero-Isaiah (that’s the second half of Isaiah, believed to be written by someone other than Isaiah), and now half-way through the Acts of the Apostles. Interesting, fulfilling, and uplifting, as always. One of my dreams is to become a Biblical scholar before shipping off this mortal coil. I’m probably about ten percent of the way there now.

Finally, a few days ago I started Napoleon as Military Commander, a book I picked up for myself as a gift at the end of tax season a few months ago. Why the interest in Napoleon? See here. Since mid-March I put away an 800-page biography of the French ruler and a 120-page examination of the battle which finally deposed him, Waterloo. I’m reading this 280-page military history as a prelude to resuming my study of the Civil War, which I’ll probably get to in the fall.

Revolting

Get out of my Church, you revolting excuse for a man!

And take all your perverted cronies with you.

When is the “Me Too” movement going to happen in the Catholic Church? When??

Difficulties

So I’m finally getting over the bronchitis. It’s been nearly a month, and I can finally go as long as an hour without coughing. I’m getting a decent night’s sleep. I don’t feel like I’m camping out on death’s door.

Lessons learned? Plenty. First, if at all possible, stay away from doctors. They’ll kill you. By and large being a doctor is not much different than being a mechanic. Yeah, they have specialized knowledge. But your dis-ease is really just an educated guess to them. They look you over, they look the tests they’ve given you over, and then they say, “X.” And if X doesn’t work, they say “Y.” If not Y, then “Z.” Etc.

Second, trust your gut. The first doctor I saw, a woman young enough to be my daughter (and I’m not really that old), prescribed for me a course of action I knew to be wrong. But I deferred to the white lab coat. As a result, I think I suffered an extra three weeks. And I mean suffered – coughing so hard I felt I would vomit, long nights without sleep, difficulty breathing to the point where I actually walked extra horizontal distance at work to an elevator to avoid walking extra vertical distance.

Third, when symptoms occur, get medical treatment. Yeah, this seems to fly in the face of Lesson the First, but negotiating your health and dis-ease is really an art, not a science. I should’ve made an appointment with a trusted doctor (not show up without an appointment for a sick visit) and asked for antibiotics, the treatment that’s worked for me in the past.

But there have been other difficulties, too.

My three-year-old laptop has been acting up. So much so that I barely use it anymore; that’s why there hasn’t been any fresh posts here of late (the previous post was written and slapped on the blog via a library computer). The problem? The screen goes black seemingly at random. However, my buddy’s son, who has been trained to take apart and rebuild computers by his dad, thinks it’s a loose connection somewhere and offered to help. I’ll bring it over to him in the next couple of days, and get him a gift card if he fixes it. Right now I’m posting on it because I have it in a certain position at a certain angle and it’s working. If I move it ever so slightly, or bang just a tad too hard on the keyboard – fade to black.

Work has been insane, insane-r than usual. Missed a couple of days due to the bronchitis, which put me behind the 8-ball. Then only had one day to process payroll during the Fourth of July week, and did that in full bronchitic bloom. Had to manually update pay rates for 185 union employees when their contract got signed last-minute last week. Had to manually move PTO (Paid Time Off) accruals for 135 non-union employees to the PTOP (Paid Time Off Prior) accrual bucket, which gives them until September 30 to use any time off or lose it. We’re upgrading our timekeeping system, so I’ve been filling out a 33-page questionnaire for the new company, half of which I don’t understand and the other half I don’t know. Oh, and endless pointless meetings meetings meetings.

Home life is hectic too as every week – sometimes every other day – the girls are somewhere else requiring a change in my schedule. And half the time whatever they’re doing involves spending more money I don’t have. And the damn dog. Always gotta rush home to feed this dog I didn’t want and rush back to work because I’m a wage slave yoked to that damn clock on the wall.

I’d throw it all away in a heartbeat and become a Carthusian monk if I could, but I don’t think the Carthusians would take too kindly to family abandonment.

Anyway, more posts on the way, and not all will be complaint-laden whinefests.

Encounter with Liberal Insanity

Well, Hopper has had his first one-on-one encounter with the mental disorder known as Progressivism. Or liberal insanity. It’s the same thing.

I’ve been fighting this bronchitis for two weeks now. Fed up with the “stay the course” advice of my first doctor, I saw another one yesterday. He was concerned and ordered me an on-the-spot nebulizer treatment as well as some chest x-rays. While I was breathing in the albuterol in an effort to clear my lungs, the nurse came in with a form for me.

This nurse is actually an older Hispanic male. He’s assisted me before and he’s a great guy, though I still prefer dealing with the female nurses there. Anyway, he apologetically told me he had to ask me some questions.

“Do you adhere to the gender of your birth, on your birth certificate, or are you gender fluid?”

“Of course I do,” I said, indicating the first.

After marking my response on the form he followed up with, “and what is your birth gender?”

I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. In my sickness, with untrimmed beard and mustache, with great bags under my eyes from a dearth of sleep, I look somewhat like Jerry Garcia. But he had helped me and I didn’t want to give him a hard time, seeing he was embarrassed.

“Male, of course.”

A nervous chuckle and he made his notations.

“And what pronouns should I use when addressing you?”

Oh Lord. I thought instantly about saying “His Majesty.” A year or two back some young Republican in college tweaked his college professor by filling that answer out on one of those pronoun forms the idiots teaching our college kids these days seem enamored with. But I didn’t want to give him a hard time. “The normal ones,” I replied, and said no more.

So now I have had my first encounter with the Philosophy of the Denial of Reality that is swiftly overtaking academia and now the health care industry. How soon before I am required to take loyalty oaths to this viewpoint to maintain a job? I already have to take annual training where I affirm women make 77 cents on the dollar (debunked just about everywhere) and that LGBTQWXYZ is the summit of all that is good and wholesome (contrary to natural law and my deeply-held religious belief).

God help us.

And for those wondering, the new doctor prescribed me some antibiotics and steroids, which I took last night at 5 pm. I slept through the night (with only two small interruptions) for the first time since June 20 and feel a hundred percent better already.