Paul Ryan hasn’t always had a problem with the Catholic clergy.
Sure, he fired House Chaplain Rev. Pat Conroy for stressing the “love” and “compassion” parts of the Bible in favor of all the Ayn Rand quotes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John somehow forgot to put in there, but that’s not all!
A Catholic himself, Ryan is good friends with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who as archbishop of Milwaukee once authorized big payoffs to priests who had been caught sexually abusing children. The payments were part of a plan to get them to leave without a fuss. And after throwing money at the problem, Dolan later lied about what he’d done, further victimizing all the young, faithful Catholics who had taken it in the apse in the good cardinal’s diocese.
According to The New York Times:
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee.
Questioned at the time about the news that one particularly notorious pedophile cleric had been given a “payoff” to leave the priesthood, Cardinal Dolan, then the archbishop, responded that such an inference was “false, preposterous and unjust.”
But a document unearthed during bankruptcy proceedings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and made public by victims’ advocates reveals that the archdiocese did make such payments to multiple accused priests to encourage them to seek dismissal, thereby allowing the church to remove them from the payroll.
Needless to say, victims’ rights advocates weren’t too happy about the payments:
A victims advocacy group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, sent a letter of protest to the current archbishop of Milwaukee on Wednesday asking, “In what other occupation, especially one working with families and operating schools and youth programs, is an employee given a cash bonus for raping and sexually assaulting children?”
Oh, SNAP! That really is an excellent question. And how dare you? Do you know who you’re talking to?
Of course, Dolan’s little white lie was unearthed in 2012, and yet Ryan continued to pal around with him for years after that.
In fact, on Ryan’s own government website, you’ll find a motherlode of homespun wisdom from an interview Dolan conducted with the congressman in 2014.
Here’s a snippet:
Cardinal Dolan: One of the things that I admired about Congressman Ryan: He has made a promise to himself and his family that, except when there’s an extraordinary reason, he will always leave Washington on a Friday and go home and be with the family on the weekends. So admired here, are you still able to do that?
Paul Ryan: Oh yeah, we stick with that. I stick with that. I’ve turned down a lot things over the years which might have been good for the career, but not good for the family. It’s all about the balance. I’ve had so many people in their 60s and 70s tell me: “Gosh! I just wish I spent more time with my family.” Well, I don’t want to be one of those people.
Yeah, if I had kids attending Catholic school in Wisconsin I’d come home every weekend too. You kind of have to. You’ve got hundreds of priests prowling around their parishes toting six-packs of Mike’s Hard Lemonade while diligently working on their severance packages.
Ryan’s priorities aren’t just misplaced as a legislator. He must be a pretty shitty Catholic, too, if the thing he most admires about the church is its unaccountable magisterial authority.
But then his real religion has always been Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, not Catholicism.
***
Hello, friends! Mama needs a new pair of Crocs, so take some time to download my new magnum opus, Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump, available now on Amazon. (You get it for the low, low introductory price of $2.99 if you don’t ask me why I’m forcing my own mother to wear Crocs.)