COMMENTARY: O’Malley Should Skip Sermon, Kick the Dog Instead

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) If you dialed “O for O’Malley,” as Bing Crosby’s Father Chuck O’Malley invited the […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) If you dialed “O for O’Malley,” as Bing Crosby’s Father Chuck O’Malley invited the troubled to do in “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” who would answer the phone _ the new archbishop of Boston, Sean O’Malley, or the pope in a mad mood about America?


Archbishop O’Malley has worked hard to steady the barque of Peter after it took on so much water _ and pitched Cardinal Bernard Law overboard _ running the rapids of the clergy sex abuse scandal.

O’Malley seemed to find his own voice as he used common sense, a pastor’s heart and Irish good humor to get the archdiocese not out of hock but certainly into dry dock for much needed repairs. He has made many Catholics feel that, in time of need, they could call O for O’Malley and get a pastoral response rather than a recording.

If, however, they dialed O for O’Malley on Holy Thursday, the voice may have been the voice of O’Malley but the theme _ America as Evil Empire _ is the theme of the pope.

Many Catholics were surprised to hear O’Malley describe the United States as a “hostile, alien environment” that is characterized by `a culture of death … consumerism, hedonism (and) individualism.”

This is Vatican boilerplate for America, whose superpower status it bemoans, whose consumerism and might it condemns but whose money and protection it eagerly accepts. These are the papal themes that anybody who wants to be a bishop, much less an archbishop, writes a hundred times on the Catholic school blackboard of his inner ambition.

Maybe O’Malley had a bad day and, instead of kicking the dog, as many men do to displace their frustration, he vented it by describing Catholics as “exiles in Babylon.” Catholicism, however, has prospered in America as in no other country in history.

He likened preaching to Americans as a form of martyrdom and said that “the pulpit can be painful.” Does he think this is news to average Catholics who die for their faith regularly during ill prepared and overlong sermons?


O’Malley reserved his polemics for baby boomers, whom he viewed as “heirs to Woodstock, the drug culture, the sexual revolution, feminism, the breakdown of authority and divorce.” He still takes their money, of course, following another papal theme of hating the donor but loving the donation.

O’Malley would never have preached that sermon if he had understood the Sept. 11 tragedy that is the great sacramental revelation of our age. Walk among the victims, archbishop, for they were mostly the boomers you write off with such condescension. Learn of their goodness, their love for their spouses and their children, and their devotion to their beliefs; learn from these dead, who, along with the firemen and policemen martyrs of that day, tell us that they are at least as great as the greatest generation of World War II celebrated by Tom Brokaw.

Read the casualty lists from the war on terrorism and ask yourself if you could speak to these dead and their families of the selfish, hedonistic America that you claim to see. Read about the latest police officer or firefighter killed in the line of duty in Boston and ask if you would speak at his or her funeral in the same papal-pleasing and self-indulgent way you did on Holy Thursday.

Besides losing that sermon, perhaps O’Malley should buy a dog for kicking on bad days and then leave that downtown rectory into which he moved after rejecting the traditional archbishop’s residence. Maybe he is still a monk but he apparently cannot see the simple goodness and generosity of his own people.

DEA/PH END KENNEDY

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!