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The most important editorial Catholics should read this week comes from the pages of Commonweal under the headline: Of Popes & Trumpists: Who Drives Catholicism? It expresses exactly what I was thinking as I wrote the story Kansas crowd applauds Cardinal Burke's stump speech.
The Commonweal editorial begins: “There has been a brief flurry of news stories speculating about the ideological affinities, or possible political alliance, between Stephen Bannon, the White House’s disrupter in chief, and traditionalist Catholic figures opposed to Pope Francis, especially Cardinal Raymond Burke.”
It also mentions The Washington Post opinion piece written by Emma-Kate Symons that boldly advises Pope Francis on how to “cleanse the far-right rot from the catholic church.”
The editorial then speculates for a couple paragraphs on the question: “Why do dubious stories like these get traction?”
But then it zeros in on what is really important, what the news accounts above distract us from:
“What the brouhaha over Bannon and Burke fails to recognize is that the fate of Catholicism, as Francis himself constantly reminds us, is not being decided in Rome or Washington, but in thousands of parishes and Catholic ministries across this country and the world. It is there that both Catholics drawn to Francis and those disquieted by him will either find a way to forge real communion or not.”
That, my dear reader, is the heart of the matter. Commonweal, thank you.