Sack Bishop Morlino, Christ’s lobbyist…

Bishop Morlino should be stripped of his office and brought into court for election tampering if what Bill Wineke reported today is true. Wineke said,

He sent [all his priests] a “personal and confidential” letter last week ordering them to play a 14-minute CD announcing his positions on the “marriage referendum, the death penalty referendum and the issue of embryonic stem-cell research” at all services next weekend.

The bishop says the priests don’t have to endorse his views but warns, “I must make it very clear that any verbal or non-verbal expression of disagreement with this teaching on the part of the priest will have to be considered by myself as an act of disobedience, which could have serious consequences.”

Such arrogance. But the Bishop is devoted to Mary, which I suppose gives him the right to interfere in our elections. And while insinuating his vile intolerance into the broader community at large, the Bishop encourages free and open discussion of the important matters in his own community, like music at mass.

In 1980 Archbishop Oscar Romero was martyred in an act of class warfare, an act of state sponsored terrorism that began with the training of the assassins by the US government at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” the trainers and the graduates of the School of the Americas are complicit in hundreds of similar crimes committed since the school was founded in 1946.

Madison Bishop Robert Morlino accepted an appointment to the WHINSEC Board of Visitors last year. Many people thought this was unpardonable.

Earlier in 2024 the Bishop’s cathedral in Madison was torched. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that the Bishop himself was responsible in order to provide leverage for building a grander structure on the city’s west side.

The fourth Bishop of Madison’s reign has been tainted by circumstance and the ill favored WHINSEC appointment, but it wasn’t until today that I wondered if Henry VIII didn’t have the right idea: if the Bishop is going to meddle in secular affairs, then his properties should be forfeit to the state.

This post is not about the pompous fellow’s urging the Governor to withdraw support from embryonic stem cell research, although the arrogance of that request is beyond belief. It is not about his strange silence following community concern about his role supporting the training of Latin American terrorists. I wouldn’t even make the assertion that having found disfavor in the eyes of God his cathedral was burned, because there was — one assumes — insurance.

This post is about the separation of church and state and Morlino’s sense that as a catholic Bishop he stands above the law. Shoving down the priests’ collective throat his political opinions about stem cell research and the state’s need for a “marriage amendment” to our constitution is one thing. Herr Ratzinger provides the bishops with a lot of strong suggestions about how to pull the church to the right and disempower the people. It’s the bishop’s job to follow Herr Ratzinger’s orders as it is the priests’ job to follow Morlino’s orders. But where does it stop? Morlino has ordered the priests to instruct their parishioners how to vote next Tuesday. He has threatened to punish any who do not follow these instructions absolutely.

The arrogant fellow needs to answer to the District Attorney, and if he wants to be Christ’s lobbyist, then we should demand that he turn in the miter, we should rescind his tax exemption and we should make him file the appropriate paperwork.