Thinking of You… Gross

Several years back, before we knew his depths of depravity, my mom gave me a book of the collected weekly columns of Theodore McCarrick. The book, titled Thinking of You, contains hundreds of Teddy’s weekly columns that appeared in The Catholic Standard, the archdiocesan newspaper for Washington. McCarrick had written the column for 14 years prior to assuming that see when he was Archbishop of Newark. I’ve held onto the book only because I think it might be a collectors item at this point. That is, if one is a collector of the bizarre.

Every so often I will pull the book off the shelf and thumb through the pages. What amazes me is just how ambiguous the words are. Much like the vaunted documents of Vatican II, every missive in this tome could be read with a straight face and could have been written by a straight man. It is only in knowing the backstory that one sees the hidden and disgusting rot that pervades this man’s evil mind. Take the following for instance.

First, diabolical narcissist much? The first few words read like a Facebook post of a 13 year-old girl. “Like and share if you don’t think I’m not pretty.” On the surface it seems like a banal, congratulatory note of approval for one’s successor. Yet McCarrick knew full well that Wuerl was not a good man. He was one of Teddy’s handpicked boys, someone who had presided over a funeral mass for a priest who had been murdered by a gay rent boy, assuring the congregation that the man was in heaven. No, when McCarrick said Wuerl was a good man, he meant “he’ll do exactly what I trained him to do and that is to wreck the Church.”

It’s kind of like how when Sacrosanctum Concillium says that Latin is to be retained in so many words, yet we end up with a Church who’s mother tongue is all but forgotten because “hey, we still drop a literal word of Latin in once a year or so”. And technically they’re right.

Funny how the key players in attempting to topple the Church all knew the same tricks, isn’t it?