ROME, Italy — The ultra-progressive National Catholic Reporter has named Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez “newsmaker of 2021” as a backhanded compliment meant to highlight the prelate’s failure to worship at the altar of Joe Biden.
“On Joe Biden’s inauguration day,” the newspaper observes in a December 17 editorial, Archbishop Gomez “issued a 1,200-word statement outlining disagreements about policies that ‘would advance moral evils,’ though also offering his prayers.”
“It was just the beginning of what would become a yearlong divisive, pointless campaign to smear the nation’s second Catholic president, a campaign led by Gomez,” laments the Reporter, a longtime shill of the Democratic Party.
US President Joe Biden, left, talks to Pope Francis as they meet at the Vatican, Friday, Oct. 29, 2021. President Joe Biden met with Pope Francis on Friday at the Vatican, where the world’s two most notable Roman Catholics plan to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and poverty. (Vatican Media via AP)
“As head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for the past two years, Gomez has squandered his presidency fighting dead-end culture wars,” the editorial states. “The year was bookended by Gomez’s moves to attack Biden and a year-end speech denigrating social and racial justice movements that do the work of the Gospel.”
“In an organization whose history is peppered with failed leaders, it is hard to find one less accomplished,” the paper declares. “For this, we name Archbishop José Gomez as NCR’s Newsmaker of 2021.”
What seemed to really get under the Reporter’s collective skin is Archbishop Gomez’s unwillingness to recite from the leftist script that all Latinos are expected to embrace uncritically — something akin to Biden’s demeaning and bigoted comment that if you fail to support him “you ain’t black.”
“Gomez’s actions have been particularly disappointing given the excitement among Latino Catholics when the Mexican-born prelate was elected in 2019 as the first Latino to hold the post of president of the U.S. bishops’ conference,” the Reporter bemoans.
Instead of fighting for the lives of unborn children, supporting the family, or defending religious freedom, the archbishop should have used his presidency to do things like “make the church an active leader in the racial reckoning happening in our country,” the editorial states, and “lead the fight against climate change to save our planet.”
Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, of Los Angeles, and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), kneels in prayer before a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary as he leads a special liturgy in renewing the consecration of the United States to the care of our Blessed Mother amidst the COVID-19 pandemic at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, Friday, May 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, Pool)
Commenting on the Reporter’s “award” and the catty editorial accompanying it, Catholic League President Bill Donohue suggests that the dissident paper’s disfavor is truly a badge of honor that Gomez can wear with pride.
The archbishop’s November 4 speech that so riled up the Reporter’s editors was “one of the most brilliant addresses given in Catholic circles in recent memory,” Donohue asserts.
Gomez said in his address that an “elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures.”
“This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization,” the archbishop warned.
“In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions,” he continued. “In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.”
In his critique of “cancel culture” and “political correctness,” Gomez said that “often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more.”
Perhaps the Reporter’s editors found the archbishop’s words particularly troubling because they realize they are aimed at them.
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