This is especially true if you happen to believe in some silly abstract thing like equality under the law.
The following is excerpted from an article attributed to Cardinal George in Catholic New World, the official newspaper for the Archdiocese of Chicago. Cardinal George starts out explaining the canonization process for JPII and then dives into idiocy, heresy, or bizarre rationalization, depending on your point of view:
......A saint lives in loving intimacy with God, who creates that love in the saint by first loving him or her. Since there are great saints and little saints, God doesn’t love everyone equally. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know why God loves some people more than others, but recognizing this difference reinforces our conviction that everyone is unique and challenges any assertion that everyone is equal, except before the abstract principles of the law. Life, however, is not a dialogue with legal principles. In life, differences abound in our relations to God and to other people. The differences — between the two sexes, among diverse races and cultures, in personal history and desire — make life rich. If we ignore them, we risk living only with ideas, divorced from real people. We become ideologues of “equality.” (I don't believe I have ever read a sicker rationalization to discriminate against others. This entire paragraph has to be code for his campaign against gay 'marriage rights'.)
Even if God loves each of us differently and unequally, he still loves us all. Thinking of sanctity, we have to ask also about our love for God. Do we all love God equally? Obviously not; but why not? I suppose there are as many answers as there are human creatures, but two reasons not to love God or at least not to love him as he wants to be loved come to mind.
First of all, perhaps our intimacy with God is stymied by fear, especially by fear of punishment. We tend to avoid those we fear; we ignore those who might ask us embarrassing questions, even God. This has been the pattern of human interaction with God ever since Adam and Eve hid from him after their disobedience in the garden. Perhaps, secondly, we resist intimacy with God because we resent losing our autonomy, our imagined self-sufficiency. To love another means he or she has entry into one’s life. To love God means he directs our life in ways we sometimes don’t care to go. Better to keep our distance, loving enough to be safe but not given to considering what God wants in our every thought and action. What makes great saints, however, is the desire to please God in every detail of their lives. (Now I get to add the fear that God doesn't love me as much as others, and I'm supposed to accept it doesn't matter that I will never know why.)
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I have never been overly impressed with the thinking of Cardinal George and I can pretty much guarantee that isn't going to change in the near future. The above essay might even be the signature entry for a new blog called Unenlightened Catholicism. I have to wonder if the next offering from George will be plagiarized from the Protocols of Zion.
The idea that God loves some of us more than other of us is the worst type of Stage I spiritual thinking. It is the product of an absurd level of anthropomorphising as it essentially says "God is just a bigger form of an immature daddy".
Except, I don't believe for one second Cardinal George actually believes his own writing. I think he is quite capable of stooping low enough to relativise God's love in order to justify the USCCB's anti gay marriage crusade. It's right there in the first paragraph when he writes that God's relative love challenges the assertions of equality under abstract laws. Next thing you know, he'll be writing that God loves the conceptus more than he loves any human who has actually taken a breath. Oh wait, the USCCB actually pretty much already says this. Well then maybe George will next speculate that God does not love members of unions as much as He loves Walmart employees and that furthermore God loves Walmart ownership even more.
It is really sad how pathetic our American Catholic leadership has become. I would love to hear some bishop somewhere call George on the theology in this article. There really does come a time when integrity should call for real bishops to break ranks with their so called leadership, and this is one of them. Dragging God through the mud in order to prop up a political stance is about as low as it gets.
I'm seriously beginning to wonder if one has to flunk an integrity test to get a red hat or if one's integrity is drained away by getting a red hat. I do know that the last month has not been full of positive Kodak moments for the integrity quotient of American Cardinals. When I look at the stories around Bevilaqua and Rigali in Philadelphia, Mahony in LA, and Dolan in NY I guess Cardinal George deciding God's love is relative shouldn't really surprise me. I just wish it wasn't so.
