Ken Cuccinelli, tool of racist, fascist depravity, can be added to the list of morally depraved Republican fascists who are a product of elite Catholic prep schools, Gonzaga College High School, that includes such figures of pure, cruel, opportunistic evil as Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and so many others in and around the Trump administration, serving the closest we have had to the most vulgar of late medieval gangster strong man rulers, a devoted worshiper of Mammon and himself while posing as Catholic-Christians - though as I understand it, in the case of Gorsuch and Thomas, posing as Anglo-Catholics in right-wing Episcopalian churches, the last I heard.
The product of elite Catholic education and Catholic education in general is certainly varied but the status of some of its most evil alumni and alumnae should be extremely troubling to the Jesuits and other teaching orders who run these training grounds of elite criminals and gangsters.
I think the continued existence of such elite Catholic prep schools, expensive and selective for the elites they serve, are an important part of the more general Catholic-establishment edifice complex in which the institutions turn into objects of veneration, devotion, and, in every practical meaning of the word, worship. The eminence of such institutions, like all elite institutions, are both a sign and a practice of corrupted morality. I know in the wake of the exposure they got in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings there was a lot of talk about reforming such elite Catholic schools, especially boys' schools but I wouldn't count on anything more than that talk to happen. Such elite institutions will always service their rich patrons and supporters and they are exactly the kinds of people who have no problem with the perverted amorality of such people as Kavanaugh. I didn't see any elite - rich Catholic backlash as the prep school days of Kavanaugh and his posse was laid out in florid detail for the world to hear.
The best thing to do with those places, if the Catholic orders, organizations, institutions who run them were interested in not gaining a chunk of the world at the loss of their souls, would be to shut them down, sell the physical plants, perhaps preserving green space they own, using the assets to serve the poor, the downtrodden, the people who Cuccinelli wants to edit out of Emma Lazarus's most famous poem.
Of course that won't happen, the idiotic movie Shoes of the Fishermen in which the first Slavic Pope sold the Vatican to feed the poor was a piece of Hollywood crap. In reality the first one managed one of the most corrupt modern papacies and he adored everything about the lavish spectacle and centralized power that is the absolute worst part of Catholicism. Francis is doing better but his papacy is fighting against the entrenched fascism that John Paul II and Benedict XVI appointed to so many bishops palaces and to head institutions of the Catholic Church. He is clearly afraid of a right-wing schism and is so afraid of that, led by the likes of the putrid drag-queen queer basher sometimes partner with Steve Bannon, Cardinal Raymond Burke and assorted gangsters in red and purple caps, that Francis is in danger of leading many of us to despair. There is a large group of ultra-rich Catholic millionaires and billionaires funding an anti-Francis putsch, already.
I doubt that he, unlike the Wojtyla pope, saw Shoes of the Fishermen in all its unrealistic stupidity. In real life it was the Slavic Pope who reignited the inquisition that censured and silenced theologians, those represented in the movie, Hans Kung clearly one of them. I was convinced that the Cardinals who elected him did so because they saw that piece of junk.
But if Francis wanted to make an even more impressive gesture, impressive because it would be real and would strike at the heart of the rich elite who are his enemies, might I suggest that he do exactly what I described, sell off the parts of the church that service the elite, preparing them to be the Kavanaughs, the Cuccinellis, the Clarence Thomases and worse, sell them off to serve the ones that they are crushing under their feet. If he's waiting for a reform from those in the hierarchy and in charge of such institutions, there aren't enough merely reforming papacies left before the Second Coming to do it that way.
Of course, there is just a possibility that Francis, being the first Latin American Pope, might understand that, by a very large percentage, the people Cuccinelli is trying to exclude and destroy are Catholics. Though that shouldn't make the slightest difference in their right to justice and asylum.
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