Comeuppance

St. Louis. The "Arched' gateway to the West. The St. Louis Cardinals the reigning World Champs of baseball for the 11th time in their storied history. The homeland of Anheuser Busch, the king of beers. Missouri Botanical the finest garden in North America is in St. Louis. St. Louis is my birthplace and the home of the Corrigans from County Carlow for five generations. St. Louis remains an opportunity for immigrants and the industrious. Catholicism and decency still reigns in St. Louis. Pride in my homeland? You bet!

But all that aside, I've never been more proud to be a native St. Louisan than right now. Why? Because of one man. He is another native St. Louisan, recently named Cardinal (not with the birds on the bat but with the angels above) by the sitting Pope Benedict XVI in Rome, his name, a fellow Irish Catholic, Timothy Dolan.

Presently, Cardinal Dolan is the top Catholic Bishop in all of the United States. His physical address is St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City. That is he in the top picture above. The bottom picture is of President Obama and his Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kathleen Sebelius. These two are locked in a major fight for America's moral conscience or what is left of it. Take a good look at those two pictures above. Striking contrast. Dolan looking fierce for what he believes in. Obama and Sebelius looking cunning and unctous. Authentic versus fake. So what's the big deal?

What's at stake is the protection of the basic tenents in the Constitution and our governance as a democracy. Dolan represents his church of 60 million American Catholics. Obama represents an over-reaching government who is telling the Church what to do and when to do it in full violation of the First Amendment. The Constitution's very first words are "We the People..." not, we the ruling party. Obama's misreading of the Constitution and of his own learned leitmotif that more government is better than less government whatever the costs, has placed him at odds with not only Catholics but millions of citizens that believe in the rights as protected in our Constitution.

Mistakenly and with great hubris, Obama cavalierly ordered Catholic institutions to adhere to his ObamaCare's flawed and unseemly governmental mandate of including access to free birth control and abortifacient drugs. Problem. It violated the beliefs of the Catholic Church. What happened to church and state separation as protected in the First Amendment? President Obama, by his own constitutional miscalculation and EVERYTHING he does is calculated, awakened the great big sleeping dog, the Catholic Church. Enter Timothy Dolan.

Dolan is Obama's worse nightmare. Regardless of the apparent insitutional evisceration of many Church leaders over the last few years, Dolan is the exception. Maybe the disgusting and nagging church pedophilia issue had something to do with this collective church emasculation and shuttering of forceful opinion. In any event, whatever dirty laundry the Catholic Church may have, it hasn't effected the ferocity of one Timothy Dolan, in being a lion for his faith. Dolan is the backbone of the American Catholic Church of today. This is his private fight against tyranny but he's not alone. Millions of Main Street Catholics and other faith-based groups are lining up behind him with purpose afoot...much to "voter-loss angst" of President Obama.

The Catholic Church has endured centuries of attack. This is minor moment in history compared to the last pagan Emperor of Rome, Julian "the Apostate", in 360AD, one of the worst persecuters of Christianity ever. But this current headline shall soon pass with President Obama's glorious defeat in November. For I'm certain, we have Timothy Dolan on the side of conscience instead of Obama's peculiar secularism.

So, you go Bro Dolan...return President Obama back to that political paradiso called Chicago...permanently. A broken Chicago will embrace him more than a bruised and battered country he left behind.