It is unfortunate that Chicago's Cardinal Francis George is beset with a kind of pernicious paranoia. In 2012, he wrote that he expects die in bed, that his successor will likely die in prison and the following archbishop will be executed in public.
This dread of the future appears vividly in his most recent column in the Catholic New World. "There was always a quasi-religious element in the public creed of the country," he writes. "It lived off the myth of human progress, which had little place for dependence on divine providence. It tended to exploit the religiosity of the ordinary people by using religious language to co-opt them into the purposes of the ruling class. Forms of anti-Catholicism were part of its social DNA. It had encouraged its citizens to think of themselves as the creators of world history and the managers of nature, so that no source of truth outside of themselves needed to be consulted to check their collective purposes and desires."
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