Cardinal Insubordination
Britain’s Basil Cardinal Hume, head of the Catholic Church in Britain, died on June 17. “The tributes to Hume,” says Arthur Jones in the ultra-liberal National Catholic Reporter (July 2), “were extensive and deserved.” Jones, the Reporter’s Editor-at-Large, isn’t shy about telling us why they were “deserved.” He quotes from a taped (but apparently unpublished) interview Hume gave the Reporter in 1998, which, says Jones, shows us Hume in a moment of “private candor.” In the interview Hume revealed what he said at the end of a retreat he had conducted years ago for America’s bishops: “I’m leaving now and going to get on an aeroplane, so I can say what I want. I think you should stop looking over your shoulders at Rome.”
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