Cardinal Dolan Still Getting Flamed For Breaking Bread With Donald Trump At Catholic Dinner

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan is still getting scorched after he was photographed smiling and laughing it up with former President Donald Trump at a key dinner held by the Catholic Diocese of New York.

Dolan was clearly enjoying himself immensely at the annual Alfred E. Smith dinner last week as he chatted and joked with convicted felon Trump, who a jury earlier this year declared had sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store. The annual event which was held the same day the Los Angeles diocese agreed to pay $1.5 billion to hundreds of sexual abuse victims of Catholic priests, raises money for Catholic Charities.

It was insult on top of grievous injury, many are complaining.

New York Times columnist Maureen Down wrote Saturday of Dolan: "The cardinal should go to confession."

Dolan allowed a "white-tie charity dinner" in New York to "showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump ... [and] suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic Charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments," viciously attacking his opponent Kamala Harris as "having the mental faculties of a child," in the kind of assault he usually reserves for women.

Dowd yearned for an alternate reality in which Dolan would have stood up and declared "Enough! ... Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" — to "our modern Joe McCarthy."

It is the "church's job, after all, to teach right from wrong," she noted.

Instead, Dowd complained that Dolan enabled Trump in his "blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God."

Trump is "proudly amoral," Dowd writes. "He disdains the Christian values I was taught by nuns and priests. His only values are self-interest and self-gratification. He has replaced a code of ethics with the Narcissus pool."

Esquire writer Charles P. Pierson put it all more bluntly: "It was gross to watch Trump yuk it up with Cardinal Dolan" at the dinner.

Dolan plays the "jocular, backslapping Irishman while his rap sheet on burying the ongoing sexual-abuse scandal is one of the longest of all his fellow members of the Clan of the Red Hat," Pierson argues.

Dolan was once a parish priest along with Fr. LeRoy Valentine at the Church of the Immaculata outside St, Louis. LeRoy is alleged to have sexually abused boys for years before the church took any action, and Dolan insisted he knew nothing about it. Dolan has also been accused of shielding church funds in a trust from sex abuse claims while he was archbishop of Milwaukee.

Dolan was even attacked in an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter early this month, which upbraided the cardinal for complaining that he was "doubly disappointed" that Vice President Kamala Harris would not be attending the dinner (Harris sent a video address).

"Perhaps it would be best to stop here to collect our breath and spend a moment or two reflecting on just who should be placed on the spot for engaging in less-than-civil behavior," the editorial noted.

It criticized Dolan over a recorded phone call with Trump in 2020 to discuss policy that highlighted the men's "unctuous, ecclesial-political bromance."

The newspaper pointed out that Trump's reputation is "besmirched" by "actions such as inciting an insurrection, paying off a porn star for her silence and placing children in cages at the border and separating them from their parents. There's lots more of course."

The "real scandal," the editorial noted, is that the "good Catholic cardinal of the great city of New York would not have the courage to say, this year, that the current Republican candidate is a walking example of so much the Catholic Church finds repugnant in today's politics that he would suspend the normal invitations" to the dinner.

The "real controversy," the editorial noted, is that an "event that touts its history of raising funds for society's most needy is going to host someone who is one of the culture's greatest threats to that kind of caring ... whose personal example and policy wishes are in a collision course with the principles of Catholic social teaching."

Critics on social media also chimed in.