Hannity the Heretic

Sean Hannity, like 96% of practicing American Catholics, has no qualms with birth control. A priest calls him out on it, whereupon Hannity flops around like the liberal straw men O'Reilly deals with on a nightly basis. WorldNetDaily's Jill Stanek has the column:

You would never know Sean Hannity is a pro-life Catholic by his interview March 9 with Father Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International.

Euteneuer is a highly respected leader in the pro-life movement and a priest. He appeared on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" by invitation to challenge Hannity on his unorthodox support of contraception. Euteneuer said he previously wrote Hannity in 2004 an unanswered request to meet...

If you haven't watched the video, you should.

Hannity used all of the tricks one must use when pressed up against the wall. There were at least three counts of "Judge not lest ye be judged," which is taken out of context more than almost any verse in the Bible. (If we're really not supposed to judge, Hannity had better stop offering judgments on the morality of birth control.) He offered the priest a false tautology, birth-control versus abortion, as if we ought to choose between two morally repugnant items. Hannity is used to cheering for the lesser of two evils, but as Catholics, we're not supposed to do this.

He talked about his time in seminary, during which, he apparently studied nothing, though he knows, evidently, some Latin. Going to school does not an education bequeath. I know plenty of engineers who don't know a thing about their field of study, and it is just as obvious that Hannity hasn't a clue when it comes to the Church's teaching on birth prevention, eloquently presented in Humanae Vitae, and recently expounded upon in Pope John Paul II's talks on the Theology of the Body.

Oh, and Sean even told the priest to clean up the corruption in his Church, as if 1) the individual priest was responsible for the shameful actions of a large number, but still a minority, of bishops and fellow priests and 2) that the sins of the aforesaid mean that the Church no longer has a legitimate claim to truth. It is also worth noting that it was liberal Catholics, which Sean could be construed as, who oversaw the seminaries which failed to weed out pedophile priests--though they certainly discouraged orthodox seminarians. Michael S. Rose lays it all out in Goodbye! Good Men, which was written before the priest scandal began to receive major media attention.

I don't mean to suggest that every liberal theologian was guilty of pederasty, or that conservatives are not prone to sin. Still, it's not hard to see who would be the more likely pedophile: a Hannity-esque theologian, who views the Church's stance on sexuality to be antiquarian, or a militant conservative such as Tertullian. Since Sean went to seminary, I am certain he is familiar with the early Church father Tertullian, but for the rest of the readers, Tertullian was found to be a heretic after he refused to offer the sacrament of Reconciliation to those who had committed sexual sins.

Hannity can sleep easily knowing that Fr. Euteneuer, for all his judgment, lacks the militancy of some of the early Church fathers. The good priest didn't even take him to task for his failure to conform to the Church's teaching on just war, the exercise in Iraq having been found a violation thereof by the last two Popes. Of course, when the Church lacks the courage to refuse Communion for even the most resolute of pro-abortion politicians, it's no surprise that most waffle on the less egregious matter of an unjust war. Maybe next week.