He also sounds a tad...skeptical about the claim that the Diocese is broke despite the millions it has paid out recently. He's right to be skeptical. There's more to the story. Let's start there.

the massive payouts the church has made to settle lawsuits related to the priest pedophilia scandal.

Yes...and no.

I live in Mass and the fact is that the pedophilia scandals have had a devastating effect on the Church's finances from both ends. Yes, they've paid out a lot but what's really hurting them is that they're not taking much in, either. Ever since the scandals broke (and that's years ago now), donations, contributions, and Sunday collections have been shrinking. There are a lot of churches barely alive financially, and rumors are spreading that if the situation doesn't turn around soon, there will be a LOT of churches being closed. Obviously that impacts the funding of the CCB. It frankly doesn't surprise me that even an inexpensive bulk mailing is now beyond their resources.

Nor does it surprise me particularly that O'Malley would ignore this looming crisis so he can concentrate on the dogmatic anti-abortion fight ordered by Benedict. It doesn't even surprise me that he would cross the line and potentially endanger the Church's tax-exempt status by attacking one political party and at least implicitly endorsing another. The Church hierarchy has been, as you note, virulently conservative for decades.

It is interesting too, to see the Cardinal attack the Democratic Party as a whole, as if it had a lot of say, or should have a lot of say over who the membership picks as its candidates, and who the voters ultimately choose as its representatives.

Nothing new about this, either. Boston's Archbishops have historically been very heavy political players. Usually they've kept their influence in back rooms, out of public view, but every once in a while they forget and say something out in the open, like O'Malley just did. It's been a continuing problem for a long time.

However, since the scandals things have changed dramatically. Boston in particular but Mass as a whole has always had a large and politically active contingent of Catholics. Up until the 60's, they were so ruled by the Church that they were considered a block vote. As the Bishops and clergy said on Sunday, so would the laity vote on Tuesday.

But Viet Nam and abortion rights fractured that block into two distinct pieces: conservative pro-war, anti-abortion die-hards and liberal anti-war, pro-choice activists. Once that split happened, other cracks began to show. The hierarchy, represented by the Archbishops, has consistently been far more conservative than most of the laity. Bishops were a bit less monolithic as a class (there have even been eras when they were more or less evenly divided) but on balance have been somewhere between congregants and Archbishops.

As the gulf between them widened, feminists began criticizing - quite rightly - the Church's rigid anti-female dogma: the "Woman as vessels of sin" stuff; civil libertarians criticized its autocratic disdain for dissent and its support for anti-democratic suppression tactics; historians criticized its ties to authoritarian regimes, including Hitler's; and so on. By the 70's, the notion that all Massachusetts Catholics voted in a block was shattered.

In response to all this revolt, increasingly conservative priests and Bishops took stands that were more hard-line than their predecessors. At one point in the 80's there was talk that all abortion supporters were going to be excommunicated. That didn't happen but the threat has been in the air ever since.

The harder the Diocese tried to crack down, the more people left the Church altogether. This weakened the Archbishops' political clout considerably, though that didn't stop any of them from using what was left of their muscle to pressure politicians who had heavily Catholic constituencies. Bernie Law was a frequent guest of powerful state figures like Billy Bulger, who is Catholic, and Mike Dukakis, who is not. By all accounts, he liked playing politics, and he was good at it.

Since most of the people who left tended to be liberal and those who stayed more conservative, the hierarchy moved even further to the right. By the time the pedophilia scandals broke in the 90's and Law was under fire for the way he mishandled the problem by shoving it under the rug time and again, even the conservatives had stopped supporting the Church financially, at least to the extent they had been. The liberals who remained were appalled and collections went into freefall.

They've been low ever since. Though they recovered somewhat when the worst of the disclosures were over and the lawsuits settled (there was a sense that the Church was making amends), they're still pretty meager. A lot of people have never gotten over the revelations of the way Law and the Church consistently protected pedophile priests, sometimes for many years, at the expense of the victims, and what galls folks the most is that the Church in general and Law in particular have never apologized. There's also a sneaking suspicion on the part of many that for all its embarrassment and guilt, it hasn't really changed the way it deals with the problem. They're half-expecting a new round of accusations to pop up any day now, revealing that the Church is still hiding and protecting pervert priests.

All of this has made the once-powerful Archdiocese of Boston a shadow of its former self, but you aren't going to get that impression from O'Malley. The way he dramatically overplayed his hand with respect to the Democrats is only the latest in a string of hard-line, right-wing pronouncements which arrogantly assume that, in effect, nothing has changed and everything is as it has always been.

Denial, after all, is the modus operandi of the Catholic Church. It's the tactic they used - are still using - to deflect responsibility for the scandals. It's the tactic they employed when dealing with the pedophile priests. It's the tactic they used with the Vatican banking scandal. It's the tactic they used when Galileo agreed with Copernicus that the sun did not in fact travel around the earth.

"If we don't acknowledge it, it isn't true."

It is how they've resisted change for centuries. O'Malley is living proof of how it works. It will be another hundred years before any Boston Archbishop finally admits that the Diocese isn't as strong as it used to be, and that will be 20 years after the Diocese has ceased to exist altogether.