Now that the Cloyne report is available, the perfidy of the Catholic church is directly measurable. Michael Nugent has tallied up a list of all the documented, unambiguous cases of Irish Catholic officials lying — just blatant, undeniable, flat out lying to investigators. I’m pretty sure that’s against one of their commandments.

If you want to see a Catholic nuisance closer to home, look to Philadelphia. They have a new archbishop, and he’s apparently because he’s overtly political.

“I think that with Chaput you will see a much more politically active archbishop than we saw with Cardinal Rigali,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, former editor of the Jesuit magazine America and author of numerous books on the Catholic hierarchy.

Reese described Chaput as an “in-your-face” leader who is “going to be a real pain in the neck for the Democratic Party.”

…

But he has been even more forceful in articulating what it means to live as a Catholic. He has regularly rebuked the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

A month after President Obama’s inauguration, Chaput decried what he called a “spirit of adulation bordering on servility” toward Obama by “some . . . Democratic-friendly Catholic writers, scholars, editors and activists. He said, “There’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope, and change.”

Oh, boy. Let’s see the Catholic Church find common cause with the teabaggers. Roger Ebert has a nice summary of the ways the GOP is the party of the past; I’m happy to see the church hopping on that same train to oblivion.