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Cardinal Sean O’Malley: A simple show of friendship

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley.Associated Press/file 2013

Simply for sharing a gracious moment with a Methodist minister during an ecumenical ceremony on Sunday, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley has come under wholly unwarranted attack from conservative Catholics who accuse the Boston archbishop of undermining church doctrine. At a service at the Sudbury United Methodist Church, O’Malley and the minister, the Rev. Anne Robertson, anointed one another with consecrated water, a show of mutual respect and Christian devotion.

But conservative Catholics, some of whom feel increasingly besieged as Pope Francis shifts the church’s focus toward outreach and away from the enforcement of doctrine, saw something different: a cardinal seeming to accept a female minister. “What a disgrace to our Holy Mother Church,” wrote one of O’Malley’s critics. The act was a “public repudiation of the sanctity of the Holy Orders of the Catholic Church,” said another.

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That reaction, in turn, has led to a somewhat overheated defense of O’Malley, with his supporters praising the act as if were a calculated symbolic response to charges that Catholicism denigrates women.

But what if it was neither? What if O’Malley was just being polite? “People are congratulating him for being just a decent human being,” noted the Rev. Tom Getchell-Lacey, another Methodist pastor. Indeed. Nobody should find that objectionable.