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All for the Love of Money

All for the Love of Money

Last updated on: January 18, 2025 at 2:13 am by Mary Pezzulo

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All for the Love of Money 2025-01-18T02:13:46-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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I’m not going to watch the inauguration.

I don’t see why anyone would. We all know what’s going to happen.

The inauguration will be attended by the richest men in the world. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk will be honored guests. Other CEOs will be there. Right wing populist demagogues from all around the world will be there. Cardinal Dolan, who never met a rich and powerful politician he didn’t want to curry favor with, will be there. Franklin Graham, who makes hundreds of thousands a year to run a charity, will be there. It will be a grand celebration of the love of money.

It was all about money, after all.

It wasn’t about anything else.

Just the love of money, and cruelty.

It wasn’t about abortion. Abortion rates have been bouncing up since the beginning of the first Trump administration. The Dobbs decision didn’t stop the rise; they’re still going up. Women are dying and the babies aren’t safe either. Everything has gotten worse, except that it’s illegal some places now, so people can be punished and hurt.

What good does hurting even more people do?

Some things go away if you make them illegal. Abortion isn’t one of them.

I grew up believing that pro-lifers were the real feminists. We cared about life from womb to tomb, as others did not. We were the ones who had women’s best interest in mind. All the abortion supporters wanted was their money. And here they’ve elected an adjudicated sexual abuser, who committed thirty-four felonies to cover up his dalliances with a porn star who was traumatized by the experience. A serial adulterer. A man who brags about sexual assault. And his whole entourage is equally foul. Everything that was said about the movement turned out to be true.

All for money.

I keep going back to that day in 2016, when a priest I had been brought up to admire brought out that naked corpse to decorate his altar for Mass in honor of Donald Trump. The day I began to find out, that nothing is what I thought it was. Now, Frank Pavone is no longer a priest. Lord knows my own Catholicism has taken a severe beating, for many reasons.

For money.

The mass deportation raids will start Tuesday. The Pope of my childhood, John Paul the Second, who was so very pro-life as well he ought to have been, stressed that mass deportation is also intrinsically evil, but we’ve heard so little about that. The Bible is clear that persecuting migrants who come to you for help is a sin, but it’s not the kind of sin we’re concerned about just now. Just now we’re concerned about money.

Avarice is also a deadly sin, but the honored guests at the inauguration will be the richest men in the world.

I did all I could. I stressed that there is no Catholic political party and that I’ve voted Republican before, but that Donald Trump was particularly unsuitable for a position of power. The MAGA movement is not a movement that a Christian ought to support. White Christian Nationalism is a heresy against the Gospel. I’ve been repeating this for eight years. For now, the White Christian Nationalists won their pyrrhic victory.

We’re not going to get a Christian nation, after all. We’re going to get a nation that worships money.

Pro-life pastors and activists and nuns won’t be the honored guests at the inauguration. Rich people will. Because it was all about money. He used all of them, for money.

It’s never been about anything but money.

And the irony of it all is, I don’t think most of us will see any money either.

I don’t know what I’m going to do on Monday. Maybe I’ll stay in and celebrate Martin Luther King Day with Adrien. Maybe we’ll put on three layers and go for a hike, or a long drive out to see the ice.

Tuesday we’ll get back to work, and see what kind of a country we live in.

Maybe we can build a better one, but just now I don’t feel hopeful.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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