More Important Things Than Hurricane Katinas

Being as interested as he is in protecting children from potential abusers it will be interesting to see when Rod Dreher gets around to posting on this. He is waaaaay behind Jonathan Carpenter who is covering the story meticulously and with whom I agree with wholeheartedly.

But within Crunchy Conservatism there is a hierarchy of importance that mere mortals seldom understand. I think we should infer from recent posts that sexual predators in the Orthodox Church are not as important to report on as the following topics:

1. Treatment for insomnia.
2. Bad news for conservatives.
3. Giving hits to irrelevant blogs.
4. Telling Catholics to write-in the Pope for President in 2008.
5. Obligatory weigh-in on the AG non-story.
6. Two stories about shopping. One boringly illustrates how sales people would be obsolete if everyone was smart.
7. I'm glad we won the Revolutionary War.
8. Crunchy Cons review by influential writer no one has heard of.
9. Surprised he disagreed with NPR about whatever.
10. Some university doesn't like intelligent design.

So obviously there are more important things out there to cover presently. Certainly there is free speech within the Orthodox Church unlike so-called Methodist universities, so that shouldn't be a problem... should it? Terry Mattingly hasn't weighed in on it yet either. Hmmm...

Regardless of what happens in this case one thing is certain. Other than the beard and head thing, Archbishop Demetrios is no different than any Roman Catholic bishop or archibishop from Mahony to Egan to Grahmann. He's protecting the interests important to him. Some of those interests are no doubt really important, for example, Father Katinas wants to be "buried as a priest, not a layman."

I'd be willing to bet that Father Katinas doesn't want to be buried at all, seeing that he's not dead yet. I think that he should be grateful that he has some time to repent for what he's done instead of worrying about his employment status. It's a weird request, too; don't Orthodox like Catholics believe that Holy Orders leaves an indelible mark? Defrocking is a formality of sorts -- it's disciplinary. But although it is hard to imagine, pride is an even greater and more deadly sin than the one he has been accused of.

[Update: I had written Dmitri rather than Demetrios. My mistake, I corrected it.]