Bloomberg and the Clerical D-List

For multibillionaire celebrity political honcho, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg is not doing terribly well with the clergy of his city.  At a press conference yesterday morning with the Statue of Liberty in the background, called to support the Ground Zero Islamic center, Bloomberg appeared with a D-list of clerics whom he would be mortified to encounter at a dinner party.

The only Catholic in attendance was a lone Franciscan, Rev. Brian Jordan of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi; the Archdiocese was conspicuously absent. Not a single rabbi from any of New York’s major synagogues turned up, but a certain Rabbi Irwin Kula from the Center for Learning and Advanced Leadership was in the photo-op. Known as “Rabbi Cool,” the man is something of a joke; he recentlytold a fundraiser, ““Rather than use Judaism to make Jews Jewish we are using thh e spirit of Judaism to enhance the ethical culture of America.” A couple of bureaucrats from the United Jewish Appeal and the Jewish Community Relations Council turned up, but not a single Jewish leader of standing.

Bloomberg did manage to rope in one evangelical pastor, Rev. Les Mullings of the Church of the Nazarene, but he had to come in from Far Rockaway (the extreme eastern corner of Brooklyn).  There was no-one from any of the major African-American Churches. The Russian Orthodox archiocese did turn up, for reasons that are unclear.

All in all, a pathetic turnout, and a strong indication that even traditional liberals in New York don’t want anything to do with the proposed monument to Muslim triumphalism 500 feet from Ground Zero. That is a result I would not have expected. It’s nonetheless encouraging.