Besides being just ridiculously stupid, Eugene Cullen Kennedy at the Reporter manages to brutalize a metaphor so badly, its in a coma. You will may end up in a coma as well. No operating heavy machinery and all that.

The Reformers of the Reform resemble those who restore and sell antique cars. They labor strenuously to polish up once sleek models out of the ’20s and flog them confidently as the next big thing in Catholic life.

Their sparkling showroom is modeled on St. Peter’s, their sales people speak Latin, and, instead of cash, they offer plenary indulgences as incentives. They hand out a stilted language manual that promises the people they want to convert into pilgrims that they can ride happily again on the two-lane roads of pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

There is only one thing missing: the fuel of neurotic guilt that these vehicles desperately need in order to wheeze their way back to that church whose imagined glories depended on making people feel bad even about being good.

The so-called Reform of the Reform will sputter out precisely because it cannot drill in the Arctic, in the Gulf, or in people’s backyards for the massive amounts of inappropriate guilt that were pumped into the lives of Catholics to keep them in their pews and in their places in the Father-is-always-right era into which these deluded pied pipers of reform are determined to lead us.

We are all so much better off without guilt, right?

Kennedy should feel copious amounts of appropriate guilt for writing something so dumb.