Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard has written a book in which he reveals Catholic thinking about AIDS.

The Archbishop who is seen as a conservative does not pull his punches. Speaking about AIDS he says that this is a kind “immanent justice”.

I note that the archbishop is probably mortal, and appears to be aging. If he someday suffers miserably from a prostate cancer that is ripping his guts apart, I hope he finds comfort in it as a kind of “immanent justice”. If he should suffer a massive stroke and his brain should bleed and fail, I hope he has a last moment of awareness to appreciate the “immanent justice” of his fate. I hope that if one day he is crossing the street and suddenly finds a bus roaring implacably in his direction, that the destination on the bus’s sign reads “Immanent Justice”.

We’re all going to die. Labeling our ends as the conscious acts of a vengeful god and treating the inevitable as an outcome contingent on our respect for religious mores is one of the oldest tricks in the book of pious lies.