Anti-Catholicism is Always Just Below the Surface

But it has broken through the surface recently in the attacks on Pope Benedict XVI. The sheer volume of accusations, half-truths, mis-quotes, unchecked rumor-mongering and outright lies coming out of the anti-Catholic press, especially the New York Times, these days can be overwhelming.

Many ordinary people have one of three instinctive responses:

1. It is too terrible - I can't be bothered to try to think about it. (Yet they have been subconsciously influenced anyway.)

2. There are probably lies in the overall coverage but where there is smoke there is likely fire. (This is what they are counting on you thinking when they get caught out in a lie.)

3. The Pope is responsible for the clerical abuse scandal even if he personally did nothing wrong. (This is what they are hoping: they are out to get this particular pope.)

The liberal Protestant media and their liberal Catholic Quislings are in cahoots to put a liberal on the throne of St. Peter. That is what this is all about.

They know that Benedict is righting the ship and steering the Church back to the center of orthodoxy after it veered sharply to the left during the post-Vatican II period. Pope John Paul II saved the Church from becoming just another dying liberal Protestant denomination, which is what the liberal Catholics wanted, but they waited out John Paul because they were afraid of his personal popularity and convinced that once he was gone their time would come. But now they are beginning to realize that their time may never come.

The world is changing. Orthodoxy is rising; heresy and compromise are fading. All the aging hippies in the Roman Catholic Church now realize that time is no longer on their side. They fear a window is closing. As the culture of death chokes Western culture ever more tightly in its icy grip, more and more Christians of all denominations are awaking to the reality that modernity is a failed experiment, that life without God is impossible and that the sexual revolution is a dead end for humanism.

This is why there is one last gasp attempt to wrest control of the Church from the conservatives and assert the will to power of "progressivism." The victims of the child sex abuse tragedy are not the focus here; they are pawns in a power game that has one objective only: to bring down Pope Benedict XVI. The Church should be criticized but the foundation of criticism must be the truth - not lies, deceit and character assassination.

MSNBC ran this headline on a story on the Catholic Church yesterday on its website: "Pope Describes Touching Boys: I Went Too Far.” When you clicked on the story you found nothing related to the headline whatsoever. MSNBC today apologized and the Catholic League accepted the apology. As far as I'm concerned, the Catholic League speaks for itself. I don't accept the apology. I want somebody fired first. I want screaming headlines running for days on all MSNBC news outlets saying: "MSNBC Employee Engages in Anti-Catholic Hate Speech: the Investigation is On-going." Then once the person or persons responsible for this deed has been identified publicly and it has been determined how high up the ladder the buck should stop and the appropriate terminations for cause have taken place. Then, and only then, will it be time to talk about accepting apologies. It is far too easy for this king of "bait and switch" and "O my goodness, who would do a thing like that" baloney to be used to poison minds and destroy people.

The New York Times has degenerated into a parody of a once proud "newspaper of record." Investigative journalism for them means opening the electronic equivalent of brown envelopes and publishing whatever accords with their mean, narrow-minded prejudices. This story attempts to implicate the pope in the abuse scandal on the flimsiest of evidence supported by almost no investigative reporting. Who needs to interview the principals or dig into the background - or even keep dates clear - when the goal is just to shovel another load on mud onto an innocent man?

The replies to the NYT hatchet job have been quick in coming.

The Anchoress at First Things has a number of good links here, including a scathing reply by William Cardinal Levada and a plea for fairness from the New York Daily News. CNA has a story on the priest who was the Vicar-General of the diocese of Milwaukee at the of the alledged incidents that formed the substance of the NTY story. He notes that they NYT felt free to quote him but never bothered to call him to ask questions.

Father Zuhlsdorf of "What Does the Prayer Really Say?" has a number of good posts on this issue including a good summary of Archbishop Timothy Dolan's rebuttal to the NYT (aka Hell's Bible). He published a piece back in October on his blog about the anti-Catholicism of the NYT, which the NYT refused to publish as an op-ed piece. Dolan's comments on the latest NYT scandal are here.

Look, the clerical abuse scandal is terrible and the cover-up was criminal. The truth should come out and the guilty should be punished. But the whole Roman Catholic Church should not become the punching bag for indiscriminate attacks by groups with their own agendas. Truth is the minimum standard for all "crusaders for truth and justice."

I'm not Catholic and I'm not Jewish. But I want to condemn all anti-Semitism and all anti-Catholicism any time I see them. Why? Because once they have destroyed the Catholic Church and Israel, guess who is next in line for persecution, slander and hate speech? Conservative Protestants won't have anybody to call on for help if that happens. We need to speak up now while we still have allies. Liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, atheists and secularists may have Benedict in their cross hairs today. But tomorrow it could be you.