Mark Shea is Mad and He Isn't Going to Take it Anymore

Mark Shea is mad about the liberal media's shameless inquisitorial tactics, misleading half-truths, irresponsible journalism against Pope Benedict XVI and he isn't going to take it anymore. Good for him.

Reason doesn't seem to work with these people. Facts are brushed aside like annoying insects. Maybe they can be shamed. Probably not, but Mark gives it a good try in this article:

As the Mysterious Get Benedict Society campaign to destroy Pope Benedict XVI continues shooting itself in the foot with various false starts, half-baked stories, and tales told by mainstream media idiots, the thing that continues to impress me is the sheer self-contradictory irony of the thing. It's really quite crushing.

We are instructed (just as a pedophile priest might have told one of his victims) that our proper response to the media as Catholics ought to be gratitude for the massive eruption of unapologetic lies that have been told about Benedict over the past month because, you know, we depend on them as the mediators of truth and light, and we would live in darkness but for their ministrations. So yeah, even though they may have committed a few peccadilloes in the performance of their sacred duty, still it would be foul ingratitude for any Catholic to offer them anything but abject thanks for the debt we owe them in saving us. Indeed, we are to take it for granted that, with the sole exception of the fact that the MSM has pretty much gotten everything dead wrong in the whole "Benedict, the Nazi pope, protected perverts and endangered The Children" narrative it has ginned up for the past month, it mostly got everything right. On the other hand, those who question that narrative are "deflecting blame" and not taking that "searching and fearless inventory" of Benedict's wretched moral failings that the MSM are just about to discover after several false starts, lying headlines, and craptastic pieces of lousy reportage.

That much we talked about previously in this space.

But, nothing daunted by their ignorance and transparent malice, the MSM marches on in its war on Benedict, determined to get the Nazi pope, even if they have to completely throw aside all their journalistic ethics to do it.

Much of this is due to pride and vanity as much as to malice against Benedict and the Catholic Faith. When a journalista has documentably screwed up not just once but multiple times in his hysterical vendetta, he presses on, hoping that he can find some sort of dirt to prove that he is the brave crusading journalist and not a hack with a grudge who is afraid of looking stupid. So we keep getting a succession of dramatic "Ah-HA!" flourishes from the press, with the assurance that this time, for sure, they've nabbed the Nazi with the goods.

Read it all here. In all the anti-Catholic hysteria so far, I have not heard one word of apology from a media outlet for the outright lies and distortions they have printed in the cause of character assassination against Pope Benedict XVI. They won't acknowledge even a tiny bit or bias or even admit it when caught out in factual errors: they just move on to another 23 year old fabrication or whatever.

Do they realize that even atheists are beginning to find it all offensive and a bit ridiculous? Brendon O'Niell has an article in Spiked entitled "The Secular Inquisition" in which he says:

The New Atheist campaign to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested when he visits Britain later this year exposes the deeply disturbing, authoritarian and even Inquisitorial side to today’s campaigning secularism. There is nothing remotely positive in the demand that British cops lock up the pope and then drag him to some international court on charges of ‘crimes against humanity’. Instead it springs from an increasingly desperate and discombobulated secularism, one which, unable to assert itself positively through Enlightening society and celebrating the achievements of mankind, asserts itself negatively, even repressively, through ridiculing the religious.

Read it all here. Even from an atheist perspective, there is something pathological and pathetic about the current anti-Christian campaigning going on in the Western, liberal media. From a Christian perspective it is downright sinister.