Anti-Christian Madness on Parliament Hill

Barbara Kay's column in The National Post, "Gilles Duceppe Owes an Apology to Catholics," names and shames the extreme anti-Christianity of Gilles Duceppe and the dominant political class in Quebec.

This mentality is the same as that which characterized the madness of the French Revolution. No literal guillotines yet, but the level of rhetoric is getting pretty violent and, of course, violent speech prepares the way for violent acts. When secularists start calling for the dissolution of the Church and for the painful death of Cardinals, we have passed way beyond liberalism and tolerance into a dark space that reeks of fascism and irrational fanaticism.

On May 27 Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe tried to set a witch hunt in motion with a political drive-by shooting of several completely innocent people:

“Mr. Speaker, Ottawa’s bishop stated yesterday that a sizeable pro-life caucus is working behind the scenes within the government. The Prime Minister, who controls everything, must know about this caucus.” With McCarthyite melodrama, M. Duceppe then intoned the names and positions in the Conservative Party of three practicing Catholics, as if that were proof of the ominous “caucus.”

These Catholics are all members of Opus Dei, a prelature of the Catholic Church, a group I am very familiar with, and amongst whom I count some of my closest friends. Opus Dei means in Latin “God’s Work.” Members of “the Work” believe that holiness is something to be strived for in one’s daily life: in one’s job, however important or however humble, in one’s friendships, one’s family life and civic obligations.

Opus Dei does good works all over the planet (I have seen documentaries on their projects in the hellholes of the world, bringing aid, comfort and social assistance to the poorest and most forgotten, without fanfare or publicity-seeking or missionary profit), punching far above their demographic weight. Few in number – about 85,000 world-wide and only a few thousand in all of Canada – they are immersed in public life in the most positive and benign ways. And of the more than 100,000 members of the Conservative Party, why yes, there are probably two or three members of Opus Dei.

But the back-story to Duceppe’s naming (and by implication shaming) of these three good people (two of whom I know well as ideal Canadian citizens and warm, engaging, admirable human beings ) is not his apparently high-minded upholding of the division of church and state. It is his loathing for the Catholic Church, a loathing he is at small pains to conceal. In this he is entirely representative of the media and political elites that dominate Quebec’s public discourse. And that is the real story here.

Look at the reaction to Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s call for public debate on the morality of abortion. Note: he did not call for legislative change. He called abortion a “moral crime.” In response the francophone media went ballistic. Would Patrick Lagacé of La Presse have dared to curse any non-Catholic religious leaders? It is unthinkable that any Canadian pundit would say of an imam, as Lagacé did of Cardinal Ouellet: “We must all die. We are all going to die. Cardinal Ouellet is going to die one day. I hope he will die of a long and painful sickness…Yes, the paragraph I have just written is vicious. But [Cardinal] Marc Ouellet is an extremist. And in this debate, all blows are permitted against religious extremists…the Cardinal is a fundamentalist. This is a known fact. From there on, whoever agrees to share a political podium with him should be treated like an accomplice to the fanaticism of Kazem Ouellet… “

(By “Kazem” he refers to Kazem Sedighi, an imam in Teheran who declared that recent earthquakes had been caused by certain women’s indecent wardrobe.)

Similarly, would any Canadian journalist call for the dissolution of Islam because parts of shariah law run counter to Canadian gender values? Yet on May 28 Le Devoir published an op-ed written by a sociologue who calls for the dissolution of the Church and its transformation in Quebec into a network of cooperatives : “This cooperative network, based on modern values of equality and non-segregation of the sexes, of anti-racism and the rejection of homophobia, would permit us to experience together, socially and ceremoniously, the great moments of life between birth and death. This project of modernization of the Catholic institution seems to me, moreover, completely compatible with the fundamental secularity of the state which is indispensable to social peace.”

Read the rest here.

Secularism has become a new religion and, like many new religions, its zeal, if not checked, can lead to a kind of violence that most of Christianity has outgrown. If Marc Cardinal Ouellet is an extremist then practically every religious leader, political leader, great artist, humanitarian and scientist who lived prior to 1968 was also an extremist. So who is the real extremist here?

Kay is right that these people would not dare criticize Islam. I am growing weary of journalists insulting and bashing Christians and holding back from saying anything critical of Islam. Let's be honest: they are cowards and eventually cowards are conquered and dominated by the strong. To be blunt: they are crazy in the sense of not recognizing their own enlightened self-interest.

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.