Posted on 04/04/2002 12:26:30 PM PST by Caleb1411
The Catholic Church is under fire in the American press unlike any time I can ever remember. To be sure, much of it is self-inflicted; what is being reported as "news" is, sadly, news that demands coverage. That is something Catholics must accept. But Catholics do not have to accept what follows, the what-this-story-means analysis. Many in the press are using recent Church scandals as fodder for attacks on Catholicism in general, Pope John Paul II in particular, and that is also scandalous.
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift has penned a piece on the magazine's Web site that demonstrates just how impossibly incoherent some can be when they choose to comment on a subject about which they know so little. She is positively breathless in her denunciation of the Roman Catholic faith.
Unable to go deeper than the superficial, Ms. Clift reduces the Church's problems to the political. "Like the church, Congress makes laws but doesn't always follow them," she explains. "The analogy extends to the Appropriations committees in the House and Senate, each of which is known as the College of Cardinals, because that's where the power is. They hold the purse strings."
Uh-huh. And why would this be so important? Here we go: "Pope John Paul II (has) named virtually every bishop in America. All of this pope's appointees are ideologically conservative. What has happened mirrors a U.S. president stacking the courts. With John Paul loyalists at every level" -- and here it comes -- "social change will be wrenching, if not impossible."
But the Catholic bishops aren't just out of step with the Enlightened; they're downright evil. Oh, Ms. Clift won't say that, of course. Instead she uses the old journalistic trick of having someone else say it for her. She finds the perfect gutless wonder to do her bidding, an anonymous diocesan priest. "As a group, they're like the Taliban," he proclaims, in his Christian kind of way, of his superiors. "If you want to succeed in this system, you never talk about the ordination of women -- and abortion and birth control are like the third rail."
This system. The Catholic Church with her 2,000-year-old tradition is thus reduced to some kind of Richard Daley good-old-boy political machine. Or Enron. The statement is preposterous, to be sure, but its inclusion in the article is calculated: Because this nameless source is a man of the cloth (we presume), he must by necessity be taken seriously. One wonders if it ever dawned on Ms. Clift that the reason he chose anonymity is not because his words are controversial, but because the "social change" he implicitly supports as a Catholic priest -- say, support of abortion -- is heresy in the eyes of the Church. One can be pretty certain that Ms. Clift never has figured out that what he told her is pretty stupid, too. But it doesn't matter. It's color he brings to her story, and that's really all that counts.
Ms. Clift now takes over and puts things in her own words. I wish she hadn't. "The papacy as we know it" -- she is now an authority on the matter -- "is a 19th-century convention. The idea that in an age of e-mail and fax, and the ability to whisk around the globe in jets, everybody kowtows to a central figure seems quaint."
Attention, Catholics: We had it all wrong. What Jesus Christ meant was, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church -- until the Internet comes along, at which point never mind."
Clift saves her best for last, returning to the scandals with as ugly a statement as she can muster. "The priesthood attracts sexually conflicted men," she states categorically, thus insulting every man who ever dedicated his life to Christ, every mother who ever bore a son who joined the priesthood, every Catholic who ever felt a certain reverence for those touched by God as his shepherds -- in short, every Catholic who calls himself a Catholic -- "and the church will have to face up to that as a potentially criminal matter, not as a way to perpetuate an outdated custom of celibacy."
She is called the Suffering Church for a reason. The Catholic Church survived the Romans, the Reformation, Hitler's Nazis and Lenin's communists. She will survive the poison quill of Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, too.
This is more like Enron that you might think.
There have indeed been some shameful and sinful coverups. But the media, as is their wont, pile on and indict Catholicism for every media-determined "sin": e.g., not being sufficiently "broad-minded" about abortion.
See the link in post 19 for a more evenhanded, biblical look at the larger problem in Christendom itself.
That doesn't give them permission to break laws, though. The level of not only abuse, but failure by church leaders to disclose abuse to the authorities, has been appalling.
Amen to that. Check the WORLD magazine link in #19 for another forthright look at the problem in other churches.
The thing that gives them away is the fact that they do not discuss any other religion or organization.
For example, last week all the networks were headlining their news with "two Catholic priests involved in internet child pornography ring."
Well, it ends up that there were eight clergymen arrested, including two Catholic priests. Do non-Catholic clergy get a free pass on child pornography?
The next big move in sexual deviancy will be the legitimization of adult-child sex. The standard patterns have already emerged, such as psychologists writing papers saying it's not that bad, etc. Soon, there will be articles appearing about how Greek philosophers used to take young boys under their wing and raise and educate them. Following that, expect more movies like "Manhattan", with an adult/high school/child romance involved.
While the scandals in the Church are deplorable on their own, the media making hay with them is part of a calculated ploy to blunt the ability of the Church to address this issue. I fear it will work.
The Catholic Church doesn't need many more stories like this to create irreparable harm to itself.
Most of the criticism is deserved and most catholics are in deep denial and I can't blame them.
"When they came for me no one was left....."
Pray for GW and the Truth
Bill Clinton had scandal after scandal but he would never address them directly. Instead, he and his media pit pulls would dissemble and prevaricate and create the impression that we nasty conservatives were just out to get him. "It's Open Season on Bill Clinton," these flacks and lackeys would proclaim on all those news shows, "It's a vast right wing conspiracy to unseat the president."
Well here we are with the Catholic Church who have a huge problem with homosexual priests abusing and sexually molesting children. Instead of taking responsibility, assigning blame and booting out the bad apples, including the cardinals who not only allowed it to happen but shuffled the priests off to other parishes, the apologists for the Catholic Church have decided to circle the wagons, stonewall and accuse those who would have a problem with what the Church has done of being "on a vendetta to destroy the church."
Sounds like the Catholic Church has inherited Bill Clinton's playbook. And many of us here are just playing along.
Oh geez. That's like saying "all of this pope's appointees are religiously Catholic." What a moron!
I can't believe she actually thought that was a worthwhile point to make.
I have run into so many of those kinds... it's tragic. That is a great line btw!
Not exactly. If people had been using the Clinton scandals to codemn the office of the President and declare that the US Government should no longer be allowed to operate, and that the constitution should be abolished, then it would be the same.
LOL!
I'd like to see these guys in jail, too. But many in the media are using this scandal to condemn Catholic moral teaching, the papacy, the priesthood and just Catholicism in general. As Bozell pointed out.
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