Fostering Distortions: Anti-Clerical Paper Attacks Father Echert With Fisheye Lens

A More Accurate Psychological Portrait of Father Echert

Updatsky: We were told by a tipster that the print edition features an advertisement for a Polka Mass right next to this story.  Roll out the barrel... Perhaps the irony will be lost on most?   We also neglected to stress that this is one of the few parishes where the Immemorial Rite of the Mass is celebrated with Diocesan approval.

Local Paper Makes Father Echert Look Distorted, Weird and Scary

Editor:Some may recall a story about the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima where the Masonic, anti-Clerical newspapers came to scoff at the "fools" who came to see a Miracle, well, history has a way of repeating itself, perhaps.


The outgoing Diocesan Communications Director, Dennis McGrath, contacted us and asked us to remove a photo of Father Echert on the story from a Parish in South Saint Paul, Minnesota, about the possibly miraculous Host which did not dissolve and became surrounded by what appears to be blood.  Since then, there has been  a story in the provincial Saint Paul Pioneer Press, describing the event with citations both from the Vicar General, Father Laird and the Communications Director, Dennis McGrath and some comments from Father Echert who was, we presume, photographed for the interview by a professional staff photographer.  Aside from omitting clerical titles in a jarring and offensive way, and not capitalizing the word "Host", which is Christ present in the Eucharist, even when He's been put in a ciborium of water, they also didn't credit us for our observations on a possible scientific explanation for the phenomenon and even misquoted us.  They write:

BACTERIA TO BLAME?
One blogger has raised the red bacterium, Serratia marcescens, as a possible explanation for the communion wafer turning red. According to Microbe Zoo, a website developed by the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, the bacterium grows on bread and communion wafers that have been stored in a damp place.

We never said probable, we said "possible".   The quote we took to explain the phenomenon was from the unreliable on controversial and religious subjects, Wikipedia, which, of course, has little to no sympathy for the transcendent, but gave a basic idea of the phenomenon itself. Even the Wiki article didn't say Serratia marcescens was the probable cause of the miraculous Host of Bolsena...   Pioneer Press writes: 

The site goes so far as to cite Serratia marcescens as the probable cause of the bloodlike substance that a priest discovered on communion bread in 1263, referred to as "The Miracle of Bolsena."

 Check out the reporter's anti-Catholic bias here as here, almost gleefully describing the poor Catholics who "flocked" to the apparition site only to have their expectations dashed later when the Diocese proclaimed that it wasn't miraculous. 

More-recent incidents have pointed to bacterium contamination, including a highly publicized instance in 2006 when people flocked to a Dallas-area church after a host turned red in a glass.

It would be nice if  anti-Catholic journalists, who routinely flock to the sites of banal celebrities and rock stars, would engage in a little visual as well as factual accuracy in their reporting.

Exibit B

Instead of the attractive photograph of Father Echert which appears on his parish website, we were treated to a bizarre fisheye shot from below which gives a strange effect implying menace and even mental aberration.  It looks frankly nightmarish and spooky like some people imagine Catholics to be.  We'd like to be gracious and assume that the Archdiocese didn't know what the Pioneer Press would do with Father's image, but it's hard to be that generous:

Appalling Fisheye Shot of Father Echert