Tendentious Church Journalism

Edit: it's like there's an editorial template for this sort of thing that journalists in the Western world are expected to use when it comes to distort the public's understanding of these power struggles. Never mind that they're like the ritual combats of professional wrestling.


What has recently been read in aggressive commentaries and reports against conservative bishops brings to mind the papal expression "explosive hostility." This is how Pope Benedict XVI. had complained in 2009 complained of media reactions to his statements.

A guest contribution by Hubert Hecker.

At the Spring General Assembly, the majority of German bishops adopted a paper on pastoral care for sectarian marriages. Thereafter, a Protestant spouse should then approaching Holy Communion would be admitted if they affirmed the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist and at the same time disallowing Communion would plunge the spouses into a "serious spiritual emergency".

Campaign for Intercommunion [In this corner, weighting in at 130 kilos!]

Damian Thompson Breaks a Lance For Sodom

Edit: does being sinful in any regard make you exempt from stating the Church's teachings, even if you have been a Liberal for most of your career? If anyone is hypocritical, it's Thompson, who embarks on an ecclesiastical hissy fit of dramatic proportions in an all-too familiar conditioned response to fallen churchmen. How much longer before Damian out and swims the Thames in a fit of rage?

Here's an excerpt from the increasingly anti-Catholic Torygraph:

I'm deeply unimpressed by Cardinal Keith O'Brien's vague and guarded admission that "there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal". Does he really think he can leave it at that? After raging against gay marriage with a ferocity that was – I suspect – intended to make the English bishops look wimpish and therefore butter up the Vatican?

Scottish Catholics in particular have the right to ask: What the hell do you mean by "sexual conduct"?

And what are we supposed to make of this? "In recent days certain allegations which have been made against me have become public. Initially, their anonymous and non-specific nature led me to contest them."

H/t: Pewsitter


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100205086/hypocrite-cardinal-obrien-admits-sex-acts-in-a-vague-apology-that-will-make-things-worse/

Fr. Dwight Longenecker on the founder of Miles Jesu: "The guy gave me the creeps from the start."

From Fr. Longenecker's blog:

http://gkupsidedown.blogspot.com/2011/01/miles-jesu-founder-dismissed.html

I'm pleased to report that the founder of Miles Jesu has been dismissed for 'totally unacceptable behavior'. I got to know the members of Miles Jesu when I lived in England. American Steve Ryan was the leader of the community of celibate, consecrated laymen. Steve is an intelligent, devoted and spiritual man who lived a very sacrificial life in service of the church. The guys at Miles Jesu organized the annual Path to Rome conference in London at which various converts to the Catholic Church were invited to speak. At a couple of the conferences the founder, Fr. Alfonso Duran turned up with his retinue. I have to say that the guy gave me the creeps from the start. My impression was of a sinister, power hungry leader of a cult.

However, this was simply my personal, subjective impression, and always wishing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and not liking to accuse anyone of being a Catholic Darth Vader, I kept my opinions to myself. Nevertheless, I was not surprised a few years later to discover that Miles Jesu was under investigation, that my friend Steve Ryan had left the organization, nor that he was being persecuted and having false allegations made against him by those members who remained loyal.

The case is too much like the problems of the Legionairies and Fr. Marcel Marciel. Anyone associated with this kind of religious behavior will recognize that it is not only a problem with Catholicism. There are fundamentalist, Evangelical colleges, churches and other organizations that operate with the same cult-like mentality--demanding total loyalty and black listing and ostracizing those who criticize or leave the little fortress of faith. The problem is complex and is not only the blame of the domineering cult leader. Those who belong to such groups collude with the leadership, and a sick symbiosis of the dominator and those who wish to be dominated develops. Often those who follow such leaders desire the security and absolute certainty that comes with membership and the totally unacceptable demands for loyalty and mindless obedience that are part of the system.

The same problem can exist within marriages, families, parishes, schools and workplaces in a less extreme form. Anyone who demands total, unquestioned loyalty and anyone who wishes to submit themselves to such a regime or relationship is living out a frighteningly immature and irresponsible reaction to life's challenge. Such systems, wherever they occur, breed infantilism--not the proper child-like trust of the saint--but a diabolical counterfeit that controls and oppresses (and even more sickly) desires to be controlled and oppressed. Saints are not made in this way. All that results from such a life is spiritual, social and psychological abuse of a profound nature which produces not saints, but sad and stunted souls.

Finally, we should understand that those who are involved in this sick relationship are more often sick than evil. The dominator really thinks he is doing God's will and is simply exerting the necessary discipline to produce saints. The dominated really thinks he is doing God's will by living out a life of sacrifice and total obedience. Most often the great growth of such organizations, their ability to raise funds and attract followers and their undoubted good works make them difficult to criticize. Their deception operates at many different levels to both themselves and outside observers. Either way, sick or evil, such religious behavior has to be exposed and rooted out.

Crypto-Fascist Goldberg Trashes Sobran

Neocon Liar Jeffrey “Dr. Goebbels" Goldberg Dishonors the Memory of Joseph Sobran

by Michael Hoffman | www. RevisionistHistory.org | Oct. 13, 2010

Jeffrey Goldberg is the Israeli agent who is currently national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He helped engineer America’s invasion of Iraq based on the propagation of Goldberg’s well-publicized lie, published in the March, 2002 issue of The New Yorker and broadcast on NPR’s "All Things Considered” in February, 2003, that Saddam Hussein was an ally of the alleged 9/11 terror group, Al Qaeda. Now Goldberg is lying again. In a column published Oct. 12 on the website of The Atlantic magazine, Goldberg indicts the eminent Catholic historian and philosopher Joseph Sobran as a “Nazi.” This craven and despicable defamation had to wait until Sobran was dead and could no longer sue for libel.

It seems that Goldberg, his pal Greenberg, and a network of apologists for Israeli war crimes, had their ox gored when the New York Times published an obituary for Mr. Sobran which did not stigmatize him with the obligatory “Holocaust denier” Newspeak, preferring to describe him with the more moderate term, “Holocaust skeptic.”

This minor deviation from the approved script unleashed the hounds of Holocaust halachic correctness, in this case on the Times and on the memory of the deceased. Exploiting the Newspeak mechanisms of the imposed word “Holocaust,” the following fallacy has been advanced by Mr. Goldberg: "Imagine an obituary of a public figure who had denied that World War I had taken place. Or that fifty percent of the Civil War battles we know to have occurred did not, in fact, occur, and that there had been no slavery in the antebellum South.”

Link to original...

Weigel Defends (Neocons) Pope

As Zoe Romanovsky reports, Weigel gets praise from America Magazine. If he gets praise, it might have to do with he fact that Weigel echoes the tired anti-clerical language of Liberal Catholics, but invokes it to praise the person of the Holy Father, if not the institution of the Papacy, how masonic...

Really, George Weigel is a Hegelian statist who likes the idea of religion, even if he does find its deeper claims and political aspirations distasteful.

Like Peggy Noonan, a careerist, "defending" the Catholic Church, perhaps, more like Grima Wormtoungue in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: these flatterers leave much to be desired in the league of sincerity, but owe everything to their status as infighters and journalistic schemers:

To be sure, the Catholic Church ought to hold itself to a higher moral standard than other similarly situated institutions. But after too long a period of denial, the Catholic Church is now at the forefront of combating the sexual abuse of the young in the United States. And no one in the church has done more, over the last decade, to compel the sclerotic institutional culture [Wow, somebody's mad that he doesn't have the free access he enjoyed when John Paul II was in power] of the Vatican to face these problems than Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.

These are the facts. [No, these are your impressions] Thus the concern naturally arises, on this Easter, that those who continue to portray Catholicism as a global conspiracy of sexual predators are indulging in the last acceptable prejudice, anti-Catholicism, while aiming at nothing less than the destruction of the Catholic Church's credibility as a global moral teacher.

From InsideCatholic:

Read the article already...

George Weigel animus delendi against the SSPX and Tradition

Gregorian Rite

George Weigel thinks enough time has passed since the "red and gold" debacle that he can now re-enter the fray. As usual, it's against the SSPX.

In his column, The Catholic Difference, Weigel purports to tell us what is going on in the CDF-SSPX discussions. And it's no good for the SSPX.

Goto, Gregorian Rite for the rest of the article...

"Who is a Neo-Conservative" an Interview with Michael Novak

Insidecatholic

Prominent writer, thinker, and Crisis Magazine co-founder Michael Novak sat down with Italian scholar Alia K. Nardini to discuss neoconservatism, Catholicism, and the future of the West.


♦ ♦ ♦



Alia K. Nardini: Professor Novak, generally people in Italy and the rest of Europe want to know how much American neoconservatives share with the Republican Party. However, I find that the most interesting question really concerns the relationship between neoconservatives and the Democratic Party, especially in terms of conceptual differences that developed during the 1960s and 1970s. What is your view on this?

Michael Novak: In the first generation, virtually all neo-conservatives -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Paul Johnson in England -- were not only Democrats; we were on the left wing of the Democratic Party. We were Kennedy Democrats. But from about 1972, the Democratic Party, drawing the wrong lessons from the war in Vietnam, chose as its campaign slogan, "Come home, America!" and began retreating from the world and its international burdens. Then, after 1973, the Democratic Party increasingly became the party of abortion. It is still the party of abortion. From our point of view, we did not leave the Democratic Party, the party left us.

AKN: Is it true that the American public did not vote in favor of abortion, but that the Supreme Court, in effect, decreed it?

MN: Actually, prior to 1973, any time abortion had been put to a vote in the United States, it was overwhelmingly defeated. The American people prefer pro-life [legislation] by a good majority. But the Supreme Court stepped in, and in 1973 made a ruling that permitted abortion for almost any reason (in practice) and during all nine months of pregnancy. This was an illegitimate exercise of judicial power. It is not the business of the Court to make legislation. Legislation should be made only with the consent of the governed, through the Congress. The American people have never consented to this ruling, [which] has caused turmoil in our politics and culture for 34 years now, as nothing else has. Together with other factors, it brought a long series of defeats to the Democratic Party.

AKN: What other major issues made you move away from what was becoming the official position of the Democratic Party in the 1970s?

MN: Economics. Many of us once thought that socialism was basically a good idea, but socialists had not found a practical way to implement it successfully. Then we actually started to examine the many different national experiments in socialism -- almost 70. None of them worked. So socialism cannot be a good idea. Now, if you are on the Left and you cease being a socialist, what are you? If you do not take the state as the main engine of progress, where do you turn?

In these circumstances, and independently, several writers started re-examining the American founding. Irving Kristol in particular wrote a beautiful book about that, and discovered a new way of thinking about the future.

Like socialists, neoconservatives try to imagine, and to work toward, a better future. Unlike socialists, neoconservatives saw in a dynamic free economy a better way of breaking the chains of poverty than socialism ever discovered.


Again, at the time of the American founding, the term "republican" was much preferred to "democratic." The latter meant rule by the majority, but that has often proven dangerous and tyrannical. A "republic" places checks and balances on the majority through representative government and stresses the rule of law and the protection of the rights of the free.

Then there was this second discovery: not just that the American founding held a superior economic idea (which is why socialism never took root in the United States), but also that the American people, when given a free choice, would usually come down on the conservative side of most issues. Polls reveal that even in Europe the vast majority of people believe in capital punishment. It is the political class -- the elites -- that does not. The Left thinks it speaks for the people, but rarely does so.

Link to article...