ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI
See previous page for earlier entries today, January 26, 2019.
Though bishop claims he was 'bullied' by the media
into his rush to judgment against the boys on Jan. 19
Bishop Roger Foys apologizes to Nick Sandmann
and Covington Catholic families
by Cristina Laila
GATEWAY PUNDIT
January 25, 2019
After initially condemning them on January 19, Roger Foys, the Bishop of Covington, finally apologized to Nick Sandmann and other Covington students who were smeared with an edited video [
accusing them of racism and bigotry against a native American who tried to provoke them but failed] after the March for Life in Washington, DC.
The Diocese fell for fake news and immediately condemned the Covington Catholic boys.
On Friday, nearly a week after the media onslaught and a myriad of death threats, the Diocese finally withdrew its condemnation of the boys and apologized.
The Bishop said in a letter to Covington Catholic parents that since that condemnation, “other video clips” have surfaced showing the teens did nothing wrong, and that
the same people who put pressure on the Diocese to condemn the students are now putting pressure on them to retract. [????]
“We are sorry that this situation has caused such disruption in the lives of so many. We apologize to anyone who has been offended in any way by either or our statements which were made with good will based on the information we had.
We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it,” the letter read.
“I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal,” the Bishop said. “Nicholas unfortunately has become the face of these allegations based on video clips. This is not fair. It is not just.”
The Covington Catholic teens have lawyered up and they are preparing to bring massive amounts of lawsuits against media outlets and celebrities who defamed and libeled them over an edited video.
As reported by TGP’s Cassandra Fairbanks, a team of very high profile lawyers are joining together to fight for justice for the Covington Catholic High School students who were ruthlessly attacked by the media following a school trip to DC for the March for Life.
Kenton County Prosecutor Rob Sanders is also aggressively pursuing the terroristic threats posted to Twitter to the Covington Catholic teens. Mr. Sanders said in an interview with Fox News Laura Ingraham that subpoenas and search warrants have already been issued and justice will be served.
The greater sins in the
mass hysteria over the Covington boys
by Anthony Esolen
JANUARY 26, 2019
I dislike writing about failure and sin, and dearly wish that the leaders of my Church would give me less occasion to do so.
Everyone by now has heard about what happened to boys from Covington Catholic High School. They were at the Lincoln Memorial, waiting for the bus home to Kentucky. They were in Washington, of course, to protest the murder of unborn children. In other words, unlike almost everybody else who goes to Washington to protest, they were there not to campaign, not to condemn a political party, and not to demand something for themselves, but to protect human lives that are now vulnerable to destruction. Some of them were wearing a Make America Great Again cap.
Then they were harassed, in the vilest terms, by members of what appears to be a lunatic group, the “African Israelites.” They did not respond in kind. They began to chant school chants, to drown out the insults. At that point another protest group came into the picture. They yelled at the boys too, telling them to go back to Europe. This one was led by an American Indian (I too am native; I was born in the United States), beating a drum, within inches of the face of a boy he had apparently targeted. The boy, nonplussed, held his ground and smiled a frozen smile.
Let us enumerate the sins that followed. The Diocese of Covington, along with many another organization and person, leapt to condemn the boy in harsh terms. They did so without knowing what happened. After all, they were not there.
This is called PREJUDICE, or RASH JUDGMENT. You have the tree and the noose ready, and you say so publicly, before you know a thing. What prompts the sin of PREJUDICE? A variety of things, in this case.
- One was race hatred: many people leapt to judgment because the accused were white.
- One was our endemic contempt for boys.
- One was political faction: people who do not believe as I believe about X – fill in the blank – are not simply mistaken, short-sighted, ignorant, or simply possessed of a different judgment about what is possible or advisable for the common good. They are wicked.
That was shortly followed by VINDICTIVENESS. People called for the boy to be expelled, and they were glad to subject him, his family, and his school to national disgrace. The glee of vengeance causes people to lose all sense of proportion, and to forget their sins.
Unless I am much mistaken, this is not a land of saints. To be rude to an old man is bad, even when the old man is behaving in a disgraceful way. Place the worst construction upon the boy’s action.
[The worst construction has been to describe his fixed smile as a SMIRK. Whatever you choose to call it, he did not say a word to the nasty old man, he did not wag a finger or spit in his face. And by all accounts, he signalled his friends not to do anything that might seem like provocation.]*
Each of us has done plenty of things that are a hundred times more wicked, vile, and destructive than is that sin in question. If the boy deserved expulsion for that, we should all deserve, for our worst sins, protracted torments followed by slow hanging. The very call for a wildly disproportionate and ruthless punishment was such a sin.
A lot of people began to have second thoughts. Others roamed over the Internet to find something, anything, that would cast the school in a bad light. Some said that the boy did not himself write his sometimes ungrammatical apologia, explaining what happened. They had, of course, no evidence for their accusation.
This was the sin of CALUMNY. By this time, people knew quite well that the boys had not sought out any confrontation, and that they had been already abused by grown men aplenty.
To abuse the weak – children, women, youths – is at least a sin of COWARDICE, and to call them “faggots” and “incest kids” compounded the abuse with the sin of OBSCENITY. To withhold the truth about the context of the incident, truth that would mitigate any guilt, or exonerate entirely, is to commit the sin of DETRACTION.
The Indian with the drum and his group showed up at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception the next evening, attempting to disrupt the Mass. This was a sin of SACRILEGE, against the holy place and the worship of innocent people; in the context of what they had already done, it was the sin of CONTUMACY, and of SOWING DISCORD.
The school had to remain closed the following Monday, and the boy and his family have received plenty of threats of violence and death. I have seen some of these. Incitement to a felony crime is nothing for police to take lightly. These are, at the least, sins of MALICE, not of intemperance; sins committed not in the heat of a situation that has come upon you suddenly, but in the cold; deliberate, calculated, intentional.
At the worst, they are sins of VIOLENCE, and of vicarious participation in the evil that is wished, if someone should be so mad or so wicked as to burn or kill.
I am not calling for the prejudicial, the contumacious, the cowardly, the deceitful, the vindictive, the factious, the malicious, and the violent to be strung up. The point is that, surrounding these boys and taking their words and actions in the worst way they can reasonably be taken, are crowds of people committing the sins I have named, sins that are many orders of magnitude more miserable.
That people can commit them and not be aware of the trap they have set for their own feet is simply astonishing to me. I do not understand it. I’m not a saint. I daresay they are not saints, either. But they think they are.
They must think they are, because nobody, knowing that he is steeped in moral sewage from head to toe, would rave and rage at the filth on his neighbor’s shoe. It would be worse than nonsensical. It would be like begging for the vengeance of God to come down upon you.
*It has surprised me very much that in the flood of positive commentary in favor of the aggrieved Covington boys, no one has pointed out they did something that is most unusual in this day and age: They had to stay there for 2 hours listening to the vilest insults, and did not succumb in the least to lashing back with any violent word or deed.
Yet even 5 minutes of that kind of insult would have unleashed reactions worthy of the worst episodes of disproportionate violent rage from the insultees.
But did anyone even lay a hand on anyone in that confrontation? If anyone had, violence would have erupted - and between the black Israelites and the native Americans staging a demo for their own cause, there was no lack of anti-Catholic anti-life elements who would have used any pretext to get physical against the Covington boys.
Their apparent amusement at the elderly Indian's in-your-face challenge to Nick Sandmann was, I submit, their version of 'turning the other cheek'. The very fact that they decided to drown out the insults against them by chanting their school songs was very much grace under pressure. For all that they may be typical teenagers of their generation, somehow their Catholic upbringing kicked in when it was necessary. It doesn't necessarily make them saints, but at least it made them behave decently when targeted for insult.
If Pope Francis were to give a real-life lesson to the young people he is meeting in Panama, he could do no better than setting up the Covington boys as worthy Catholic youth who defied provocation and who have ended up as white martyrs bearing up with the world's scorn in a most Catholic way.
But of course, none of the pope's high-powered communications counselors would have called his attention to the incident. Like Bergoglio himself, they snootily think 'Has anything good ever come out of the USA?" Which would be well for them to think when considering the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and the procession of the rich and the powerful who have come to the Vatican to be photographed with the pope.
On the other hand, I gave a silent cheer for the Polish lawmaker who reacted to the story promptly by saying the boys should be invited to address the Polish Parliament - now that's someone who quickly saw something exemplary in the boys' conduct that adults in a similar situation may well have botched.
Fr. Sirico at the Acton Institute had one of the most insightful commentaries on the Covington Catholic boys 'saga' in choosing to discuss the instant fake news-based, media-powered fury against them as the result of GOSSIP. He cites an anecdote about St. Philip Neri (1515-1595) that I never heard before - and that obviously Jorge Bergoglio had never read about either, because what better precedent could he cite for his periodic pontifications against gossip than that genial Doctor of the Church who was one of the great figures of the Counter-Reformation, and was so popular in Rome he came to be called the third apostle of Rome after Peter and Paul...
The sinister and irreparable nature of gossip is memorably illustrated in the penance St. Philip Neri once gave to a woman who had confessed it to him. He told her to walk through the streets of Rome plucking a chicken. Humbled, the woman accepted the penance. When she returned to him and reported she had completed the penance the saint told her to now go and collect all the feathers she had plucked.
“But Father Philip,” the woman is reported to have replied, “That would be impossible. I have no idea where they have blown to.”
“Now you see, my daughter, the effects of gossip,” he said.
Today we see gossip spread by journalists as recently demonstrated in much of the coverage of the Covington Catholic High School students attending the March for Life. Surely you know the whole story by now:
On Saturday, a story went viral that the previous day the Covington kids, wearing MAGA hats, while waiting for the bus that would take them back to Kentucky after they took part in the Marh for Life, found themselves boxed between racially charged groups of activists - the Indigenous People’s March and a black version of the Westboro Baptists known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. Both groups of adults hurled vile and provocative words of contempt at the boys. The image that emerged was that of an American Indian activist Nathan Phillips (who, the next day attempted to disrupt Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception), beating a drum in the face of one of the boys while chanting a war cry into his face. The boy quietly listened and smiled.
The gossip dimension of this affair begins as usual with an edited video of the encounter which was picked up by the “news” media (including the
New York Times). It reported this encounter as a group of white teenagers racially harassing a venerable tribal elder and Vietnam Veteran. And so the feathers blew across the nation, confirming Lord Acton’s observation that,
“Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality.” We can be thankful to Robby Soave over at Reason who went through the tedious task of gathering some of the feathers by examining the available video footage in its entirety, providing additional context,
…the rest of the video — nearly two hours of additional footage showing what happened before and after the encounter—adds important context that strongly contradicts the media’s narrative.
Most were not as careful with the truth. That lack of care extended to a lack of care for the persons at the center of the story, as Sara Aldworth helpfully pointed out,
What started for those students as a trip to the March for Life, ended in public shaming, death threats, and even calls for them to be forever condemned, with no mercy...
We fail to respect the reputation of persons when we make rash judgments and engage in detraction or calumny.
Many have made rash judgments about the persons involved in this story (including officials in the Diocese where the boys live and their own school). Some (not all) have apologized.
How many shared these stories about people they do not know with people who also do not know them, just like feathers down the alleyways of Rome? Much of what has been shared is calumny, stories contrary to the truth which harm reputations and cause others to make false judgments about the parties involved.
Gossip is a form of bearing false witness (a violation of one of the Ten Commandments), it is a grave sin, and one that demands more than an apology. It demands repentance. Let this tragic media frenzy be an occasion for all of us to lead more responsible and merciful lives.
For any of the boys from Covington Catholic High School who should chance upon this article: You will be called upon to explain and defend your beliefs in the moral foundations of Western Civilization. For any of you so inclined to come, you will be awarded a full scholarship to attend the Acton University in June here in Grand Rapids to help equip you in this regard.
For those who may not know about Acton University, it is the annual four-day intense and very Catholic super-seminar
that Fr. Zuhlsdorf always attends and recounts to his readers:
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/01/2019 06:42]