Brent Bozell is founder and president of the Media Research Council, a conservative think tank founded expressly to "document, expose and neutralize" liberal media bias. It's no wonder he cuts through all their fancy-schmancy sanctimony to show them for what they are. NewsBusters is the MRC blogsite.
The media's Vatican coup
By Brent Bozell
April 6, 2010
Our secular liberal media elites are never more poisonously insincere than when they recommend that conservatives should move closer to liberals, for their own good.
Witnessing the relentless media attacks on the Catholic Church, no member of the flock should assume that the agitators at
Newsweek or the
New York Times know best how to steer the faithful – or even believe they want to help the faithful.
Much like Ted Turner (founder of CNN), who called Catholics “losers,” his media colleagues see Catholics – and particularly Pope Benedict XVI – as loathsome political obstacles.
One can conclude from all the coverage of sexual-abuse charges that those charges aren’t really the primary point for the “truth” seekers. These leftist media elites have hijacked those heinous actions for a much broader goal. [DIM]8pt[=DIM][Not to mention that leave behind a broad swathe of lies, half-truths and distortions in their self-proclaimed task of 'seeking the truth'. They wouldn't recognize truth if it literally poked them in the eye!]
Theirs is a very political crusade, with the goal of sacking Pope Benedict and “reforming” the ancient Church into their hipster image, one that celebrates gay bishop Eugene Robinson’s Episcopalian gospel of “tolerance” and “inclusion” and “pluralism.”
That kind of church would pose zero threat to the global goals of the left. In that kind of church, there is no stained-glass ceiling to untrammeled abortion and unlimited “marriage” of everyone to everyone.
Secular liberals and liberal pseudo-Catholics alike have overtly compared the sex-abuse charges to Watergate, and the Holy Father to President Nixon. In this vision, what the Catholic Church truly needs are cardinals to go to the Pontiff, like Barry Goldwater went to Nixon, and tell him he has to pack it in, for the good of his flock.
This is a stunning smear of Pope Benedict. Richard Nixon was heavily involved in plotting the petty crimes of Watergate, from break-in to cover-up. No media outlet has proven beyond their own jaded liberal assumptions that Cardinal Ratzinger or Pope Benedict had a similar involvement in plotting a coverup – not to mention ordering sexual abuse by priests.
Forget proof, evidence...facts. This is all about character assassination.
Whether it’s Sally Quinn of The Washington Post going on MSNBC or Timothy Shriver writing in the Washington Post, this march of the Holier Than Thou to the walls of Vatican City is a sickening spectacle.
Father Thomas Brundage, who was a judge in the church trial of deaf-child-molesting Father Lawrence Murphy in Milwaukee and is intimately familiar with the facts, is being ignored by the media.
Here’s what he wrote about this Pope, in regard to the Murphy ase: “In this matter, I have no reason to believe that he was involved at all. Placing this matter at his doorstep is a huge leap of logic and information.”
After Cardinal Ratzinger assumed responsibility in 2001 for sex-abuse cases being investigated by the Vatican, Brundage found “in my observation as well as many of my canonical colleagues, sexual abuse cases were handled expeditiously, fairly, and with due regard to the rights of all the parties involved. I have no doubt that this was the work of then-Cardinal Ratzinger.”
In addition, he wrote, “Pope Benedict has repeatedly apologized for the shame of the sexual abuse of children in various venues and to a worldwide audience. This has never happened before. He has met with victims...He has been most reactive and proactive of any international church official in history with regard to the scourge of clergy sexual abuse of minors.”
None of this mattered to the media. They will not allow this testimony to goodness to derail their religious revolution.
Newsweek even put a painting of the Virgin Mary on its cover with the words “What Would Mary Do? How Women Can Save the Catholic Church From Its Sins.” According to
Newsweek, Mary is now a radical feminist. They declared the Catholic scandal “is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?”
That is their goal, and it’s political.
Men are pigs, according to the female religion editor of
Newsweek, Lisa Miller, and celibate men who fail to accept women as professional equals are the biggest pigs of all.
This woman even attacked Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in her crusade. Were the bishops responsive to mothers who warned of abusive priests? “In this case Jesus was wrong: the meek did not inherit the earth. They received pious and self-serving sermonizing....the women of today's church have found themselves marginalized and preached to amid the interminable revelations of the sexual-abuse scandals. Their prayers to the Virgin, protector of humanity, seem to have gone unanswered.”
And as I write these words, the same spirit moves Rosie O’Donnell, as she just compared the Roman Catholic Church to...the psychotic suicide cult at Jonestown.
[Rosie O'Donnell is an ignorant loudmouth who is the Demon High Priestess of the Santimonious!]
And this is the face of 'the true, the good, and the beautiful':
Benedict XVI at the GA today.
NB: I must say Thank you to the news agencies (AP, Reuters and AFP), who, despite their obvious negative bias in reporting on the Pope and the Church, continue to file the photographs they take of him without apparent editing. They could choose, for instance, to release only the photos which show him in a sinister or unflattering light, but then, if they used that as a criterion, they would never be able to release anything, would they? Providence is defying their worst intentions with the most photogenic of all Popes!
I saw the original of the following but it's one of the favorable media items piling up since Easter weekend that I haev not had time to translate. CNA gives a good idea of it:
Jewish columnist in Spain says
the media using sex-abuse issue as
a gimmick to promote secular agenda
Madrid, Spain, Apr 7, 2010 (CNA).- Jewish poet, novelist and essayist Jon Juaristi published an article on Easter Sunday in the Spanish daily ABC asserting that “it is not necessary to be Catholic” to understand the motives behind the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI and the Church.
He remarked that the campaign is merely a sales gimmick aimed at getting Catholics out of the public square.
In his article, Juaristi wrote that he wants to address the media attacks on the Pope since an increasing number of “journalists and independent bloggers now expect the Pope to submit his resignation.”
These people have a greater "fascination with the idea of a hypothetical papal resignation, than with the very acts of pedophilia committed by priests,” he said remarking that their intentions are “merely an excuse to corner Benedict XVI. And only the Pope and the Church have taken this issue seriously."
"By exploiting the scandal, the tabloids only seek more sales and progressives seek to remove Catholics from the public square, or at least destroy the reputation of clergy if the campaign can’t do the former,” he said.
“In case I haven’t said it enough,” he continued,
“I am not Catholic, but even I am not blind to the immense moral stature of the current Pontiff in comparison to his present-day swarm of detractors, who are a bunch of harassers.”
Ever since the release of the Holy Father’s letter to Irish Catholics, Juaristi pointed out, the target of the attacks are no longer the pedophile priests and the bishops who covered them up, but rather the Pope himself.
“Since it seems in this case that the principle of 'strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered' is not going to work, it is likely that this campaign will drag on for some time and that the stage will be filled … with spontaneous individuals who recount what they suffered from the pedophile priest in question,” he said.
I will translate this brief editorial from TEMPI...
They paint a child-eating Church
because they hope to keep Christians
out of the public discourse
by the Editors
Translated from
April 7, 2010
For the Church of Papa Ratzinger it was a difficult but also purifying and instructive Easter.
Benedict XVI, and with him, all the bishops of the ecumene, have been very clear in acknowledging the shameful abuses that some priests have committed and to take responsibility for bringing them to justice and to keep them away from minors, while acting, too, against members of the Church hierarchy who have been complicit in covering up for their priests.
Heads will roll, and the scandal could well accelerate the Ratzingerian reform of the various curias, of the liturgy, and of seminaries.
But the abysmal distance between facts and the extended braying and barking of the media circuit against the Catholic Church will remain.
They make her appear as a child-eating monster, even as simple statistics show the minuscule contribution of sex-offender priests to reported cases of pedophilia and all the other perversions that are the outcome of the theory and practice of secular 'humanism'.
Just think of the free rein they give pornography. Or the pedophilia-advocating political party in Holland, that has now announced it will not field candidates in the next elections, not because the Dutch Parliament has outlawed it, but because they did not collect enough signatures to qualify them to become candidates.
Of course, it has become an international sport to shoot down - in more ways than one - anyone who wears a cross. In Asia and Africa, Christians are physically shot at or hacked to death or crucified or burned alive.
And here in the West - where the Christian who does not limit himself simply to catching butterflies, as Czelaw Milosz wrote, but insists on being involved in the
res pubblica - public matters - "will have his hand chopped off" for such audacity.
Already Christians are on the play stations of theologians the likes of Kueng and Mancuso. For whom Benedict XVI needs to be legitimized by a third democratic and Martinian Vatican Council composed of married priests and priestesses!
Thank God, none of that will ever happen. What is certain is that the People of God will continue to trust in the Only One who will never deceive them.
And I missed this very apropos blog entry by the Telegraph's Cristina Odone, whose creds include being former editor of the Catholic Herald, and deputy editor of the New Statesman. No example could be more appropriate for the liberal media's stultifying self-blinding hypocrisy!
Benedict XVI and Roman Polanski:
Liberals bay for the Pope's blood
while genuflecting to a child abuser
By Cristina Odone
March 31st, 2010
There is child abuse and then there is child abuse. Or so the liberal establishment would have us think. The tale of two elderly men bears witness to the incredible hypocrisy of our intelligentsia.
Both men are brilliant and influential figureheads. Both have been accused of perverting the course of justice in cases of child abuse. But there the similarity ends between Pope Benedict XVI and Roman Polanski, the noted Polish film maker.
Because, you see, although Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, he is an “artist”.
When US authorities issued a warrant for his extradition last year, the creme de la creme of Hollywood was up in arms. Stars like Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Whoopi Goldberg petitioned for the director of
The Pianist and the forthcoming
The Ghost Writer to be let off.
When he raped a child, Goldberg explained, it “was not rape rape”. It was something altogether different. Polanski, you see, was so talented, so special, mortal laws could not apply to such a genius. From NW3 to Manhattan, the chatteratis clucked about the provincial American justice system and their philistine mentality.
The same chatteratis can now be heard baying for the blood of Pope Benedict XVI. He has been celibate all his life. He did not plead guilty to sex with a child, he did not flee from America, thereby perverting the course of justice.
He is not an award-winning film director, but merely the spiritual head of the world’s one billion Catholics. In other words, he is not “one of us”.
The Pope probably doesn’t care that he is a hate figure for the same intelligentsia that genuflects to a child abuser like Polanski. I do.
[BRAVA!!!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/04/2010 00:35]