British Catholic magazine
tells US bishops to back Obama
and stop fussing about abortion
August 15, 2009
The Tablet’s teenage crush on Barack Obama is no longer just embarrassing: it’s downright offensive. The editorial in the current issue says that “US bishops
must [yes, must] back Obama” and ignore the opponents of his healthcare package, who are being manipulated by “robber barons”.
This is patronising even by the standards of the Bitter Pill, which often adopts a colonial sneeer when talking about red-state America. But this is the passage that made my jaw drop:
It is unfortunate that the one body that could turn out to be a decisive strategic force in his favour, the US Catholic bishops, have so far concentrated on a specifically Catholic issue – making sure state-funded health care does not include abortion – rather than the more general principle of the common good.
Are you serious? Abortion is “a specifically Catholic issue”, is it, to be distinguished from the all-embracing principle of the common good?
That is the sort of misrepresentation of the Church’s position that I might expect from a teenage student union activist, not a venerable Catholic magazine.
It suggests that the author of the editorial (a) is pig-ignorant of the Magisterium and (b) actually believes that the rights of the unborn child should be subordinate to, rather than an indispensible component of, “the common good”.
The politics of the
Tablet haven’t shifted much over the past decade: they’re still as predictably Left-liberal as ever. But one thing has changed significantly. Ma Pepinster’s
[Catherine Pepinster, editor since 2004] editorials
routinely display a degree of theological illiteracy and ignorance of basic Catholic teaching that would have been unthinkable under the previous editor, John Wilkins. No wonder Archbishop Vincent Nichols is keeping his distance.
'Theological illiteracy and ignorance of basic Catholic teaching' - I doubt that it is ignorance of basic Catholic teaching as much as it is a deliberate ignoring, if not downright defiance, of any part of Catholic orthodoxy that liberals cannot accept.
However, as a general statement, I would say that the Tablet's writers are simply being consistent with the overall level of cultural illiteracy in much of the liberal media - for all that they pride themselves in being supposedly far more well-informed than obscurantist conservatives who are mired in the Middle Ages.
Liberal illiteracy is precisely in choosing to ignore any facts that do not fit into their world view - and if you do this, which you have the duty not to do as a journalist, then of course, you will get facts wrong about the other side.
Thankfully, as with the 45,000 Italian Jews, the Tablet has a circulation of only 65,000 - and one has to believe these 65,000 are necessarily the choir they preach to!
So, apart from holding up to appropriate ridicule for their intellectuakl dishonesty and increasingly hysterical and ludicrous propositions, should we really worry about what the Tablet says?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/08/2009 19:45]