PJM Lifestyle
How the New York Times Smeared Pope Francis Today
New York Times editors moving offices.
When Benedict XVI was pope, the New York Times ran a scurrilous, distortion-infested campaign intended to link the former Joseph Ratzinger with the awful abuse scandals that have so harmed the Catholic Church. These pieces were manifestly dishonest and substance-free when you read them through. But the Times editors know most people don’t read the articles — they read the headlines and the first paragraph.
So this morning, the pseudo-journalists at the Times began their campaign of lies against the new pope, Francis, under the damning (and damnable) headline: “Starting a Papacy, Amid Echoes of a ‘Dirty War’”:
One Argentine priest is on trial in Tucumán Province on charges of working closely with torturers in a secret jail during the so-called Dirty War, urging prisoners to hand over information. Another priest was accused of taking a newborn from his mother….
Another clergy member offered biblical justification for the military’s death flights, according to an account by one of the pilots anguished about dumping drugged prisoners out of aircraft and into the sea.
As he starts his papacy, Francis, until this month Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, faces his own entanglement with the Dirty War, which unfolded from 1976 to 1983. As the leader of Argentina’s Jesuits for part of that time, he has repeatedly had to dispute claims that he allowed the kidnapping of two priests in his order in 1976, accusations the Vatican is calling a defamation campaign.
This is just despicable, isn’t it? Lead with examples of some priests who were wicked then segue into a paragraph about the pope to make it sound like he was one of them. Really — for shame.
Reading more deeply into the story — which I did so you don’t have to — we learn that the pope’s “entanglement,” involved hiding fugitives from the government bad guys, pleading for the release of two priests, and helping one guy who looked like him escape by lending him his papers and a priest get-up. Which last is actually pretty cool. Go, Pope.
Catholic Nuns: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone?
I expect more from Rush Limbaugh.
The Maha-Rushie’s grasp of American culture and history is powerful. Yet, commenting on news of a “Vatican crackdown” on a group of “dissident” U.S. Catholic sisters, Limbaugh remarked earlier this month:
Do you know what the nuns are doing? The nuns have gone feminazi on everybody. This small group of nuns in the Catholic Church is going feminist, and the Vatican is obviously — well, a figure of speech, slapping them down. And the Vatican is trying to tamp it down and say, “No, no, no, that doesn’t happen. There’s no such thing as a feminist nun.”
Where has Limbaugh been living? In a convent?!
American nuns went “feminazi on everybody” more than 40 years ago. Catholic religious orders are as riven left vs right as anywhere else in the country.
As in the media and the academy, the “left” cadre of sisters outnumbers the “right” one. The liberal nuns battling the Vatican today are (literally) the same ones who’ve been doing so for decades.
The latest skirmish comes after the Vatican’s four-year investigation into what American “women religious” actually believe (and more importantly, tell other Catholics, through teaching, counseling, and writing):
The Vatican looked at three particular “areas of concern,” citing “problematic statements and serious theological, even doctrinal, errors” (…), policies of dissent, and a prevalence of “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic Faith.”
If the notion of pro-abortion, New Age nuns sounds like heavy handed satire, then obviously you’re not a Catholic.
(Neither, some would argue, are these nuns.)
As layman Mark Shea explains with characteristic brio:
The Church is reining in nuns who are no longer Catholic from oppressing nuns who are and from poisoning the faith of people subjected to their loony quackery, goddess worship, Marxist theory masquerading as orthodoxy, bizarre sexual experimentation, substitution of Rogerian psychobabble for the Tradition, and naked hostility to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Amusingly, you’d think the Vatican itself — never mind (Protestant) Rush Limbaugh — had just found out about outrageous nun-related goings-on that millions of current and former Catholics have complained about for years.
Take me, for instance…
