Sweet Macaroni!!!

Must be because they are professionals.

//In his review of Amazon’s Goliath, The Times‘ Mike Hale critiqued the “needlessly complicated structure of the initial episodes,” especially Billy Bob Thornton‘s character’s investigation of a suspicious suicide.

“The nature of the case McBride has taken on… is revealed slowly and cryptically, a bit of writerly delayed gratification that keeps your attention but isn’t particularly rewarding,” he wrote. “Then, presumably because the first episode leaves so much unanswered, the next jumps back in time to fill in the history of the case — and when the second episode ends, the story hasn’t even caught up to where it started.”

“The narrative juggling has the feel of stretching — of starting with a story suited for an episode of traditional TV or maybe a feature film and extending it to more than nine hours. Final judgment on that will have to wait until all 10 episodes are available,” Hale concluded.

But as The Times admitted in a correction, there was a reason why that plotline seemed to jump across time and space:

Correction: October 18, 2016

A television review on Friday about the new Amazon series “Goliath” included an inaccurate discussion of the show’s plot structure. The critic mistakenly watched the first two episodes out of order.//

A New York Times Christmas message...

....to all of those Earth-destroying viruses that constitute the greater part of humanity outside the progressive enclave of "People Like Us."

A Christmas Letter to the Editor published by the NYT on Christmas Day:

//Regarding the Dec. 14 front-page article “Paris climate deal nearly unraveled over 1 word”:

Why are the words “population” and “climate change” rarely, if ever, uttered in the same breath? There was a graph in Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” where population growth and carbon dioxide emissions were in lockstep from near zero heading toward infinity. Will no one in a position to do so ever raise this issue?

As I understand the term “virus,” there are “good” ones and “bad” ones. A “good” virus will sicken its host but not kill it so the virus can be passed to other hosts, thus ensuring its viability and continued existence. A “bad” virus will kill its host, ensuring the ultimate end of the virus. The “good” virus controls itself to ensure its continued existence. Picture, if you will, the human race as a virus and Mother Earth as its host. We are, all of us, a “bad” virus. If we are left unchecked by our own devices, we are going to kill our host. It is not a question of what we do; it is a question of the fact that we are — more than 7 billion and growing.

Often, though, the host produces antibodies to the invading virus. Think, in this case, of plagues, bacteria, cancers and other assorted ways that humans have been (somewhat) checked by Mother Earth. We, the virus, have put up a valiant defense against these attempts to be thwarted by our host. But for how long: What is out there that we don’t know about? Whatever it is, we may not survive it as a species and may go the way of a million others before us. If we do survive it, we will make Mother Earth uninhabitable and kill ourselves.

I am betting on Mother Earth. We are but a dust mote in the time of existence of this beautiful blue and green orb.

Alan L. Waters, Bethesda//

Merry Christmas, Alan!!!

Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism?

Remember when freedom of conscience mattered?

Screw that pre-2008 noise; the Stalinist Left is in charge now.

//But again, legal hairsplitting is at most a pretext for the fury directed against Indiana. Here we will take the unusual step of praising the New York Times editorial board for forthrightness. In a single sentence, if a lengthy one, the paper sums up what changed: “Religious-freedom laws, which were originally intended to protect religious minorities from burdensome laws or regulations, have become increasingly invoked by conservative Christian groups as gay rights in general—and marriage equality in particular—found greater acceptance nationally.”

Narrowly speaking, that is, the left’s hatred of RFRA is about preserving the authority of the cake police—government agencies determined to coerce bakeries, photo studios, florists and other small businesses to participate in same-sex weddings even if the owners have eccentric conscientious objections.

Whether Indiana’s RFRA would protect such objectors is an open question: The law only sets forth the standard by which state judges would adjudicate their claims. Further, as the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, notes, the Hoosier State has no state laws prohibiting private entities from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. (It does have same-sex marriage, pursuant to a federal court ruling.) There are also no such antidiscrimination laws at the federal level. Thus under current law, only certain cities and counties in Indiana even have a cake police.

What makes that Times editorial surprising is the frank admission that the editors are unwilling to apply their principles to the religious group they disfavor, namely “conservative Christian groups.” That’s not to say their candor is untarnished by bad faith. They set up a dichotomy between “religious minorities” and “conservative Christian groups.” But unless the old Moral Majority was—and still is—worthy of the latter half of its name, the dichotomy is self-evidently a false one.

It is also an invidious one, since it singles out one religious minority (or, to be precise, one category thereof, since there are many kinds of conservative Christians) and deems it unworthy of the first freedom. And that supposed unworthiness is not limited to the matter of same-sex marriage, or gay rights more generally. The Times once again rebukes the Supreme Court for having “helped the cause of Christian conservatives with its 2014 Hobby Lobby decision,” which held that RFRA limited the government’s coercive authority vis-à-vis the provision of contraceptives through employee medical benefits.

You might sum up the Times’s position as follows: Legal rights are all well and good, but they shouldn’t be extended to an enemy in wartime—at least not if it’s a culture war.//

The media is evil.

All the Doxxing that is fit to print.

NYT publishes Darren Wilson's address and the names of his wife and friends.

The mainstream media doesn't just want their friends to win - they want their class enemies murdered.

Update:  Snopes says the story is wrong.

On the other hand,The NYT article contains this:

Officer Wilson and Officer Spradling own a home together on Manda Lane in Crestwood, Mo., a St. Louis suburb about a half-hour drive from Ferguson.

They have scarcely been seen there since Mr. Brown was killed on Aug. 9. Neighbors said that within a few days of the shooting, Officer Wilson and Officer Spradling abruptly left their home.//

It also names the witnesses to the marriage and the name of Wilson's wife.

How is that information "newsworthy"?  Particularly in light of the death threats against Wilson and the riots and protests.

It looks like the same strategy that we saw in the Prop 8 campaign of publicizing the names of supporters of traditional marriage so that protests could be directed against their employers.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Disasters everywhere and the New York Times notes - only now - that Obama has a false sense of self-assurance.

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

Ryan T. Anderson and a New York Times reporter debate civility.

Note that the reporter believes that he doesn't have to treat one side of the marriage debate as worthy of civility.

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

The New York Times is tolerant of atheist attacks on Catholicism....

....but absolutely won't permit ads identical to attack ads on Catholicism to be run against Muslims.

//The article points out that this is the second FFRF ad attacking Catholicism and that the NYT refused to run an identical ad re Islam.

//At least one conservative group pointed out an apparently cowardly double standard at work within the Times, noting that while the paper has eagerly and regularly run the FFRF's anti-Christian advertisements, it turned suddenly reluctant when approached by a group that wanted to run an ad critical of Islam, assumedly because it feared violent backlash from militant Islamists.

The Media Research Center linked to a 2012 blog post by libertarian David Volokh, who showed how the Times had run the FFRF's ad titled “It's Time to Quit the Catholic Church,” but demurred when approached with a similar ad, titled “It's Time to Quit Islam,” submitted by a duo of groups, the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of Nations (SION), both of them creations in part of anti-Islamist activist Pamela Geller.

Geller wrote that in response to her groups' ad, Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, called “to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in 'a few months.'”

Predictably, the “few months” have turned into two years, and the Times has yet to run Geller's ad — while it continues to roll with the FFRF's ongoing paid anti-Catholic diatribe.

Volokh noted that the Times' response to Geller's submission is proof of one of the points Geller had earlier made: “Almost no Catholics are likely to respond violently even to harsh criticism of the Catholic Church — but enough Muslims are likely to respond violently to harsh criticism of Islam (whether the response is against the critic or against others) that the Times itself views such criticism as unsafe. There are plenty of peace-loving Muslims, but unfortunately there are also enough extremist Muslim thugs to affect what the Times is willing to publish.”//

Life among the "cultured despisers."

The New York Times offers this double-face-palm moment:

Easter is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life. In urging peace, Francis called on Jesus to “change hatred into love, vengeance into forgiveness, war into peace.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

The NYT is running a "push poll" on "Catholic" attitudes toward Catholicism...

...which plays up the negative elements.

Note that the numbers for weekly attendance are drastically different.

*Yawn*

Timely.

Communio's pdf-available article from its current volume is David L. Schindler
Editorial: The Repressive Logic of Liberal Rights: Religious Freedom, Contraceptives, and the "Phony" Argument of the New York Times

New York Times calls for bankruptcy of Catholic Church.

A NYT editorial calls for re-opening the statute of limitations on sex abuse claims:

The Grey Lady just published another editorial on Sunday on its favorite topic: sex abuse in the Catholic Church from decades ago. This time the Times praises the state of Hawaii for passing a law to lift the statute of limitations for two years to file stale sex abuse claims and then lobbies Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York to do the same in an attempt to bankrupt the Catholic Church in New York.

How these ex post facto laws are constitutional is unclear. Particularly when they so clearly constitute a bill of attainder.

The New York Times and Religious Freedom.

James Taranto reads the NYT editorials so we don't have to:

But the most revealing Kristof assertion was this one: "The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can."

That prompted an incandescently furious response from Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

Nicholas Kristof's statement is light years beyond the President in disrespect for religious liberty.…The language of accommodation is almost as old as the Constitution itself, but it was never framed as Kristof frames it—certainly not by the founders who spoke of "inalienable rights" granted to human beings by the Creator's endowment.…

With this one simplistic and condescending sentence he throws religious liberty under the bus and reveals what makes sense to so many in the secular elite.

They will try their best, they promise, to respect our religious beliefs, and to "accommodate them where we can."

That's it. Don't dare ask for anything more.

Religious liberty—no scare quotes here—is one of America's basic principles, the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. The separation of church and state protects religious minorities, and nonreligious ones, from the coercive imposition of religious law. It is also a bulwark against a secular government's impositions on private conscience. To the Times editorialists, it is at best an inconvenience.

And the paper's reporters aren't much better. Here's what passed for balance in a story by Laurie Goodstein:

The uproar threatens to embroil the Catholic church in a bitter election-year political battle while deepening internal rifts within the church. On the one side are traditionalists who believe in upholding Catholic doctrine to the letter, and on the other, modernists who believe the church must respond to changing times and a pluralistic society.

Albert Mohler is a Baptist. This columnist is an agnostic. But I'm with Mike Huckabee, another Baptist, who said: "We're all Catholics now."

Anti-Catholics just aren't living up to their reputation.

It does seem that every anti-Catholic agitprop effort by the Left over the last few weeks has back-fired, leaving the left look like a bunch of clumsy chumps trying to hold up their pants.

Bad Catholic collects the memories ranging from the Planned Parenthood campaign that resulted with a pro-Catholic priest "laying down the law" as the most popular clip on the PP site, the attempted hacking of the Vatican website, which shows that the Vatican website is better protected than the ones put up by "IBM and Sony," and, of course, the New York Times lame anti-Catholic ad, which, well, actually confirms Catholic teachings, i.e., believe or leave. Concerning that last, Bad Catholic writes:

When the NYT ad said that those who support abortion, sterilization, and contraception should realize the Church is never going to change its mind and consider leaving, I thought, well shoot! That’s what we’ve been telling Nancy Pelosi for years!

The ad proclaimed the alarming indestructibility of Church doctrine, and Her refusal to conform to our fads and fashions. It came from a moronic angle, but to the liberal Catholic nourished by the beauty, truth and goodness of the Church — who would no more consider leaving the Church than leaving his family — it begs an examination of conscience. Sure, it says “Here is what the Church believes. Hear is what you believe. There is a disparity between the two. Leave the Catholic Church.” But there is an unspoken alternative to the NYT ad’s message, an alternative every bad Catholic will hear, whether he wants to or not: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The ad leaves only two options: Either you, or a two-thousand-year-old institution that produced the greatest art, theology, philosophy, science, and music the world has ever seen, is correct. Know thyself.

Now don’t mistake my trivialness. This is unprecedented bigotry. It’s been a long time since a specific religion was publicly attacked and defamed in a national newspaper, and they weren’t exactly times of love and tolerance. But the reasons our enemies are foaming at the mouth over the Church are the very reasons we embrace Her. The Church is too pro-life, too ancient, it stands against the modern age — amen, amen, in saecula saeculorum.

So I thank God for the enemies of the Church. With every ugly, classless attempt to end the Eternal Revolution, to persecute the Persecuted Body, and to scorn the Communion of Saints, they remind us of how good, how true, and how beautiful the Bride of Christ is. A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness — somewhat hilariously — cannot comprehend it.

New York Times runs with unsubstantiated Anti-Catholic bit of Yellow Journalism.

Here's a horrifying headline from the New York Times - "Dutch Church Is Accused of Castrating Young Men."

Wow!

But wait there's more -

"A young man in the care of the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands was surgically castrated decades ago after complaining about sexual abuse, according to new evidence that only adds to the scandal engulfing the church there."

Wow!

But wait there's more -

"It is unclear, however, whether the reported castration was performed as a punishment for whistle-blowing or what was seen as a treatment for homosexuality."

The Catholic church was castrating gay men who complained about priests abusing them as a treatment for homosexuality!

Is that a trifecta or what?

The problem is that the story is a pretty obvious hatchet job that doesn't mean minimal journalistic standards according to Get Religion:

This is a disturbing story. But is it fair or thorough reporting? No.

The lede states there is “new evidence that only adds to the scandal engulfing the church there.” The body of the story reports that there was no new evidence to be found.

What is also missing from this article is a comment or statement from the church, the hospital, the state — anyone representing the authorities that had this poor man castrated or the commission that reviewed this case. The voices we hear are of a professor of religious history — who offers an opinion that this was a bad thing, but has no knowledge of the particular case; and of a reporter interviewing another reporter about his story.

Does this failure to offer a second side to the story necessarily render it suspect? I can see an argument being made that there is no need to hear a justification of castration. But as the New York Times ran with a headline that accuses the Dutch Catholic Church of castrating young men, I would hope there was an attempt to elicit an explanation.

Another piece that is missing from this story is context. How many people were castrated in the Netherlands during this period? The Dutch reporter cited by the Times believes there were 10 cases. A quick search through the academic literature reports that there were around 400 cases.

An article entitled “Eugenic and sexual folklores and the castration of sex offenders in the Netherlands (1938–1968)” published in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 39, No. 2, June 2008 by Theo van der Meer states that castration of sexual offenders was part of the Dutch state’s eugenics program. Pedophiles were castrated to prevent them from re-offending as were those adjudged to be mentally deficient.

The abstract to the article reads in part:

From 1938 to 1968 in the Netherlands, after a decade of debates, 400 sex offenders who had been committed to asylums for the criminally insane were ‘voluntarily’ and ‘therapeutically’ castrated. For political reasons debates on castration, meant to create consensus, eliminated any reference to or connotation with eugenics, yet these policies were unthinkable without them.

Read through the journal article and you will find all the details you will ever want to read about a dark chapter of Western medicine which saw castration as a tool in a public health program to improve the human race through eugenics and to combat what that age saw as criminal sexual deviancy.

The Times story fails the test of good journalism on several levels. It begins with an over the top headline and lede that implies the existence of Catholic cabal worthy of Dan Brown that preyed on young men — abusing them and castrating them.

It offers uncorroborated anecdotal evidence from a man dead 54 years to insinuate the Church was complicit in a gruesome crime — yet we don’t know if it was a crime. The history offered is full of gaps and makes assumptions — was the victim in the care of a Catholic institution when he reported the abuse? Was he passed from Catholic institutional custodial care to a Catholic-affiliated psychiatric hospital to a Catholic-affiliated surgery center for sterilization? Under what circumstances was the claim of abuse made? The journal article reports that castration was ordered by the state for those found to be mentally deficient or who were incorrigible sexual offenders. Who was the victim? Could the Catholic Church order the castration of a young man? How was that possible?

Professionally this is sloppy work. It is also offensive. The Catholic pedophile scandal in Holland is a horrific case of abuse, betrayal and evil. Tossing the incendiary charge of castration into this cesspit of moral corruption cheapens the suffering of those who were abused. It tells the true victims of abuse, “well it could have been worse, you could have been castrated.”

There is a story in this mess that a good journalist could bring out — a story of state sanctioned abuse of those whom science adjudged to be defective — of a church that relaxed its standards in the face of government and public opinion. We do not get that here. (One of the lacunae in the journal article is the objection by Catholic theologians in the 1930s to state castration programs on moral grounds and its disquiet over the whole field eugenics.)

What say you GetReligion readers? Is this a case of shoddy journalism, or courageous reporting of unpalatable truths?

So, yes, this is awful.

Castration is awful.

Castration in 1968 is awful.

Castration for eugenics is awful.

But you know who was castrating for eugenics in 1968?

It wasn't the Catholic church; it was the government and more particularly liberal governments.

The Catholic church was regularly condemned by those who believed in the best "science" for standing in the way of progress in eugenics.

On the other hand, liberals loved eugenics. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood was a supporter of eugenics. In Buck v. Bell, the liberal idon Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously opined that "three generations of imbeciles were enough" before sending Carrie Buck off to have her fallopian tubes removed.

On the other hand, it was the lawyers for a Catholic Mens' Group that petitioned for reheaing on Carrie Buck's behalf, according to this site:

The petition for rehearing--written not by Irving Whitehead but by lawyers for a Roman Catholic men's group--was the finest effort in Carrie Buck's defense. But by then, as Whitehead no doubt knew, there was little chance that the Court would reconsider.

But, heck, don't let facts stand in the way of a good smear.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Compare and Contrast - New York Times says "We can make money off of Anti-Catholic" but "Anti-Islamic Bigotry is Unacceptable!"

Mark Shea comments on the New York Times' latest indulgence in liberal hypocrisy:

Doubtless, somebody will shout “But Spencer and Geller are bomb-throwing Muslim baiters!”

Okay. Let’s grant that for the sake of argument. And your point is what? All they did was take the copy of the original ad and tweak it slightly to demonstrate that the original ad was written by bomb-throwing Catholic baiters. And the alleged standard-bearer in American journalism had no problem with that and ran it.

The NY Times: Champions of Anti-Catholicism as the Last Acceptable Prejudice in America.

And here are the ads:

More on that NYT Ad.

Vox Day writes:


It's hard to illustrate their cowardice more precisely than the NYT's rejection of an anti-Islamic ad copied directly from an anti-Catholic ad previously run in the newspaper:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in "a few months."

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Mr. Christie said, “I’m not here to discuss the anti-Catholic ad.”

I said, “But I am, it’s the exact same ad.”

He said, “No, it’s not.”

I said, “I can’t believe you’re bowing to this Islamic barbarity and thuggery. I can’t believe this is the narrative. You’re not accepting my ad. You’re rejecting my ad. You can’t even say it.”

We used the same language as the anti-Catholic ad. The only difference is, ours was true and what we describe is true. The anti-Catholic ad was written by fallacious feminazis.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Christians should do every single time anti-Christian propaganda is put forth through the mainstream media and every time anti-Christian views are displayed by irreligious individuals. Force them to publicly expose their hypocrisy. Force them to admit that they are actively taking sides in the cultural war. Force them to finally recognize that they are not secular and neutral as they feign to be, but are actively working against the survival of Western civilization.

Being a "radical" who is "transgressive" and "provocative" is only possible ...

...if the transgression is against Catholics and Evangelicals who abide by the rules of civility.

Here's Mark Steyn's take on the New York Times double-standard under which it will print anti-Catholic rants, but won't touch anti-Islamic ones:

Pamela Geller was struck by that ad The New York Times ran the other day, “It’s Time To Quit The Catholic Church“, an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics”. So she sent in her own ad, “It’s Time To Quit Islam“, an “open letter to ‘moderate’ Muslims”. Analogous artwork, same pitch, only difference being the intended target. The Times’ Senior Vice-President for Corporate Hogwash called to tell Miss Geller that – surprise! surprise! – they were way less eager to rush this one into print:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in “a few months.”

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Thus the courage of the secular left: If you’re going to be “provocative”, it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked. Pamela is right. If you want to be treated with respect by The New York Times and the rest of the multiculti establishment, make it clear you’re willing to kill them. That’s an interesting message to send.

God bless their pointy little heads, the editors of the New York Times probably don't even begin to understand.

Guess who doesn't issue fatwahs - Liberal Hypocrisy/Liberal Cowardice.

The liberals of New York talk brave when they are sticking crucifixes into urine because Christians don't issue fatwahs.

But when it comes to exercising First Amendment rights with respect to that well-known "religion of peace" the idea of being transgressive and provocative doesn't sound so....safe anymore.

New York Times - and Liberals - aren't even subtle in their Anti-Catholic bigotry after running anti-Catholic ad, NYT refuses to run anti-Islam ad patterned on the anti-Catholic ad.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

James Taranto picks up on the New York Times "good-think":

Two Papers in One!


■"It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses. Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments--a constitutional gimmick. . . . Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 9, 2006

■"Nearly six months after it opened its doors, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a director, after President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray. . . . Mr. Obama also appointed three new and qualified members to the National Labor Relations Board. . . . Announcing the appointments, Mr. Obama also asserted a welcome new credo: 'When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.' Hear. Hear."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012

Shoot,  ever since one of our first bishops sold out Christ for 30 pieces of silver, it's been all uphill from there.

There's another book out on the sins and vices found in the historical record of the papacy that has the anti-catholic faction slavering for a fix. The New York Times gave "Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy” by John Julius Norwich the cover and assigned its top editor to give it a rave review, which was an odd choice according to Mollie Ziegler Hemingway:

We don’t typically spend too much time looking at mainstream movie or book reviews, but I thought the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review was worth looking at. For one, it’s written by Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. For another, the Review has this curious note from “the editors”:

Through the years, The New York Times’s coverage of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican has received sharp criticism from practicing Catholics — including the past eight years that Bill Keller has been the paper’s executive editor. Yet Keller, who wrote this week’s cover review of “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy,” by John Julius Norwich, was raised within the fold.

“My parents took their faith very seriously — especially my mother, who had the fervor of a convert (from Episcopalian),” Keller recalled in an e-mail. “My brothers and I had nuns and priests as our teachers through high school, and I look back on that education with real gratitude. I’m now what my friend Dan Barry calls a ‘collapsed Catholic’ — beyond lapsed — but you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”

I love that “Yet” in the first paragraph. Why “yet”? I mean, the next paragraph explains that he’s “beyond lapsed” to “collapsed.” If being raised in the faith is supposed to mean something about how the coverage can’t be unfair, what is collapsing from it supposed to mean?

And then we read the first paragraph of the review:

John Julius Norwich makes a point of saying in the introduction to his history of the popes that he is “no scholar” and that he is “an agnostic Protestant.” The first point means that while he will be scrupulous with his copious research, he feels no obligation to unearth new revelations or concoct revisionist theories. The second means that he has “no ax to grind.” In short, his only agenda is to tell us the story.

Since when does being “an agnostic Protestant” mean that ipso facto one wouldn’t have an ax to grind against the Roman Catholic Church or the papacy? But also, how does this relate to the editors note? Are we to presume that Keller does have an ax to grind since he’s a “collapsed” Catholic? I know he’s acted contrary to the faith in which he was raised (he and his wife aborted a son, for instance). Is that playing a role in The Times’ coverage of the Catholic Church? And then, there’s this famous Keller column — “Is the Pope Catholic?”

Here's a paragraph from the "famous Keller column":

Probably no institution run by a fraternity of aging celibates was going to reconcile easily with a movement that embraced the equality of women, abortion on demand and gay rights. It is possible, though, to imagine a leadership that would have given it a try. In fact, Pope Paul VI indicated some interest in adopting a more lenient view of birth control, and he handpicked a committee of prominent Catholics who endorsed the idea almost by acclamation. The pope agonized, and then astonished Catholics by reaffirming the old ban.

Ah, Keller is one of those "collapsed Catholics" - a person who puts his allegiance to the totems of his tribe, upper-class liberalism, above that of his faith.

And - lo and behold - Mollie finds that the nonscholarly book by a nonscholar "Protestant agnostic" that retails myths and slanders as scholarship is congenial to the prejudices of said "collapsed Catholic":

Here’s the thing: This review is not up to snuff. Many folks across the Catholic spectrum are talking about problems with the review and its uncritical look at the book in question. For instance, the book author gives quite a bit of time to a fictional incident of a female pope — a full chapter. Keller gives another couple hundred words in his short review over to discussion of this fictional character.


The review is stunningly uncritical. I actually laughed out loud at Keller’s kicker — simply a quote from the book:

“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”

Wow. It’s almost like the author has the same lack of an ax to grind as The Times, doesn’t it? Brilliant reviewer choice there, editors.

But it's in God's plan to turn every bit of evil to good, or an opportunity for snarky humor, which in this case is supplied by Diary of a Wimpy Catholic, who points out that when Catholics sin they sin on an epic scale:

What a prince Bill Keller is. In reviewing John Julius Norwich’s Absolute Monarchs, he warns that this “rollicking narrative” featuring “265 popes (plus various usurpers and anti­popes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more” might not appeal to “devout Catholics.”



It’s a nice little warning label: The following history contains scenes that might shock or upset readers. Not recommended for expectant mothers or members of the Mystical Body of Christ.

I have one question for Keller: son, just who the hell do you think you’re talking to?

Tony Montana told the INS goons that they could do nothing to him that Castro hadn’t done already. Well, John Julius Norwich can’t tell us anything that Garry Wills hasn’t told us already — in Papal Sin, Return of Papal Sin and Bride of Papal Sin. (I myself have been on tenterhooks, waiting for Papal Sin: The Gay Blade.) And then there’s James Carroll. I used to mix him up with Jim Carroll, the Basketball Diaries guy. It’s not an unreasonable mistake: the Jim Carroll Band’s greatest hit was “People Who Died”; James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword might as well be subtitled: Six Million People Who Died, And All Because of Us. Have you ever seen the thing? It’s 750 pages of pure j’accuse. I’d as lief be spitted on an actual Roman gladius as suffer a copy to fall on my foot.

And:

There’s real pride to be taken in knowing that even our screw-ups are epic and spectacular.


What’s the worst thing a fundie pastor’s ever done? Kiss another guy? Smoke some glass? Rip off the faithful? Junior varsity. Nickel and dime. Amateur hour. When one of our popes feels like living in infamy, he sells an entire hemisphere into slavery. That goes for their kids, too. You say Franklin Graham was a real hell-raiser? Cesare Borgia could have stolen his Harley and his girl, gotten his blue-tick hound in the family way, and carved “AUT CAESAR AUT NULLUS” in his forehead with a stiletto before Lucrezia finished pouring arsenic in his grits

And:

Even recently have Catholics been going bad in style. Having decided that Charles de Gaulle was a traitor and a tyrant, French military officers — all being well-bred graduates of St.-Cyr and l’École Polytechnique — didn’t lower themselves by floating any rumors about his birth certificate. (Since de Gaulle was born in Lille, an excellent case could have been made that his nose was a Belgian citizen.) No, asking themselves, “What would Thomas Aquinas do?”, they came up with the answer: take him out. An air force colonel named Bastien-Thiry engaged five gunmen to ambush the presidential car on the Rue des Petits-Clamarts. De Gaulle survived; most of the conspirators escaped to Argentina, where they found jobs teaching naval midshipmen to deliver electric shocks to dissidents’ testicles in a properly Thomistic fashion.


Bastien-Thiry himself was arrested, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death. He went to the firing squad clutching his rosary.

He had been a Boy Scout. His specialty was designing air-to-surface missiles. His given name was “Jean-Marie.”

Even our sissypants wonk patsies are hardcore.

Oo-rah!