a review of religion and media
Conservative Australian columnist, Cliff Kincaid, warns that the American people should be paying attention to the Catholic Church’s other offense: facilitating the “foreign invasion” of the U.S. by supporting immigration reform. In a Beckian rant that proves Kincaid needs to spend more time doing his own thinking, he nonetheless cynically crushes any stereotypes about critics of the Catholic Church. Continue Reading →
Mary Valle: Oh! My stomach can’t take any more! Thank you, Pontifigate. You have literally made me sick. Watergate gave its followers such a savory feeling of justice being served; there were bad guys, breaking laws, covering it up, bungling along the way: then it all ended so satisfactorily. If a scandal could have umami, Watergate did. This mess gives no such satisfaction. Continue Reading →
Ah, the simpler times. When mass was in Latin, pedophilia was not spoken of, and suffering brought cries for mercy, not cries for justice. Catholic News Service reports on a two-and-a-half hour high mass held on April 24 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.
Bishop Edward Slatterly (Tulsa, OK) was called in at the last minute to replace Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos (Columbia) who was, as Kevin Clarke at America writes, “forced to withdraw after a furor erupted over a letter he wrote in 2001 as the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, praising a French bishop for not reporting an abusive priest to authorities.” For the first time in the Basilica in decades the mass, dedicated to celebrating the fifth anniversary of Benedict XVI’s ascension, was delivered entirely in Latin. The Latin mass wasn’t the only sign of pre-Vatican II nostalgia. Continue Reading →
Mary Valle: Thank G-d Benjamin Weiner discusses the Catholic Church’s “playing” of the “Jew” today at Religion Dispatches: Catholics are daring to don the “shroud” of the “victim” while Pontifigate continues to swirl. Catholics comparing their “suffering” (because other people are daring to look into their crimes?) to that of Jews (untold) is problematic on so many levels, but let’s just start with numbers. There are fewer Jews in the world than there are Catholics in Venezuela. It’s like comparing Hershey’s Kisses to Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. Continue Reading →
by Angela Zito
Eight years in Catholic school, from which I liberated myself at the age of fourteen into public junior high, has put me into a Facebook flurry right now among former Catholic school kids now grown up. The slow-burning scandal of child-abuse covered up, which started in the minds of many as an American brush fire in 1985 in Louisiana (and which was, in the words of Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker this week: “dismissed as an epiphenomenon of America’s sexual libertinism and religious indiscipline,”) has burned right up to the Vatican’s door. Like a horrible slo-mo tennis match, we’ve had new accusations served and returned with ever-more ridiculous attempts by the Church hierarchy to defend the indefensible. (And for a comic round-up of the Church’s “blame game,” visit Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.)
The critics refuse to approach the problem as the Vatican has, “one sinning priest at a time,” and look instead for structural reasons for the abuse of kids, and for its cover-up. They have attacked hierarchy, the exclusion of women, and celibacy. But in searching for reasons and reforms, they often conflate the problems of abuse and cover-up, thus conflating the psychological and individual with the bureaucratic and communal. I’d like to try to untangle that knot just a bit. Continue Reading →
Mary Valle: It seemed to a lot of us here in America’s Greatest (Tertiary) City that the Archdiocese was trying to sneak the school closings in, craftily. Who on earth announces schools are voluntarily closing in September in March? It’s sort of like how the Colts legendarily loaded up their Mayflower trucks in the middle of the night and fled to Indianapolis under cover of darkness. Funny thing is, people are still talking about the Colts, the Mayflower trucks, the middle of the night. It’s a fairly common reference point here in Charm City. The Colts left in 1984. Continue Reading →
Mary Valle: It seemed to a lot of us here in America’s Greatest (Tertiary) City that the Archdiocese was trying to sneak the school closings in, craftily. Who on earth announces schools are voluntarily closing in September in March? It’s sort of like how the Colts legendarily loaded up their Mayflower trucks in the middle of the night and fled to Indianapolis under cover of darkness. Funny thing is, people are still talking about the Colts, the Mayflower trucks, the middle of the night. It’s a fairly common reference point here in Charm City. The Colts left in 1984. Continue Reading →
Mary Valle: Listeners to commercial broadcast radio in Baltimore may have been surprised in the past month to hear an earnest, distinctly mid-Atlantic voice delivering a message about the closing of Catholic Continue Reading →
Ann Neumann: A new hashtag on twitter this morning: #popearrest.
In a country that’s 90% Catholic but has a tradition of rigid church-state separation, the legalization of abortion and gay marriage in Mexico City has mobilized the Church. Toss in three Continue Reading →