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December 28, 2005
Again with the Camauro
Of course, because it's still winter. I think what makes it look kind of odd (sorry), is that the fur trim is too wide. In the paintings I've seen of previous popes wearing it, the trim is much thinner. But, ah well, little things. Because the pope has more important, newsworthy things to do like, as the shocked headline-writer at MSNBC would have us know, "affirm that he sees embryos as "complete" humans - (their quotation marks). Shocker, that. Text from AsiaNews.
The subhead on the MSNBC article reads "Roman Catholic Church stance against abortion, embryo research stressed." Well, no, not exactly, if I might disagree with the gods of journalism. What was stressed was the passionate, all-embracing love of God for the human beings he creates. But I guess that doesn't translate into a headline. Especially your senses screen out anything non-political when you process information.
Oh, and if you want a sense of what we're up against, read this thread at the Huffington Post. First, note how the Pope's Christmas message is spun. Very funny - as if the Pope was condemning intellectual and technological progress. And then proceed to the comments,which take the spin at face value, and combine that with virulent hatred. It is, as usual, a scary little corner of the world.
The more I think about it, the angrier this HuffPost business makes me. It is just like the stuff you find on Daily Kos, of course, but as risible as HuffPost is to a lot of us, it is widely linked and an official blog of Yahoo News, I think, featured there. Why should this bigotry be allowed to stand?
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Comments
Wow! Scary stuff. Where does all that vitriol come from?!
Posted by: CBM at Dec 28, 2005 10:11:30 AM
There is a sense of moral, intellectual, and social superiority amongst certain factions in American society (mostly left-leaning individuals).
They see anything and everything even remotely conservative or religious as somehow "oppressive" of individual liberty and against their code of moral relativism - hence the spin on the Pope's Christmas message. Portraying Benedict XVI as "condemning intellectual and technological progress" is their way of saying, "See, the Catholic church wants to throw us back to the dark ages!" This also leads to their anger and vitriolic nature.
I pray that their hearts will be moved to see the importance of progress in light of respect for life...
Posted by: Amy Pawlak at Dec 28, 2005 10:46:44 AM
That was just bare-headed bigotry, with very little thought behind it. Very intolerant, to be sure. It seems itellectually we have very little to fear from this ilk, but they would probably slit our throats in a heart beat. The barbarians are inside the wall!!
Posted by: Renee at Dec 28, 2005 10:54:01 AM
In a strange way, it is refreshing to be reminded of how the Catholic faith is viewed when people have a forum in which they can freely express their views, without the constraints that normally bound polite discourse. And so, two days after the memorial of St. Stephen, we see that little has changed since his martyrdom. As Benedict said on Tuesday: "How not to see that, even in our times and in various parts of the world, being a Christian requires a martyr's heroism? How not to recognize that everywhere, even where there is no persecution, living the Gospel coherently carries a high price?" I am afraid that increasingly this type of opposition and visceral hatred will become the norm, no matter how utterly brainless it may be.
Posted by: TDM at Dec 28, 2005 11:12:08 AM
As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus often likes to say,
"Thinking with the Church requires thinking."
But first one has to stop jerking other parts of the body, such as the knee.
Posted by: CV at Dec 28, 2005 11:15:24 AM
Those people are demented by hate.
Posted by: reluctant penitent at Dec 28, 2005 11:27:38 AM
Wow. Where does one even begin to deconstruct?
Prayers for them all, whose hard hearts--if they remain unchanged--will never know what real joy is.
Posted by: Cathleen at Dec 28, 2005 11:33:05 AM
"Wow! Scary stuff. Where does all that vitriol come from?!"
Probably they are drinking from the same well of hatefulness that the peanut gallery at CWNEWS and some other St. Blog's combox squatters regularly drink from.
Posted by: Patrick Rothwell at Dec 28, 2005 11:33:55 AM
I scanned some of this. "Scary stuff" is right.
It's very anti-Catholic, but it's worth noting that the tone and the level of discourse are about what you'd expect from the bellowings of some orc.
As I read through this stuff, that's what I couldn't help picturing: a gathering of angry orcs.
Posted by: Marion (Mael Muire) at Dec 28, 2005 11:39:02 AM
Gracious!
Amy! You should have warned us to put on our boots-
I have never had to wade through so much male bovine feces in my life.
Posted by: Joe Gloor at Dec 28, 2005 11:39:46 AM
This bigotry goes most unchallenged because it is the core religious belief of a small but immensely influential group of Americans.
Posted by: Gregg the obscure at Dec 28, 2005 11:44:01 AM
. . . er "mostly unchallenged"
Posted by: Gregg the obscure at Dec 28, 2005 11:44:45 AM
I flagged many of the posts as abusive. I left those who disagree with my point of view but which are expressed in a civil fashion.I also flagged the coarsely expressed antihomosexual post as it was crude, offensive, and irrelevant to the thread, and the weird one about the pope being Jewish.
However it appears that abusive posts are par for the course in that forum.
Still, maybe we could have some sort of effect if we all went there and flagged truly offensive posts as abusive, making sure we didn't flag any half way civil ones just because they disagree with our point of view.
It seems to me that if these folks were really secure and comfortable that their views are true and their lifestyle OK, they would not get so mad at the Pope. He would just be irrelevant to them. They have to be so angry because on some level they know there is truth to his reproach of their lifestyle. Even reproaches he didn't make in this speech. They know what he stands for and it rebukes them even when he isn't making a rebuke. That has to be where the vitriol comes from.
Susan F. Peterson
Posted by: Susan Peterson at Dec 28, 2005 11:45:15 AM
I'd wager that none of those spewing hatred of B16 have ever actually read anything he wrote and know next to nothing about his life (aside from the Hitler Youth thing) yet they are extremely content to mock him. How tolerant they are. How progressive.
Anyone who thinks the anti-catholicism of the elites is dead (the kind of anti-catholicism that we are told over and over again that Kennedy's election ended) needs to just read some of those comments.
Posted by: jack bennett at Dec 28, 2005 11:50:00 AM
Just finished the same thing as Susan. Flagged all the offensive stuff.
Scary is not the word for such hatred.
Posted by: Tim Johnson at Dec 28, 2005 12:02:26 PM
To parphase a familiar quote, "Yes, Virginia, there are people who hate you because you're Catholic". Once the hatred read that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon. This opinion still exist in some of the darker corners of the Bible Belt. Now it reads that the Catholic Church is the enemy of humanity. Such hatred is indeed a scary little corner of the of the world.
How do we respond? Perhaps we can take our cue from some quotes from the recent CBS mini-series about JPII. When the young Karol Wojtyla asked a cardinal if he should fight against the Nazi occupation of Poland, the reply was, "Fight them with the weapons they fear the most, your intellect and your faith". Later, Wojtyla says that the Christian should respond to an "abyss" of hate/evil with an "abyss" of love. Good words to live by in our time.
Posted by: Fr. Bryan at Dec 28, 2005 12:14:07 PM
Ever listen to "Air America"? When the Church is being discussed, a tone similar to that on the Huffington Post is used. I remember well the Air America program I heard on the morning of the first Friday of April, 2005, when the Pope was known to be dying (he died the next day). The hosts of Air America paid tribute by telling anti-Catholic jokes and accusing Pope Pius XII of being indifferent to the Holocaust.
I am outraged but not at all shocked by what is in the Huffington Post. The reality is that the anti-Catholic sentiment that is reflected there is widespread among liberals and leaders of the cultural left.
Posted by: Dan at Dec 28, 2005 12:16:21 PM
Arianna Huffington. She was a self-absorbed nitwit when she was a conservative, and she remains a self-absorbed nitwit as a born-again leftist. The calibre of commenters she attracts to her latest circus act comes as no surprise to me.
Posted by: Donald R. McClarey at Dec 28, 2005 12:27:06 PM
The HuffPo comments remind us that ignorance is a prerequisite for bigotry. There is some humour in the fact that these posters condemning the "medieval" and "anti-intellectual" Church are themselves demonstrating a palpable ignorance of the nature of Roman Catholicism and repeating nonsense that was manifestly false when it was first uttered by others -- over a thousand years ago.
Posted by: frank sales at Dec 28, 2005 12:32:42 PM
Really, is this at all a surprise? I read a similar thread at Atrios soon after the current Pope was elected. Actually, it was much worse. I've linked to it above, if you're curious. But please remember, that it's awful, ugly stuff.
Posted by: TheLeague at Dec 28, 2005 12:44:32 PM
Marion said, above:
"It's very anti-Catholic, but it's worth noting that the tone and the level of discourse are about what you'd expect from the bellowings of some orc."
Brilliant! Give Marion a Guinness!
Donald said:
"Arianna Huffington. She was a self-absorbed nitwit when she was a conservative, and she remains a self-absorbed nitwit as a born-again leftist. The calibre of commenters she attracts to her latest circus act comes as no surprise to me."
Dead on. I was working in Washington, in right-wing politics, when AH-ree-AH-na blew into town, and tried to make a splash on the right. I had a roommate -- a good guy -- who went to work for her; unfortunately, I lost touch with him. I'd love to hear his comments. But the impression I had then was of someone who had a lot of money to throw around, and had been married to a not-very-conservative Republican Congressman, and . . . uh . . . um . . . hold on, I'm trying to think what else she had to offer . . . well -- I'll get back to you . . .
My point is, I can't recall any specific cause she was trying to promote -- not even superficially. Rather, it was "Hellooo, I'm AH-ree-AH-na, and I'm here to help the conservative mooove-ment..." I think a perfect consort for her would be the Fernando character Billy Crystal created for SNL.
With all that fabulousness going for her, all that glitter and style, it is all the more -- shall we say, piquant? -- that her readership is so, well, UNfabulous.
Posted by: Fr Martin Fox (Septimus) at Dec 28, 2005 12:57:33 PM
I have two suggestions for papal headgear.
Someone said that "Freistaat Bayern" is translated as "The Lone Star State," since Bavaria is to Germany what Texas is to the US.
So someone send the Pope a white Stetson.
Which would be better than a Bavarian Tracht hat complete with feather, since these don't come in white or red.
He looks happy that his head is warm.
Posted by: Socius at Dec 28, 2005 1:05:29 PM
I'd never participate on a thread like the HuffPo one myself, since judging from the puerile commentors I'd likely be arguing with a bunch of teenagers. Whatever happened to the ideal of maturity?
Posted by: Kevin Jones at Dec 28, 2005 1:17:07 PM
It is interesting to read all those posts and mentally substitute "Martin Luther King, Jr." or "Bill Clinton" and think how the very same folks who write in HuffPo would howl "hatemongers"
If they could only see themselves!
Posted by: Momma K at Dec 28, 2005 1:26:20 PM
"Arianna Huffington. She was a self-absorbed nitwit when she was a conservative, and she remains a self-absorbed nitwit as a born-again leftist."
Absolutely. I once saw her participatee in a debate on Firing Line with Camile Paglia and some others on feminism. Huffington took the anti-feminist positione. Her anti-feminist argument was so intellectual vapid that it could have been fairly summarized as "why be liberated when you can have diamonds?" Charming in a Eva Gabor sort of way, but nonetheless an embarrassment.
Posted by: Patrick Rothwell at Dec 28, 2005 1:34:17 PM
