Thank you sir! May I have another?

I think the thing that is most repulsive about the current media feeding frenzy on Benedict is the appalling combination of slovenly malice with the sheer self-congratulatory demand of the character assassins that Catholics should be grateful for their vendetta. You know: “Oh, we make some mistakes now and then, but where would you be without us exposing the corruption?”

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, exactly the mentality that abusive priests and the bishops who loved them indulged in while they practiced their particular form of malpractice and it is not helped one bit by the media doing it now. Yes, yes, MSM. By all means, find the criminal and expose the corruption. But don’t kid me that you are doing anything of the sort when you launch off on ill-documented campaign to malign Benedict on the flimsiest of pretexts while ignoring the actual corruption. You’re full of crap.

Let’s get some of the more egregious stuff out of the way first. Sorry, but it’s not a “mistake” when a major news organization runs a headline like “Pope Describes Touching Boys: I Went Too Far” and then links a story that has absolutely nothing to do with a claim of sex abuse against the Pope. It is libel. Malicious libel. But we will not see any demands for the resignation of the clowns responsible because the Vatican does not issue fatwas. Similarly, the grotesque interviews with such experts as Sinead O’Connor and Mehmet Ali Agca(!) likewise betray a bloodlust that is barely concealed. As one of the readers at First Things points out, it’s like asking Sirhan Sirhan to comment on the Kennedy legacy.

Similar, of course, is the rabid and demented hatred from the usual suspects such as Maureen Dowd and Christopher Hitchens. But since these people are simply living out their ideological bigotries as they are paid to do, one can hard expect much else. Like Trig Truthers, they just can’t help themselves.

What really disppoints, however, is the supposed “news”: that great machine for selling beer and shampoo in between breathless tales of sex and gore, punctuated by trivia and adoration for abortion, militarism, Caesar and Mammon. First, we got the completely inaccurate headline from the London Times “Pope knew priest was paedophile but allowed him to continue with ministry” a claim that sells beer and shampoo, but doesn’t especially comport with reality.

Shortly thereafter, we get some extremely egregious bad reportage from the NY Times trying and executing Benedict for, well, not very much while studiously overlooking the actual villain of the piece (who, being a gay martyr, is automatically good and a reliable source of dirt on their common enemy, B16). Said reportage did not even bother to include any input from Fr. Thomas Brundage, who was the Judicial Vicar overseeing the proceedings against Fr. Murphy. Result: So great was the haste to get the dirt on Benedict that the Nation’s Journal of Record tripped over own feet in its clumsy malice and missed the real story: that the real culprit in failing to do something about Fr. Lawrence Murphy was a) the cops who did not bust the creep and b) Rembert Weakland, who dragged his feet every step of the way.

But Catholics must not complain about this. Because, you see, it would be journalistic malpractice for reporters to ignore the non-story that they themselves have whipped themselves into a frenzy about concerning the Monster in Rome. Any Catholic who objects to the media kangaroo court is an apologist for priestly abuse. Because, you see, there was real abuse, you know. Ergo, Benedict is guilty, guilty, guilty of whatever an hysterical editor is saying today.

Not that there aren’t real problems with Benedict’s past attitudes toward abuse. I think John Allen (who actually knows what he’s talking about) is basically right to describe Benedict undergoing a “conversion” once he began to grasp the magnitude of the problem along about 2001-2002. A conversion mean “converting from” as well as “converting to”. The “from” he converted from was the common episcopal culture which tended to think that abuse was not that common, that it was treatable, that the media was out to get them (true), that their first duty was mercy to the pervert rather than to the victim, that the thing was rare, and that basically it was “being handled” and there wasn’t that big a problem. In short, Benedict seems to have given about as much thought to the matter as you and I did before the Long Lent of April 2002 began.

This means that “Benedict is an evil monster” is not an adequate explanation and that, basically, the narrative hasn’t *really* changed since the media decided to undertake its annual “Smash Christianity for Holy Week” campaign a couple of weeks ago. That campaign has largely consisted of attempts to declare him a criminal for being cc’d on a memo about a priest in Europe who was not under his jurisdiction and for some bogus complaints about his supposed attempts to thwart justice for a dying pervert priest in the US. It is transparently weak, yet that has not stopped the press from concocting a smear campaign against him. All part of the normal Holy Week pattern.

Here, after all the hysteria has settled, is where we still are. Once the “filth” (Benedict’s word) started pouring out of his fax machine, he started to grok the problem and became a zealot for cleanup (more, alas, than his predecessor). So attacking the guy after his conversion seems to me to be obviously counter-productive.

In addition to that is the remaining problem, which Allen also points out: namely, the frustration many people feel about Benedict’s not going around lopping off the heads of bishops who behaved like morons and worse when confronted with criminal priests. The other day, I mentioned that it was highly unlikely, in my view, that Benedict was going to go all Innocent III on us and start micromanaging dioceses all over the world. So while he has been much more aggressive in kicking out pervy priests, he seems to me to be following the same pattern as his predecessor in that in that he is not booting bishops who were morons.

Rod Dreher took me to be saying that the Pope “can’t” kick out idiot bishops. In fact, I merely say “I don’t think he *will*” basically for the reasons Rod’s own Orthodox bishops would give: because the Pope is not the CEO of Catholicism Inc. and does not see it as his job to usurp the global episcopacy. That, at any rate, is how I read his actions.

Rod asked, “Couldn’t he get rid of two or three of the worst ones?” I s’pose so. He could, in theory, get rid of anybody he likes. But will he? Funny thing is, I didn’t have time to answer Rod when he asked that (I was on my way to Michigan) but a few days later, he answered his own question when he remarked, basically, that if the Pope gets rid of a few idiot bishops, the question then becomes “Where do you stop?” If you get rid of, say, Mahony, then why not every other bishop in the world who ever mishandled a pervert priest? And so we come back to the problem.

A favorite trope here is to point to Bp. Jacques Gaillot and his exile to Partenia. I’ll see your Gaillot and raise you a Milingo. The fact is, we remember Gaillot because he is rare. The norm with idiot bishops is more like Milingo. The guy was as crazy as Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock and it still took *years* before Rome was finally ready to get rid of this lunatic who gave them nothing but headaches. They didn’t even do that to the English bishops who all plumped for Henry VIII.

Now it could be that the episcopal good ol’ boy network is all about Protecting One’s Own. Indeed, I have no doubt that this explains a lot. But there is another, radically unconsidered, possibility here, particularly in the case of somebody like Benedict, who does not really strike me as the monster the media so very much wants to make him out to be: namely, that the real place to look for dealing with criminals harshly is not the one institution in the world tasked with bearing the mercy of God to the most desperately wicked.

See, I prefer a world in which the cops take care of the jailing and the Church takes care of the forgiving. So I *like* a Church which is slow to throw even a nutjob like Milingo under the bus. I like a Church that is slow to excommunicate, slow to damn.

Conversely, I like a justice system that actually prosecutes and jails criminals. I think that the solution to many of these problems remains what it has always been: if we laypeople think that somebody like Fr. Lawrence Murphy belonged behind bars, then hey! We own all the cops, guns, lawyers, courts, and jails. But, in fact, we laypeople opted to do nothing about Murphy when we knew bloody well what sort of creep he was. Instead, we are bizarrely eager to believe the NY Times when it reports, without knowing what it is talking about, that Benedict is somehow responsible for the guy, even though the Judicial Advocate of his trial (who was gung ho to get Murphy put away) says,

Second, with regard to the role of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), in this matter, I have no reason to believe that he was involved at all. Placing this matter at his doorstep is a huge leap of logic and information.

I would very much like to see Benedict bite the bullet and start inflicting some sort of penalties on bishops who behaved so irresponsibly for so long (particular on eels like Mahony). I’m skeptical that will happen. But that’s the biggest problem I can see with Benedict’s choices, and I’m not altogether convinced I’m right. It may well be that he has chosen the better part by being merciful. As to the the rest of the Annual Easter Media Feeding Frenzy on the Church? It only serves to muddy the water with its malicious calumnies, its absurd claims that Benedict is a pervert, its grotesque color commentary from assassin wannabes, and its grossly inept reporting that is transparently aimed at whipping the public into a frenzy of hatred against him for patently false charges.

Benedict will remain where he is till the end of his papacy: in the white hot glare of media hostility from jackals who give not a tinker’s damn about him, the faith, or abused children who aren’t usefully Catholic. But nobody will ever call to account MSM jackals who smear people with outrageous slanders for the sin of being Catholic and actually believing what the Church teaches. That reckoning will have to be put off for a higher court at a later time.