Payback

Rowen Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, who Mark Steyn calls the "Welsh Druid," slams the Catholic church. He told the BBC in a yet to air program that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost all credibility because of its mishandling of abuse by priests.

That is rich, of course, coming from a man who has lost all credibility with Anglicans around the world for his lack of leadership in the impending schism of the Anglican Church.  Siding with first one group and then another, values, Christian values, are way down the list of Williams' priorities.  He is a weasel in a cassock. A man of uncompromising amoralism.

The real reason for his new-found indignation is more likely to be that last year  the Vatican invited conservative Anglicans to join the Catholic Church.    He told the BBC today that he regrets the remarks, but  it is piling on the deliberate incitement by the New York Times that is trying to do for Ireland what it did for Massachusetts with the "pedophile priest in the pulpit" scenario.

The New York Times-owned Boston Globe had a ready audience for the incitement and the Irish are ripe for such mob reaction to the Times' stories. Rarely have such outright anti-Catholic, anti-Pope, anti-religious screeds been seen in print in any U.S. newspaper. During Holy Week or any other time.

Lost in the narrative, hidden under the anti-clerical sentiments of receptive journalists at the NY Times, is the fact that these were not pedophile priests who took advantage of youth, but homosexual priests who enjoyed treatment rather than prison. It was the practice at the time - in the late 70s and 80s - for a Catholic church ten years out of date to treat homosexuality as a mental disorder. You can argue that this was a convenience for them and avoided dealing with the issue of seminaries that poorly screened for aberrant impulses, but the fact remains that the Catholic Church in the 1970s and early 80s may have had the same proportion of homosexual men vs the general population as could be found in San Francisco. The priests were in a different bathhouse.

The New York Times and other journalists, notably from the Kansas City Star, for a while were trying to prove that priests suffered from AIDS at a higher percentage than gays in the general population. It turned out not to be true but primarily because the homosexual priest was fixated on the target of opportunity - young boys who don't carry a multitude of sexually transmitted diseases and an inherited sexual history.

The Catholic Church was not treating pedophilia. There is no cure for pedophiles, then or now. They sought to accept homosexuality by treating the sinner. Naïve, yes. The worse crime was that the Catholic Church ignored the morality of shielding homosexuals from legal consequences for their crimes. What is a church if not a fountain of morality? What purpose does it serve?

When the Catholic Church acted in self-interest during WWII, failing to speak out against the inhumanity of the Nazi socialists, they sealed their place in history. It isn't that the church lacked guidance. MIT BRENNENDER SORGE was written in 1937. It is as true today as it was then.

And it is as true today as it was then that the greatest proponent of barbarism in the form of socialism (and the complete socialism that is totalitarianism) is mass media.