The Blisteringly Anti-Catholic Tabloid.
The Chicago Sun-Times is the number one Catholic-basher among U.S. urban newspapers…running on regular basis columnists Carol Marin, Neil Steinberg and Christopher Hitchens all of whom repeatedly slug the Church, the paper not bothering to run any defense of the Church…despite the fact that Catholics comprise 40% of the population of Cook and Lake counties.
Marin, a strident liberal who is a one-person oligopoly in commentary (newspaper columnist, NBC-TV and WTTW-TV public television commentator) on occasion calls herself Catholic but rabidly disagrees with the Church’s basic theological fundamentals—abortion, gay rights (she endorses same-sex marriage) and the male priesthood. A braying ignoramus on theology and church tradition, known as Apassionata van Leftward the 60sh flame-haired, radical feminist frequently baits the Church, last Sunday wrote of interviewing heretical lefty nuns who are challenging the hierarchy. In the paper she blasted the Church (the theology of which she knows nothing and cares not a whit) for certifying that the nuns who want to be ordained priests are under scrutiny.
How dare the Church seek to discipline its own without checking with the rabid man-hater who nurtures a grievance that men are usurping women’s rightful place…this despite the fact that she earned big bucks as a TV anchor on NBC and duplicitously avoided being fired for low ratings by serving up the pretext that her exalted standard of ethics would force her to resign because her station signed Jerry Springer. That bogus stand for “principle!” Calculating her story with abject cynicism, she avoided being tagged for the real reason she was being demoted—a ratings flame-out.
Skillfully this authenticist Catholic-hating ranting far-left ideologue linked the charge made by the Vatican scored the fact that a bishop excommunicated a nun for sanctioning the abortion of a woman…repeating the canard—earlier disproven—that the nun ordered the procedure in order to save the life of the mother of four. Then she equated the legalized murder perpetrated by the nun with laxity of the “old boy” network concerning pedophilia. If she dared intake a breath of honesty she would know that neither she nor the Vatican officially have the guts to call the reason for pedophilia by the right name. As Marin is a patron of homosexual “rights” she cannot reconcile herself to recognize that the cause of child abuse is the liberal intake by the seminaries of outward exhibiting and closet lavenders. .
Marin is one of three Sun-Times lightweights to slurp ink over the vestige of the Church, its 2000 year old rubrics against abortion, its refusal to stomach gay advocacy and its opposition to women priests.
The second is the syndicated columnist Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens’ glowering bearded face appears weekly in the tabloid. He is so virulent an anti-Catholic that shortly after the death of Mother Teresa…the beatified nun who served the very poor of the Calcutta streets, ministering to the hungry, sick, dying and their progeny, he wrote the scurrilous, blasphemous book The Missionary Position which ridiculed her work, the title, of course, the double entendre of a sex position, blistering her as one who adopted the guise of a saint to spread an extremist religious ideology (Catholicism) and raise money.
Explaining his choice of the book’s title, Hitchens said: “It was either this or Sacred Cow and I thought Sacred Cow would be in bad taste.” This regular weekly columnist for The Sun-Times maintains that she used contributions to open convents in 150 countries rather than establishing a teaching hospital, that she did not lift a finger to support “structural measures to end poverty” and that she did not do anything to raise the status of women. Shades of Carol Marin.
The third is Neil Steinberg. He’s a reform Jew who makes much of his Jewishness although he’s far from observant…a guy who slugged his wife in a drunken rage with a cell phone and spent time in jail and who writes a column frequently berating the Church’s lack of humanity (last week he called me a Catholic “gargoyle” because I defend the Church from his abuse). He’s called the Church a “a bully in eyeglasses” [I don’t quite get what it means but maybe he’s gone back on the bottle] because some members of the hierarchy have called for excommunication of politicians who support abortion. He has no time for Catholic dogma but then doesn’t know a thing about its theology, counting on long-disproven theories to shore up his pseudo-sophisticated bigoted anti-Catholic rants, raking up make-believe sophistry on Galileo and Copernicus that begs for scholarly erudition…but it is not in him.
Attacking the pro-life movement isn’t the same as being virulently ant-Catholic as Steinberg is, but you can understand by reading his words on abortion why he hates the Catholic Church. Simply, abortion means a great deal to him. His jaded cynicism about life can be seen readily by his terming abortion “murder lite.”
“Abortion isn’t murder—well, not until the last stage of pregnancy when it is, but rather a sort of murder—murder lite…”
Again: “If being pro-life meant an across-the-board reverence for life—if pro-life activists were Human Watch members, also fierce opponents of capital punishment and vigorous battlers of AIDS in Africa and, of course, anti-handgun and anti-war—then I could almost understand the compressed rage that pro-lifers often exhibit.”
More: “The abortion is murder line is just that—a slogan. The people saying it obviously don’t believe that in their hearts [sic] because otherwise they’d be even more extreme than they already are. If it’s murder then why aren’t they talking about, not only banning abortion, bu also conducting enormous public trials to prosecute the millions of women who have had one?”
There you have it…Marin…Hitchens…Steinberg. My word to the tabloid is not to fire them…but not be surprised if—as I hope—a wave of criticism and canceled subscriptions hits. The idea that the paper has a supposed Catholic publisher…John Barron…and a Catholic editor of the editorial page…and both can stomach this tide of religious hatred is sickening.
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*: Pope St. Victor [AD 199]. He was a native of Africa and succeeded St.Eleutherius as pope. He struggled hard against heresies including one caused by an arrival from Byzantium of a leather merchant named Theodotus who taught that Jesus Christ was only a supernaturally endowed man. Then there was a group of Asians in Rome who insisted on celebrating Easter on a date that accorded with their own traditions. When certain Asian bishops supported them he threatened the whole bunch with excommunication. St. Iranecus of Lyons told him he was too severe but Victor’s strength got the dissidents to yield. He died worn out, a chilly and aloof man but whose vigor and energy caused his enemies to accept the rule of Rome.
I haven’t had any use for the Sun Times since my bird died 10 years ago.
ReplyDeleteTom, you recently listed your life’s resume. When I mentally compare your resume to what I know of the three people you write about here, I wonder if perhaps you’re just overqualified to be a modern-day journalist.
When FBI agent Patrick "Ed" Buckley, bribed and subverted by Britain's MI5 (according to FBI agent Joe Doyle), framed me for the murder of the Langert family in Winnetka, it was Carol Marin that Buckley selected to be his accomplice in spreading the lie that the IRA were involved. So successful did Marin prove for Buckley that he incarcerated my wife and me in the Federal Correctional Center at Clark & Vanburen. Some 15 months later it was all over when a Federal Court (Judge George Lindberg) absolved us when we proved that the only evidence against us, an FBI audiotape, was criminally-fabricated. Buckley and Marin nearly sent me to death row, where I'd have gone had I lacked the $100,000 it took to stay free. Both Buckley and Marin had covered for the actual murderer, David Biro, who later blabbed through his FBI cover into Life Without Parole. His murder weapon belonged to FBI agent Lewis.
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