Then, on October 21, the Archbishop recounts, “the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome.”
“Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans.
“Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition,” he explains.
Nevertheless, the Archbishop of New York says the “most combustible example” was “an intemperate and scurrilous piece” on the opinion pages of the Times by Maureen Dowd, a 57-year-old alumna of Catholic University of America who has a history of anti-Catholic bias.
“In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.”
Describing the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives as “the matter that triggered the spasm” of Dowd, Archbishop Dolan says that it “is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning.” “But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.”
“I do not mean to suggest that anti-Catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times,” writes Archbishop Dolan, who also admits that “the Catholic Church is not above criticism.”
“We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be ‘rained out’ for good.”
The Archbishop of New York, also an alumnus of the Catholic University of America with a doctorate in Church History, writes that “my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.”
“Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.”
The full version of Archbishop Dolan’s column is available at: http://www.archny.org/news-events/columns-and-blogs/blog---the-gospel-in-the-digital-age/index.cfm?i=14042
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