The bishop speaks

Bishop Thomas Paprocki slams Chi Trib today for “anti-Catholic bias,” accusing it of emulating 19th-century Know-Nothingness as embraced by the Trib of long, long ago. 

It’s a good letter that cites perpetrators — editorial writers, ex-Tribber and more to the point ex-Notre Dame VP-PR Don Wycliff, mayoral brother and Democrat party operative William Daley, and propagators of an April 5 front-page story about the mean old Catholic Church and its teaching against in vitro fertilization — with Catholic moralist acting as unwitting foil to sorrowing non-parents.

The Bill Daley letter of April 3, apart from its extremely sharp “Cardinal George’s stand is an embarrassment to Chicago Catholics,” was full of the utterly usual complaints, with not an original thought in it, and indeed the standard misunderstanding and/or misrepresenting of the issue as a matter of disagreement over doctrine, not public policy. 

And this from a largely behind-scenes performer who may run for governor and may not but almost never puts pen to paper for a paper.  He got the call, apparently, or at least the inspiration this time as a Catholic loyalist (to the party), to put it to Cardinal George as part of a full-court press to discredit him as opposing Obama at Notre Dame.

So Bishop P. was on target, but alas, engaged in overkill.  One does not have to recall Chi Trib nativism of the 1850s (sic) to take strong exception to what the Trib did this month — two op-eds, an editorial, and (unrelated to the ND business) a Front Pager heavily weighted against official Catholicism. 

The trick is to do some ju-jitsu on the newspaper, using its own weight to make it fall down, rather than to condemn it as hopeless for lo these 150 years.

And the kicker, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”?  I’d save that for genocide or at least serial murder, especially when it comes on the heels of a condemnation for inveterate bias.