By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In the early 1960s, the establishment media began attacking a “sinister development” in the American culture and body politic. The “dangerous trend” had various names — “the lunatic fringe,” “conspiracy theorists,” “Birchers,” and, more generically, “right-wing extremists.” These broadsides were not limited to news programs and the press — they infected late-night comedy shows, celebrities, and that newly discovered treasure of Americana, “folk music.”
All this attention was prompted not by intellectual curiosity, but by a reactionary left that saw the fearful specter of Barry Goldwater on the horizon, leading a legion of conservatives that liberals thought that they had buried with Robert Taft in 1952 and Joe McCarthy a few years later.
Their efforts availed them not. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964, and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the floor of the GOP convention in at the Cow Palace in San Francisco to denounce “television commentators and political columnists.” On the convention floor we joined in a lusty roar of support, shaking our fists at the media skyboxes, where Huntley, Brinkley, and the other usual suspects feigned bewilderment and smirked at the lack of decorum of the unwashed assemblage below them.
We were simply deplorable.
For years the elites in both parties had done everything they could to stop the movement they saw seething below them on the floor that night. One key aspect of their strategy: ignore conservatives. Three networks and a handful of newspapers controlled the political/cultural narrative, and their silence implied that conservatives simply didn’t exist. After Goldwater, they switched from silence to a non-stop, all-out attack.
Ultimately, it didn’t work — Ronald Reagan was elected president and resuscitated the conservative cadaver which had languished long and lonely under Nixon, Ford, Rockefeller, and Dole.
The left never changes, and their shopworn tactics are now emerging in the ongoing saga of the scandal turmoil in the Catholic hierarchy. We recall that, in the 1950s, conservatives had to rely on a few newsletters — The Dan Smoot Report, American Opinion, and a few radio commentators — Fulton Lewis Jr., The Manion Forum, and Bob Siegrist. The American establishment paid them little mind because the left understood — correctly — that coverage would merely constitute free publicity for an otherwise meagerly funded movement.
In the current crisis of the Catholic Church, the undertow of criticism and uneasiness among many of the faithful has remained under the mainstream radar for years. Scandal has compounded scandal, and yet little attention has been paid to its root causes. The media continued to spew their anti-Catholicism, but they gave the Obama-friendly bishops a pass. After all, the perpetrators of the scandals had offered an explanation that conformed to the establishment’s own narrative.
McCarrick changed all that. Suddenly, organizations, media, and individuals who for years had pointed to the moral rot that had both fomented the scandals and perpetuated the cover-ups were no longer on the “lunatic fringe.”
Very quickly, their penetrating analysis that had been ignored for decades was suddenly revealed to be true. Active homosexuals in the hierarchy, the clergy, the laity, and the public had harmoniously purred the party line: All of this abuse was the tragic result of a few pedophile perverts. They have been removed and punished, and the bishops have donned the armor of procedure and abstraction to make sure the scandals would never happen again.
Nothing else to see here, move along.
Not anymore.
Why The Establishment
Can’t Ignore Us
“Websites like Church Militant, LifeSiteNews, and the Lepanto Institute are ratcheting up the rhetoric while replacing polite and prayerful discourse with personal attacks on supporters of gay Catholics, they say,” NBC News laments.
And who is “they”? “Many Catholics,” the catch-all trope for lazy journalists who in fact have only a very few selected Catholics in mind, all of them dissidents, some of them heretics, and many of them ardent cheerleaders for sodomy.
One of those cheerleaders, the thin-skinned, fragile Jesuit James Martin, spews hatred of defenders of magisterial truth but shivers in fear at their first discouraging word. “They use the same tactics as the political alt-right,” he whimpers — “lies, personal vilification and demonization of minority groups….These are things the bishops really should have been speaking out against. But they are afraid of these groups.”
Martin knows that his homosexualist message has the support of over forty percent of U.S. bishops. Clearly some two-thirds fear the revelations that a thorough and transparent investigation would bring. So when Bishop Joseph Strickland asked the Baltimore bishops why Martin is allowed to spread his disease-laden message in so many dioceses, a good many bishops undoubtedly wished the bishop of Tyler would just shut up.
For its pro-sodomy “exposé,” NBC called on Dissenters Central. DignityUSA, the “anti-hate” SPLC, and New Ways Ministry chime in with dissidents Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, a favorite of Pope Francis, and Vermont’s Christopher Coyne, a USCCB leader playing a key role in the effort to prevent a thorough and speedy investigation of – well, him and dozens of his fellow bishops.
Two-thirds of the bishops support Martin, but NBC — and a lot of those bishops — recognize that the advocates of transparency, justice, and accountability can no longer be ignored. Hence, the preemptive, full-bore attack. We should expect many more, and none will mention Catholic moral teaching or the predominance of homosexual crimes in clerical abuse cases. Tellingly, NBC never mentions the name “McCarrick” — apparently, they didn’t consider him worth interviewing.
The Truth Cannot Be Silenced
By necessity, the NBC propaganda rates high on what Washington calls the fog factor. Clarity is the enemy here. But NBC’s effort represents only one dimension of the powerful cover-up engineered by the left, including many figures in the Vatican, covering for McCarrick and the broader sodomite cliques and cabals in the hierarchy.
The Pope’s terse “I will not say a word about this” constitutes a cover-up command to his troops defending what he once called the Vatican’s “Gay Mafia.” The infection fouls not only the Vatican, but the USCCB and many American chanceries.
The result? Fr. Martin, writ large. The Gay Mafia never mentions McCarrick, but attacks its critics relentlessly. They take their cue from the Pope’s sermons in Casa Santa Marta, and the message passes down through the command structure: ad hominem attacks, doctrinal confusion, and self-preservation at all costs.
Pope Francis and his allies have not only branded Archbishop Viganò and his supporters as tools of Satan, but have moved to silence the voices of orthodox prelates and laymen as well. The Synod on Youth was hijacked not only in an attempt to advance the LGBT agenda, but to warn faithful Catholics that they risked being placed on a Vatican blacklist.
Days after the bishops’ Baltimore meeting came to a grinding halt, a shock report emerged: Mafia allies Cardinal “Rabbit Hole” Cupich of Chicago and Washington’s disgraced Cardinal Wuerl had conspired with Vatican officials for weeks prior to the meeting on an “alternative plan” for handling abuse allegations against bishops. Their goal? Prevent any demand, any vote, that violated the Mafia’s code of silence and cover-up. (See p. 7B for a related story by Ed Condon of Catholic News Agency.)
And it worked. But not before the stunned bishops were chilled to the bone by National Review Board Chair Francesco Cesareo’s charge that a third of the prelates gathered before him might well be guilty of covering up themselves.
So far, not one bishop has quit. But the fear and distrust and, in many cases, outrage at the stage-managed fiasco, have rendered the multimillion-dollar USCCB virtually comatose. Soon individual bishops might follow the practice of many of the faithful and cease contributing to the USCCB’s D.C. bureaucracy and devote the faithful’s hard-earned donations to works of charity closer to home.
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