By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
I saw a news item soon after the March for Life this year which purported to show Catholic high school boys at fault in an altercation with a Native American man. Uttering a prayer that it wasn’t true, I retweeted it as merely informational. Soon after came voices questioning the incomplete nature of the video. Sure enough, additional evidence showed that the initial characterization of the boys as the guilty parties was incorrect. In the meantime Catholic leaders had piled on with the accusers. The boys were wearing MAGA — Make America Great Again — hats, you see.
As a result of the overwhelming anti-life choice of politicians of one of the two dominant political parties, the pro-life flag has been rightfully claimed by President Trump and his MAGA campaign. This is surely one of the reasons why the Covington Catholic High School boys were targeted by enemies of human life in the womb for a particularly ferocious attack, targets in the crossfire of sworn enemies in a war they didn’t start.
It all began after the March for Life as the boys were waiting with chaperones for their buses to pick them up for the long ride home to Kentucky. By all indicators available to us, they were minding their own business in the vicinity of the Lincoln Memorial when a particularly noxious group known for hating just about everybody named the Black Hebrew Israelites started attacking them verbally and obscenely. Then a man falsely claimed by the media as a Vietnam veteran and clearly a Native American strolled into their group, picked one boy out of the crowd, invaded his space and began beating his drum and chanting loudly and persistently in very close proximity to the boy’s face, whom we all know now as Nick Sandmann.
The media rushed to demonize the boys on scant evidence, claiming the opposite of what in fact happened, blaming the boys for inciting the encounter. For example, crude comments about rape caught on video of a man not part of the Covington group were attributed to them, among other injustices.
Bishops and Dioceses of Baltimore, Covington, and Louisville were quick to mimic the attacks of unbelievers and enemies of the faith based on what turned out to be a partial cut of more extensive video. When made public, the full video exonerated the young people. My question on Twitter, in regard to this phenomenon of believers throwing our young Catholics to the dogs without demanding more time to gather the facts, drew 1,746 likes and 447 retweets, a big hit for a small account like mine with 18,200 followers.
“Why are some Catholics so quick to burnish their credentials with non-believers and enemies of the Faith by throwing fellow faithful under the bus while under attack without all the facts? Insecurity born of a lack of authentic conversion?” I wrote. Support came from those outside the Church as well as from fellow Catholics.
Blue checkmark Catholics, that is, verified Twitter users, including Fr. James Martin SJ, were quick to jump on the bandwagon against the boys. In what other context would reasonable persons immediately fault children in a confrontation with two groups of adults without all the facts? That happened with Nick Sandmann and the boys of Covington Catholic High.
The rash judgment resulted in death threats and the temporary closure of the school. The reason for the attack lies in the purpose for which the boys were in D.C. to begin with: the March for Life. You see, the media and pundits who are in the tank for abortion, a deeply unreasonable position which already involves an attack upon the innocent, have a stake in demonizing Catholics like Sandmann. They are outraged that the pro-life cause is attracting youth in great numbers and seek to discredit them in the eyes of the world.
Sandmann did a great job standing up for himself and avoiding falling into Savannah Guthrie’s verbal traps laid for him on a morning NBC interview. She asked him things he couldn’t possibly have known, such as the motives for Nathan Phillips’ actions. She also asked inane questions such as whether anyone chanted “Build the wall.” So what if they did? The desperation of this anti-life crowd that goes after a 16-year-old boy has no shame. They lost all sense of it years ago when they fell in with the sex without consequences crowd that seeks the death of any child unfortunate enough to be conceived by adults who do not want her.
A grown man wades into a group of high school boys already under verbal attack by other adults, chooses one boy out of the group for special treatment which means getting in his face with a drum and beating it nonstop for an interminable period of time, and Savannah Guthrie asks the boy if he should apologize? Shame one her as an enabler and accomplice to this injustice. I want to see her ask Phillips that same question.
There was a time when most reasonable people would be ashamed of defending an adult bully preying on children. This is the upside-down world in which our young people must now live and witness. We must pray for them and support them. And when they are accused, we should demand all the facts and search exhaustingly for such before joining in with those who fault them.
Phillips led another group in an attempt to interrupt a Mass the Saturday following the March at the National Shrine. Alert guards at the doors were able to stop them before they entered. This and other groups continue their outrageous assault on Catholics with the blessing of old media.
On the same day the Covington Catholic boys were targeted by leftist operatives and the media I was proud to walk in the March for Life with the Penitential Brotherhood of St. Philomena. These are also young men who believe in and witness to their Catholic faith. They wore burlap robes of their own design and asked me to bless their Philomena red and white cinctures connoting chastity before I celebrated a Traditional Latin Mass at Old St. Mary’s in D.C. the morning of the March.
In a recent column I asked if anyone would dare use children inappropriately to further a cause, answering in the negative. Perhaps I know must take that back in light of these and more recent events. In an especially blood-curdling development, the New York state legislature just passed a bill allowing the murder of the unborn by defining a person only as “a human being who has been born and is alive,” permitting abortion in some cases up to birth. All for the sake of adult use of the sexual faculty without consequences.
This truly is abusing the young in the most evil of ways. Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
@MCITLFrAphorism
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