Talk About Hate Speech!

It's an interesting phenomenon that when you speak the hard truth you are likely to be accused of hate speech. But those who actually are filled with hate, for example, against the pope and the Catholic Church, see themselves as champions and protectors of human rights. So homosexuals accuse Christians of hate speech for telling the truth about the disordered nature of same sex relationships and feminists accuse pro-lifers of hating women for trying to protect both women and their unorn babies.

But lately the most exteme hatred and vitriol is reserved for the Catholic Church, specifically Pope Benedict XVI. It's sobering to see it during the Easter season when we hear the Acts of the Apostles read from the pulpit. This week the pharisees, stung to the quick by Stephen's revelation of their malice, drag him out of the holy city of Jerusalem and stone him to death. The apostles are dragged before the Sanhedrin and warned never to mention the name of Jesus again. Acts describes them being flogged and imprisoned. 

The evils that have been committed and covered up by clerics in the Church are horrible. But the over-the-top hateful rhetoric has been selective on the part of the media and reserved for the Catholic Church and the pope. Its scattershot nature indicates that the sex abuse crisis is just the excuse for a concerted effort against the world's greatest enemy of moral relativism and the culture of death. They practically foan at the mouth as they spout their venom.

Here's what an ABC Australia columnist blogged after comparing the pope to Osama bin Laden, "Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?"

Christopher Hitchens, an atheist who hates the Church and has attacked Mother Teresa (calling her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud" in a piece titled Mommie Dearest) recently wrote an attack piece on the pope where he says, "Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel." The letter he mentions in the article is completely misrepresented. And, in fact, Hitchens hatred for the Church oozes out of every critique he writes.

Then there is the on-going attack by the New York Times. Catholics know the "paper of record" is so biased that nothing in its pages can be trusted. The Vatican has protested its slanted reporting, but NYT has a long term history of slandering the Church, pro-lifers, conservatives, Christians, anyone, in fact, who stands in opposition to their liberalism.

Expect the attacks to continue. It's not primarily about the sex abuse crisis, but about the mainstream media's hatred and contemp for people of faith. Their bias is one of the reasons mainstream media outlets are laying off workers and closing offices in major cities. In the meantime they can still do a lot of damage to the reputations of anyone connected to the Church no matter how unfounded their assault.

It's no surprise. Read Acts of the Apostles.