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Quote for Day: “When Tribalism Takes Over” (with Commentary on the Tribalistic Reaction of Catholic Journalists to U.N. Report on Vatican)

William D. Lindsey

Steve Benen at Maddow Blog:

It’s amazing what tribalism can do to public perceptions.

Indeed. Case in point: just have a look at what the lock-arms, tribalistic reaction to the recent U.N. report is doing to the perceptions of one centrist Catholic journalist after another these days–to the folks who claim to offer us “balanced” and “objective” analysis of Catholic news, which describes rather than prescribes.

Same old stupidity, same old meanness, same old parochial insularity, same old casual, callous reading out of the Catholic circle of the huge percentage of fellow Catholics who question the teachings of which these centrist arbiters of the Catholic conversation have made a shibboleth.

A great deal of it driven by unacknowledged presuppositions about…