UNITED STATES
NewsHounds
With its large stable of conservative Catholic hosts and its support for the teachings of the conservative Catholic bishops, it does seem like Fox News is a media arm for the Catholic Church. Nobody embodies Roger Ailes love for the Magesterium than Ailes’ *”surrogate,” Fox VP, John Moody, a devout pro-life Catholic conservative, whose views appear to suffuse Fox’s religious content. Because he is **concerned about what he perceives as anti-Christian bias in the mainstream media, he obviously wants to put a positive spin on Christian issues, such as when he and official Fox “news” anchor and fellow Catholic, Martha MacCallum gushed about Pope Benedict without a mention of the Catholic pedophilia scandal. This morning, during a lovefest for the two Popes who will be canonized, the sexual abuse crisis was not only framed as a euphemism, but the victims were trashed. Mirabile Dictu?
During the interview, MacCallum (a Cardinal Dolan pal as is Roger Ailes) and Moody were positively orgasmic about the canonizations. While Moody spoke positively of the liberal Pope John XIII, he focused mainly on Pope John-Paul II who, as he noted, represented the conservative wing of the church which for Fox and its viewers is the only game in town. Unlike on other news networks, which mention the reality that JP II didn’t adequately address the sexual abuse crisis, nothing was said about the pedophilia scandal that is still a hot issue in the church which has yet to defrock a bishop. The criticism of JP II seems to center around his ignoring the degeneracy of Father Marcial Maciel who, while head of the Legion of Christ, sexually abused a number of victims, was addicted to drugs, and who fathered several children. Fox recruited Fr. Jonathan Morris when he had a very high position in the Roman headquarters of the Legion. He has since left the order and now has a cushy assignment at Columbia U. JP II also appointed Boston’s Cardinal Law, who presided over a network of pedophile priests in Boston, to a Vatican position safe from extradition to the US.
But at one point during the conversation, MacCallum said this: “Obviously there’s a lot of cynicism out there, a lot of recent history that needs to be dealt with the Catholic Church so a lot of people look at these two individuals and they say what makes them a saint.” (Translation – “recent history” is the sexual abuse scandal about which people are cynical.” No shit, Sherlock!) Not only did Moody defend JP II but he appeared to attack the victims of the “recent history.” He gushed about how the popes “lived their lives the way God wants us to live our lives.” Then came the coup de grace: “Neither of them was perfect, none of us is, a lot of the criticism, a lot of the backbiting comes from bitter people who just couldn’t make it as Catholics, therefore they can take a shot that neither of these men can fight back.”
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