UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Dec 18, 2014
Today’s lesson concerns charging reporters with smuggling opinions into news stories. Exhibit A comes by way of the redoubtable Mollie Z. Hemingway, formerly of GetReligion and now senior editor at The Federalist. Still on the lookout for distortions by the liberal MSM, she took umbrage at the following paragraph from the AP story on the Vatican report on nuns a couple of days ago:
The [Vatican] probes also prompted an outpouring of support from rank-and-file American Catholics who viewed the investigations as a crackdown by a misogynistic, all-male Vatican hierarchy against the underpaid, underappreciated women who do the lion’s share of work running Catholic hospitals, schools and services for the poor.
Mollie tweeted; The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher replied (and it went on from there).
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For the record, it’s worth noting that there was indeed an outpouring of support for the nuns, as indicated by the May, 2012 RNS story that began, “Catholics around the U.S. are coming together for prayer vigils as a show of support for America’s nuns, whom the Vatican accuses of having ‘serious doctrinal problems.’” And it was Rome’s chief doctrine guy, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, who invoked the M-word against critics of his investigation when he told Osservatore Romano in September, “Above all we have to clarify that we are not misogynists, we don’t want to gobble up a woman a day!” And the Vatican report itself makes mention of the nuns’ work in education, health care, and social services.
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