UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
Yes, many Catholic priests are hypocrites. But so are the Lefty media. Most people are hypocrites; get over it
Ed West
I’m sure many of you listening to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor on Radio 4 the other day shared my disgust at how such a large and powerful organisation – one always lecturing the rest of us on morals – could be so full of sexual wrongdoers.
But that shouldn’t negate all the good work that the BBC does, nor its central moral message. It’s just that, like the Catholic Church, its members are bound to fall short of the moral demands made of them.
Dr Tom Wright has written an interesting piece for the Guardian about our attitude to hypocrisy, and why there is such an obsession with the Catholic variety. He writes:
The joke here is that it is usually the media that tell people how to behave. Yes, the church sometimes “speaks out”. But if it’s moralising you want, turn on the radio. Or pick up a newspaper. And the institution the media especially love to attack is of course the church. There is a logic to this. The media want to be the guardians of public morality, but some people still see the church that way. Very well, it must be pulled down from its perch to make way for its secular successor.
Don’t be fooled when “religious affairs correspondents” look prim and solemn and shake their heads at the latest clerical scandal. They are enjoying every minute of it. It keeps them in a job (did anyone imagine that the real “religious affairs” of this country, the prayerful and self-sacrificial work that goes on under the radar every day of every year, would ever make headlines?). More: it makes it easier to sustain the fiction that the journalists have taken over as the nation’s moral police.
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