BishopAccountability.org
	The Catholic Untruth Society By Martin Kelly The Washington Dispatch October 10, 2003 Archbishop Vincent Nicholls of Birmingham was outraged two weeks ago. The reason for his anger is the consistently negative, disrespectful way that the BBC reports on the business of the Catholic Church, and his comments display a deep-seated anger at the way in which the world’s largest religious institution is continually demeaned and undermined by a publicly funded body. The archbishop has a point. One of the follies that the BBC has recently spent my money on is a huge expansion of digital services, which most of its licence fee payers can’t access, not having digital television. One of the first new programmes commissioned for digital was Popetown, an animated show for adults (!) casting an irreverent(!) look at life in the Vatican. One of the voices of the cast was Jerry Hall, ex-wife of Mick Jagger, previously not known for public displays of piety. On Sunday 12th October, the Corporation’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama will be broadcasting a feature concerning the effect of the Church’s sexual teachings on the flock. The title of the programme will have caused a ripple of laughter throughout the wine bars of London’s media lands, for being so clever. It’s called Sex and the Holy City. Priest-bashing, a popular British occupation since the 16th Century, is back with a bang, and the root of the problem is not the Church itself, but the liberals. Priest-bashing shows liberals at their worst. It displays their inverted racism. You will never hear a word of criticism from the liberals towards very much more intolerant clerics, the Wahhabists, because they come from a different culture. The fact that their culture promotes murder and death-cultism is, for them, simply an expression of the late Edward Said’s ‘Other’. It is not to be analysed, or criticised, but simply is. They have an attitude towards culture that almost exactly matches the Catholic attitude to God. It is, simply, an article of faith for them that all cultures have equal value, a theory that should be tested by trying to sell the collected works of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to the women of Saudi Arabia. It displays their inherent licentiousness. Their philosophy of life seems to be derived from the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who said that it’s good if it makes you feel good, a position that John Stuart Mill had to revise into the ‘Harm Principle’ pretty quickly – it’s good if it makes you feel good, but don’t hurt anyone else in the process. They will never accept anyone placing boundaries on them, which is one of the reasons why liberal influence in parenting is rearing some of the most obnoxious, badly behaved children in history. But for liberals, there can be no sexual boundaries. One of the great liberal victories of the Blair years is the repeal of Section 28 of Margaret Thatcher’s Local Government Act 1988. Section 28 was a very short clause preventing local authorities promoting homosexuality in grade schools. The critical word is ‘promote’. In the 1980’s, London’s schools became an ideological battlefield, with the popularly described ‘Loony Left’, using the classroom as a means of promoting their own very narrow, limited ideologies into impressionable minds. Baroness Thatcher said ‘No More’. After the Scottish Parliament came into being, one of the Executive’s first acts, one that he they hadn’t listed in the manifesto, was to attempt the repeal of the section in Scotland. This brought a massive outcry, but they went ahead and did it any way. The Catholic Church will always have its critics. The hierarchy in the UK, up to the new Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, have been mired of handling accusations of child abuse badly. Movies like the noxious The Magdalene Sisters, directed by Glaswegian Trotskyist Peter Mullan (who, if you ever hear him being interviewed, is one of the most boring people alive) keep the muck flying. Ireland’s Magdalene laundries closed down in the 1960’s. In short, stories of abuse in the Magdalene laundries are not news. They do not add to the sum of human knowledge, but it must make Mr. Mullan feel good to point out the suffering of women in a patriarchy. However, for a movie that isn’t even set in Scotland, my money was used to finance the making of The Magdalene Sisters, due to the availability of grants from the National Lottery and the state production body, Scottish Screen. It gives a whole new meaning to the expression ‘having a share of the gross’. On October 6th, a movie called Dogma premiered on British terrestrial television. Getting in late from work, I flicked between it and the news, staying more on the news, until I heard Chris Rock say that his character was the 13th Apostle, and that he’d come back to Earth to have the Bible re-written. It was supposedly a comedy, with Mr. Rock being shadowed by two corpulent, pasty-faced, long-haired loser types, Liberal Apostles of Loserdom. Enough, already. For all its faults, the good works of The Catholic Church far outweigh the ill works of a few of its clergy. It deserves more respect than this.
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