Every insult can be considered a victory for Catholics

By MICHAEL COREN

Last Updated: 7th November 2009, 4:05am

I just can't keep it in. I know I shouldn't boast but, well, as a Roman Catholic I simply have to.

We've won. I mean, we actually have won. The church founded by Christ has become the one and only institution hated by assorted Marxists, maniacs and misanthropes. In the space of a single week, we had the following:

The Washington Post ran achingly predictable self-promoter and professional atheist, Richard Dawkins, writing that the Catholic Church was "surely up there among the leaders" as "the greatest force for evil in the world."

He described the eucharist as a "cannibal feast" -- incredibly significant in that this is just what the Romans said as they ripped Christians apart and cut off their heads -- and then, in an almost racist manner, moaned on about missionaries sent out "to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans" regarding condoms.

He then, of course, spoke of priests "buggering altar boys." Maybe it's sexual repression that makes Catholic-bashers so fascinated with this particular horror, but it's interesting that many of the same people who want to lower the age of consent for gay sex to 14 become so allegedly upset about abusive homosexual clergy. Apparently it's OK to bugger teenagers as long as they're not altar boys.

The Los Angeles Times devoted an entire editorial to claiming that "church leaders, including popes, have changed their thinking over the years about everything from usury to the culpability of Jews for the crucifixion." Fascinating if true, but anybody with a schoolboy education ought to know that the church always has held sinful humanity, and not any single ethnic group, responsible for the crucifixion.

The editorial went on to state that "you don't have to be Catholic (or Anglican) to realize that society as a whole would be better off if the church's views of women and gays underwent a similar evolution."

Good lord, some people are obsessed with homosexuality.

The church, while concerned about sexual brokenness, is more interested in the billions of poor and marginalized people, which is why it does more for the starving and destitute throughout the world than any other body in history. Even more than white, wealthy liberal journalists in North America!

Then the New York Times ran a column calling the Pope -- try to be more original -- "God's Rottweiler" and referred to him as being a member of the Hitler Youth. Yes, he was. As was almost every young German. Unlike most, however, he was an anti-Nazi and his father risked his life opposing fascism. If only the American and Canadian governments had been as pre-emptive and brave in their defence of the Jews and condemnation of Hitler.

Yet it's all such a compliment. Because, with all due respect, nobody really cares enough about the Anglicans, the United Church, their American cousins and the rest of the moribund group to hate them or even criticize them.

If you stand for nothing, you're not worth attacking. Every insult is a victory, every libel a win, every lying vulgarity a triumph. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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