Another reason to defund NPR...

...because it seems to think that it is the successor to St. Peter.

Which would make it a church, and I believe in the Separation of Church and State.

NPR issues one of its perennial encyclicals that "Female Priests Defy Catholic Church At The Altar."

On a recent June day in Maryland, four more women were ordained as priests. The gallery at St. John's United Church of Christ was filled with Catholic priests and nuns, there to support the women and the ordination movement — though visitors were asked not to photograph them. Witnessing the ceremony was enough to risk excommunication.


The audience turned to watch as the women made their way down the aisle, beaming like brides. The two-and-a-half-hour ceremony ended with Holy Communion — the moment they'd been waiting for. Each woman performed the rites for the first time as a priest, breaking bread and serving wine as tears of joy flowed down their faces.

From a Catholic standpoint, they were women pretending to be priests - they weren't ordained, and the wine and bread they were playing with stayed wine and bread, which insofar as they thought it was the Body and Blood of Christ makes them guilty of idolatry.

That's their problem.

In another cut-and-paste excerpt from a previous story of this kind, NPR offers:

As members of the Roman Catholic Church, these female priests are all breaking church rules, which allow ordination only to baptized males. No member of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests has been excommunicated by the Church, but they have felt repercussions. They've not only been threatened but also have lost friends and colleagues within the Church — many of whom fear they will lose their jobs if they support the women's ordination movement openly.


LaRosa recognizes they are breaking Church law — specifically Canon 10:24 — but says, "when you have an unjust law, sometimes it needs to be broken before it can be changed."

Because, you know it's all about "rules."

My problem is where is the journalist guidelines about giving some deference to reality. If a group of women get together and call themselves the Supreme Court, does NPR start referring them as "justices"?  I doubt it.  So, why does NPR get to appoint itself as a super-magisterium in this situation?

By the way, it is probably too much to expect NPR to get the little facts right when it is acting as the Vicar of Christ, but there is no Canon 10:24.  There is a Canon 1024 which declares that only a baptized male can be licitly ordained, but no Canon 10:24.

Which suggests that NPR couldn't be bothered to check the facts with the Catholic side of this issue even to the extent of reading the on-line Canon Law.

Here is Newsbusters' take.

Newsweek is written on a Fourth Grade level.

The Newsweek "Belief" reporter, Lisa Miller, has written a piece on "taking conservative religious people" seriously in their "biblical" approach to marriage. Along the way, she reveals that she has virtually no knowledge concerning her subject and very little curiosity on the same, which explains why she is as ignorant as she is.

Molly Hemingway's deconstruction of the cover story ends with this:

And yet preach with unhinged emotion is precisely what Miller does. She never once speaks with an actual opponent of same-sex marriage. She never once speaks with someone who knows anything about the Biblical model of marriage as understood for thousands of years. This piece is disgusting, unfair and unworthy of a high school graduate. It is the opposite of thought-provoking. It’s a post-frontal lobotomy exegesis of Scripture. This is journalism? This is how people are supposed to cover the news, today?

She actually uses Miss Manners to defend liturgical changes in marital rites. I mean, really. This is a serious topic. We have had the majority populace of three dozen states now vote to define marriage as a heterosexual union. I know the news industry is suffering but perhaps one reporter could go actually research what these people think.

Instead we learn nothing about the principled opposition to same-sex marriage and instead get blasphemy and some of the most cliched reading of Scripture to appear in print. Thanks, Newsweek. Thanks a bunch.

Miller seems to do a lot of this. In a piece on abortion, she offers this intelligence-devouring solipsistic observation:

Before the election I wrote a piece for NEWSWEEK.com about white evangelicals and abortion. In that piece, I predicted that conservative Christians would not move in large numbers away from the Republican Party because of their fundamental theological and cultural objections to abortion. In response, I received many comments—mostly the usual entrenched rhetoric on both sides. But embedded in the comment boards was a surprising point of view: a tiny fraction of readers objected to the relentless framing of the pro-life arguments in religious terms. The case against abortion could be made without God, they said. Atheists could be pro-life.

What a phenomenally sheltered life Miller must have led - protected against philosophy, history, the liberal arts - for her never to have heard of Natural Law, which is, like, you know, in the Declaration of Independence.

One suspects that Miller has a journalism degree and prides herself on her inquiring and skeptical mind, but she seems to have never actually read any of the many works that base the anti-abortion argument on concepts of natural law or human equality. It is as if she is mired in a cartoon debate where the people on what I imagine is her side of the argument regularly route the predictably confused arguments based on scripture.

As Molly Hemingway asks, this is journalism?

Hack Reporting Alert.

It turns out that the media got it wrong on both the "Luther rehabilitation" and the "New 7 Deadly Sins" stories.

Gospel of Judas Mistranslated by National Geographic Society to make Judas more sympathetic.

According to Coptic scholar April Deconnick, the National Geographic Society's translation contained key mistranslations that would have depicted Judas as a demon, not as Jesus' most trusted lieutenant:

Likewise, Judas is not set apart “for” the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says, he is separated “from” it. He does not receive the mysteries of the kingdom because “it is possible for him to go there.” He receives them because Jesus tells him that he can’t go there, and Jesus doesn’t want Judas to betray him out of ignorance. Jesus wants him informed, so that the demonic Judas can suffer all that he deserves.

Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas’s ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it’s clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will “not ascend to the holy generation.” To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.

So - gosh! - even in the Gnostic version, Judas is condemned for his betrayal.

Deconnick maintains that the Gospel of Judas was most definitely an attack on orthodox Christianity:

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

Then there is the million dollar question: why the mistranslation?

Deconnick speculates that the reason lies in the National Geographic Society's failure to follow academic guidelines requiring the distribution of text for independent verification and the desire of scholars to redeem Judas because of the anti-semitic legacy that the story of Judas' betrayal has been used to support.

There is some truth to this theory. If the text had been disseminated, scholars with an agenda couldn't have been as sure of smuggling their agenda into the initial release of information. They might have felt compelled by a fear of public embarrassment to second-guess the "too good to be true" elements of their position.

But I don't think Deconnick quite allows for the degree of attraction created by the sense of "this is too good to be true."

We've seen an amazing thing in recent presidential primary debates - there have been planted questions by people with political agendas. The idea of plants is not amazing, but the fact that the plants are all from one side of the political spectrum - the side that is most favorable to the ideology of those people in the media - is amazing. Simply put, it can't be a matter of random accident; there has to be a common element in the fact that Democrat activists penetrate both sets of debate.

Obviously, the answer is that CNN fell into the "too good to be true" trap. They wanted people to ask certain question and - voila! - they found what they wanted.

Likewise, with the Gospel of Judas, there is an element of academia that is hostile to orthodox Christianity. So, when an early document comes along that seems to upset the settled traditions of Christianity, it must be true despite the fact that it is - literally - "too good to be true."

Next up...the science of Global Warming.

Any Stick to Beat the Church.

Internet Monk Michael Spencer posted this on Boar's Head Tavern:

Hypocrisy in the death of JPII? Should the Pope have taken a feeding tube?

My quick response:

The Times article has this claim:

“Catholics are enjoined to pursue all means to prolong life.”

That’s just wrong - painfully wrong.

Catholics are enjoined to pursue all reasonable means to pursue life. They are not required to pursue heroic or extraordinary means. Look at the Catechism para 2278: “2278 Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment. ”

This was clear in the seminal case of Karen Anne Quinlan, where Catholic teachings were used to justify taking Quinlan off of life support, but presumably the Times’ reporter is innocent of any knowledge that didn’t happen after 1990.

So, we once again have a reporter’s ignorance being used to invent a case of gotch’a against the Catholic church.

I see that the story is getting some play on Foxnews, so it probably has some legs.

Also, the story is based on one report from someone with no contact with JPII.

Yet, it's a Time news story.

Pathetic.