BBC Spin Good Friday Homily Against the Church

Well, I have held out the Good Friday fast from blogging until I could bear it no longer. Mea culpa. Still, my culpability is at least partially mitigated by the fact that the BBC has tempted me beyond my feeble limits.

Fr Raniero Cantalamessa is a Franciscan Capuchin Catholic Priest who is Preacher to the Papal Household also known as the Apostolic Preacher, who today preached a Good Friday homily in the presence of the Pope, the Cardinals, Bishops and Prelates and others.

The title and office of Apostolic Preacher, apparently, date back to the time of Paul IV (1555-1559).

Today, during his homily he read aloud a letter from a Jewish friend which asserted that the vitriolic tirades against the Church and especially the Holy Father reminded him (that's him, not Fr Cantalamessa) of the propaganda campaign against the Jews in Nazi Germany. One would have thought that given that Fr Cantalamessa had received this letter from a Jew, that the friend's opinion would be quite valid. I mean, he is not far from the truth, since the campaign against the Holy Father in the World's media has been hysteric and driven not by fact, but hearsay and slander. So, what do we have that reminds Fr Cantalamessa's Jewish friend of the Nazi campaign? We've got grotesque cartoons in the press designed to elicit fear, ridicule and hatred of the Holy Father. Check! We've got misleading and generalising reports concerning the sins of a few which are then used to slander the entire Priesthood. Check! On the whole, we have a press, radio, internet, TV and magazine campaign designed to produce coverage and opinion of the abuse scandal that makes the Church and the subject, the Pope and the Priesthood look absolutely terrible and beyond redemption, no matter what the facts of each case are. Check! And to top it all off we have mass hysteria in which truth and fact are sacrificed according to a deep-seated prejudice running through government, media and society. Check!

What we don't have, of course, are burning Churches and our own 'Kristallnacht'. But then, as the BBC report is at pains not to analyse in any depth whatsoever, presumably because they are as guilty as the New York Times in their increasingly brazen, biased reporting of the scandal, the Jewish friend did not say, "Oh my God! It's just like the Holocaust all over again! They're killing all the Catholics, just like they did the Jews!" No, he said that the stigmatisation of the Church's Priesthood and the Pope reminded him of the kind of massive and very public stigmatisation of the Jews in Nazi Germany, before, and it started quite a bit before, Hitler had as many as he could rounded up and gassed.

Of course, the BBC are as guilty as the proverbial, redeemed as it was by Our Lord by merit of His saving work on the Cross at Calvary and so get as many 'angry Jewish leaders' as they can to denounce Fr Cantalamessa, instead of the Jewish friend who condemned the media, because it is 'outrageous' that the Preacher to the Papal Household should draw attention to the media's flagrant anti-Catholicism and tell the World that his Jewish mate told him that the media's anti-Catholicism reminds him of the anti-Semitism widespread in Nazi Germany.

Of course, when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head it is immediately condemned by the mainstream media. When it is prevalent in a culture or a country the media call it what it is. But when anti-Catholicism is prevalent in a culture or country the media would rather call it something else entirely. When anti-Catholicism is prevalent in this country, for example, the BBC call it 'a massive abuse scandal engulfing the Church which implicates the Pope', every single day.

So, somehow, the BBC manage to turn a story about their own vicious anti-Catholicism into a story about how the Preacher to the Papal Household has insulted Jews and still end the article by contiuing to perpetuate the outright lie that the Holy Father was culpable or even responsible, in any way, during the Fr Lawrence Murphy case, a slur refuted entirely by the very man who oversaw the investigation of the trial cut short, as it was, by the said Priest's Death and Judgment by God. Incredible? Yes. Surprising? Sigh. No, not really...

This is, however. Catholic Telegraph columnist, Christina Odone, who tells us how much she continues to "love my faith", (my ears always pick up when I hear the words, "my faith") has welcomed the words of the Archbishop of Westminster today, as the breakthrough for supporters of condoms and the pill that it isn't...that's according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and, er...Archbishop Vincent Nichols, if you actually read what he said.