I am so over Mike Clancy and the Arizona Republic
Mike Clancy's latest piece for the Arizona Republic is painful to read (as usual), partly because of its falsehoods and distortions about the Catholic Church and Bishop Thomas Olmsted, but also because it's embarrassing for Clancy. His facts are so consistently wrong and his bias so obvious that it actually makes me cringe.
Now, of course I don't expect our local paper to fawn over the bishop or whitewash the Church, but is fact-checking and fairness too much to ask?
You can read the entire article, here, if you have the time and the stomach for it.* But as I did last time, allow me to comment on a couple of glaring snippets. Clancy says of the Catholic Church:
It is absolutely no secret and easily ascertained that the Church has taught the intrinsic evil of contraception not merely for the past four decades, no, but since the establishment of the Church approximately 2,000 years ago.
Not once (meaning "never") has the Church taught anything different.
Clancy is alluding to Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which simply reiterated, against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the unbroken, unchanging teaching of the Church since her inception.
How can a veteran religion reporter exhibit such a weak grasp of basic Church doctrine, the Church he's been covering for years and years? It's also troubling that he doesn't seem to have adequate knowledge of modern cultural history, either. For not only has the Catholic Church always taught that contraception is "intrinsically wrong", but until the 1930s, every Protestant denomination taught the sinfulness of contraception as well. When a committee of Anglicans was the first to abandon Christian principles on this well-established point of the moral law, even the secular world was shocked, as an editorial in the Washington Post makes clear:
Read the rest here.
Now, of course I don't expect our local paper to fawn over the bishop or whitewash the Church, but is fact-checking and fairness too much to ask?
You can read the entire article, here, if you have the time and the stomach for it.* But as I did last time, allow me to comment on a couple of glaring snippets. Clancy says of the Catholic Church:
The church has taught that birth control is 'intrinsically wrong' since 1968, around the time the pill came into widespread use.The statement is shocking.
It is absolutely no secret and easily ascertained that the Church has taught the intrinsic evil of contraception not merely for the past four decades, no, but since the establishment of the Church approximately 2,000 years ago.
Not once (meaning "never") has the Church taught anything different.
Clancy is alluding to Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which simply reiterated, against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the unbroken, unchanging teaching of the Church since her inception.
How can a veteran religion reporter exhibit such a weak grasp of basic Church doctrine, the Church he's been covering for years and years? It's also troubling that he doesn't seem to have adequate knowledge of modern cultural history, either. For not only has the Catholic Church always taught that contraception is "intrinsically wrong", but until the 1930s, every Protestant denomination taught the sinfulness of contraception as well. When a committee of Anglicans was the first to abandon Christian principles on this well-established point of the moral law, even the secular world was shocked, as an editorial in the Washington Post makes clear:
Carried to its logical conclusion, the [Anglican] committee's report, if carried into effect, would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be "careful and restrained" is preposterous. -- March 22, 1931 edition.
Read the rest here.
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