MSM's Attempt To Crucify Pope Certain To Backfire

Things have really been heating up lately regarding the sex-abuse-scandals of certain priests in the Catholic Church, but not in the direction that the secularists had hoped for.  

In their effort to fatally stab the Church in its 1-billion-member-heart, the MSM (led by New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd ---a documented catholic basher) falsely accused Pope Benedict XVI of enabling a pedophile priest to molest over 200 deaf boys.  She wrote:

"Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed 'God's Rottweiler' when he was the church's enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys."

As was reported in the NY Daily News (no friend of Pope Benedict), this was simply untrue.  While the Daily News is of the opinion that the Church could have handled the case much better than it did (I agree on this, too), they reported that then-Cardinal Ratzinger waived a church statute of limitations to bring charges against the priest to have him defrocked.  No looking away here!  Only someone like Maureen Dowd could have jumped to such erroneous conclusions of Papal guilt.  Way to go, babe!

In a follow-up story released today, the NY Daily News reports a number of Cardinals standing up for The Pontiff, claiming he never once covered up, but cleared up cases of abuse.

His Excellency, Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York,  has also weighed in on his own blog.  An excerpt of three key points:

• The New York Times relied on tort lawyers who currently have civil suits pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the Holy See, who are aggressively supporting the radical measure right now before the Wisconsin legislature to abrogate the statute of limitations on civil cases of abuse, and who have high financial interest in the matter being reported.  Hardly an impartial source…

• The documentation that allegedly supports these sensational charges is published on the website of the New York Times; rather than confirming their theory, the documents instead show that there is no evidence at all that Cardinal Ratzinger ever blocked any decision about Murphy.  Even a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, calls this charge “unfair” in his column of March 29.

• We also find on the website a detailed timeline of all the sickening information about Murphy, data not “uncovered” by any reporter but freely released by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee a number of years back, and thoroughly covered at that time by the local media in Milwaukee.  One wonders why this story, quite exhaustively reported in the past, rose again this very week.  It is hardly “news.” One might therefore ask: Why is this news now? The only reason it is news at all is because of the implication that Cardinal Ratzinger was involved. Yet the documentation does not support that charge, and thus they should have no place in a putatively respectable newspaper.

In a possible effort to pull themselves from the likelihood of bankruptcy or perhaps merely due to sloppy, biased, vindictive, baseless reporting...., the New York Times has once again proven it cannot be trusted to get things right.  What a shame.

(h/t:  Brutally Honest and The Anchoress for jump starting me on this)