BishopAccountability.org
	Piltdown Man Demands Pope's Resignation Catholic Culture April 26, 2010 http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otr.cfm?id=5281 The sign of a truly dedicated propagandist is the willingness to push ahead with an argument even when the facts don't support it. Newspaper readers in the Boston area are blessed with the work of two truly dedicated propagandists. The Boston Globe offers James Carroll, who has, over the years, developed a habit of rewriting history as needed to support his arguments. In his most recent column attacking the Catholic Church, for instance, Carroll evidently thought that it would strengthen his overall argument to report that after the First Vatican Council, Rome established institutions like the North American College to train promising seminarians from various countries, and began negotiating concordats with national governments. Actually the first Rome-based national seminaries date back to 300 years before Vatican I, and the earliest concordats came 700 years before that council. But why quibble over a millennium when there's an argument to be made? The Boston Herald, meanwhile, serves up Margery Eagan, whose own latest anti-Vatican screed included this remarkable passage: In an amazing repudiation of Pope Benedict XVI, the German church vicar who had claimed responsibility for protecting a pedophile priest in then-Joseph Ratzinger’s diocese has changed his story. Now Gerhard Gruber says he only took the blame after being bullied by higher-ups hoping to protect the Pope. You'll notice that Eagan does not provide a source for this report. That's because there is no source. She does not indicate to whom Msgr. Gruber was speaking when he reported being bullied. That's because he never said any such thing. Der Spiegel had made the claim, a week earlier, that friends of Msgr. Gruber said he had been pressured. Der Spiegel ran with that story, failing to contact the former vicar general himself. Another German paper did contact Gruber, who promptly set the record straight: there had been no pressure on him to protect the Pope; he took responsibility for the accused cleric's parish assignment because that was the truth of the matter. So now, several days after that clarification appeared, Margery Eagan cited the un-clarified story. Again, why let the facts get in the way of an argument?
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