UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
One of the clear effects of Pope Francis’ strong management style has been an expanded Vatican media “management” effort that includes trying to cultivate more “papal apologists”, while also employing papal apologists to try to curtail Vatican critics.
As a longtime Vatican critic, I have recently experienced what appears to me to be an instance of this curtailment effort. I am being barred without explanation from making future comments on the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) website, after having made around 10,000 NCR comments, plus having written two NCR columns , over the last four and a half years.
Admittedly, as a Harvard Law trained retired Wall Street lawyer, I sometimes write with an “edge”. But the rape of thousands of innocent children by perverted priests protected by ruthless bishops makes a grandfather like me “edgy” sometimes.
This has been picked up by other websites, including Bilgrimage. A quick review of the comments to date to the current Bilgrimage column by theologian, Bill Lindsey, suggests that the NCR censorship efforts may be backfiring. Catholics are waking up! Amen!!
For what I am driving at, please see Bill’s column and the many new comments here:
In thinking about why Catholics are turning off to escalating Vatican spin efforts, the “elephant in the room” is, of course, always the continuing priest child abuse scandal. This is increasingly exacerbated by Pope Francis’ failure after almost a year and a half to address honestly and transparently holding bishops accountable for covering up, as well as for failing effectively to deal with, the continuing scandal.
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