The Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran an
inexplicably soft
front-page editorial about Barack Obama’s record on April
29th. One would have thought, pace Ron Howard
and Dan Brown, that a member of the “Illuminati” had wormed his
way into a staff position and scribbled the editorial in the
hopes of damaging the Church.
The editorial claimed that Obama has “moved with caution,” and
that the fears of pro-lifers about him are unfounded: he “does
not seem to have established the radical changes that he had
aired.” He may even be “rebalancing” his policies “in support of
motherhood.” The editorial also declared that Obama’s policies
are opposed to all cloning, which is false. (He is open to
cloning for research, as revealed by his constant and careful use
of “reproductive” as a qualifier before “cloning” in his
statements.) Then the editorial added in the final stretch:
“Signals of innovations in the Obama administration are
undeniable. Above all on matters of the care of environment and
in particular the partnership that seems born with Beijing.”
Unbelievable.
In January, members of the dominant media cast Vatican officials
as clueless oafs for not even knowing that Bishop Richard
Williamson had downplayed the Holocaust. But L’Osservatore
Romano’s astonishingly clueless pro-Obama editorial
generates hosannas from them.
Like clockwork, E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post
seized on it to needle American Catholics who are protesting
Notre Dame’s decision to honor Obama: “We now know that the
reaction of right-wing Catholics to Notre Dame’s invitation to
President Obama falls into the category of ‘more Catholic than
the pope.’”
The author of the editorial, Giuseppe Fiorentino, whom Dionne
describes with respect as “L’Osservatore’s frequent
foreign affairs contributor,” is not a member of an
Enlightenment-era secret society but he is a fact-challenged
“enlightened” European liberal. That such a staggeringly stupid
and irresponsible column from him managed to appear in the Pope’s
own newspaper should scare Catholics more than Ron Howard’s lame
movie.
Who is vetting articles there? The head of Internet research for
the Williamson case?
As I
wrote last week for Catholic World Report, orthodox
Catholics in America reeling from Notre Dame’s blown kiss to
Obama have a right to ask: Et tu, L’Osservatore Romano?
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Were Obama given a rating by the Catholic Church according to her
official moral teachings (rather than Fiorentino’s European
liberalism), it would be zero. On every single contested issue
that touches on the natural moral law—from abortion to gay civil
unions to euthanasia to dispensing abortifacients to teens at
Rite Aid—he is gravely wrong.
Assessing Obama’s record is not even a close call. Any Catholic
who is even remotely paying attention knows that during his first
hundred days he has advanced policies that contradict the
teachings of the Church baldly. What would Obama have to do to
excite L’Osservatore Romano’s attention? Physically take
a torch to Catholic hospitals? Perform abortions himself?
Am I getting too worked up here? I don’t think so. Yes, I know
the editorial is not surprising at one level — the Curia is
crawling with European liberals capable of the pompous, sniffing,
recklessly obtuse opining on display in Fiorentino’s column—but
the timing of it is a little surprising and very disgusting.
Look what Dionne does with it: he writes that the “article will
strengthen the liberal claim that the Catholic right’s
over-the-top response [to Obama] is rooted at least as much in
Republican and conservative politics as in concern over the
abortion question.” Wrong, E.J.: it is entirely rooted in the
fact that Obama is formally cooperating in the killing of
children and the destruction of the family.
“Largely lost in the Notre Dame furor is the extent to which the
ferocity on the Catholic right has emboldened moderate and
liberal Catholics to fight back,” Dionne continues, adding that
the “current issue of America magazine, published by the
Jesuits, includes a sharply worded editorial criticizing the
‘divisive effects of the new American sectarians’ which ‘have not
escaped the notice of the Vatican.’”
Really? Dissenting modernist Jesuits are listening to the Vatican
again and reading L’Osservatore Romano? And Vatican
officials in turn are fretting that “right-wing Catholics” are
defending the Church’s magisterium at the expense of civil
concord?
Well, it is a topsy-turvy world these days. Do a movie about this
illuminati at the Vatican, Ron Howard.
