The Tillsonburg News in Tillsonburg, Ontario, may be a small-town newspaper, but that doesn’t exempt it from the requirements of journalistic integrity. And on the Internet, the whole world can see the effects of its inaccuracies. In a column by one of its regular opinion writers today, the newspaper printed an unbelievable tale that the Archdiocese of Boston was going to put confessional booths right in strip clubs, manned by priests to hear the confessions of men ogling the women. Any editor with even a hint of competency is going to look twice and demand corroboration.
You might say, oh this column was obviously a joke. If it was, it was a poorly delivered one since the writer says right in the second sentence “I’m not making this up.” The piece degenerates predictably into a series of blasphemous one-liners and finally the long-expected dragging of the clergy sex-abuse scandal into it. Just another anti-Catholic tirade delivered by the news media.
So what about the writer’s claim that he didn’t make it up? Yeah, he didn’t make it up. He read it in the Weekly World News, a supermarket-checkout tabloid that regularly reports on Bigfoot sightings, alien encounters, and this week, vampires attacking US troops in Iraq.
Pathetic. I sent a letter to the editor of the Tillsonburg newspaper telling them they owe the Catholic Church and their readers a retraction and an apology. I’m not holding my breath for a reply.
Technorati Tags:anti-Catholic, Boston, Catholic, media bias
The column was I believe meant to be humorous, and failed. Quite honestly, and I say this as someone who has an absolute loathing for the sex industry, I find it almost too stupid to be offensive.
The idea of confessionals in strip clubs is particularly ironic considering the Church’s near silence on porn and the skin trade, even as those evils have made their ascendancy into the American mainstream. I know I’ve expressed my disappointment about the Church’s silence on this topic here before, and I apologize for repeating myself.
I guess I find it really odd though that despite the Church coming out gangbusters opposing same sex marriage (and appropriately so), no mention is made of the sex business, which surely also constitutes a huge threat to marriage, family life, and the wellbeing of women and children.
And dpt raises a good point: it’s doubtful a similar type of column would have been written about Islam.
It just occurred to me this column is actually instructive – it shows that the purveyors of the Culture of Death *know* what the Church should be fighting. Now if only we could get more Catholics to engage in the battle.
Alan: See the search box at the top right of the page? Enter Cardinal Law in it. I’ve been blogging about the scandal since 2001.
Or are you just made because I hurt yaw wittle feewings criticizing your small town newspaper?
“You should be more concerned about what Cardinal Law of Boston(now promoted to a cushy job in Rome) really did in his top position, rather than a small town newspaper taking a poke at the RCC and its ‘confession box’ routine.”
I don’t see how either one is okay, and if you have to compare that column to the totally inept handling of pedophiles in order to make it seem okay, that illustrates how low caliber it is.