***TheMediaReport.com SPECIAL REPORT*** Minnesota Public Radio’s ‘Betrayed By Silence’: A New Low In Vengeance Journalism

Again (the 6th, 216AM), from the imposingly self-named ‘True Catholic’ we simply get the same bit, and again with no explication or demonstration, the assertion about ‘smearing the messenger’. Thus again the Playbook plan: just keep tossing the stuff out there and up there and maybe if they see it often enough people will believe it.

What is the definition of ‘smear’ that ‘True Catholic’ relies upon here? And how is it distinguishable from simply noting the actual statements of the various media outlets, in this case MPR, and reflecting upon the quality of those statements?

And until we have demonstration that what MPR reporting is some reasonable effort to convey the factual and the truthful on all sides of the matter, then how can MPR be legitimately characterized as “the messenger” and not as simply – say – ‘the deceiver’ or ‘the manipulator’?

But instead it looks like – in best propaganda style – ‘True Catholic’ has simply come to the situation with an already-presumed notion of the ‘truth’ and ‘the message’, and anything that interferes with that spin has to be somehow derided.

Hi Julie, Why do you think so many German catholics have walked away? I believe in large part it was due to victims coming forward.

Let's face it catholicism is a very very strict religion. So when the people who demand so much obedience from their parishiners are caught protecting and even worse transferring known pedophiles to new parishes with no protection of children. The myth of a "clean" priesthood was shattered irrepairably.

Add to that:  No punishment but more protection (cardinal Law) for the supposedly sane leadership who enabled those abusors to rape again.

Add in the 43 million dollar home for the German cardinal and it spells : disastor for your church brought upon itself by itself.

If I'm obsessed with anything it's getting all the truth out.

I don't rely on "mysteries" in life  particularly when there is no proof. You do. That's your choice but don't expect a free pass when your faith allows for felonies.

If the coverups hadn't happened we would not be talking about this now. You would have had no scandal. All the stupidvisors would have had to do is call the police. They didn't and here we are.

In regard to LDB’s latest bit (the 6th, 906AM): It is an open question as to what precincts in the world most profoundly embrace “superstition”.  Surely the Abuseniks here have offered nothing to eliminate those precincts that embrace the beliefs (in no way scientifically established) that matter itself appeared merely by accident or by chance, that human beings are nothing more than the working of the sum total of their various physical and material components, and that existence is comprised of nothing more than the Monoplane.

As for JR’s continuation of his assorted 3×5’s: how does he explain the fact that German Catholicism has been losing adherents since – not to put too fine a point on it – the Reformation, and certainly since the 1960s (which antedates the Stampede by quite a few years)? Would the fact of East Germany being under the control of an atheist regime not have had some effect here?

And now that he mentions it, German history provides us with Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Catholicism, a government-supported and government-sponsored agenda the objective of which was to undermine and diminish the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany, reducing it to state-subservience as he had the various Protestant polities.

And – as has been mentioned in comments on this site – the Third Reich provides us with the efforts of that government to achieve that same end by attempting to make priests look like criminals in the public eye, leading to the failed effort to prosecute an entire hospital staff of Brothers and priests as sex-criminals … until public resistance forced the Reich to abandon such initiatives (and it reverted to simply tossing clerics and nuns into concentration camps as some form of ‘political’ enemies of the Reich).

As for the rest of it, we simply see the Abusenik attempt to shoe-horn whatever they can into their preferred script and vision, and yet (as I have mentioned before on a recent thread) we do not at all know just how many  (or how few) incidents actually conformed to the Stampede’s preferred script and vision.

As to what has been “shattered irreparably” (correction supplied) in regard to the priesthood, this assertion of JR’s remains simply another instance of his reading his own favorite tea leaves (unless he has convincing and demonstrative proof that he has neglected to put up here).

But the idea that JR’s only ‘obsession’ is with “getting all the truth out” need only be left up where it was put.

And if JR doesn’t “rely on ‘mysteries’ in life particularly when there is no proof” then he can of course explain to us clearly – as he has so far neglected to do – how he has embraced the theoretical-system of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory as if it itself were not a belief-system but rather contained sufficient demonstrated fact that there is only the Monoplane and the material existing within it.

And – how could this have escaped him? – has he not been berating many on this site for quite some time precisely because they will not accept without proof certain assertions that he insists be taken as demonstrated fact … ? (Time-saver here: the mere repetition of his own assertions does not constitute demonstrated fact, including the assertion that he is so truthy as to constitute a fundamentally sound factual source beyond which nobody need seek further credible evidence or proof.)

And again the mantra-type repetition of the bit about “if the cover-ups hadn’t happened” … and how – to repeat – can a) one distinguish cover-ups from a simple hesitation in the face of a highly-dubious ‘story’ and b) how many incidents thus actually qualify for inclusion in the Stampede’s preferred script and vision? Answers to these vital and fundamental questions would require corroboration and/or substantive explication.

As for why the parents themselves didn’t call the police – being the ones most familiar with the allegants – JR yet again has nothing to say.

Thus his conclusion in regard to this effort to i) explain the provenance of the Stampede and ii) blame the Church for it (i.e. “They didn’t and here we are”) fails as anything except his own just-so arranging of just the blocks he has selected to play-with here.

Then on the 6th at 1003AM he tosses up again his bit about my “defense of the indefensible” (correction supplied): which, in the absence of any explication or corroboration, remains merely another instance of his epithetical plop-tossing. And it – yet again – manipulatively seeks to get readers to accept precisely what has yet to be proven.

As for JR’s further reading of his favorite tea-leaves and informing everyone definitively what “any normal adult” would do … let it simply be left to hang up there where it was put. Has he studied ‘normal adults’ to any great extent?

The epithet “shopworn St. Michael” (correction supplied) is really too much to be credited to what we have come to see as the usual level of this commenter’s material; and perhaps he might secure from its creator a bit of explanation as to how I am in any way functioning as “St. Michael”.

What Abuseniks define as “respect” is far too tall an order: accepting their various bits without question and proffering sympathetic clucks and sighs instead. Nor would I fall for the manipulative gambit by which JR here tries to start the play on second rather than at-bat at home-plate by inveigling readers to grant and presume that he is ordinarily a most respectful person generally (and thus that his performance in comments on this site must be excused as merely the consequences of his being victimized by utterly unbearable provocation … perhaps by me acting as St. Michael to JR’s diabolic dragon … ?

And once again: if i) karma is indeed what JR says it is here, and ii) JR is an agent of karma (as he has said), then … ?

Again with the anti Darwin junk think?

The idea that you spell well (thanks to Spell check); and that that makes you intellectually superior in these arguments, is pitious.

My parents did not call the police because my parents did not know what was happening to me.

I was too overwhelmed to tell them.

The adult religious at my school, at least two of them, knew and did nothing. Blaming the unknowing parents excuses the transfer of perpetrators by their bosses, who knew, exactly how?

Why is it that it took MPR and the local media to report the many negligences of Mr. Nienstedt and the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul? Negligences which the archdiocese subsequently responded by enacting recent changes regarding pedophilia diligence, along with its dismissal of guilty priests? Negligences and betrayals that former cannon lawyer Jennifer Haselberger reported through these media?

l

Well, let’s get to it.

On the 7th at 1045AM, JR asserts that my “logic isn’t” … isn’t what remains the question here.

In a marvelous example of what LDB might call ‘quibbling’ JR claims a distinction with a difference: “being an agent of karma is not the same thing as being karma itself”. I will say that the transitive property holds valid here, since his distinction is indeed not a difference of any relevant substance. If JR cares to explain what he sees as the substance of his distinction here, he is welcome to do so – so far it appears to have slipped his attention.

That transitive property being expressed: if a equals b, and b equals c, then a equals c. I thought it fits nicely and relevantly here and works well. Readers may consider it as they will.

But even prescinding from agreement with my point here, JR’s conclusions as expressed in the last paragraph of this comment of his (so to speak) are not justified by the putative weight of his own objection. But he or the source of this comment under his name is now on a roll mimicking adult style, so he will go on with his ‘conclusions’ A through D. How nice for him or for the source of the material in this comment under his name.

 And don’t the Abuseniks love to deliver pronunciamentos and anathemas. One wonders if perhaps JR (or some other Abusenik) wouldn’t have made a ‘good’ medieval Pope, if that term is defined according to the stereotypical Abusenik fever-visions about Catholicism.

Although in ‘C’ he now claims that there are indeed “no archangels named st. michael or anything else” – rather vividly demonstrating not only how he can create phantasm with which to have pillow fights with himself, but how he can thus in that process refute himself. We are indeed in ringside seats for something beyond the “normal adult”.

And as far as ‘D’ goes: whoever said here that there were any “excuses for child rape enabling” (sic)? Nobody on this site has, to the best of my knowledge and recollection. Does JR have a quote (accurate, of course) that demonstrates otherwise? If he doesn’t, then what we have here is a truism and nothing more. But a truism whose appearance of relevance is based on nothing more than his own (or his source’s) selective interpretation of what others here have written.

Then at 1058AM he characterizes the rather profound and substantial questions and problems with the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian positions as “anti Darwin think junk” (sic). Well, that’s certainly a serious and attention-worthy proffer, and so vividly put, is it not?

But the record here shows that neither he nor any other Abusenik have made any substantive and relevant response to those questions and problems.

He then, however, gets trapped in a web of his own weaving: I apparently “spell well (thanks to Spell check)” [sic]). But here he has raised again the lethally inconvenient reality that no word-processing programs are commercially available today that do not contain some form of spell-checking capability, unless the user purposely disables that function. So then: whence his own very oddly unsystematic spelling-misspelling rhythms (let alone the wide variance in (charitably) his own writing and expression styles)?

We are then brought back to a rather classic Playbook gambit deployed by Abuseniks, and one which in JR’s case were looked-at closely and at length here when he proffered some links to documents from his own case:  allegants did not tell anyone at the time – and thus, neatly, there are few if any corroborative indications of that sort contemporaneous with the alleged abuse – because they didn’t want to.

 (And yet some – including JR – rather quickly ‘told’ peers who, we are to imagine, were supposed to tell those very parents. Or – in a somewhat mutually exclusive alternative variant of the script – parents were too ill or fragile to be told but peers were told anyway; peers who themselves could thus only provide hearsay ‘evidence’ long long after the fact, just in time for the allegations entered into lawsuits.)

As best I can recall from documentation that we saw here, the “adult religious” at his school at the time did not “do nothing” (which is a classic Abusenik spin and scripting trope); rather, they assessed the claim and dismissed it as being attributable to other – and hardly not-obvious – possibilities.

And it was not until years or decades later, when the Anderson Strategies opened up an entire world of attractive cash possibilities, that – by amazing coincidence – numerous allegations were suddenly produced. And from what we have seen, most of them rather light on evidence.

Which problem was neatly sidestepped in that Andersonian synergy with the ‘reforms’ of victimist-inspired law ‘reforms’ (regressions, in my opinion) that avoided the evidence problem by i) introducing all over again the medievalism of ‘spectral evidence’ and ii) seeking to weaken the need for any evidence at all by relying on ‘feeling’ rather than on fundamental principles of Western law and jurisprudence.

And in that regard, I recall the current President saying at some point in his tenure that when nominating judges he was not so much concerned with the nominee’s knowledge of law or jurisprudence, but rather merely with the nominee’s capacity to ‘feel’. Which is, as I have said before here, both a) a fatal assertion for the concept of the rule of law and b) a regression from the achievements of Western law and jurisprudence that opened up floodgates that may yet swamp the legitimacy of law and Law in our culture and our society.

Again – also – this exemplifies that “synergy” I had spoken about, without inferring an overt “conspiracy” by which one might claim that the President was engaged in an active and deliberate “conspiracy” against the rule of law, and Law itself, and the Church. And lastly, as I have said before, Anderson saw the possibilities inherent in synergizing his Strategies with this general political and legislative and cultural trend in American and Western society and culture three decades ago.

Nor do I recall anybody on this site “blaming the un-knowing parents” – which is yet another JR invention of material he finds more congenial to work-with than the actual and difficult material that the consideration of the Stampede generates here.

Indeed, we see in this bit of JR’s another sly and manipulative Playbook gambit: it neatly seeks to distract from the question as to just who actually was directly responsible for the parents being “un-knowing”. Somehow and for whatever reason(s) that might be proffered, that “who” was the allegator him/herself.

JR then further tries to distract by now changing the subject to the (still undemonstrated) alleged widespread practice of the “transfer of perpetrators by their bosses”. In just how many cases – especially given the cases we have had a chance to look-at on this site – did this Stampede script scenario actually play out? And the answer to that would have to be: very few indeed.

On then to 1105AM: JR will now try to distract by re-introducing his bits about his being “questioned”. Neatly avoiding the “questioning” of his proffered material on this site – well established in the record here – and his various contortions in reaction to that (which is primarily what I was referring to), he simply goes back to his claims that he was (purportedly) “questioned” so deeply and extensively and profoundly by attorneys for the Church and the Insurers in the process of the lawsuit (that 500-plus Plaintiff lawsuit that so perfectly embodied the Anderson Strategies) that for all practical purposes he was examined as if at trial, and that therefore his claims were indeed proven at law, and that therefore his stories and claims are formally demonstrated to be true (and thus he himself is – as was said by S.Z. Sakall in Casablanca – “honest as the day is long”).

But in regard to that ‘questioning’ we have nothing to go on but JR’s recollected assertions, against which must be weighed the problems with the content and subsequent elaborations of the allegations themselves.

And – as I have said before – once the defense attorneys had made up their minds that the mere number of Plaintiffs and allegations precluded any trial(s), then such ‘questioning’ as would have had to be carried out would have been cursory and pro forma, simply covering required legal procedural steps; attorneys would be looking merely to get down this and that bit of required information, suppressing any instinct they may have had to further ‘question’ whatever dubious bits were thrown at them from across the table. That was the brilliance of the ‘bundled lawsuit’ strategy.

(Nor, of course, were the torties themselves really desirous of having the various claims, stories, and allegations exposed to the light of day on the stand, let alone – and we have seen why here on this site – letting their according-to-the-script pure and innocent allegators reveal themselves under the pressure of any sustained questioning on the stand. We still see that in the recent Billy Doe events in Philadelphia, which still remain to be played-out.)

Thus the only basis for the implication that I am “wrong” is that of JR’s own proffered memories and recollections of his time across the desk from the defense attorneys. Readers may judge as they will.

Meanwhile, in regard to the questioning on this site – to which I was primarily referring – JR has not taken well to being ‘questioned’ at all, nor has his proffered material performed well, as the record voluminously indicates.

On to ‘Thomas’ on the 7th at 1141AM.

‘Thomas’ also seeks to start the play at first or second base rather than with an at-bat at home plate: we still haven’t established – and this series of TMR articles precisely questions – the quality and validity of the “report” and the reporting by “local media” in the first place.

Ditto the validity and legitimacy of what “that former cannon lawyer … reported through these media”. (sic)

We also notice that no matter what the Church does, it is wrong: were there enacted “recent changes regarding pedophilia diligence” and also the dismissing of “guilty priests”? Well that just proves – to the Stampede-shaped mind – that somewhere back there the Church didn’t do things so well. And if the Church hadn’t instituted the reforms of the past dozen years … ? You see how the Game is played and The Ball Is Kept Rolling.

I also point out that only a very few priests out of all those allegated-against qualified for a formal clinical diagnosis of “pedophilia”. But perhaps ‘Thomas’ was simply using the term in that looser PR sort of way, in which ‘everybody knows’ that all or most or many priests are and were and always will be ‘pedophiles’. That sort of thing.

And LDB comes back, as if he isn’t carrying a rather hefty load of questions-left-unanswered from prior exchanges.

And what have we got from this allegedly elite-trained philosophical and legally-trained mind?

We have nothing but an extended epithet, although whether specifically aimed at me or aimed at “man” generally is anybody’s guess (clearly, none of his alleged education taught him clarity of expression).

Also, in refraining from the adolescent and juvenile practice of deploying scatological terms of abuse or illustration, I am being “baby-ish”. And thus … are those who deploy such terms being – not to put too fine a point on it – adult … ?

But he seems quite satisfied with the little pile he has produced for us here, and allows himself a classical flourish to go-out-on, to stage-direct his presumed victorious departure from the stage (for this scene anyway): exeunt omnes. This might be some juvenile effort at mimicking Catholic liturgical directions, or it may be a variant of Shakespeare’s stage-direction in Act III of Winter’s Tale. Whatever the case, we once again see LDB declaring victory after a rather unimpressive performance and then going-home.

It may seem like a lot of work to expend on the type of material we get here from the Abuseniks, but I repeat that Abuseniks provide us with two things, at least: a) they reveal much about themselves and thus the Abusenik mind that they don’t realize and b) they exemplify so many of the gambits in the Playbook. All of which is well worth the effort to point-out.

 First, let me expand upon the concluding image I used on the 9th at 619AM. I had said there “In this matter, then, I will say that scientism has reached the point Hitler reached when he took France. His tanks faced the Channel, and that was territory they could not cross, let alone take or hold”.

As an analogy concerning ‘scientism’ it also goes further: not only have the tanks reached the Channel and find themselves unable to cross to England, but the tankers then console themselves by claiming that since their tanks can’t deal with it, then therefore England doesn’t exist. And thereby they have not actually solved the problem, but merely relieved themselves (to their own satisfaction) of the responsibility for being any further concerned about the problem they face. Nor does their ‘solution’ here do anything to reduce the reality of the existence of England.

Now to JR’s of the 9th at 1057AM.

JR evades the problem he created for himself with his assertion about the uniqueness of the Church by a) merely claiming that they all think they are somehow unique – but that wasn’t the point at issue in the comment.

 And then by b) whining about why he “should … care about” that “’centralized structure’ being important” – in other words, if the Church is very plausibly unique along several axes, and yet he had claimed that it was not unique, then he can just ignore the stuff that doesn’t support his assertion. After all, he doesn’t care and doesn’t need to care.

This is a signature demonstration of the Abusenik approach to whatever material they don’t want to deal-with (either because they have no answer or because the answer isn’t going to be one that they like). Facts are just blocks or piles of play-dough to them, and disciplined reasoned inquiry is simply some toy that can be used if it gives them the answer they want, and ignored if it doesn’t.

And as I have said before more than a few times, this mentality was actually allowed to play a serious role in the changes (they cannot be legitimately called ‘reforms’) demanded by Victimist law in regard to evidence and jurisprudential and police procedures.

The rest of this bit of his is epithetical and nothing new there.

And then the mere resort to the bit about there being “no evidence” that Planes of Existence exist. And again we see the tankers simply claiming that since they can’t get at it, then England doesn’t exist.

And then again some epithetical stuff about Roswell.

Then the curiously well-styled bit about presumptions in regard to “Dr. Zeuss” (sic; did he take this text down over the phone and thus get the spelling wrong?). To which I would respond: if the vast majority of human beings throughout recorded history have demonstrably evinced some sort of awareness-of and attraction-to and concern-for some form of non-physical or beyond-physical or metaphysical levels of their existence (not only of God but of their own soul or spirit) then any theory positing that there is no such metaphysical actuality would have to explain the consistency and near-universality of that phenomenon. And that means a lot more than merely tossing around some variant of (to use Dickens’s fine imagery) the undigested-bit-of-beef ‘explanation’.

But to consider oneself as being a world-historically enlightened individual who can see what the vast body of human beings has not seen (i.e. that all things metaphysical are merely symptoms of this or that superstition or psychological need or weakness) is certainly a pleasurably self-consoling conceit, is it not?

And then – in so pitch-perfect a bit of adolescent juvenilia – we get a reversion to thinking on the level of sexual organs and the sex act. And it goes on for a while. A charming self-revelation, although probably not intended as such.

Then on the 9th at 823PM JR goes on about whether religion is “a necessity” for humans. There remains the demonstrated fact of the vast majority of humans having evinced precisely such a preoccupation with ‘religion’. Which certainly increases the probability that “religion” is somehow a universal source of interest and concern to humans and therefore quite possibly for some reason it is indeed a “necessity” to humans.

Against the weight of which demonstrated fact, we get nothing from the Abuseniks and cafeteria atheists except variations on the undigested-bit-of-beef bit.

But then – in yet another fine example of projection – JR claims that he rejects trying “to pass belief off as truth”. And yet that is precisely what the Stampede has – at its genuine best, which is not to say all the time – tried to do: passing off their allegations and claims and assertions as truth. And worse, to do so on the basis of what is nothing more than spectral-evidence (i.e., I can see it – nobody else can).

Which in a legal forum produces the lethal whackery: I can see it  -nobody else can or did – but on the basis of my spectral evidence I want and demand that the government use its Sovereign Coercive Authority to produce for me (choose one or several: lots of money, the prosecution of the person(s) I have named, and ditto the prosecution of anybody who didn’t buy my story and who thus interfered with my getting the money or interfered with my ‘getting’ the person(s) I have named in my spectral evidence). And that’s how the Game is played.

And JR then nails down all that by outright demonstrating (intentionally or otherwise) the ‘spectral evidence’ dynamics when he insists “I don’t ‘believe I was raped. I know I was raped”.

First, we have to consider this in relation to all the other things JR has claimed to “know”.

Second, we have to ask if what any allegant claims to personally “know” is sufficient, without any actual evidence, to trigger the deployment of the Sovereign Coercive Authority of the government against any other person or persons. In the Salem Witch Trials that Court answered Yes to that question, with the result that a number of persons were executed as ‘witches’. And nowadays we are back to this relatively primitive legal concept again, are we not?

JR (the 10th, 115PM) now informs us that we have every right to believe in the tooth fairy if we are that gullible. But apparently we run serious risks of being immoral if we don’t believe the Stampede stuff. Go figure.

Then – the Wig of Deep and Courageous Insight – he heads for the high-ground on his flat little stage, declaiming that he doth “refuse to not talk about the flaws in your hypothasis of god and faith”. To what “flaws”, precisely, does he refer, in the “hypothesis” (correction supplied) of “god and faith”? Is there anything he’s got here beyond the assorted variants of the undigested-bit-of-beef bit?

And perhaps he has given too much away with that “talk about” – that’s what they do around the table in the cafeteria. In other precincts of the building, things advance beyond mere “talk” to the more strenuous processes of examination and assessment.

“No matter how many times you say it does”: a marvelous candidate for taping on both his computer screen and his mirror.

He then proceeds down his little list of what he does “hate”, including everything connected to the Doyle Project outlined by Doyle in 1985 and then piggybacks on that bit another mere epithet about my “apologies for the church” being “a fraud”. And his assertions about the Stampede are not “apologies”? And fraudulent?

And – without ever having produced a substantive bit in the comment – he delivers his exit-line about “hokum”, with the cutesy bit about Fantasy Island and Hervé Villechaize.

At on the 10th at 117PM he repeats the “hokum” bit. And then – no doubt of some interest to the clinically-inclined mind – the bit about “swallowers”.

It was doubly brilliant of Anderson’s Strategies: a) provide an attractive venue for these types to come up to the surface while b) insuring that Anderson and the other torties would never have to be directly associated with these types. (Except when such types made cash-inducing allegations, where – nonetheless – the torties did everything they could to ensure that the material wouldn’t be publicly examined and their connection to such types be more clearly demonstrated.)

But on to something far more substantive. I am intrigued by ‘Malcolm Harris’s idea (the 11th, 141PM) about a Catholic “guilt complex”.

If we consider American Catholics (leaving aside thus for the moment a universal sense of all Catholics throughout history) I think that we can see the paralyzing effect of the Blitzkrieg tactics of the Anderson Strategies: enrolling so comprehensive a list of influential synergistic allies (the media; politicians and legislators; secularist-minded intellectuals, academics and celebrities; assorted ‘reform’ advocates, especially in the legal field; zealous critics of the Church both non-Catholic and within the Church; torties whose whiskers were ever-twitchy for potentially lucrative causes of legal action; plus (going into the mid-1990s and ever-increasingly since then) the amplification and un-boundaried dynamics of the internet).

As the Stampede so quickly and comprehensively deployed its various elements, Catholics – even more than citizens generally – made the hardly-unsurprising assumption that so widely bruited a story must be true. And the claims and allegations made by the Stampede were so expansive that even if some moderate or sober-thinking individuals imagined that only a percentage of the claims and allegations were true, yet in light of the originally massive size of the claims and allegations, then even a fraction would still constitute a large number of (presumably genuine) cases.

And the basic template or ‘scenario’ of the Stampede was – as I have described on many occasions on this site – perfectly suited as a type of humanly-engaging and humanly-seductive imagining: like the old silent movie plots of yore and resembling the propaganda gambits seen so clearly in the early to mid-20th century, that template or ‘scenario’ limned a simple and simplistic Manichaean dynamic of Pure Innocence bethumped by Pure Evil, with various embellishments added. Many movies have made much money trading on this dynamic.

Catholics in the U.S., almost all of whom lived with no personal experience of active and dangerous animosity against Catholicism, were taken almost completely unaware. After the tremendously encouraging experience of Catholicism and the Church conducting a long climb up from the nativists burning down the Ursuline Convent in 1834 to the Church-Democratic Party teamwork of the early 20th century and through the powerful bonding of Church and government and culture in World War 2 and on up through JFK’s election … American Catholicism was not well-prepared for the rigors of existing as the target of  broad and deep synergistic coalition of social and cultural and political and institutional forces.

Those in the Vatican who had lived through Fascist and Soviet and Communist propaganda and procedural attacks against the Church, and as educated Europeans knew well the dynamics of the French Revolution and Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, initially categorized what began in the U.S. in the early 1980s as simply another example of such efforts. (Nor has it been clearly demonstrated that this assessment was not fundamentally the most cogent and accurate; as time goes in I think its essential accuracy is becoming more apparent.)

And thus the Anderson Stampede blitzed its way, cutting huge swaths in a brief time.

And thus American Catholics almost immediately became themselves shrouded in a sense of ‘collective guilt complex’ (and the Abuseniks never tire of trying to reinforce that shrouding): if ‘they’ are ‘reporting’ all this, then all or most of it must be true … would have been the presumption many Catholics made, perhaps without even thinking too deeply about it.

And of course the Playbook (a spawn variant of all the old propaganda gambits of the past) specifically seeks to attack anybody who tries to think carefully and assess. They are ‘insensitive’, ‘sociopathic’, abstracted from reality, ‘proud’ (go figure), gullible and lumpish, evil and ‘enabling’, or fill-in-the-blank.

American Catholics of the era since 1985 had never imagined nor been prepared-by-experience for this type of broad cultural and political assault. The Stampede succeeded – such as it did – the same way Blitzkrieg succeeded in France in 1940 and Russia in 1941 and the Imperial Japanese ran riot in the Pacific in 1941 and 1942.

Your being "queasy" is your own doing.

Have you got the vapors? Ask the deacon and the altar boys to bring out the smelling salts.  P's swooned with disgust. Lol!

And exactly what "type" are you?

"The metaphysical plane"? Oh you mean fancy/ fantasy, nothing, air, your imagination, your religious leaders imagination. The metaphysical plane that used to belong to Zeus? Osiris? Tinkerbelle? and now belongs to the trinity and st. JP2?

Denial, not just a river in Eygpt.

I hear the sound of a rat squeaking.

Here's another link that shows the effect SNAP and other fake victims groups have allowed in Australia. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/18/catholic-churchs-melbourne-response-under-review