Damian Thompson, a Catholic, is in a frothing rage – not at the pope or the all-male hierarchy of his authoritarian church, but at the Times for reporting on it.

There is international outrage in Catholic circles over a headline in The Times this morning that many people regard as utterly misleading and part of the newspaper’s reliably biased coverage (reinforced by vicious cartoons) of anything to do with Pope Benedict XVI…A universally admired Catholic journalist contacted me this morning and accused The Times of (and I am toning this down for legal reasons) an extremely serious error of judgment.

A universally admired Catholic journalist? There is no such thing. There’s no universally admired anything, and certainly not a … Read the rest

Too bad for you if you’re Irish and you want to leave the Catholic church – the church is so dominant in public life that you can’t leave without making life difficult for yourself. Sor-reeeeee.

[T]he church is so deeply woven into the fabric of Irish life, it is difficult for many ordinary Irish people to distance themselves from it. The church is involved in education and health care, and its imprint on the Irish national identity is deep…Ninety-two percent of primary schools are still run by the Catholic Church and most of the best schools are Catholic.

So parents who want to leave are screwed. But hey, the remaining fans of the church are having a hard time too.… Read the rest

Things are getting hot for the Catholic church.

The pope, meanwhile, continues to be under fire for a 2001 Vatican letter he sent to all bishops advising them that all cases of sexual abuse of minors must be forwarded to his then-office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the cases were to be subject to pontifical secret…But canon lawyers insisted Friday that there was nothing in the document that would preclude bishops from fulfilling their moral and civic duties of going to police when confronted with a case of child abuse. They stressed that the document merely concerned procedures for handling the church trial of an accused priest, and that the secrecy required by Rome

Oh, Texas, Texas, Texas.

The Texas school board has been fixing up the standards for the curriculum.

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present…9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.”

That’s wonderful, isn’t it? From a list that … Read the rest