As Papal Election Nears, AP Recycles Old News about Bishop Finn Attacking NCR's Catholicity

Does anyone in the world but me find it, well, odd that, on the eve of a papal election, the Associated Press is shopping around an article by Maria Sudekum about Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City "rebuking" the National Catholic Reporter for, as Finn wants us to imagine, having ditched Catholic identity? Here's the Sudekum article, which has just shown up at the ABC news site. FOX (of course) is also helping to push this article, as are the Washington Post, Breitbart, and a slew of news outlets.

The reason I say this is odd is that this story actually dates from January, though Sudekum's AP article doesn't mention that fact! Nor do any of those helping AP shop it around right now. Here's Alan Bavley reporting on the story back in late January for Kansas City Star.

And so why discover this story right now and tell it as if it's a just-breaking story? My suspicion: Opus Dei Someone wants the public to have this meme in its head just as the papal election takes place. Opus Dei bishop Robert W. Finn, champion of Catholic orthodoxy; National Catholic Reporter, a fishwrap rag that doesn't deserve credence in the mainstream media or among faithful Catholics, since it misrepresents Catholic teachings and values.

Which Finn has, we all know, upheld with such valor and integrity . . . . 

Opus Dei Someone is really determined to smear NCR just as the papal election takes place, lest the mainstream media pay serious attention to NCR's news coverage of what's going on in the Vatican. Opus Dei and its super-rich adherents and friends Someone is, it seems, not above any and all kinds of dirty tricks to mislead the mainstream media into thinking that NCR's voice has no credibility as a Catholic voice, while the voices of Finn and bishops like him do have such credibility.

And the mainstream media are just bought gullible, cowardly, and uneducated enough about religious matters to play right along with these dirty tricks. They're willing to recycle this tired old news suggesting that NCR is defectively Catholic and Finn isn't, while, to an astonishing extent, they've let Finn sit right there on his episcopal throne for months on end, unscrutinized and unexamined, after he was convicted of criminal malfeasance in having shielded a priest under his authority who took pornographic pictures of little girls.

On the graphic for this posting, see this June 2011 Bilgrimage posting.