A friend sent me this email last week. Here it is slightly edited:
I'm really not trying to get you to snap your molars off at the gum line, but I can't help but point out this followup, once again illustrating what a master manipulator Dreher is. As we saw, having baited the anti-Catholics with the Home babies story, he then quickly picked a fight with Andrew Sullivan both to provide himself with a "cutout" and to get himself linked up the food chain by provoking a response from Sullivan, which Sullivan duly supplied.
But the guy who TMFKS reminds us ostentatiously made up publicly with Sullivan only a year ago now decides to use him as his condom in two ways: first as cutout, and now as representative of Catholicism. The screaming subtext from the man who's still not going back to the Catholic Church is hardly subtle: if you really want a safely non-libertine, sodomy-free religion, better become Orthodox like him. Otherwise you might have to settle for Catholicism 3.5.
BTW, for any who might want to discuss Dante with Rod up close and personal in a hot, steamy environment, he helpfully discloses the specific YMCA where he now regularly works out and can be found:
It’s amazing that I can stand in the Y in Zachary, Louisiana....
Later my friend followed up with an earnest
bleg for a Catholic to respond to this story and I said I toss something up. Which I didn't; I didn't find the time. However yesterday he got a major answer to his wish in the form of
this fine article by fellow Clevelander, Tom Piatak titled "More Anti-Catholic Hysteria". Here's the meat of it:
It now turns out that the story has been grossly exaggerated. On Saturday, The Irish Times—a paper that is about as friendly to the Catholic Church as its New York namesake—reported that Catherine Corless told the paper that “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.” One of the boys who found the bones in the 1970s, Barry Sweeney, told the Times that "there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” When asked by the Times how many bodies were in the pit, he replied, “About 20.” Nor is it clear that the underground pit found by the boys ever was a septic tank, though it may have been; or that the bodies they saw there were from the home, though they may have been; or that the nuns were the ones who decided to put them there, though they may have been. The Times story also notes that the number of dead children from the institution is "a stark reflection of a period in Ireland when infant mortality in general was very much higher than today, particularly in institutions, where infection spread rapidly. At times during those 36 years the Tuam home housed more than 200 children and 100 mothers." Indeed, the Irish Catholic blog Lux Occulta calculated that the mortality figures at the home are in line with general infant mortality in Ireland at the time.
Four years ago, when the same papers and bloggers trumpeting this story were attempting to blame Benedict XVI for clerical sexual abuse in Milwaukee decades earlier, British atheist Brendan O'Neill made this telling point: “it might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless: very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.” Whatever may have happened at one home for unwed mothers and their children in Tuam, O'Neill's basic point also applies to the vast number of Irish nuns who served in countless schools and hospitals in Ireland and throughout the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Rod Dreher's desire to pass judgment on Irish Catholicism on the basis of one poorly sourced story, and Andrew Sullivan's desire to jettison sexual morality on the basis of that same story, tell us that they cannot be trusted when it comes to the Catholic Church. Nor, indeed, can the myriad of newspapers that gleefully ran with this story.
I'm glad Tom was the one who responded to this. It's a common sense correction using facts and the title is so accurate. It is hysteria—note how old the subject matter is. Bill Donohue is always pointing out that the abuseniks must consistently go further and further back in time to find the evidence demanded by their narrative. It is anti-Catholic; Rod Dreher is anti-Catholic, Andrew Sullivan is a Catholic who is always bashing the Catholic church for its core teachings so he is basically an enabler of anti-Catholicism. And the initial word
more just reminds us that this is just the latest round of hysteria from the scandal machine which will emanate from the tares among the wheat until the end of time.
Another reason I'm glad that a serious writer like Mr. Piatak responded was because
it elicited this even more hysterical response from one of the aforementioned anti-Catholics in a lame partial-retraction:
It’s wrong to call all this “good news,” but to me, it is a relief to learn that the Church may be less culpable than the initial reports indicated. I posted the shocking first story, and have posted the debunking follow-ups as they’ve become available. That hasn’t stopped pious Tom Piatak, a stringer for a turgid Midwestern monthly, from losing his grip over my blogging. A “bitter apostate” he calls me, which is theologically ignorant; according to the Catechism, an “apostate” is one who totally repudiates Christianity, while a “schismatic” is one who affirms Christianity but who does not submit to the Roman pontiff. But this isn’t really about theology with him, but rather tribal breast-beating....
Who is losing their grip here? Sorry, but this verbal ad hominem assault on Tom Piatak is not going to go well for Rod Dreher. Tom Piatak is not some breast-beating neanderthal drone sent by the Catholic hierarchy. He is a nice guy and a smart, traditional conservative who writes for Vdare, Takimag, and ...oh, wait...
lookie here! Seems like Mr. Piatak wrote for TAC once upon a time six years ago.
As
Mark Levin once remarked in a similar situation, "Oh, the pain of it all."