Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a piece by Tim Padgett that appeared yesterday on the website of Time:
The Catholic Church decides to maintain its policy against women priests. Those who are Catholic and don’t like it, can always join any one of the mainline Protestant denominations that allow for women clergy: given that their numbers are fast going south (while Catholicism continues to grow), they would be glad to get new recruits to help stop the bleeding. Those who are not Catholic should mind their own business.
Tim Padgett says he is Catholic, so that gets him in the door. But one wonders why. Why would he belong to a voluntary organization that has a “malicious” and “misogynous declaration” that is evidence of its “increasingly spiteful rhetoric of bigotry”? Why would he want to stay when it is “represented by a bunch of homophobes wearing miters”? Is he a phony or a masochist? Either way, he is surely not being intellectually honest with himself.
We are accustomed to this kind of rant on blog sites. Unfortunately, we are now becoming accustomed to it at Time: the hit job it recently did on Pope Benedict XVI—it was the cover story—showed how violently it has turned on the Catholic Church.
If I wanted to nudge an organization I belong to, enticing it to make reforms, I would use diplomacy. Instead, today’s Catholic dissidents resort to bombast and vitriol, using a sledgehammer to get their point across. And they wonder why no one is listening.
Contact the managing editor, Richard Stengel: richard_stengel@timemagazine.com
