Recently the New York Times ran an article by Frank Bruni that was a clear demonstration of his hypocrisy; the week before, he said he doesn’t hate priests, just the Catholic Church and its “appointed caretakers” (a.k.a. the bishops).
In the article, the angry ex-Catholic homosexual ripped about a lot of things Catholic, one of which was a recent boneheaded decision by lawyers for a Colorado Catholic hospital who invoked state law to shield the facility from damages: they argued that because a fetus is not defined as a person, the facility could not be sued in a “wrongful death” suit involving unborn children. The Colorado bishops disagreed with these attorneys, branding their decision “morally wrong.” End of story? Not for Bruni.
Bruni seized on documents indicating that former Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony failed to report cases of suspected sexual abuse, but his anger was targeted at the Church. For example, at the end of last year when it was reported that Mark Thompson was leaving the top post at the BBC to become the new president of the New York Times Company, it was revealed that he pleaded innocent to knowing anything about BBC icon and child rapist Jimmy Savile, despite clear and convincing evidence that he lied. Bruni said nothing. Nor did he question Thompson’s innocence, even though it was the result of a BBC internal investigation. Yet he would like the government to go after Mahony, and would mock the idea of an internal probe.
Bruni is a deeply conflicted man. In 1997 he wrote an article about the sexual abuse of minors that was amazingly sympathetic to the abusers. He quoted “experts” who said we need to get away from “ironclad roles of villain and victim,” and who said the victim should be told “that somebody cared about you and loved you but didn’t do it in the right way” (our italics). Not only is the compassion twisted, it shows that the real hypocrite is Frank Bruni.
