What’s this? We’re bashed in a book about military strategies and in an astronomy magazine? That’s right, one never knows where Catholic bashing will appear next. It’s ubiquitous.
In Daniel P. Bolger’s book, The Battle for Hunger Hill: The 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment at the Joint Readiness Training Center, the author manages to digress from his war stories to take a shot at Catholics. On page 89 we learn that “American soldiers resemble Roman Catholics.” In what way, you might ask? Here’s how.
American soldiers are like Roman Catholics, Bolger says, because the latter like to “pick and choose, grabbing at half-understood Biblical verses in order to justify a daily faith principally found on tradition.” Want more? “You can search both testaments of the Bible from stem to stern and you will not find a pope, saints, rosary beads, or seven sacraments rattling around, and yet Catholics thinks these conventions are in there, and even contrive to find them when they look.” We’re surprised he didn’t notice that the Bible says nothing about pope-mobiles as well.
From the pages of Astronomy, we found a curious statement from one of the magazine’s subscribers who blasted the Vatican for its alleged culpability in the Holocaust and the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Our letter of protest elicited a good response.
The editor, Bonnie Gordon, apologized for running the statement and promised to print the apology in the next issue. Indeed, she even said she was doing a “wonderful profile of the Vatican Observatory” in an upcoming issue. So while this was unnecessary to begin with, it’s now over.
