Catholic Church

The New York Times has a story today about the Diocese of Harrisburg's decision to ban high school boys from competing against girls in school wrestling. This is the second day in a row that the Times has covered this story, and there is nothing new of any substance in today's piece.   Today's news story on the Pennsylvania Catholic high school wrestling policy merited 978 words. By contrast,…

NPR's Jason Beaubien spotlighted a woman's "nightmare with El Salvador's abortion law" on Monday's All Things Considered. Beaubien zeroed in on the case of Christina Quintanilla, who served four years of a thirty-year prison sentence, after a dubious conviction for the death of her unborn child. He also cited unnamed "activists who are pushing to liberalize El Salvador's abortion law [who] argue…

Mark Litke hyped the "population explosion – what some are calling a crisis" in the Philippines on Sunday's PBS NewsHour Weekend, and played up how poor "families in Asia's most Catholic country...have had little or no access to contraception or family planning advice." Litke confronted a retired Catholic archbishop on his Church's teaching against birth control: "If the people of the…

On Thursday, the al Qaeda spinoff group the Islamic State seized numerous towns in northern Iraq that are home to much of the country’s minority Christian population, sending tens of thousands of them fleeing further into the Kurdish-dominated region to avoid the unforgiving and deadly extremist group. When it came to the major broadcast networks covering this story on their Thursday morning…

In a piece discussing the University of Notre Dame’s policy on contraception, Irin Carmon of MSNBC.com revealed her unashamed support of government-mandated birth control and abortifacient drugs. And if the headline “This is the Next Hobby Lobby” wasn’t clear enough, the article barely mentioned opposition to Notre Dame’s decision to fight the contraception mandate. Aside from a few brief…

Billy Hallowell at The Blaze passed along a Billboard magazine interview with classic rocker Tom Petty, who’s now 63 and writing protest songs about the hot issues of...2002. His new album “Hypnotic Eye” carries a bonus track called “Playing Dumb” that attacks the problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Is he playing dumb that the church hasn’t made any strides in correcting the problem…

On June 3, Shawn Pogatchnik of the Associated Press picked up on a horror story from western Ireland: “a researcher found records for 796 young children believed to be buried in a mass grave beside a former orphanage for the children of unwed mothers” in County Galway. That sounds like a terrible story, if true. AP and Pogatchnik somehow skipped over Britain's Channel 4 reporting in March on…

On Sunday's CNN Newsroom, Susan Candiotti slanted toward the liberal opponents of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati's updated morality clause for its schoolteachers. Candiotti played up how the "new contract now has a litany of thou-shall-nots, including no sex outside marriage; no in-vitro fertilization; no remarriage without an annulment; no homosexual 'lifestyle;' and no public support…

On Sunday, the Washington Post's Anthony Faiola spotlighted how Pope Francis is supposedly "the most old school of any pope since at least Paul VI" with regard to his consistent teaching on the Devil. Faiola underlined that "Francis has not only dwelled far more on Satan in sermons and speeches than his recent predecessors have, but also sought to rekindle the Devil's image as a supernatural…

Isn't a Satanic Mass at Harvard as national a news story as a potential Koran burning in Jacksonville? Just before the 9-11 anniversary in 2010, pastor Terry Jones – who they mocked for having a congregation of 30 even as they treated him as hugely influential – threatened to burn a Koran, drawing a major media uproar, even a TV question to the president. Catholic bloggers and CNSNews.com…

John Heilprin of the Associated Press played up how the Catholic Church supposedly "sought to limit its responsibility for the global priest sex abuse scandal" in front of a United Nations committee on torture. Heilprin repeatedly underlined how the Holy See underwent a "grilling" by the UN panel for allegedly violating an "international treaty against torture and inhuman treatment" in its…

Buyer beware those promising a “Catholic education.” St. Mary’s Institute (SMI) is the Catholic grade school in my wife’s New York hometown, Amsterdam. It is affiliated with St. Mary’s Catholic Church, whose pastor Father John Medwid pens the opening to the Saint Mary’s Institute annual newsletter.

ABC, CBS, and NBC spotlighted the issue of child sex abuse by priests on their Saturday morning and evening newscasts – twenty-four hours or less before the Catholic Church canonized Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. CBS and NBC both uncritically turned to the president of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), but didn't mention her controversial affiliations with prominent anti…

In a newly released annual audit of abuse by independent experts, it was reported that there were only ten contemporaneous abuse allegations made against priests even deemed "credible" in all of 2013 (out of some 40,000 active priests) and that the "fewest allegations and victims" ever were tabulated since annual reports were first compiled in 2004. This is obviously good news. But…