NBC’s resident Catholic pundit Maria Shriver proclaimed on MSNBC on Wednesday afternoon that Pope Francis has now made it possible to enter a Catholic church without it being “kind of embarrassing.”
This is someone who might feel it “kind of embarrassing” that Grandpa had her Aunt Rosemary lobotomized, or that her movie-star husband had affairs (and a child) with the household help. She was telling all this to Brian Williams – the freshest embarrassment of NBC News.
I was talking to a priest just the day before yesterday and he said pointing to his collar, you know, two years ago people saw this on me and they thought I was a pedophile. Today, they see me and they come up and say “I love your pope. Give him a hug. I want to know more about him."
And I myself as a Catholic, you know, just two years ago, two and a half years ago. That's a very short time, it was kind of embarrassing to walk into your church. You had a lot of questions. You felt bad about what was going on. You felt bad they weren't responding to a lot of these allegations, doing anything about it. And now you have a man who has really changed that, stepped forward who has made changes, not only in the Vatican but all the way down to the kind of parish level.
This passage misrepresents the long-standing effort to address the sex-abuse scandals in the American church, starting with the first serious national media investigations in 2002. (Ask any of us who were finger-printed before we could teach religious education to Catholic children a decade ago.) The notion that the Vatican wasn’t “doing anything” or “responding to a lot of these allegations” of sex abuse before Francis isn’t accurate journalism, and even more objectionable coming from someone posing as a Catholic expert on the Catholic response.
Shriver seemed relieved in some sense because Francis is changing the “emphasis of dialogue” to liberal-pleasing issues like climate change and illegal immigration. She also sounded a note that they like the Pope more than the “institution” he was elected to lead:
And people tell me all the time that their parish priests are talking differently and they feel a sense of pride when they walk in the doors so I think that we're all going to be talking a lot about climate change and immigration. But I think if you stand back, what people will really be looking at is this is a model, this is a man in public life and we see so much of our institutions crumbling around us. And in our polling, people felt much more sympathetic and empathetic to him than they do to the institution of the church. He's managed to intrigue people with his language and his approach. And made people as I said earlier want to be better people and emulate as best they can in our democracy and a consumer capitalistic society to live maybe just a little bit more simply, to look at their fellow man, to be aware of you know, the struggles of the 99 Percent in this country.
As if Shriver with the plastic-surgery budget and her anchorman living in the Bloomberg Tower aren't the One Percent?
Williams, fresh from his own credibility crisis, replied, “Maria Shriver, thank you for putting it so well. There is a change, indeed, under way in the American Catholic Church after so many years of crisis. Most of it attributable to this one man.”
Earlier, she first hit the “embarrassed” liberal-Catholic theme, implying other popes have never seemed sincere or humble or strong in conviction:
SHRIVER: I think when you said he didn't kind of scold this morning, this is a person who has shifted the emphasis of dialogue in the Catholic Church. He’s made people who two years ago were embarrassed to walk into a Catholic church feel proud to come into this church. They understand that this is a person who speaks from the heart, who speaks from his own convictions, who is simple in character, who is loving, who is compassionate. And who is a kind of person that is modeling what I think a lot of people male and female want to be in their own lives. He has this kind of air of freedom about him, like ‘This is what I think, this is what I feel, I'm not running for office. I'm not doing a debate. This is what I think is the right thing to do’ and I think there is a lot of freedom with that.
WILLIAMS: Well, Maria, there you have it. It's the people who are looking at their own church differently and taking pride in their church because of this new pope. And people who so admire his vow of poverty and simplicity. All the trappings that we have seen before -- helicopters, red shoes, very elegant robes and vestments. Very elegant living conditions in some cases. That's all gone and at the parish level and at the diocese level, we have seen a similar change in the United States in Catholic churches all across this country.
Again, the networks are throwing Pope Benedict under the bus for having a personal attachment to wearing "very elegant" things like red shoes, as if he spent any church money on these items (they were donated, just like fashionistas donate outfits to the First Lady.) We know no one in the media slights the Obamas for having "very elegant" tastes in outfits or vacations.
