“For decades it was common practice in the church not to involve law enforcement in sexual abuse cases.” Thus does the Times give the impression that outside the Catholic Church, secular and religious organizations typically called the cops when they learned of abuse cases by employees. This is pure, unadulterated bunk. The rule, not the exception, was to deal with such matters internally.

Only recently have there been any laws mandating that the authorities be notified. What really takes chutzpah is the fact that the New York Times did not endorse a bill last year in New York State which would have treated public institutions the same way it would have treated private institutions in dealing with sex abuse.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s—the very period when the vast majority of cases of priestly sexual molestation took place—the prevailing zeitgeist was to rehabilitate and renew. Had the Church dealt punitively right off the bat with alleged offenders, it would have been branded heartless and un-Christian at the time. How perverse it is, then, that those who sold us the  idea that every malady could be cured by rehabilitation are now the very ones condemning the Catholic Church for following their prescription. That they are selectively doing so is all the more infuriating.

Anyone who thinks this twisted thinking is confined to the New York Times isn’t keeping up with liberal sentiment on this issue. It’s the norm.

Contact NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt: public@nytimes.com

A grant for three milking cows for Rosarian Sisters in Kerala, southern India, is among a long and varied list of grants announced this month by ACN.

The cows will enable the contemplative Sisters at St. Teresa’s Convent, Trivandrum, to retail milk and other dairy products to help fund the care of elderly nuns who are sick or bed-ridden.

The Rosarian Order’s provincial superior, Sr. Lissy Tresa, wrote to ACN: “We solely depend on your generosity… We assure you of our daily prayers in a special way.”

Funds for the cows are among a series of aid payments from ACN this month, with a number of grants for communities of Sisters, especially in Eastern Europe.

These include assistance for sick and elderly nuns in Poland and Belarus and support for Sisters in the Archdiocese of Moscow, Russia, and others doing pastoral work in the Diocese of Kiev, Ukraine.

In many of the former Communist countries, ACN’s help is vital to strengthen a Church that was suppressed by the authorities for generations.

The charity is also helping the Evangelizing Sisters of Mary in Kenya work to towards being self-sufficient, as well as supporting their novices.

ACN is also supporting more than a dozen Church building projects worldwide.

These include help to enable Kenya’s Diocese of Bissau to finish building a chapel, as well as help for repairs on the Conception Nuns’ convent chapel in Bolivia and four other chapels in Ethiopia.

Other projects include formation for priests and seminarians in countries including Poland and Mexico, new transportation to help priests reach far flung parts of their parishes in Ghana and Belarus, and water pumps for a parish in Senegal.

In his letter to ACN, he writes about the attack on January 17th, 2010, “in which over one hundred persons have been reportedly killed followed by an early morning raid which occurred on March 7th in the villages of Dogon Nahawa, Ratsat and Zot Foron, some 15 kilometers south of the city of Jos.”

“The villagers of the Berom ethnic group (mainly Christians) alleged that their attackers were Fulani Muslim herdsmen who swooped on them while they slept. The attack which lasted more than two hours began at about 2:30 am and the victims were completely unprepared for the fury of the marauders.”

The Holy Mass will be said tomorrow, on the 19th of March 2010, at St. Jarlath’s Parish Church Bukuru, where clashes resulted in the physical destruction of lives and properties.

To show the importance of this common prayer for peace in the region of Jos, his Eminence Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson who has officially taken over from Cardinal Renato Martino as the President of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, will preside at the Mass.

The Archbishop of Jos hopes that this common prayer by so many will also bring comfort to those who were affected by this tragedy. He appreciates the support, which the Archdiocese of Jos is receiving from other dioceses of Nigeria and international church agencies.

He wrote: “Our Justice, Peace and Caritas Department has already attempted to attend to some food, medical and clothing needs of the many thousands who were displaced (Muslims, Christians and others).”

In the chapel of Aid to the Church in Need’s International headquarters in Königstein, Germany, Mass will be said at 8.00 a.m., in a gesture of solidarity and compassion with these suffering in Jos. All are invited to join in pray for the victims and their families.

Anyone seeking to know the position of a newspaper on any given issue would be well advised to consult the editorial page. Anyone seeking to know the position of a labor union on any given issue would be well advised to consult what union officials say. Anyone seeking to know the position of the Catholic Church in the U.S. on any given issue would be well advised to consult the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The fact that some reporters, union members or Catholics disagree with some of the positions taken by the editors, officials or bishops is interesting, but changes nothing.

This needs to be said as media outlets are now trying to cast the bishops as one voice among many in the Catholic community. Of course, adding to the confusion are fraudulent Catholic groups like Catholics United, a front for its benefactor, George Soros; the National Catholic Reporter, a newspaper known mostly for its rejection of Catholic teachings on sexuality; groups like NETWORK, a Catholic organization whose founder Sister Marjorie Tuite was threatened with expulsion from her order because of her aggressive pro-abortion position; and an array of dissident nuns. Previously, Donna Quinn, the co-director of the National Coalition of American Nuns, signed a statement demanding abortion coverage in the health care bill.

All of this started when a nun who heads the Catholic Health Association (CHA) said she liked the Obama bill. It quickly metastasized into something so bizarre that we now have a liberal Catholic, E.J. Dionne, wondering why the bishops are undermining the CHA!

The Catholic League stands with the USCCB, Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, Archbishop Charles Chaput, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, and all those Catholics who truly oppose abortion and refuse to compromise Church teachings.

Of course, that soapbox must be provided first. So who would give this naked man a fig leaf of respectability? The Washington Post would.

The Posties awarded Raines their marquee venue – the Sunday Outlook section — to denounce Fox News Channel and its owner Rupert Murdoch. Announcing this was tugging at his “professional conscience” (thus suggesting he has one), Raines demanded to know “Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team?”

What has Murdoch done to break with the “team” of American media? Raines lamented his “blatant political alliances started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher’s political career.” No! But wait, this one’s even more rich; he also declared “For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party.”

Raines expects people to believe you can say “news media” and “Barack Obama” and not think “blatant political alliance.” On Sunday, his New York Times published a half-page “photo illustration” of Obama’s head at the center of a cross, surrounded by a halo glow of white light.

But let’s continue. Raines then indicted Fox News president Roger Ailes. “Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.”

After sentences like that, conservatives have to put the paper down. The laughter is beginning to deprive oxygen to the lungs.

Raines cannot be serious, and he isn’t. This article makes much more sense if you read it in Raines Code. What he’s saying is this: the “old-school news organizations” are the exclusive venue for liberals, and liberal activism. Who let these fair-and-balanced pretenders in here to create the “news” differently? He charged that Ailes has torn up “the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.”

Raines Code translation: Damn you, Ailes. You broke us.

Do the liberal media remember civil rights and Watergate and Vietnam as events they covered with objectivity? Do they deny (and deny warmly recalling) how their passionate advocacy defeated segregationism, militarism, and Richard Nixon?

Even when he’s so dishonestly trying to wrap himself in an objectivity blanket, Raines still can’t help but spew his leftist opinion. His liberal-media team “bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality.”

The media are, in his view, dynamic activists in the Hope and Change business. He is outraged that Fox News has stalled health “reform.” In his Orwellian Raines Code, liberal bias is objectivity, and the refusal to banish Fox News from the media is surrendering “the sword of verifiable reportage.”

It’s certainly not “verifiable reportage” to insist the media haven’t been partisan in 100 years, or that Fox News is currently conducting an anti-presidential “campaign without precedent in our modern political history.” Decrying president-bashing sounds a little tinny from a man who viciously charged after Hurricane Katrina that President Bush protected Big Oil “while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die in foreign deserts.”

The most important rebuttal to Raines is this. In a free country – which America still is, barely, despite the designs of liberals – media elitists do not get to decide who is allowed to report, and who is banished from the briefing room. They don’t get to select a unanimous liberal “team” and a rigidly liberal “rulebook.”

Fox News exists. It can’t be legislated away by Nancy Pelosi, and it can’t be wished away by Howell Raines. It’s popular with millions of Americans who’ve spent their entire lives being pelted by the mudslinging of the Fox-hating media “team.”

Poor Howell Raines. His New York Times is crumbling while the Fox News Channel was just named the most trusted news network in America by the public. Those…peasants!

Once upon a time there was a homosexual priest who was accused of molesting boys in Germany. That was 30 years ago. At the approval of Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger (now the pope), he was sent away for therapy and was later reinstated; years later, under a new archbishop, there was another incident and more therapy.

We know this because the New York Times (which does not like to report on molesting rabbis in 2010), told us about this on Saturday in a front-page article. Today, it ran a front-page article on the same story. Was there any difference? Yes. On Saturday, the Times was only able to identify the priest as bearing the initial “H.” Today, it has real news: his name is Hullermann. And now “H” has been suspended.

Was it wrong to send abusers to therapy? Is it wrong today? The Times does not say. While it is painfully obvious that psychologists and psychiatrists have oversold their competency in treating abusers, it has long been considered to be both scientifically and ethically sound. It still is. Perhaps that view is unwarranted, but it is flatly unfair to cherry pick Catholic decision-makers for indictment when therapy fails.

The Times also wrote today that when the pope was Cardinal Ratzinger under Pope John Paul II, he was “in charge of reviewing sexual abuse cases for the Vatican.” In doing so, the Times leaves the impression that Ratzinger was in charge of overseeing these cases when the scandal developed. Nonsense. The Times reported on January 9, 2002 that he had just been appointed to this role. Thus, he had nothing to do with this issue at the time when most of the abuse took place (mid-60s to mid-80s).

The Times has a vested ideological interest in keeping this story alive. To say it dislikes Pope Benedict XVI intensely is an understatement.

Newsweek’s Sarah Kliff proclaimed: “One hundred thousand people have watched Angie Jackson’s abortion. Late last month, Jackson posted a video of herself to YouTube, recorded after she took RU-486, a medication used to end pregnancies.” Kliff asked only “why shame remains” about the act of killing one’s baby. Jackson was honored for her courage in “demystifying” and “destigmatizing” the procedure: “We need 10,000 more of her,” proclaimed Peg Johnston, chair of something called the Abortion Care Network. This desire for 10,000 more unashamed abortions is what “pro-choice” is all about.

Overall, this was just another classic tale from the “news” magazine that lamented 20 years ago that “Sadly, many home [abortion] remedies could damage a fetus instead of kill it.” What about the pro-life side?

Newsweek devoted just one sentence to Silent No More, a website where women tell a different abortion story, and now speak publicly of their shame and regret. But women are increasingly coming forward everywhere, just like the original “Jane Roe,” Norma McCorvey, publicly admitting the horror of their actions, genuinely penitent – and genuinely forgiven. But their stories aren’t deemed “newsworthy.”

CNN interviewed Angie Jackson on the morning of March 8, and they were explicit in rejecting any notion that Jackson deserved a rebuttal. Anchor Kyra Phillips declared after the interview that “as you can imagine, we received a lot of response about even doing this story because abortion is such a controversial issue, and we really didn’t want to get into a debate about abortion, but rather, look at what people are doing now, using social networking.”

That’s a unique concept: abortion is so controversial that we feel it’s best to only let one side talk, the side that’s taking a child’s life on camera.

CNN claims these days that they are the sober and neutral center between MSNBC and Fox News, but there was nothing neutral about their sympathy for Angie Jackson. Phillips rushed to proclaim that the most savage part of Jackson’s abortion was the pro-lifer comments.

“These are really harsh,” the anchor warned. “But people wrote in and said – they called you all kinds of names, from being a whore to someone who just couldn’t keep her legs closed. They called you a baby killer. I mean, it’s even hard for me to say these things because some of those- the e-mails and the responses were so brutal.”

As brutal as an abortion? Worse than that, Phillips never acknowledged that pro-lifers most certainly filled Twitter (and the heavens) with their hopes and prayers for her. CNN cannot deny those e-mails were there.

CNN also showed some of Jackson’s horrific YouTube video, where she admitted that her baby had the “potential” for life, “but it [it!] was more likely to kill me, and you’re not going to shame me….I do not feel sorry that I saved my life. I do not feel sorry that I stayed here for myself, for my boyfriend, for my kid that I’ve already got.”

CNN didn’t define that sentiment – or lack of it – as “really harsh.” CNN never told their viewers that Jackson’s nom de plume on Twitter is “Anti-Theist Angie.” Nor did CNN consider the “brutal” contents of Jackson’s Twitter page to be worth commentary. Here are some examples of statements Jackson “retweeted” as worthy comments about Jesus after she popped up on CNN:

“Who would Jesus do? He’d totally do Anti-Theist Angie just to prove a point to those who sully his/her name.”

And: “Where would Jesus donate? To science-based education, and better abortion techniques!”

And: “Jesus hates the little women, all the women of the world.”

To their credit, when ABC’s “World News” hyped this story on February 28, they at least allowed conservative Cathy Ruse of the Family Research Council to declare “Your heart breaks for this woman. And I hope that it doesn’t encourage, I hope that what she’s doing won’t encourage others to take this path.” ABC’s online story also allowed a few paragraphs of pro-life argument.

ABC weekend anchor Dan Harris noted Jackson was an “outspoken atheist,” and quoted her saying “I hope everybody on YouTube has a great and godless day. Peace.”

Jackson said she was four weeks pregnant when she aborted her child. The technology now exists to see just about every human feature – eyes, hands, feet, even the human nipple – on a “fetus” one inch in size, and only two weeks older. Peace.

Even as Catholic Relief Services continues to deliver relief supplies to the Haitian people, our staff is working on long-term recovery plans for this country, which was devastated by the January 12 earthquake that killed over 200,000.

“We are working with the Haitian people now and will be for years to come,” says CRS President Ken Hackett. “Our fundraising for Haiti has passed the $90-million mark. We are grateful for such generosity, and our donors should know that we will spend all of this money, and much more, helping the people of this devastated country.”

Emergency Recovery in Three Phases

Annemarie Reilly, CRS’ vice president for overseas operations, explained that planning focuses on three phases—the acute relief effort that is ongoing, an intermediate transitional phase that will last most of 2010, and a longer-term recovery phase that will last several years. In practice, there will be a fair amount of overlap among the phases.

“When an acute disaster like an earthquake strikes, you respond as quickly as you can with immediate lifesaving activities to alleviate suffering and protect human dignity,” Reilly says. “But this is a relatively short phase, and as we move into the recovery phase, we need to make sure we are thinking along with our Haitian partners about how what we are doing lays a foundation for longer-term sustainability and the rebuilding of livelihoods.”

As the rainy season approaches, the focus of CRS’ relief effort is moving from food—CRS has fed some 600,000 people—to transitional shelter. Many Port-au-Prince residents, their homes either destroyed or unstable, are living beneath sheets and curtains that provide no protection against inclement weather.

CRS has distributed emergency shelter kits—two waterproof tarpaulins, 80 nails, 100 feet of rope, and one rubber inner tube—to 12,000 families. The material will be used to construct temporary structures that should give 60,000 people protection from the rain. The inner tube is cut into squares that reinforce tarps at the points where they’re fastened to frames by nails.

Plans call for distributing several thousand more of these kits plus a second wave of emergency shelter materials—woolen blankets, bedsheets and insecticide-treated mosquito nets—in the coming weeks.

Shelter Challenges

CRS personnel recognize that such shelters are really temporary, good only for a month or so at most. So plans are being drawn up for transitional shelters: small, sturdy houses that can be used by families for several months while the capital city is being reconstructed.

The challenges in providing transitional housing are many—from designing a structure that is not too costly but still strong enough to withstand hurricanes, to finding a source for lumber (Haiti is heavily deforested). Building material also has to fit conditions in Haiti. For instance, a roof made from a single piece of metal that would be fine in another locale could turn into a deadly projectile during hurricanes, which are common in Haiti.

But the main challenge is finding a place to build the houses. The Haitian government is working to identify sites both in Port-au-Prince and in the surrounding areas that then must be cleared and prepared with proper drainage and sanitation measures before construction can begin. The desires of Haitians—many of whom want to remain near their current homes and employment—must be a major part of any decision.

Income, Health and Safety

Markets are reappearing throughout Port-au-Prince and other areas affected by the earthquake, often out on the streets in front of destroyed buildings. With food coming into the city—from the countryside, from the Dominican Republic, from other sources—CRS does not want to disrupt markets with too many additional food distributions. The challenge is to see that people have money to shop in the markets, so the focus now is on cash-for-work projects that pay people to clear rubble and help with other activities.

CRS is supporting the employment of scores of Haitians to clean out one of the main canals in Port-au-Prince, which became cluttered with rubble and other trash in the weeks after the quake. The canal needs to be cleared both to help restore sanitation and to avoid flooding when the heavy rains come.

Providing decent health care remains an ongoing challenge. Teams from the University of Maryland continue to rotate in and out of the St. Francois de Sales Hospital. CRS helped to get the hospital up and running in the days after the earthquake though most of its buildings were destroyed. Now operation of St. Francois—taking place mainly under tents—must be moved to another site so the destroyed buildings can be cleared and plans for reconstruction can be drawn up. CRS is looking for a site suitable for patients and hospital equipment so that this crucial health care facility can continue to provide its lifesaving services without interruption.

Life in the impromptu camps that now house tens of thousands of Haitians also comes with health risks. CRS is employing a number of measures to get information about proper hygiene to displaced people, including hiring a famous Haitian street artist who paints health and hygiene messages on public walls around Port-au-Prince.

Another ongoing concern is the safety and security of children. Even as CRS sets up safe spaces for children in the camps, we are working with the many orphanages we supported before the earthquake, assessing their needs as they return to providing care. Plans call for continued work to ensure the safety of children—including reuniting those separated from their families as the transitional housing communities are set up.

Michael Hill is CRS’ communications officer for sub-Saharan Africa. He is based at the agency’s headquarters in Baltimore.

According to The Australian, “dozens of bodies lined the streets” of three Christian villages in northern Nigeria. “Other victims of the weekend’s Muslim fury jammed a local morgue, the limbs of slaughtered children tangled in a grotesque mess.” Children were scalped, “most had severed hands and feet,” and “officials estimate that 500 people were massacred in night-time raids by rampaging Muslim gangs.” According to one eyewitness media account, “They then set homes on fire and attacked men, women and children. Many were decapitated.”

Now here is how CNN is reporting the story. “Gangs of machete-wielding Muslims have been blamed for the weekend slaughter of hundreds of Christian villagers in Nigeria, but analysts say it would be wrong to assume the conflict was rooted in religion.” Of course: When Muslims massacre Christians, religion never has anything to do with it.

“Some analysts,” the story continues, “believe the weekend slaughter was a revenge attack for the killing of around 150 members of the Hausa Muslim community by Christian mobs in Kuru Karama south of Jos, in January 2010.” Well, let’s see. Back in January, a U.N. media outlet reported that Muslim and Christian leaders in Kuru Karama, a predominantly Muslim village, “met to make a pact with the police to defend any attacks by outsiders.” But guess what happened? “Several hours later youths armed with machetes attacked the village.” And we know who likes machetes.

Back to CNN. It cited an ugly Muslim-Christian incident in 2001 in the same area. What started the Muslim massacre back then? “A Christian woman had tried to cross the road through a group of Muslims during Friday prayers.” Yeah, that’ll do it every time.

It’s time to stop viewing Muslim-Christian violence through the lens of moral equivalency.

In its ruling, the Court adopted the Becket Fund’s argument for the Pledge’s constitutionality, in particular the idea that Congress’s purpose in enacting the Pledge was “to underscore the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers that God granted certain inalienable rights to the people which the government cannot take away.” This is in contrast to the “ceremonial deism” argument—namely, the idea that the words “under God,” through years of rote repetition, have lost any meaning—made by the federal and local governments in the case.

The Court also focused on the fact that because saying the Pledge is voluntary—something affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1943—the Plaintiffs are attempting to suppress the speech of others: “What is at issue is not saying the Pledge or affirming a belief in God. What is at issue is whether Roechild [Dr. Newdow’s anonymous client] can prevent other students, who have no such objection, from saying the Pledge.”

“The Ninth Circuit finally stood up for the Pledge,” said Kevin J. “Seamus” Hasson, who argued the case to the Ninth Circuit for the Becket Fund. “The Court has just said what was self-evident to Thomas Jefferson and the signers of our Declaration of Independence in 1776 – our rights are unalienable precisely because they come not from the State, but from the Creator.”

The Becket Fund intervened in the case on behalf of the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal organization that spearheaded the effort to add “under God” to the Pledge 55 years ago; children enrolled in Sacramento-area public schools and who want to keep saying the Pledge of Allegiance complete with the words “under God”; and their parents. The Becket Fund also intervened in a similar case brought by Dr. Newdow in Hanover, New Hampshire, that is now pending before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt dissented from the three-judge ruling. As part of his dissent, Judge Reinhardt took pains to describe the history of the Knights of Columbus’ involvement with ensuring the place of “one nation under God” in the Pledge.