Cracking the code

Your blogstress finds herself dismayed this morning to find that the usually enlightened folks at Beliefnet.com have permitted the use of their fascinating site to promote scurrilous charges against your écrivane by William Donohue of the Catholic League.

While accusing Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of speaking in anti-Catholic code for noting, in William Pryor's confirmation hearing for a seat on the federal bench, the "fervent personal beliefs" of the Roman Catholic nominee on the subject of abortion, Donohue refers to your cyberscribe as "a leftist writer." Now, who's using code?

It sure would be news to the folks she worked with at the World Bank that your blogstress is a "leftist". (Your writer did the editorial work on a report that was used as the Bank's presentation to the U.N. conference on sustainable development that took place in Johannesburg, South Africa.)

Donohue also draws a disingenuous parallel between the use of the term "Rome" to denote the home of the Roman Catholic curia, and "Israel," the reclaimed homeland of a people nearly exterminated 60 years ago on the force of Europe's anti-semitism.

Your blogstress fails to understand just how her observation that Rome (as in the curia) must be smiling at the nomination of John Roberts to the High Court constitutes anything close to anti-Catholic bigotry. Judge Roberts appears to embrace the thinking of Church's most conservative prelates, who today stand at the pinnacle of ecclesiastical power. Why would they not smile at his nomination? American Catholics have long constituted an irritation to the curia; too inclined are we to place the dictates of our own consciences above commands issued by the Vatican.