Newtown and Gosnell: A tale of two massacres

From: WashingtonExaminer.com

You might not know it, but there's a mass murder trial going on in Philadelphia. There has been plenty of courtroom drama, and the death penalty remains a possibility.

The media are seldom shy about such sensational affairs, but they have been with one. Perhaps it's because the accused mass murderer is an abortion doctor, who along with his medically untrained staff is accused of killing a female patient and several babies who had already been born, alive and breathing.

Doctor Kermit Gosnell's preferred method of killing these latter, according to witnesses, was to sever their spinal cords. Upon his arrest in January 2011, his urine-scented and blood-soaked clinic was deemed a "house of horrors." (I will spare readers further details, which are far worse.)

This trial's gruesome revelations are emerging at almost the same time as new details about the loathsome and cowardly murderer who killed his own mother and then 26 others at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., late last year.

Some will find the comparison inappropriate, but from a political perspective, Gosnell's trial is to abortion what Sandy Hook is to gun ownership.

Both are emotional cases with horrific details that cry out for public policy debates. And in each case, the debate pits public safety against something widely considered a constitutional right.

The two cases are different in that Sandy Hook received wall-to-wall coverage and thus facilitated a national conversation about mental health and gun control -- a debate whose outcome is yet to be determined.

Not so with the Gosnell trial, which has been completely blacked out by the media. The American people are now like a jury, shielded from relevant information because judges (read: editors) decided it might prejudice their views -- in this case, against lightly regulated abortionists.

Whatever one's position on gun control, the appropriately heavy coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre at least served a public purpose by starting a discussion about mass shootings.

At its most thoughtful, the debate considered what measures might have prevented the massacre and which could be squared with Americans' constitutional rights.

At its worst, the debate suffered from media cheerleading for panic gun control legislation -- as in, "pass something, anything!" -- including but not limited to such left-leaning figures as CNN's Piers Morgan.

In stark contrast, television coverage of Gosnell's trial has been "hard to find," as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan put it very charitably last Sunday on "Meet the Press."

In fact, not counting Noonan's allusion, Gosnell's case has not been mentioned even once on any of the three major networks in the last month (his trial began March 18).

It has received only seven mentions on cable television since it began, one on CNN and six on Fox News. In print, Gosnell's case has been largely ignored outside of local media outlets in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

It's not as though there isn't an obvious connection between the Gosnell case and public policy. Legislators in some states (including Pennsylvania and now Alabama) have acted since Gosnell's arrest to crack down on the next abortion quack.

The media have collectively and perhaps deliberately failed to draw the obvious connection between the two stories.

The month after Gosnell's arrest, Virginia's legislature approved new health and safety rules for abortion clinics on a nearly straight party-line vote in 2011.

Gov. Bob McDonnell, R, approved the new rules three months ago. Last week, amid Gosnell's trial, abortion rights groups unashamedly announced they had submitted thousands of comments in opposition. The state Board of Health is expected to hand down a final decision next week.

Many have asked what kind of law they could pass to prevent the next Newtown. Few are writing about how to prevent the next Kermit Gosnell.

Given the frequent claim that abortion is safer for being legal, and the eagerness of the abortion rights lobby to distance itself from Gosnell, why such incredible and inflexible resistance to basic safety regulations?

The gun lobby is often accused of resisting any new gun law as if it were the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. The liberal editors who are keeping Kermit Gosnell's case off the air should ask themselves whether they aren't taking sides in the culture war.

Or can public health, public safety and public debate be subordinated to the question of whose camel's nose is going under whose tent?

Philly 5th Grader Gets in Trouble, Searched in Front of Class,

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Rise of the Evangelical Catholic Bishops

From: National Review Online

When Pope Benedict XVI appointed the archbishop of Denver, Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.Cap., as the new archbishop of Philadelphia on July 19, the usual suspects were trotted out to say the usual things that the usual suspects say.

Thus David Clohessy of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, continued his nine-year rant against the Catholic Church by pronouncing Chaput’s record on abuse (which virtually everyone else finds admirable) “dismal.” But then David Clohessy would likely have found St. John Chrysostom, St. Charles Borromeo, or Chaput’s 19th-century predecessor in Philadelphia, St. John Neumann, “dismal,” because if you’re the New York Times’s go-to guy for anti-Catholic-hierarchy sexual-abuse soundbites, that’s what you say. As for Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., the former editor of America magazine made his own priorities rather clear in fretting to the Philadelphia Inquirer that Chaput would “be a real pain in the neck for the Democratic Party.” (Bob Casey the Less, you have been warned!)

Just about every story on the Chaput appointment identified the archbishop as a “conservative” (because he believes and teaches as true what the Catholic Church believes and teaches to be true); just about every story claimed that Chaput was a tough guy when it came to holding Catholic politicians accountable for their votes on abortion and the nature of marriage (while completely missing the fact that Chaput had consistently made genuinely public arguments, not uniquely Catholic theological claims, about the inalienable right to life and marriage rightly understood); and of course every story emphasized abuse, abuse, abuse (as if this were the only reality of Catholic life in America).

All of this is tiresome, if wholly predictable; both its tediousness and its predictability help explain why it’s the rare discerning reader who turns to the mainstream media for serious reportage about and analysis of the Catholic Church. In this case, however, the same-old-same-old also obscured what is truly important about the Chaput appointment — which is not the archbishop’s Potawatomi ancestry (interesting as that is) but his place as one of the most vigorous exponents of what might be called Evangelical Catholicism.

Archbishop Chaput put it best himself in an exclusive interview with Catholic News Agency: “The biggest challenge, not just in Philadelphia but everywhere, is to preach the Gospel. . . . We need to have confidence in the Gospel, we have to live it faithfully, and to live it without compromise and with great joy.”

That formulation — the Gospel without compromise, joyfully lived — captures the essence of the Evangelical Catholicism that is slowly but steadily replacing Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the United States. The usual suspects are living in an old Catholic paradigm: They’re stuck in the Counter-Reformation Church of institutional maintenance; they simply want an institution they can run with looser rules, closely aligned with the Democratic party on the political left — which is precisely why they’re of interest to their media megaphones.

Archbishop Chaput, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, and other rising leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States are operating out of a very different paradigm — and in doing so, they’re the true heirs of both the Second Vatican Council and Pope John Paul II.

The Council put the Gospel and its proclamation at the center of Catholic life. John Paul II, in his apostolic letter published at the end of the Great Jubilee of 2000, challenged the entire Church to leave the stagnant shallows of institutional maintenance and put out into the deep waters of post-modernity, preaching Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life. In his 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio [The Mission of the Redeemer], John Paul insisted that the Church doesn’t have a mission, as if “mission” were one among a dozen things the Catholic Church does. No, John Paul taught, the Church is a mission, such that everything and everyone in the Church ought to be measured by what the management types would call mission-effectiveness.

The old warhorses of the post–Vatican II debates, on either end of the Catholic spectrum, don’t get this; they’re still mud-wrestling within the old paradigm. But Archbishop Charles Chaput gets it, big time. That, and the effective work of his predecessor, Cardinal James Francis Stafford, is what has made the archdiocese of Denver what is arguably the model Evangelical Catholic diocese in the country: a Church brimming with excitement over the adventure of the Gospel, a Church attracting some of the sharpest young Catholics in America to its services, a Church fully engaged in public life while making genuinely public arguments about the first principles of democracy.

This is the vision that Archbishop Chaput is bringing to Philadelphia, and it has virtually nothing to do with “agendas” as the usual suspects understand agendas. Of course that vision includes addressing serious problems of sexual abuse. The old clericalism that protected perpetrators in various dioceses created serious legal problems for the institutional Church; but it was also, and even more importantly from an evangelical point of view, a terrible impediment to preaching the Gospel and attracting people to friendship with Jesus Christ. It’s his palpable commitment to the latter — to the project of unapologetic evangelism — that will give Archbishop Chaput credibility in cleaning up what needs cleaning up and in healing what can be healed in Philadelphia.