Melanie Phillips Accepted Media Lies on the Catholic Church

I was very disappointed with Melanie Phillips on the BBC's Question Time the other night (see video above).

Her answer to the question - interestingly coming from a supposed woman with the voice of a man, a man pretending to be a woman hypocritically pointing the finger at the Catholic Church's alleged behaviour of preaching something and doing something else, a bit like a man trying to pass for a woman I suppose - about Scottish Cardinal Keith O'Brien who recently apologized for "sexual conduct" unbefitting a priest and said that he would play no further role in the public life of the Catholic Church.

The so-called Church abuse scandal is a subject which is not within Phillips' expertise. There is nothing about it in her latest book The World Turned Upside Down (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK) , which covers topics of religion, morality and the modern world, of which this issue has recently been a relevant part.

I suppose Melanie Phillips does not write on things she does not know anything, or enough, about. But on Question Time she did not have the luxury of choice. She was put on the spot and she had to give a reply.

But I think that a better answer would have been to profess her ignorance of the subject.

Instead, her ignorance was revealed by the fact that she repeated the media's favourite inanity about the Catholic Church's celibacy being a contributing factor to the problem.

As far back as 2003, lesbian and former feminist activist Tammy Bruce, in her book The Death of Right and Wrong (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK) , condemned the hypocrisy of her ex-colleagues in the feminist movement, who were accusing the Church of being the cause of paedophile behaviour in its clergymen by not permitting them to marry.

Many of these feminists had been working in rape cases, Bruce said, so they knew very well that sexual abstinence is hardly ever a factor in sex crimes.

The typical profile of the sex offender of any kind is a man who is married or has a girlfriend.

The old-fashioned, Freudian view that there is a libido which must find its outlet is discredited. Psychoanalysis is a false, rejected theory. Freudian concepts like "sublimation" are not accepted any more and I was surprised to hear Phillips using it.

If celibacy were indeed a contributing factor, we would see a lower incidence of these sex abuses among other religions' or Christian denominations' clergy who are not bound to celibacy.

But this, despite the media's almost exclusive attention on, not to say obsession with, the Catholic Church's problems with this issue - obsession that included reporting these events on front pages much, much more often than the new developments warranted -, is not the case.

The rates of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church were in the past the same or even lower than those in other Christian churches, in other religions and in other institutions like schools and children’s homes, as shown by a U.S. Department of Education's extensive study. Now, due to the fact the the Catholic Church is the only one who confronted and effectively dealt with this issue, those rates are much lower.

So, the celibacy causal theory is empirically disproved by the evidence.

Tammy Bruce wrote:

In the world as defined by the leaders of the Left Elite:
... Taking vows, claiming to represent God, and then molesting adolescent boys is the fault of “the Church,” not of the reprehensible gay men who betray their vows, their church, and their community.

This is in clear letters, by a woman who is herself homosexual, exactly the point of the whole "Catholic Church sex abuse": the perpetrators were not acting like Catholic priests, they were acting like homosexuals.

The whole debate over this has been turned upside down not to offend homosexual sensitivities. Nobody cares about Catholic sensitivies, so that was fine.

Reality has been turned outside down, and it is odd how Melanie Phillips' latest book not only has the title "The World Turned Upside Down", but also deals with the many cases in which the Leftist ideology which dominates the West overturns reality, exactly like in this case concerning the Church.

What shocked me was how Phillips passively believed and repeated all the nonsense peddled by the media on this subject.

After having denounced media reporting on Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians which grossly distorts reality, Phillips more than anyone should know from first-hand experience (being a Jew with a passion for Israel) that the media portraying of highly politically sensitive issues cannot be trusted.

The mainstream media are politically overwhelmingly on the Left and, in the way they are prejudiced against Israel, they are also, and even more, prejudiced against the Catholic Church.

How could she have missed that? I believe that, if someone, in repeating the media distortions and even outright lies, had treated Israel as badly as she did the Catholic Church the other night, she would have accused this someone of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism.