AMERICAN MEDIA LOVES TO BASH CATHOLICS

Well, Holy Week is about as good a time as any to bring it up:

A campaign of hatred is being conducted against the Catholic Church in the United States, and much of the American media, where it is not condoning it, is deliberately covering it up.

Good for Cardinal John O'Connor for having the guts to say so.

"Columnists and editors who are censored for ethnic slurs or attacks on virtually any other people," the Cardinal writes in his archdiocesan paper, "can romp all over the place at the expense of Catholics who dare to publicly uphold their faith."

Triggering the Cardinal's rebuke was the press reaction to the anti-Catholic indignity at the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Now whatever one thinks of male sodomy and lesbianism, the traditional teaching of Catholicism on this score is well known.

That the mayor of New York would surrender his place at the head of that Irish parade, to march up Fifth Avenue in the company of men flaunting their perversions, was a deliberate affront to Roman Catholics comparable to men donning Nazi uniforms and waving swastikas in front of Jews celebrating a religious holiday.

"The gay groups' marshal," John Leo writes in U.S. News & World Report, "had a long string of pearls over a black motorcycle jacket, and his T-shirt read Queer Boy. He had a purple pansy in his ear." In cavorting with Queer Boy, David Dinkins showed an utter lack of respect for the Catholic families at that parade, and for the Church.

Though it is he who owes an apology to the Cardinal and the Catholics, the mayor is out posturing like some wounded moral hero for having been booed and jeered. And the press is supporting him.

New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen said the opposition to homosexuals parading on St. Paddy's Day confirms the stereotype of Irish as "antediluvian bigots." Newsday's Sydney Schanberg chides the Cardinal for a "failure to teach," wondering if his doctrinal allegiance was so strong he "cannot bring himself to feel love for those who are gay and lesbian." (Though the Catholic Church has done more for dying AIDS victims than the Gay Rights Movement ever thought of doing for dying Catholics, Cardinal O'Connor does not have the power to alter an iota of church teaching that sodomy is sinful.)

Why does the press side with the Catholic-bashers? Well, who are the press? In "Media Coverage of the Catholic Church," a new study done for the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Dr. S. Robert Lichter notes that only 1 to 2 percent of the national press are practicing Catholics.

Studying news reports from Time, CBS, The New York Times and Washington Post, Lichter finds a predictable pattern: "On most controversies involving Catholic teachings, the Church came out on the losing side of the issue debate reported in the media. ... These included heated controversies over birth control, clerical celibacy, the role of women and minorities in the Church, and its response to internal dissent and issues involving freedom of expression...

"The result was a long-running media drama that pitted a hidebound institutional hierarchy against reformers from within and without. ... Moreover, long-term trends ... have been unfavorable to the Church. Over time, official Church teachings were reported less frequently and were challenged more often when they did appear."

While dissidents like Charles Curran and Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen get friendly treatment, "The Church was overwhelmingly portrayed as an oppressive or authoritarian institution."

Among the reasons Catholicism is more reviled than ever is its refusal to endorse two of today's most fashionable social causes "Gay Rights" and "Reproductive Rights" where the media do not maintain even a pretense of neutrality.

Still, the press coverup of Catholic-bashing is remarkable.

The Right-to-Lifers of Operation Rescue have consistently been treated far more brutally by cops than civil rights demonstrators of 30 years ago, but their maltreatment is widely ignored.

And militants in the homosexual community no longer bother to disguise their hatred. In Los Angeles alone, six churches have been broken into or vandalized by homosexual extremists. One mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral was desecrated, with consecrated hosts spit on the floor and taken outside as trophies. In off-Broadway shows, and "gay" nightclubs, the figure of Jesus Christ is mocked in a manner rivaling the barbarians who sacked Rome. Transvestite "nuns" are popular features of gay parades. Not only do the media rarely condemn such hate crimes, it does not even cover them.

John Leo writes: "(A)n Act-Up attempt to shout down and drown out an ordination ceremony in Boston was described rather carefully in the Boston Globe as `colorful, loud and peaceful.' Readers were not told of the parody of the communion rite featuring condoms as hosts, the mocking of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as an endorsement of sodomy, the simulated anal and oral sex ... the level of harassment outside the church. Some of the Act-Up angries swarmed around one newly ordained young priest and his elderly mother, pelting them with condoms until police intervened and escorted them away."

Not since the days of the Know Nothings has anti-Catholic bigotry been so prevalent, so public, so popular. To the trendy bishops who worked so hard to make Catholicism "relevant" to our decadent age, a question: And what did it profit you?

But, then, Christians were warned long ago, were they not, that the "world will hate you."