The template in the Temple

Rachel Donadio is female NYT writer, book reviewer and Rome bureau chief. My guess is that she is an American Jew of Italian background. Not numerous, they do exist.   Not everyone is a fan, apparently. And with a 1996 Humanities degree from Yale, I can only assume she is steeped in the world of PoMo and "cultural studies" where all of Western history is a passion play of oppression about race, class and gender. To a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Since it is fitting on Good Friday that I somewhat defend former enemies, I found the opening lines of her piece of the Pope's Holy Thursday sermon typically cartoonish and wholly predictable, fitting the template people of her ilk use to inform the rest of us about the real world.

Several hundred Austrian clerics* recently published a manifesto calling for disobedience in order to effect the same kinds of changes in the Church that liberals have been calling for since the Sixties and which now characterize Western churches that are disappearing or breaking apart. They seem utterly unable to understand the meaning of the word "No".

The accompanying pic (probably not her doing) shows the vested, mitred and crosiered Pope, from the back, an isolated figure standing against a blurry mass of worshippers.

While she trots out the "God's Rotweiler" moniker, even the priests who are on the receiving end of the Pope's rebuke make it clear that his words were "not harsh" nor implied any "threat or sanction".  While it is unusual for him to make a direct confrontation in such a venue, only a fembot with an agenda could find Benedict's papal displeasure Rotweilerian.

While I'm at it, one of the structural ironies of our journalism system is that they reveal very little about themselves, in order to continue the charade of "objective" reporting. It dawned on me years ago, perhaps even prior to my migration to the Right, that when Dan Rather was going on, I had no idea about who he was other than the talking head on my screen. While reporters make much of their moral task as investigators, they are uncommonly unforthcoming when it comes to being investigated. Or perhaps they believe that because of their undoubted probity and intelligence, no one should bother asking, or if they do ask, the answers shouldn't make any difference.

With HT to my FB buddy Geoff Faustmann, this note from fellow Columbia grad Dennis Prager:

I grew up in New York, and I realized at a young age that, for all intents and purposes, I was living in a liberal Jewish ghetto. I rarely met non-Jews and do not recall ever meeting a conservative, Jew or non-Jew (certainly not at Columbia University).

I came to realize how insular New York City was. What really blew my mind was that liberal New Yorkers considered themselves among the most universal, cosmopolitan, worldly and intellectually open people in America.

Yet, these people socialized with, dined with, read, listened to and married people who agreed with them on virtually every significant issue of life. If the archetypical New York Jewish liberal, Woody Allen, had to spend a week alone in a small town in Idaho or Alabama, he would probably feel as if he had traveled in a time machine or been transported to a foreign culture.** He would feel much more at home in Oslo or Paris even if he didn’t speak a word of Norwegian or French.

It was one of the revelations of my early life that a Tennessee or Montana conservative was far more familiar with liberals and liberalism than a New York or Los Angeles liberal was with conservatives and conservatism.

*She is a Middlbury-educated speaker of French and Italian, but apparently not German. She mistranslates as Preachers' Initiative the term Pfarrer-Initiative. Pfarrer means "parish priest". The German for preacher is Prediger.
** Professor Stephen Bloom incarnates this type.