October is the month we relish the high-point of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!
Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-Catholicism.
It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as "the
deepest bias in the history of the American people," while John Higham described it as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac
agitation in American history." "The anti-Semitism of the left," is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book
on the topic "the last acceptable prejudice."
If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:
On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish
community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse
in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny
minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency.
Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize "religious sensitivities," and no criticism was offered of the DA's
office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases "internally." Given the Catholic Church's own recent horrible experience, I am hardly
in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so, but I can criticize this kind of "selective outrage."

