Some fresh Mark Shea for breakfast

Here's an excerpt of a long post that should be read in its entirety. A great defense of the Pope.

We are instructed (just as a pedophile priest might have told one of his victims) that our proper response to the media as Catholics ought to be gratitude for the massive eruption of unapologetic lies that have been told about Benedict over the past month because, you know, we depend on them as the mediators of truth and light, and we would live in darkness but for their ministrations. So yeah, even though they may have committed a few peccadilloes in the performance of their sacred duty, still it would be foul ingratitude for any Catholic to offer them anything but abject thanks for the debt we owe them in saving us. Indeed, we are to take it for granted that, with the sole exception of the fact that the MSM has pretty much gotten everything dead wrong in the whole "Benedict, the Nazi pope, protected perverts and endangered The Children" narrative it has ginned up for the past month, it mostly got everything right. On the other hand, those who question that narrative are "deflecting blame" and not taking that "searching and fearless inventory" of Benedict's wretched moral failings that the MSM are just about to discover after several false starts, lying headlines, and craptastic pieces of lousy reportage.

That much we talked about previously in this space.

But, nothing daunted by their ignorance and transparent malice, the MSM marches on in its war on Benedict, determined to get the Nazi pope, even if they have to completely throw aside all their journalistic ethics to do it.

Much of this is due to pride and vanity as much as to malice against Benedict and the Catholic Faith. When a journalista has documentably screwed up not just once but multiple times in his hysterical vendetta, he presses on, hoping that he can find some sort of dirt to prove that he is the brave crusading journalist and not a hack with a grudge who is afraid of looking stupid. So we keep getting a succession of dramatic "Ah-HA!" flourishes from the press, with the assurance that this time, for sure, they've nabbed the Nazi with the goods.