The mainstream media cherry-picks the pope’s words to suit their own agenda, said Catholic League president Bill Donahue on Tuesday, which explains why they completely silenced his most recent condemnation of abortion.
The Catholic League, a watchdog group that calls out anti-Catholic bias, had harsh words for the mainstream media’s apparent gag rule on the pope’s anti-abortion stance.
As Breitbart News reported Monday, Pope Francis condemned the ongoing violations of human rights, especially that unborn babies are denied the right to life through abortion, in his message Monday commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
“When fundamental rights are violated,” the pope told participants in an international conference celebrating the UDHR, “or when they are favored by some to the detriment of others, or when they are guaranteed only to certain groups, then serious injustices occur, which in turn fuel conflicts with heavy consequences both within of individual nations and in relations among them.”
“Among other things, I am thinking of the unborn children who are denied the right to come into the world,” he said.
According to the Catholic League, an address by Pope Francis to an international conference celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “wherein he highlights the rights of the unborn” would be top news, yet this is not the case.
“Not a single newspaper in the nation picked up the AP story on Pope Francis’ address,” wrote Mr. Donahue.
“What’s going on? Abortion. That’s what,” he said.
While the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion is common knowledge, he notes, “For the pope to give the rights of the unborn the prominence he did while celebrating an historic event—on a subject where there are dozens of other human rights that could have been mentioned” is big news by any standard.
In its release on the pope’s address, Donahue observes, “Vatican News listed 18 human rights that the Holy Father has spoken about in recent years” and yet at the top of the list it featured “The right to life, particularly of the unborn and the elderly.”
Because of their evident liberal bias, the mainstream media cover the pope assiduously on economic issues, Donahue notes, while on moral issues they are “dismissive,” since he skews in a conservative direction.
Something similar happened just last week, when the Catholic League again upbraided the mainstream media for their bizarre silence over the question of gay men in the priesthood.
In a new book-length interview, Pope Francis gives his most searing critique to date on the incompatibility of the priesthood and homosexuality, and yet the mainstream media completely ignored his statements, the Catholic League noted.
In his book, the pope said that a man with an ingrained homosexual tendency “should not be accepted into the ministry or consecrated life” since the priesthood “is not his place.” Same-sex attraction, the pope said, is “not just an expression of an affection. In consecrated and priestly life, there’s no room for that kind of affection.”
For those already ordained as priests who are practicing homosexuals, it would be better for them to leave the priesthood than to continue living a “double life,” Francis said.
Bill Donahue called the decision not to report on the pope’s words a “cover-up.”
“When it comes to reporting what Pope Francis says about sexuality, the reaction of the mainstream media is stunning. Whenever he says something they consider ill-liberal, they simply don’t report it,” Donahue said.
The pope’s sharp words on homosexuals in the priesthood do not fit the mainstream media narrative on this progressive pope, he noted, and so they simply pretend not to see them.
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