MSNBC’s religion-bashing host Lawrence O’Donnell savaged the Catholic Bishop of Peoria, Daniel Jenky, on Thursday night’s program for having the utter gall and audacity to make comparisons between that secular saint President Obama and church-oppressing dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He left out that the bishop also mentioned Clemenceau, Bismarck, Hollywood, and the news media. (The whole homily is here.) He also left out his MSNBC colleague Martin Bashir comparing Rick Santorum to Stalin.
After he declared his outrage for several minutes, O’Donnell turned to “silenced” radical Sister Jeanine Gramick, who very calmly stated that actually, the Pope and his officials at the Vatican are the ones who are “very totalitarian.” O’Donnell did not react in utter disbelief that she would compare Pope Benedict to Hitler and Stalin. He just nodded along.
O'Donnell underlined his shock to his other leftist guest, Jeff Stone of the gay lobby “Dignity USA,” almost fading from the vapors as he said, "Jeff Stone, a Bishop standing in a pulpit, in a mass in this country, comparing President Barack Obama to Hitler and Stalin, how could that possibly happen?"
Right after Stone said “I think people need to be very careful about throwing around Hitler comparisons,” off came the gloves:
O'DONNELL: Sister Jeannine Gramick, what do you make of the Vatican’s reaction to American nuns?
GRAMICK: Well, may I comment on the --
O'DONNELL: Please.
GRAMICK: -- the statement that the bishop made comparing President Obama with Hitler or Stalin. I think that bishops need to be very careful about making comparisons that are totalitarian. Because there`s been much criticism, justifiable criticism, that the government of the Catholic Church is very totalitarian.
And that is what we're seeing now with the Vatican trying to control - - that's what it really is, control the women religious in the United States. I think basically we women come from a different conception of church from the Vatican.
We are -- we are following what Vatican II, the Second Vatican Council in the Catholic Church, which was in the 1960s, talked about the church as a community. And in a community, people disagree. But in a totalitarian institution, there is no disagreement. And so this is the clash that we`re seeing.
As usual, liberals applaud themselves as the forces of openness and dissent, and conservatives are totalitarians. In fact, Jeannine Gramick’s “nuns” group also called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney over the Iraq War. They act like any other group of radical leftists. O’Donnell asked Gramick to explain how she was "silenced" (as she was speaking on MSNBC) and then kept rolling with the “totalitarian Vatican” line:
O'DONNELL: Jeff Stone, it certainly sounds like a totalitarian dictate to --
STONE: Yeah, it does, Lawrence. And it's ironic because the highest law of the Catholic Church is the law of conscience. And Pope Benedict himself has spoken eloquently about it. You know, even -- if you find your conscience is in disagreement even with the words of the Pope, you are obligated in your conscience to follow your conscience.
Liberals seem to forget entirely that the Catholic Church is a membership institution that you can join or quit. You can't be "oppressed" in America by the Catholic Church. Larry O'Donnell knows that you can't start a chapter of the National Organization for Women and then "dissent" from them on feminist issues. (Ask the Dulles Area chapter.) But he wouldn't call NOW "totalitarian" for insisting that NOW chapters follow NOW orthodoxy.
Before he turned to the guests, O'Donnell unloaded not only on Bishop Jenky, but on Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for beginning a campaign targeting advertisers of The Daily Show over Jon Stewart's offensive crotch-Nativity gag. Somehow, the Catholic League -- and not Stone's or Gramick's pseudo-Catholic outfits -- was a "fraudulent" operator:
The Catholic League has absolutely no official affiliation with that other thing you`ve heard of, the Catholic Church. It is run by a fraudulent operator, who is a divorced man, which is the kind of thing that used to get you excommunicated in the Catholic Church. Jon Stewart's reputation will be unaffected by that sort of nonsense.
PS: The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation applauded the segment defaming the Vatican: "GLAAD was able to work with Jeff Stone in preparation for the MSNBC report. As a leader in Dignity, USA, Stone was in a perfect position to articulate the disparity between the words and actions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and everyday Catholic people."
