Mo Do Watch

Kathryn Lopez over at NR reviews Maureen Dowd's latest column. I was not aware of anyone who reads Mo Do anymore but I am glad to see that someone is keeping an eye on Maureen's slide. No one wants to watch a talented woman become a bitter, middle-aged spinster but someone has to do it.

Yips! from Robbo: Someone else is keeping an eye on her as well. Take it away, Archbishop Dolan!

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan has condemned The New York Times -- blasting the Gray Lady and its columnist Maureen Dowd for what he says are examples of unfair, prejudicial and just downright mean anti-Catholicism.

Dolan used his blog last Thursday on the Archdiocese of New York's Web site to rail against the Times a day after the paper refused to print his critique as an op-ed piece.

He singled out Dowd -- a poison-penned, Pulitzer winner and former Catholic-school girl -- for "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe" she wrote on Oct. 25, which "rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American religious issue."

"She digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans."

Dowd's column, which zinged the Vatican for "two inquisitions" into nuns who eschew "old-fashioned habits and convents," was only the latest Times piece to spin Dolan's skullcap.

"It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime," Dolan wrote. "

I was recently traveling with a colleague, a very p.c. person who wasted no time in telling me of all the things and people out there she found offensive for a variety of reasons. I couldn't help thinking to myself that until she has tried to live as an orthodox Christian in this day and age - and even worse, as a Catholic - she can't begin to understand cultural offensiveness.

Of course, if I had brought up the point, she certainly would not have sympathized, but instead would have branded me as a nut, a nazi, a close-minded bigot and probably a closet pedophile as well. Instead, I simply smiled and, as it were, turned the other cheek.