Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig’s (ESB) recent article on Pope Francis for The New Republic is receiving the critical pushback it deserves. Following last week’s posts which, inter alia, took ESB to task for castigating the Pope’s critics as fear-mongering reactionaries (see here and here), Professor Adam DeVille offered some hard hitting, but necessary, correctives over at Catholic World Report.
Now comes J. Arthur Bloom, an editor for both The Daily Caller and Front Porch Republic, to deliver what I hope amounts to a final blow against ESB’s sloppily composed, ill-researched article — one which has done little more than feed ongoing media myths concerning Francis, the papacy, and contemporary Catholicism. Bloom doesn’t hold back, and nor should he. For more than a year, orthodox Catholics have watched with understandable disappointment (if not horror) as the media has used its vast resources to craft a false narrative of Francis’s pontificate in order to set the stage for another liberal revolution within the Catholic Church. The fact secularists have engaged in these antics is understandable; to see a fellow Catholic engage in the same reckless behavior is lamentable. Bloom has done a great service for the truth, and I for one applaud him for it.
