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It’s Like Freaking Clockwork!

Me, in this space 24 hours ago: Imagine that: the Vatican expecting Roman Catholic nuns to teach Roman Catholicism. Will those crazy old men of the Vatican stop at nothing? I hope you’re happy, Vatican! Now poor Mrs. Dowd’s daughter Maureen has to stay up late to rehash the same old crap write her next column. Maureen […]

Me, in this space 24 hours ago:

Imagine that: the Vatican expecting Roman Catholic nuns to teach Roman Catholicism. Will those crazy old men of the Vatican stop at nothing? I hope you’re happy, Vatican! Now poor Mrs. Dowd’s daughter Maureen has to stay up late to rehash the same old crap write her next column.

Maureen Dowd, in a column published online tonight:

It’s hard to say what is weirder:

A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.”

Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon.com’s best-seller list six years after it was published.

Just the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push American nuns — and all Catholic women — back into moldy subservience.

Well, given the almost liturgical quality of everything Maureen Dowd writes about the Catholic Church, I’d say she’s one Catholic woman who is quite familiar with moldy subservience to inflexible dogma.

Of the last 12 columns Maureen Dowd has written four of them — one third — have had to do directly with the Roman Catholic Church. Here’s what they’ve been about:

April 28: Bad bishops are bullying nuns.

May 19: The Catholic Church leadership is closed-minded and bigoted.

May 22: The crazy bishops want to put women in “chastity belts.”

June 5: The Catholic Church is bullying the pro-masturbation Sister Farley.

Ross Douthat, who, unlike Maureen Dowd, is a serious and thoughtful Catholic, writes half as often — once a week, to her twice a week — but do you know when the last time he wrote a column directly about the Catholic Church was? In September 2010, when he wrote about Pope Benedict’s trip to the UK. He has written about religion more often; his columns about religion this year are: April 8, about the loss of a religious center in the US; about Tim Tebow on March 24; and on the Archbishop of Canterbury on March 18.

About the Catholic Church, the most prominent conservative Catholic opinion journalist of his generation has written nothing in his column this year. I’m not complaining! Ross has real range, and always writes intelligently about religion. Still, it’s worth comparing Douthat’s range and output with Dowd’s. If Douthat devoted four out of his last 12 columns to writing the same crude, slashing defense of the Catholic Church, is there any doubt but that the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, would not let him get away with such lazy axe-grinding?

Seriously, New York Times, you can and should do better than this. Whether it’s bigotry or a lack of professionalism, it stinks.

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