Misleading Headline Clouds Good Story On Vatican / Nun Leadership Conflict

Over at the Episcopal oriented blog TitusOneNine there is a good story /bad headline on the whole Vatican / Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) Conflict. See Religion: Tensions building between women, Vatican leaders .

A good story , but the first comment shows us the problem we see over and over again.


Who did this slanted SHNS headline?



The conflict reported in the article itself is clearly between the Vatican and the LCWR.


The headline instead claims “Tensions building between women, Vatican leaders.


The LCWR—an ossification of a small group of 1960s hangovers—is purported to speak for half of humanity, while the Vatican—for 2000 years, by definition, the people who get to say what is and is not Roman Catholic—is painted as a small group of cranks circling their wagons.


Not only is this editing an action directly supporting the Obama administration’s synthetic “War on Women” meme, it is also a direct implementation of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: Pick the Target (the Church), Freeze It (LCWR = “Women”), Personalize It (the Church = “Vatican Leaders”) and Polarize It (“Tensions Building”)


The editing is insulting both to Terry Mattingly and to John Allen, who provide calm descriptions of what is really going on if the diligent readers sticks with the article long enough.