Ocean Kayaker: Peggy Noonan: The Antithesis of Honesty in Reporting

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Peggy Noonan: The Antithesis of Honesty in Reporting

Former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan, writing in today's Wall Street Journal,
clearly and succinctly manifested the problem that gave us the misremembering Brian Williams.

After introducing her essay with a brief encomium to former CBS foreign correspondent Bob Simon, she gives us Brian Williams as the perfect counterpoint. Enough has already been said about Williams (and his omnipresent penchant for personal aggrandizement) in the mass media, so Noonan uses the words of an 84 year old longtime reader of her column to make her point.

Here's the quote:

A longtime reader of this column, age 84, emailed recently to say the heartbreak of his life the past few years has been witnessing the daily corruption of all information—the rigging of numbers and claiming of facts, the scientific papers that manipulate data to advance a political agenda, the misleading government statistics. We’re drowning in lies, he said.

Noonan adds:

That is not an exaggeration.

Transubstantiation

The Catechism of the Catholic Church: 1376: The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”

Pope Benedict XVI

The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and and limits of [papal] authority, which of course, as such, had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith. … The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.

Ocean Kayaker

Restoring the Sacred

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Peggy Noonan: The Antithesis of Honesty in Reporting

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