Christopher Hitchens is blinded by hatred.

We're off and running once again, with another completely phony story that purports to implicate Pope Benedict XVI in the protection of abusive priests.

False accusations are reverberating around the world.

In a pattern exemplifying the dog's behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today.

If we are to have an adjudication on the Pontiff s complicity or innocence in the matter of coverups or evasion by the Catholic Church in the sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked it, Im not sure Id go to Christopher Hitchens to get it.

Super Bowl Sunday epitomizes everything radical feminists once loved to loathe: violent aggression celebrated as spectator sport, male-only competition that relegates women to scantily-clad supporting roles on the sidelines, and boorish commercials using women as high-paid props to sell men beer.

Long before Leonard Cohen, Cyril Connolly wrote of it being closing-time in the gardens of the West. Glancing at the gargantuan heaps of money we fling to the wind for the unnecessities of our distracted lives, perhaps it is not such a bad thing that there is a closing time.

For a person with old-fashioned values, and an old-fashioned sense of English word meanings, the reports of the Fort Hood massacre were almost as provoking as what happened there.

One assumes that The New York Times would have been glad to receive an Op-Ed article from the new Archbishop of New York.

The following article was submitted in a slightly shorter form to the New York Times as an op-ed article. The Times declined to publish it. I thought you might be interested in reading it.