The WhoreStory Channel

I've just about had it with the History Channel. I may watch some of their items on more secular topics, but like most media outlets, they are totally unreliable when it comes to the Church. The recurring problem tends to be the prevalence of attention whores on their programs. This explains Fr. Richard McBrien's showing up on pretty much every show they have relating to Catholicism. John Crossan and Elaine Pagels are other examples.

Anyways, I am considering the virtue of any further viewing of this channel after watching a Tivo'd presentation of The Protestant Reformation, which was apparently aired back in 2007 originally. It was a shame to see a respected guy like Diarmaid McCulloch in the midst of this whorefest. Naturally, it was just one slam against the Church after another, but hey, what do you expect when they've got the head "bishop" of WELS (I think; I never could read the whole caption) and the curator of the Lutheran museum as some of their "experts." It seems to me that every time there's a show relating to a primarily Catholic topic, we get McBrien and his ilk as the "Catholic" view and then a bevy of counter-points meant to pound the Church on even the most trivial of points. Nary a Catholic perspective on this trou-dropping extravaganza praising the accomplishments of Pope Martin Luther.

This show, for example, actually said that most scholars consider Alexander VI to be the nadir of the papacy. If that's the case, most scholars are dumb asses. It's called the Pornocracy for a reason, people. Look it up. I recommend ER Chamberlin's book The Bad Popes for a clearer picture of the subject.

The intellectual dishonesty really came to light, though, when the whores started using all sorts of verbal semantics to obfuscate the doctrine of purgatory. Vague mentions of fire and the afterlife were used in order to make it sound like indulgences were about getting people out of hell rather than extinguishing temporal punishment for sins already forgiven. Referring to indulgences as "afterlife insurance" and such contributed to the distortion.

Naturally, there were other problems, mostly from the waxing poetic about Luther's awesomeness and the beauty of the Calvinist contributions to work ethic, and strangely no mention at all of The Jews and their Lies. How odd. Nor of Queen Elizabeth's persecution of Catholics. Hey, Cate Blanchett proved that Bess was just a nice lady defending her country from the rampaging Catholic hordes, so surely she couldn't have done something bad.

Finally, if it wasn't for Protestantism, we apparently never would have had science. Let's ignore the Copernicuses and Mendels of the world. It's a lot easier to talk about these things if we overlook the actual facts.

I'm switching to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends re-runs.