Yesterday, I caught a few minutes of The McLaughlin Group. (The transcript is online.) It was recorded on Friday, the day before the pope died. The discussion featured (from most sensible to most ignorant) Pat Buchanan, Tony Blankley, Lawrence O’Donnell, John McLaughlin and Eleanor Clift.

CLIFT: But, look, I can’t let what Pat said go by. I mean, basically Pat is blaming any kind of progressive thought that came into the Catholic Church for all of the ills. And what’s gone wrong…

BUCHANAN: Eleanor, doctrine…

CLIFT: …with the Church is they have not adapted to modern life. And you can’t call a whole population in heresy.

BUCHANAN: You do not adapt your dogma and doctrine to society as it moves in a pagan direction. You stand up against it, the way the pope did.

CLIFT: Nobody should use birth control? It makes no sense in the modern world.

MCLAUGHLIN: You have to distinguish between doctrine and regimental regulation; for example, fish on Friday. Do you still observe that?

BUCHANAN: No, I don’t.

MCLAUGHLIN: But you do go to the Latin Mass all the time.

BUCHANAN: I do. But here’s the thing, John. Fish on Friday…

O’DONNELL: In violation of the pope’s teachings.

BUCHANAN: Fish on Friday is not doctrine or dogma. That dates to Lepanto, back, the battle of Lepanto…

Buchanan never got to finish that sentence, or many others. You might expect Clift and McLaughlin, who obviously know nothing about the subject, to admit that they are uninformed and politely defer to Buchanan. But maybe a table of five people yelling and interrupting one another isn’t the ideal place to explain the niceties of Catholic dogma and praxis.

MCLAUGHLIN: [The pope] was, however, frozen in time as far as moral theology is concerned in many respects. For example…

BUCHANAN: As he’s supposed to be. (Laughs.)

MCLAUGHLIN: For example, Catholics all over the world practice birth control.

BUCHANAN: Well, they lie…

MCLAUGHLIN: And yet the pope…

BUCHANAN: Catholics lie and cheat and steal, too. (Laughs.)

MCLAUGHLIN: The pope has done nothing to change the doctrine that it’s intrinsically immoral to use a condom…

BUCHANAN: You can’t change it!

MCLAUGHLIN: …even in marriage. Secondly, it is a mortal sin.

O’DONNELL: That’s right.

MCLAUGHLIN: Now, that is an heirloom of an earlier era.

“An heirloom of an earlier era”? McLaughlin accidentally said something right! He spoke as if an heirloom were a bad thing, but an heirloom is a valued possession passed down through succeeding generations. The faith, with all of its dogmas, is our dearest possession, handed down from Christ, through a succession of guardians, to us. And it is not ours to change! I think that’s what Buchanan was trying to explain.

For the past couple of days, I’ve done little besides excoriate the press for its clueless coverage of the late pope and the Church. Today, for a bit of a change, I’m linking to some very astute observers around the nation, who excoriate the press for its clueless coverage of the late pope and the Church.

Jonathan Last, of the Weekly Standard, expertly dissects a hatchet piece written by the Washington Post’s Hanna Rosin.

The idea that there was a “promise” that the Pope “betrayed” shows such an ignorance of the basic character of the Catholic Church and such a fanciful understanding of what any Pope could or would have done, that one wonders what [Hanna Rosin] has in store for the late pontiff.

James Joyner looks at the new Gallup poll, surveying American Catholics about which parts of the Holy Faith freely given to them by their Savior they would like to see excised, and calls it like he sees it.

These people are obviously “Catholics” merely in an ethnic-social sense rather than a religious one… If one wants to belong to a hierarchical church that performs most of the same comforting rituals but without all the dogmatic rigor, why not simply become an Episcopalian and be done with it?

Matthew Yglesias also wonders what the heck is going on.

Am I the only one who thinks running polls on what American Catholics think the next Pope should say about various sex-and-gender issues is a bit weird? The idea that that could be relevant seems to misunderstand the nature and purpose of the Church hierarchy in so many different ways to be a bit hard to comprehend.

Dr. Steven Taylor gets it, and he ain’t even Catholic.

[T]he whole idea is that the Church instructs its members, not the other way around. The Pope is supposed to be a conduit for Truth and Truth doesnt change based on public opinion.