<![CDATA[Theocon Gall Watch]]>First Things, the theocon-RNC journal whose editor defended Marcial Maciel to the bitter end, and piled calumnies on the reporters, such as Jason Berry, actually disparages Berry's latest report as "thinly sourced." Joseph Bottum, the Catholic Republican reactionary who used to edit the Weekly Standard's back of the book, lards up his acknowledgment that the Legion almost certainly was deeply corrupt with snark about Berry and NCR. They really do have no shame, as an FT reader helpfully notes:

[T]he absolutely dismal past of First Things in relation to Fr. Maciel and the Legion of Christ makes snark in Mr. Bottum’s post particularly inappropriate.

Jason Berry and the National Catholic Reporter were telling the truth about Fr. Maciel’s crimes at a time when the editor of First Things was participating in a campaign of calumny against the victims of Fr. Maciel’s abuse. Certainly by the time that Fr. Neuhaus published his infamous diatribe against Berry, his partner Gerald Renner, and the accusers/victims, there was enough documented evidence and public first-person testimony to persuade anyone who was not either systematically sheltered from information, willfully obtuse, or simply ]]>