in time of persecution

Ian O'Doherty wrote in Tony O'Reilly's Irish Independent newspaper yesterday that the Catholic church is a paedophile ring.
O'Doherty's remarks are a sensationalist malicious lie.
He is a cretin and one should not expect anything principled, insightful or true from his pen.
Independent Newspapers published his remarks under a headline that itself reiterated O'Doherty's main falsehood, that the Catholic church is a paedophile ring.
O'Doherty's remarks were published amid pages of similarly angled news articles, a veritable stream of manipulative and maliciously invectival anti Catholic propaganda contrived by Independent Newspapers journalists with a view to discrediting the church.
Independent Newspapers is following a Hiterite methodology in trumpeting O'Doherty's lies and the lies of others in this fashion.
If you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one.
Tell lots of em.
Or as Goebbels put it:
"The broad mass of the people will more readily believe a great lie than a small one."
British historian Michael Burleigh, no friend of the Catholic church, has noted that Hitler's favoured strategy in seeking to destroy the Catholic church was to continually recycle old allegations of abuse while inventing new ones for specific priests he was targeting.
The lynch pin of the strategy was to convey the notion before the public mind that the church is an inherently abusive institution.
This was the Nazi strategy to prevent people believing in Jesus.
I am a Catholic.
I stand with the Catholic church.
Since O'Doherty has called me a paedophile, I feel quite free to respond.
O'Doherty says we Catholics are a paedophile ring.
If the law of the land permits him to say this and prevents us from responding in kind, then there is no law.
Think of what his slander means.
Ian O'Doherty is saying the priests and nuns and Christians in Auschwitz were part of a paedophile ring.
Ian O'Doherty is saying that the priests and nuns and Christians who were martyred under communism were part of a paedophile ring.
Ian O'Doherty is saying that the priests and nuns and Christians running hospitals and schools in Africa and South America are part of a paedophile ring.
Ian O'Doherty is saying that our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, are part of a paedophile ring.
Most immediately Ian O'Doherty is directly maligning as paedophiles, those priests and nuns and Christians who over 1500 years of self sacrifice have ensured that Ireland would be a civilised, literate, numerate, prosperous nation with free speech and justice for all.
I mean, which non Christian nation exactly does he think we should envy?
The sexocracies of Asia maybe where child prostitution is considered an intergral part of their culture?
The thug terror regimes of the Islamic world?
The dictatorships of Africa?
What exactly is O'Doherty championing for the human race as he seeks to subvert Catholicism.
Yes.
Ireland has free speech and justice for all.
Well, for almost all.
For if a mediocre little shit like O'Doherty can calumniate priests and nuns in their old age, a new and ever more vile dictatorship is at hand.
The dictatorship of idiots.
Yesterday Ian O'Doherty called me a paedophile in print.
Independent Newspapers published Ian O'Doherty's attack upon me.
Any of the rest of you who aspire to be Catholic should understand that Ian O'Doherty and Independent Newspapers are calling you all paedophiles too.
They are willing to desist of course gentle readers.
They are willing to accept you and to cease their attacks upon you.
The only thing they ask of you is that you abandon every principle you have ever held dear and betray the faith of our fathers.
The only thing they ask of you is that you do nothing.
The only thing they ask of you is that you be...
SILENT.