Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn has joined the chorus condemning the New York Times' attempt to implicate Pope Benedict XVI in clerical sex abuse cover-ups, saying that the Catholic Church will no longer stand to be treated as the paper's "personal punching bag."

"Enough is enough! Two weeks of articles about a story from many decades ago, in the midst of the Most Holy Season of the Church year, is both callous and smacks of calumny," said the bishop during his homily at a March 30 Chrism Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of St. James.

"I ask you to stand up with me and send a message loud and clear that the Pope, our Church, and our bishops and priests will no longer be the personal punching bag of The New York Times."

Cardinal Levada denounces NY Times media attacks on Pope as 'deficient'

Cardinal Levada, who is the current prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), began his remarks by addressing a recent New York Times article by senior columnist Laurie Goodstein which leveled charges against the Vatican's handling of a Milwaukee sex abuse case. The prelate also took issue with an accompanying editorial which echoed Goodstein's perspective.

“I am not proud of America's newspaper of record, the New York Times,” Cardinal Levada wrote.“Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting,” stressed the cardinal, who then discussed what he found to be most troubling in Goodstein's March 24 article.

Benedict “Has Done More than Any other Pope or Bishop” to Confront Sex Abuse

The mainstream media effort to tar Pope Benedict with the sexual abuse scandal has served to bring to the fore evidence that Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict - has in fact, in the words of one of his defenders, “done more than any pope or bishop” to halt the sexual abuse scandal. In recent days, numerous commentators, including in some cases even critics of the Church who believe that there is more that can be done, have stepped forward stating that the pope’s track record on the issue, rather than implicating him in a "cover-up," actually sets him apart as the member of the curia who has most vigorously attacked the issue.

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