Myth! Oh, myth! No, no,

Myth! Oh, myth!

No, no, I don't have a speech impediment.

I'm just ticked to see a formerly respectable writer fall for an old anti-conservative canard. Over on the HMS blog, everybody's favorite Catholic radio shrink Greg Popcak is engaged in a dispute about Bp. Gregory's cautiously anti-war letter.

Here Greg responds with an erroneous example to one of his co-bloggers' statements:

#1. The bishops made a prudential judgement. We are free to disagree with it by making our own prudential judgement.

Here is my struggle with this statement. The "prudential judgement" argument is overused, mostly by liberals, to disagree with everything that they don't like about what the Church says. Conservatives use it this way too (Bill Buckley's famous article, "Mater Si, Magistra, No!" for example), usually about Capital punishment, but there are other issues, and when they do, they lose any and all credibility--with me at least. [sic]

Before Greg goes layin' a rap on the credibility of Catholic conservatives, he should check out his own sources. That "famous article" of Bill Buckley manifesting a clear dissent against Bl. Pope John's encyclical never happened.

This myth has been floating around for a long time, and the original quip has been inflated beyond all reality. It appeared 12 August 1961 in National Review as an unsigned item:

Going the rounds in conservative circles: 'Mater si, magistra no'.

Clearly a joke, not a headline, not a manifesto. Not even Buckley's own words. Some people credit them to Garry Wills, who also wrote for NR.

Greg, you know you can't believe all the stuff liberals say about us Catholics.