Worst op-ed of the year

There is an art to crafting good anti-Catholic commentary.  I enjoy reading Christopher Hitchens, for example, because he's smart, writes well, and, beneath the bluster and hyperbole, many of his allegations need to be taken seriously.  It seems, though, that the bar to getting anti-Catholic commentary published is getting lower by the day.  In the Star-Tribune this morning, an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe opened with the following:

There's a raging debate about the state of the Catholic Church in America. Some church officials still cling to the hope that massive influxes of recent immigrants will fill the pews left empty by more educated, fallen-away parishioners. But clearly the Church has receded as a religious and cultural force, like a steroid-pumped bicep to a withering muscle.

Aside from offending immigrants (who are, by definition apparently, less educated), Erbe premises her inquiry on the equation of the Church's proper role with brute power.  Even in the purported "glory days," would any Christian want to think of the Church as a "steroid-pumped bicep?"  The whole problem, of course, is that the Church is too strict with all those darn rules:

Dogmatic, dictatorial churches do not resound with today's spirituality, and young people are not clamoring to join them. So sending a message that says, in essence, "Follow my rules or go to hell" might be a good way of retaining older parishioners used to such harsh boundaries. But as elderly parishioners die off, they take the church's message with them.

Hmmm.  Let's take a complicated cultural dynamic and dumb it down so that we can assign clear blame to the folks with whom we disagree.  If the mark of a healthy church is that we have young people clamoring to join, then we probably want to keep hell in the picture: evangelical megachurches are doing a lot better among younger Americans than the mainline.  

Since this is Minnesota, of course, the attention eventually turns to Archbishop Nienstedt's DVD mailing:

[He] defended his mailing anti-gay marriage DVDs to the area's 800,000 churchgoing Catholics, a tactic that angered many of them. Machiavellian diplomacy has never won followers. In case the church hierarchy has not already noticed, it's too late to return to the Middle Ages.

What?  Has she read Machiavelli?  Why is open advocacy for a policy position "Machiavellian?"  And since when does teaching on a matter of public concern represent "a return to the Middle Ages?"  Let's debate the merits of Church teaching without substituting cheap labels for real argument.  Taking potshots at the Church in print is by no means a new phenomenon, but our quality control seems to be slipping.  I'll take Hitchens any day over this drivel.