I agree with your explanation, David. That’s what self-blinding, aka confirmation bias, does. Yes, they should have checked but that’s hard to do when you don’t think you need to.

I see this often on Facebook from my leftward friends. I challenge them on it from time to time. They repeat someone’s conclusion based on misinformation because they agree with the conclusion. One friend was flabbergasted when I showed him that guns were not the most efficient means for murder. Now when I challenge, the comment thread just stops, which is a blessing. I don’t like it when my friends make fools of themselves unknowingly.

But lies? I’ve read some call it “Hanlon’s Razor”: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. It took me years to accept it as useful explanation. It was mainly my own failings that finally got me there.

OTOH, the two “researchers” taking the affirmative on the video about Pius XII’s culpability, they were pure propagandists. They’d made it their job to know better.

Some (most?) of the Catholic left does not think having women priests is a big deal. We know that. A few are willing to violate their vows in secret. The bulk, though, are lost in the idea that not being a priest makes a woman second class.

I say challenge them, even loudly, but leave the condemnation to God.

It’s the equivalent of a Romney operative claiming that Hilary Clinton had issued a press release telling people to vote for Romney. It’s absurd, and it can be checked.

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It was the newly Blessed John Henry Newman himself who pointed out that there are really three magisteria in the church: the mouth of the episcopacy, the doctors (meaning the theologians) and the people in the pews. Newman valued all three equally and the wise balance and guidance they provided.

“I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the apostles, committed to the whole church in its various constituents and functions … manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of those channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect.”

Newman was fascinated with the interactions among these three magisteria in history when doctrine and theology were being formulated, notably in the early centuries when the laity saved the church from the Arian heresy and then in the 19th century when the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was forged by Pope Pius IX, who preferred expressions taken from the church’s lived experience, from the faith and worship of the Christian people, to scholastic definitions.
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The quote is from “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine”. The last sentence of their quote, however, is incomplete! Newman continued:

“It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect; granting at the same time fully, that the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens.”

But Oddie is right: what was most contemptible of all was the slanderous misuse of Bl. John Henry Newman to support their dissent (using manufactured quotes, no less). And if he were alive today, no one would be as appalled as Newman to be dragooned into service for women’s ordination.