I can’t call a piece by CBS News anti-Catholic. Sure, it’s clearly against the Church that currently exists and pretty much everything it stands for. But the piece is very pro-future Church -that nebulous creation that exists in the minds of some left-leaning Catholic.

The piece is so skewed in its assumptions that if I didn’t think millions saw it, I’d just laugh it off but unfortunately many people still watch network news.

In a piece that uses an abortion at a Catholic hospital as its centerpiece, here’s how it starts:

It’s a battle between Catholic and Catholic, a battle between the past and the present. A battle centuries old that rages yet today.

In Phoenix, it’s a battle between Bishop Thomas Olmstead and the city’s oldest hospital, St. Joseph’s, whose staff includes a respected nun.

A battle between the past and the present? Is the moniker of progress to be so sullied as to primarily mean the moral rightness of ripping babies limb from limb?

Sadly, in the eyes of many progressive Catholics, they may be right but there’s no excuse for CBS News to imply that the position that life is sacred is a relic of the past and that to be in “the present” is to be cool with killing human beings.

And then, inconceivably, CBS partners abortion along with the ordination of women with the spirit of Vatican II. Seriously.

Some see these events – taken together – as symptomatic of a larger effort to reverse reforms set down by the 1960s advisory council that came to be known as Vatican II – reforms which, back then, were seen as an effort to bring the church closer to modern times.

“There was a sense that we should try to bring Catholicism up to the 20th and then the 21st century,” said Gary Macy, a professor of theology at California’s Jesuit Santa Clara University. “In all kinds of ways – in scholarship, how do we relate to psychology? How do we relate to political science? How do we relate to modern ethics? All of those questions were opened up. There was much more involvement of the laity in the liturgy, so people felt much more involved. There were less spectators and more participants.”

With the increasing number of pro-lifers in this country, maybe it’s good that the so called progressive Catholics shine light on their outright approval of apathy towards abortion. It shows them for what they are.

I’ve always been a little confused about the thinking of “progress” in terms of culture. There’s a sense that whatever’s next is right that I find disturbing. There’s a sense that we’re evolving towards a more loving society because that’s just what happens. It seems to me that in many ways countries grow increasingly barbaric and as often as I can point to good and just outcomes of so called progressive causes like civil rights I could easily point to others like eugenics which were and are moral calamities. So I think the entire past and progressive distinction is actually useless. People like countries don’t get better by accident. You have to choose goodness.

Let’s face it, both sides in a debate such as this one likely believe they’re going to prevail and that their vision for the future is progress.

But in this case that’s the point, it’s clear that CBS News was colored by their own assumptions here about who’s going to win and who should win. CBS News has chosen sides with the pro-aborts. And for me, that ain’t progress.