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Pope Benedict XVI greeting Cardinal Keith O'Brien as Prince Philip looks on, at the start of the pope's four-day state visit to the UK, Edinburgh, September 16, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI is the best-dressed liar in the world. And in England he presided over the best set-designed lie imaginable. He beatified the nineteenth-century Oxford theologian John Henry Newman, presenting him (in the penultimate step toward canonization) as a docile believer in papal authority, an enemy of dissent, and a rebuke to anyone who questions church authority. When the pope declared authentic the bogus miracle on which he bases the beatification"”the claim that a deacon from Boston was...