Last month, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan took on the New York Times in his blog — and had some particularly sharp words for columnist Maureen Dowd. 
Now, the paper’s Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, has decided to look into Dolan’s charges of anti-Catholicism.

A snip:

Dolan seemed particularly offended by Dowd’s column, in which she wrote that the Vatican was hoping to herd nuns “back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.” She said the “über-conservative” Pope Benedict XVI, while a cardinal, had urged women to be submissive partners. She brought up issues like the pope’s conscription into the Hitler Youth, and his statement that condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

Dolan wrote that Dowd dug “deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible.” The subject she raised was legitimate, he said, but her language was more like the prejudice in Know-Nothing papers of the 1850s.

“Far from being anti-Catholic, my column was an expression of one Catholic’s anger and anguish about the moral crisis in her church,” Dowd told me. “It’s not right to call legitimate — and widely shared — complaints about the church hierarchy anti-Catholic, any more than it’s right to call opposition to the policies of a White House anti-American.”

Dolan said he was not trying to stifle dissent. “We welcome criticism of the Catholic Church,” he said. “We need it. What I’m talking about is the ‘how’ of it. Is it measured? Is it temperate?” He said Dowd was serving up “raw red meat.”

Dowd said the issues she raised went to what she sees as the pope’s extreme conservatism and his judgment. “Should I blandly express outrage at the church continuing to treat women as second-class citizens?” she asked. Bland is not what Dowd does. I thought she was well within a columnist’s bounds.

Check out the rest of Hoyt’s column.

But don’t expect to find his final conclusion surprising.