A curious bit of news out of Beantown:

The Archdiocese of Boston, under attack by anonymous conservative Catholic bloggers, has blocked access to one of the websites from computers within the church’s Braintree headquarters.

The Boston Catholic Insider, the most lively of several blogs that have targeted the archdiocese, portrays Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley as a lax administrator and accuses his top aides of straying from Catholic doctrine and values.

Terrence C. Donilon, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said church officials blocked the site because it had become a distraction, not out of a desire to squelch debate. Its authors, he said, were “actively spamming the employees of the archdiocese with links to the site, interfering with their work day.” He pointed out that employees could still visit it from their home computers.

The Insider authors, in a post after the archdiocese blocked the site, characterized their blog as constructive criticism and chided church officials for trying to limit access to it.

“Is the mere prospect of archdiocesan employees reading this blog concerning to Boston’s archdiocesan leadership in a similar way that leaders of Communist China are concerned about Chinese citizens reading about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests?” they wrote.

The blogs are a departure from the usual attacks against the church because they offer a conservative critique of the local hierarchy. The archdiocese is more accustomed to fielding complaints from those pushing for a liberalization of church teachings on issues like the role of women, or from people who want the church to become more democratic.

They are also unusual because they are directed at O’Malley, who is widely viewed as a back-to-basics Catholic leader. He wears the brown habit of his Capuchin Franciscan order, enjoys warm relations with Pope Benedict XVI, and at times has drawn criticism from the left.

But the bloggers on the blocked site see a distinction between the cardinal’s spiritual leadership and his administrative abilities — they say they respect him as a man of faith but have concerns about his ability to oversee his underlings.

Check out the rest at the Boston Globe link.