For weeks, the US media have been running stories on polls taken that purport to show a general 'plummeting' of Benedict XVI's approval rating among Americans in general - and I have ignored them because I find such 'popularity' surveys taken at the peak of media-generated 'scandals' unduly swayed by what the media says.
Now, the New York Times comes up with a survey of American Catholics that tend to show a mixed picture at best. Why the Times did the poll at all and why it is publishing it, bylined by the woman who rigged the Father Murphy-Milwaukee case, is a puzzlement, as the King of Siam would say, and one must look this 'gift horse' in the mouth!
Catholics criticize Pope on abuse scandal,
but see some hope
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DALIA SUSSMAN
Published: May 4, 2010
A majority of Roman Catholics in the United States are critical of the way Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican have handled the reports of sexual abuse by priests, but have confidence in the Vatican to make changes to prevent abuse in the future, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released Tuesday.
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted from April 28 to May 2 with 412 Catholics. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus five percentage points.
[I know polls are increasingly scientific in their sampling, but it always makes me queasy to think that a sample of 1,000 - the usual number - much less 412 in this case - can be made to be representative of the 65 million US Catholics.]
After five years of Pope Benedict’s papacy, Catholics in the United States are estranged from the hierarchy in Rome, with most saying the Vatican is out of touch with the needs of Catholics and more than three out of four saying it is not necessary to believe in the pope’s authority to be a good Catholic.
But they feel differently about their parish priest, with a majority saying that most priests understand Catholics’ needs and that they trust their own priest with their children.
In fact, the poll suggests that for most American Catholics, the resurgence of the abuse scandal is like a far-off storm. They say it has had no effect on their Mass attendance, their financial contributions or their participation in their parishes.
Only one in 10 Catholics now say the clergy sexual abuse issue is prompting them to consider leaving the church. That is a marked contrast from the height of the scandal in the United States, in 2002, when about one in five Catholics said they considered leaving.
While the scandal in 2002 focused on American bishops, starting in Boston, who had failed to remove abusive priests,
recent news media reports have focused [CHOSEN TO FOCUS AND FOMENT, that is!] on the scandal’s outbreak in Europe and on whether the Vatican and the Pope are culpable.
The Vatican and many American bishops have reacted by attacking the news media, and it appears they have struck a chord. [So, despite all that NYT and AP have tried to do, those Americans who were polled appear to prove the saying that 'You can fool all the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but not all the people all the time!']
The poll shows that slightly more Catholics believe the news media have blown the story out of proportion than those who say it has been accurately reported. Most say the news media have been harder on the Catholic Church than on other religions. Those who attend Mass regularly are even more critical of the news media.
Many Catholic respondents indicated that they saw a change in how their Church had handled the sexual abuse problem over time. A broad majority of Catholics said that in the past, the Vatican and American bishops were far more focused on covering up sexual abuse by priests than preventing it, but that now the reverse was true.
But a majority said sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests was still going on.
Betsy Conrath, who is 60 and a retired weather broadcaster in Spokane, Wash., said in a follow-up interview: “They are not going to cover up any more and hope and pray it will just go away. Now that the Pope has a handle on it, things will change.
“I have been totally saddened by all of this,” Ms. Conrath said, “but I’m still very much a Catholic and have not lost my faith in my religion.”
Norbert Wellman, 71, a retiree in West Point, Iowa, who worked for a chemical company and a state prison, said: “Since the news came out and was spread around in all the newspapers, they got the idea they’re going to have to do the best they can to fix the problem. I think before, maybe, they thought it wouldn’t get out.”
Nearly half of those polled said Benedict’s leadership of the church had been “a mixed blessing,” and only one in four said his leadership had helped the Church.
But his personal favorability rating is more positive than negative. Forty-three percent say they have a favorable opinion of him, and only 17 percent have an unfavorable view.
Still, 38 percent express no opinion about him at all,
a decidedly blank reaction to a Pope [A fair-minded reporter would have cited the polls taken before and after the Pope's visit to the United States in 2008, where the 'after' numbers surprised even the cynics!] who made a highly publicized trip to the United States only two years ago and has issued three encyclicals, or formal teaching letters, on morality or doctrine.
The Pope’s favorability rating is higher among those who attend Mass regularly: 63 percent.
The recurrence of the sexual abuse scandal has renewed the debate among some Catholic commentators who argue that there is an underlying problem in the priesthood attributable to celibacy, homosexuality or the male-only-clergy culture.
The poll shows that
most Catholics are unconvinced of their arguments. Three in 10 said the celibacy requirement for Catholic priests was a major factor contributing to sexual abuse of minors, while nearly as many said it was only a minor factor and more than a third said it was not a factor. Results are similar on the question of whether homosexuality in the priesthood contributes.
[Goldstein says 'most are unconvinced', yet in the figures she cites, only a third believe celibacy is a major factor, while ther est believe it is not or only a minor factor, and she sames it's the same for homsexuality. Why this persistent dishonesty that cannot even see it is contradicting 'facts' she has just reported?]
Only 17 percent said the all-male priesthood was a major factor in the abuse problem, while a majority said it was not a factor.
Then Goodtsein uses her concluding paragraphs to pus the NYT and liberal agenda - though I won't take her word for the numbers she claims.
Nonetheless,for more than 20 years, majorities of Catholics have consistently said they are in favor of ordaining women and married men as priests. That trend holds true today, with 6 in 10 saying they favor women’s ordination, and two-thirds favoring married priests. Even majorities of weekly churchgoers are in favor of opening the priesthood to women and married men.
Mary Dunham, a 64-year-old quilter and crafter in Orfordville, Wis., said in a follow-up interview: “The sexual abuse issue goes back to the Vatican. They allowed it to be covered up for so long because they didn’t want the Church to look bad. Had a woman been Pope, she wouldn’t have allowed it. She would have strung up these guys herself.”
In the May 3 print issue, the Times even printed a letter from a former New York senator about anti-Catholic bias in the media, though they refused to print a more general letter on anti-Catholicisim from Archbishop Dolan last October:
Attacks on the Church:
An anti-Catholic agenda?
To the Editor:
As a Catholic, I am appalled at the now-daily assaults by the liberal media against the church.
There is no question that certain Catholic clergymen abused children and that certain members of the church’s hierarchy failed to deal with those abuses properly. That failure was based primarily on the mistaken belief that pedophiles can be cured. At the time, that mistaken belief was supported in large measure by the psychiatric community. It has since been rejected.
For the last decade, the Archdiocese of New York and dioceses across New York State have been working assiduously to accept guilt when warranted, atone for those mistakes and, most important, to take corrective action to ensure that they do not happen again.
Over the last few months, several cases have cropped up that took place decades ago and long before the church’s all-out effort to acknowledge, make amends for and rectify its past failures. Some have seized upon those cases to attack the church anew and with frightening vigor. Those attacks are unwarranted and unfair.
Such cases, which will continue to arise, do not mean that the Church’s healing crusade has been discontinued but rather are cases that took place during an unfortunate time in the Church’s history that is now over.
To simply reject out of hand the Church’s extensive and intense program to heal and correct suggests the possibility of an anti-Catholic agenda more concerned with Catholic teachings than with child abuse.
Alfonse M. D’Amato
New York, April 29, 2010
The writer, a former United States senator from New York, is a member of the board of the Friends of the Catholic Church, an informal group created to assist the Catholic Church when it comes under attack.
Now, both instances are a drop in the ocean of calumny that the Times has chosen to let loose over the Pope and the Church - and, I believe, nothing more than the faintest of tokens to show that they are not completely unobjective! It almost makes me think it's a sign to brace yourself for their next tsunami!
Sandro Magister in his blog today gives his Italian readers the gist of ex-Newsweek religion editor Kenneth Woodward's recent article about the New York Times and its brand of journalism, but also mentions an April 30 article by John Thavis at CNS which I completely missed, as follows:
Self-examination: Catholic communicators
look to address the current 'scandal'
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY, April 30 (CNS) -- With workshops such as "Benedict XVI, sexual abuse and The New York Times" on the program, it wasn't surprising that a conference of Catholic communicators in Rome provoked more interest than usual this year.
But those expecting a round of media-bashing were disappointed. Most of the April 26-28 discussion focused on how the Church itself should be more transparent, more proactive in communicating and more journalist-friendly if it wants to get its message out on clerical sex abuse.
Sponsored by the Opus Dei-run Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, the conference over the years has become a regular networking event for hundreds of Church communications personnel, including diocesan spokespersons.
The new round of disclosures on priestly sex abuse, which has taken the Vatican by storm, has also impacted these local Catholic media professionals, most of whom are lay people.
One might have expected the workshop on
The New York Times to have served up a welcome scapegoat. The newspaper's recent reporting on the sex abuse cases has been criticized as unfair by several high church officials.
Instead, Diego Contreras, the dean of the Holy Cross university's communications faculty, began the session by saying that overall, the press has had a positive role in bringing sex abuse to light and helping make it a priority issue for the church.
He then offered a "just the facts" presentation. Over the past seven weeks, he said,
The New York Times has run 65 news reports on the church and sex abuse in its print edition -- including 10 on page one -- as well as 12 op-ed pieces, one editorial, one interview and 29 letters.
His statistical analysis found that the most common "message" communicated through text or headline was that this scandal directly affects Pope Benedict. The impression, without always being explicitly stated, was that the Pope knew about sex abuse cases and yet said or did nothing, he said.
Contreras concluded by saying
The New York Times had clearly made a major effort to provide information on the crisis [That may be so, but what kind of information????] The problems arose, he said, in journalistic interpretation, and in what he termed an excessive reliance on the narrative provided by the lawyers involved in sex abuse cases.
Rachel Donadio, the Times 's Rome correspondent, afterward chatted with Contreras and told him that while people sometimes complain that the lawyers are driving this story, it's very hard to get an alternative narrative from the Vatican.
Donadio addressed the conference the previous day, saying that covering the Vatican was the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life. The Vatican, she said, in many ways remains a "hermetic culture that doesn't want to be known or explained."
Covering the sex abuse scandal has been especially difficult, and sometimes she has felt like a translator between different cultures, she said.
"For a while, I felt like I was trying to explain to American readers that the Pope's not the head of Toyota. He's not going to give a press conference and apologize for brake failure. This is not how the Vatican works," she said.
At the same time, she said, she had to explain to some people in the Roman Curia that "the problem of sex abuse in the Church ... is not a problem invented by The New York Times or by anybody in the press."
"This is an issue within the Catholic Church, not just the press versus the Church," she said.
[No one is saying that at all. The obvious and perennial complaint that thinking Catholics have against the Times and its Church-bashing colleagues and allies is that their reports make it appear that the Church is responsible for all the world's ills and the Pope is the chief conniver in all this!
It is not a defense to say you cannot get an answer from the Vatican - the MSM are still skewing their stories to make the Vatican adn the Pope into the arch-villains. Andrea Tornielli and Paolo Rodari can get answers to their questions when they have to. Like anywhere else in journalism, getting answers is a matter of contacts, knowing how to use them without alienating the entire establishment. And when you really cannot get answers at the time you have to write your story, then say so.
Some of the most challenging comments at the conference came from the Catholic communicators on the program.
Pia de Solenni, a U.S. Catholic theologian and writer, said she was disturbed that some Church officials seemed to exhibit "a sort of tone-deafness" in their defensive comments on sex abuse. She said it doesn't really help the Church to describe itself as persecuted, or to say that because only a small percentage of priests commit abuse, "we're just about the same as others."
[Sometimes Catholic journalists tend to take this 'me, too' and 'Woe is me!' attitude which really does not win them any points with anyone! Who are they trying to please? Yes, some bishops are tone-deaf and remain tone-deaf, but neither should Catholics deny that the Church is being persecuted in the media, and to point out that the attribution of scandal to Catholic priests is overblown, to say the least, is not being defensive. It is possible to state the truth about both positive and negative things in the way the Church as a whole has handled this issue.]
She said
the Church's message should focus on several key elements: asking forgiveness from the victims, accountability for those who have made mistakes and transparency in how cases have been handled.
[And has not Benedict XVI addressed all that in his Pastoral Letter to the Irish - which to all intents and purposes, appears to have been forgotten by everyone barely six weeks after it was published? What have Catholic media done to propagate that letter at all after publishing it once?
If, in answer to every accusation from the MSM, Catholic media cited the pertinent passage from the Pope's letter - while exhorting all bishops, not just the Irish, to live up to it - would that not have been an effective answer as well as a way of driving home his points??? ]
There are good models for this, including in the United States, but they need to be implemented in every diocese around the world, she said.
The Church also needs to get its good news out, including the very low numbers of new sex abuse cases being reported, de Solenni said. Above all, she said, the church needs to be proactive, going to media with its information and not "waiting for the story to come and get us."
What hurts the communications effort on sex abuse are "conflicting and uncoordinated statements," especially when they involve red herrings like homosexuality or "cultural landmines" like the Holocaust, she said.
Although de Solenni didn't name names, many at the conference thought some recent and apparently unvetted statements from Vatican officials on those very topics had only made their jobs harder.
As close followers of the Vatican's communications strategy, they sympathize with the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, who they correctly believe has had to overcome some internal pressures in his campaign to publish more detailed and timely information on sex abuse cases and policies.
On the conference's final day, Father Lombardi met with participants at the Vatican and told them his overall strategy is based on a simple principle: that the Vatican should provide as much information as possible in order to "reduce the widespread impression that we have a culture of secrecy or are trying to hide something."
He also said responding to the sex abuse scandal must go beyond answering accusations by critics or the media. One fundamental task -- in which local Catholic communicators can take the lead -- is to provide concrete examples that illustrate how the Church is today a model environment for child safety, he said.
The Vatican spokesman received something from this audience that he hasn't heard in a while: a big round of applause.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/05/2010 06:27]