Two contrasting articles from the conservative Wall Street Journal, now the largest-selling daily newspaper in the United Sattes. (Very surprising since it is owned by the same News Corporation that also owns the venomously anti-Catholic and proudly ultra-liberal Times of London.)
The Pope and the New York Times
Cardinal Ratzinger did more than anyone to hold abusers accountable.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
April 6, 2010
Unlike the Roman papacy, in certain circles the
New York Times still enjoys the presumption of authority. So when the front page carries a story headlined "Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Deaf Boys," people notice.
Written by Laurie Goodstein and published March 25, the thrust is twofold. First, that the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, a priest who abused children at St. John's School for the Deaf in Milwaukee from the 1950s to the 1970s, went unpunished. Father Murphy, she wrote categorically, "was never tried or disciplined by the church's own justice system."
This all feeds the kicker: "the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency." In other words, Murphy got off scot-free, and the cardinal looked the other way.
Ms. Goodstein cites internal Church documents, which the Times posted online. The documents were provided by Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan. They are described as "lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee."
What she did not tell readers is that Mr. Anderson isn't just any old lawyer. When it comes to suing the church, he is America's leading plaintiffs attorney.
Back in 2002, he told the Associated Press that he'd won more than $60 million in settlements from the church, and he once boasted to a Twin Cities weekly that he's "suing the s--t out of them everywhere." Nor did the Times report another salient fact about Mr. Anderson: He's now trying to sue the Vatican in U.S. federal court.
None of this makes Mr. Anderson wrong or unworthy of quoting. It does make him a much bigger player than the story disclosed. In fact, it's hard to think of anyone with a greater financial interest in promoting the public narrative of a church that takes zero action against abuser priests, with Pope Benedict XVI personally culpable.
Asked about the omissions in an email, Ms. Goodstein replied as follows: "Given the complexity of the Murphy case, and the relative brevity of my story, I don't think it is realistic for you to expect this story to get into treating other cases that these attorneys have handled."
[What McGurn omits to say is that the documents posted by the Times itself do not prove any of the outright accusations and insinuations liberally strewn throughout Goodstein's article.]
Martin Nussbaum, a lawyer who is not involved in the Murphy case but who has defended other dioceses and churches in sexual abuse suits, emailed me four interesting letters sent to Murphy from three Wisconsin bishops. These documents are not among those posted online by the Times. They are relevant, however, because
they refute the idea that Murphy went unpunished.
In fact, the letters from these bishops — three in 1993 and one in 1995, after fresh allegations of Murphy's misconduct — variously informed the priest that he was not to celebrate the sacraments in public, not to have any unsupervised contact with minors, and not to work in any parish religious education program.
It's accurate to say Murphy was never convicted by a Church tribunal.
[Because he died before the canonical trial could be concluded.]
It's also reasonable to argue (as I would) that Murphy should have been disciplined more. It is untrue, however, to suggest he was "never" disciplined. When asked if she knew of these letters, Ms. Goodstein did not directly answer, saying her focus was on what was "new," i.e., "the attempts by those same bishops to have Father Murphy laicized."
As for Rome, it did not get the case until 1996, when the archdiocese of Milwaukee informed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
Back then, the CDF handled abuse cases when they involved a breach of the Sacrament of confession (Murphy was accused of using the confessional to solicit boys). At that time, too, the only real option for reducing Murphy to the lay state was a Church trial. And the bishops in Wisconsin did begin a trial.
Ms. Goodstein's original article said simply that Cardinal Ratzinger's deputy halted Murphy's trial after the priest sent the cardinal a letter saying he was dying and asking for clemency.
A follow-up Times article last Thursday clarified that Rome came down the way it did because Murphy had shown "apparent good conduct" for the last 24 years, and "it would be difficult to try him" because "so much time [had] passed between the crimes and the trial."
[Didn't realize there was a follow-up - must look it up. But the fact alluded to here was already clear in Cardinal Bertone's reply posted online with the original article!]
Plus, his bishops had already stripped Murphy of his priestly faculties, the equivalent of taking a doctor's medical license. Does all this really suggest people callously looking the other way?
A few years later, when the CDF assumed authority over all abuse cases, Cardinal Ratzinger implemented changes that allowed for direct administrative action instead of trials that often took years. Roughly 60% of priests accused of sexual abuse were handled this way.
The man who is now Pope reopened cases that had been closed; did more than anyone to process cases and hold abusers accountable; and became the first Pope to meet with victims.
Isn't the more reasonable interpretation of all these events that Cardinal Ratzinger's experience with cases like Murphy's helped lead him to promote reforms that gave the church more effective tools for handling priestly abuse?
That's not to say that the press should be shy, even about Pope Benedict XVI's decisions as archbishop and cardinal.
[They have not been shy at all! Quite the contrary, they have been reckless - stretching already tenuous facts to the breaking point in their effort to pin some culpability on Benedict XVI.]
The Murphy case raises hard questions:
- why it took the archbishops of Milwaukee nearly two decades to suspend Murphy from his ministry [No, they suspended him immediately in 1974 or thereabouts, and then dismissed him from duties a few months later, so that he spent the last 26 years of his life as a retired priest]
- why innocent people whose lives had been shattered by men they are supposed to view as icons of Christ found so little justice;
- how bishops should deal with an accused clergyman when criminal investigations are inconclusive;
- how to balance the demands of justice with the Catholic imperative that sins can be forgiven.
Oh, yes, maybe some context, and a bit of journalistic skepticism about the narrative of a plaintiffs attorney making millions off these cases.
That's still a story worth pursuing.
McGurn's article came as a surprise to me since this weekend, the WSJ's resident Catholic editorialist, Peggy Noonan, had written a column I found outrageous because she portrays the media as 'kinghts in shining armor' who rescued the Church from its own perversion and blindness - she glorifies the media to the point of ignoring the usncrupulous war of innuendo they are now doing!
Of course, the Boston Globe was right to break the story out into the open - like necessary surgery to lance a putrid boil. But the actual facts became the pretext for a no-holds-barred media witch hunt against the Catholic Church as sort of payback for her firm opposition to the liberal causes that media advocates - and most probably, an expression of latent anti-Catholicism that was only waiting for an excuse to erupt full-blown.
It continues to this day, and gained almost exponentially in virulance with the new disclosures in Europe. Yet Ms. Noonan mentions none of this, even though she clearly does not agree with their guiding narrative about Pope Benedict, thank God for that!]
The Catholic Church's catastrophe
The press and the Pope deserve credit for confronting scandal.
By PEGGY NOONAN
April 4, 2010
There is an interesting and very modern thing that often happens when individuals join and rise within mighty and venerable institutions. They come to think of the institution as invulnerable — to think that there is nothing they can do to really damage it, that the big, strong, proud establishment they're part of can take any amount of abuse, that it doesn't require from its members an attitude of protectiveness because it's so strong, and has lasted so long.
And so people become blithely damaging. It happened the past decade on Wall Street, where those who said they loved what the street stood for, what it symbolized in American life, took actions that in the end tore it down, tore it to pieces. They loved Wall Street and killed it.
It happens with legislators in Washington who've grown to old and middle age in the most powerful country in the world, and who can't get it through their heads that the actions they've taken, most obviously in the area of spending, not only might deeply damage America but actually do it in.
And it happened in the Catholic Church, where hundreds of priests and bishops thought they could do anything, any amount of damage to the Church, and it would be fine.
[If they were true Christians, I don't think their consciences would have told them 'that would be fine'! No, they committed the offenses even knowing they were committing sin.]
"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." That is Mathew 16:18, of course, Christ's great promise to his Church.
Catholics in the pews have been repeating it a lot lately as they — we — absorb the latest round of scandal stories. "The old Church will survive."
But we see more clearly than Church leaders the damage the scandals have done. It is damage that will last at least a generation. It is an actual catastrophe, a rolling catastrophe that became public first in the United States, now in Europe. It has lowered the standing, reputation and authority of the church. This will have implications down the road.
[Ms. Noonan is speaking from her position within the US media system - and though that is the reading given by the Western media, I do not think it represents the thinking of the Catholic faithful, the greater majority of whom live outside the West. But even in the West, if that were really so, we would not have seen the crowds at the Vatican and the Colosseum for the Holy Week liturgies - and their obvious affection and enthusiasm for their media-beleaguered Pope.]
In both the U.S. and Europe, the scandal was dug up and made famous by the press. This has aroused resentment among church leaders, who this week accused journalists of spreading "gossip," of going into "attack mode" and showing "bias."
But this is not true, or to the degree it is true, it is irrelevant.
All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press — the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe —has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue.
Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it.
The press forced the Church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the Church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The Church shouldn't be saying j'accuse but thank you.
Without this pressure — without the famous 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight series with its monumental detailing of the sex abuse scandals in just one state, Massachusetts — the Church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer.
In fact, the press came late to the story. The mainstream media almost had to be dragged to it. It was there waiting to be told at least by the 1990s, but broadcast news shows and big newspapers weren't keen to go after it.
It would take months or years to report and consume huge amounts of labor, time and money — endless digging through court records, locating victims and victimizers, getting people who don't want to talk to talk.
And after all that, the payoff could be predicted: You'd get slammed by the Church as biased, criticized by sincerely disbelieving churchgoers, and maybe get a boycott from a few million Catholics. No one wanted that.
An irony: Non-Catholic members of the media were, in my observation, the least likely to want to go after the story, because they didn't want to look like they were Catholic-bashing.
An irony within the irony: Some journalists didn't think to go after the story because they really didn't much like the Catholic Church. Because of this bias, they didn't see the story as a story. They thought this was how the Church always operated. It didn't register with them that it was a scandal. They didn't know it was news.
[All of the above is pure bias in favor of the media - in which Noonan portrays the press to be as lily-white and pure as the Church is iniquitous in this matter!]
It was the Boston Globe that broke the dam, winning a justly deserved Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Some blame the scandals on Pope Benedict XVI. But Joseph Ratzinger is the man who, weeks before his accession to the papacy five years ago, spoke blisteringly on Good Friday of the "filth" in the church.
Days later on the streets of Rome, the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported, Cardinal Ratzinger bumped into a curial monsignor who chided him for his sharp words. The cardinal replied, "You weren't born yesterday, you understand what I'm talking about, you know what it means. We priests. We priests!"
The most reliable commentary on Pope Benedict's role in the scandals came from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, who argues that once Benedict came to fully understand the scope of the crisis, in 2003, he made the Church's first real progress toward coming to grips with it.
As for his predecessor, John Paul the Great, about whom I wrote an admiring book which recounts some of the scandals — I spent a grim 2003 going through the depositions of Massachusetts clergy — one fact seems to me pre-eminent.
For Pope John Paul II, the scandals would have been unimaginable —literally not imaginable. He had come of age in an era and place (Poland in the 1930s, '40s and '50s) of heroic priests. They were great men; they suffered.
He had seen how the Nazis and later the communists had attempted to undermine the church and tear people away from it, sometimes through slander. They did this because the great force arrayed against them was the Catholic Church.
John Paul, his mind, psyche and soul having been forged in that world, might well have seen the Church's recent accusers as spreaders of slander. Because priests don't act like that, it's not imaginable. And he'd seen it before, only now it wasn't Nazism or communism attempting to kill the church with lies, but modernity and its soulless media.
[My comment to the above apologia for JPII is this: I love John Paul II and pray to him every day, but fair is fair. If Karol Wojtyla chose not to accept the bitter truth that some priests are sexual perverts preying on children, nor that some bishops chose to cover up for them, then he is just as responsible for the failure to address the problem much earlier. And why is it acceptable to Noonan for JPII to blame the 'soulless media' but wrong of Benedict XVI and Cardinal Sodano to call the media games 'petty gossip'????
If John Paul II had been confronted about it after the US scandals broke, he would probably have been forced to 'face the music'. But no one confronted him about it. Perhaps because he was also 'protecting' his friend Fr. Maciel, and no one in the media was prepared to point an accusing finger at an undoubtedly saintly Pope. But saintliness does not mean perfection, and very likely, this was John Paul II's one obvious failing.]
Only they weren't lies.
There are three great groups of victims in this story.
The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life.
The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the Church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and, literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized.
And the third group is the Catholics in the pews — the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken.
No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they're stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old Church too.
Thank God Noonan ends on the right note. But what she says about the 'Catholics in the pews' - and she is speaking here of Catholics in the USA, where she lives - puts the lie to her earlier statements about the 'catastrophe' that this media-generated firestorm is causing to the Church!
That 'catastrophe' is all in the collective imagination of the media which thinks that by saying something often enough, it will prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as by repeating the same lies often enough, they will get to be accepted as fact.
Here's a new entry in the culture war now being fought ostensibly over the future of Catholicism in a secular world. Pat Buchanan is an intellectual and a Catholic but he does not normally write about his faith because he is best known now for being a political ultra-conservative who once sought the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. Before that, his primary career was journalism. You can tell - because in this article, he gives as good as the MSM can hit out with - and better, because he does not traffic in innuendo but in provable fact. Human Events is a conservative newspaper whose writers are among the most prominent names in American political conservatism.
www.humanevents.com/about-he.php
Anti-Catholicism and the Times
by Patrick J. Buchanan
04/06/2010
"Anti-Catholicism," said writer Peter Viereck, "is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual."
It is "the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people," said Arthur Schlesinger Sr.
If there was any doubt that hatred of and hostility toward the Catholic Church persists, it was removed by the mob that has arisen howling "Resign!" at Pope Benedict XVI.
To American Catholics, the story of pedophile priests engaged in criminal abuse of children, of pervert priests seducing boys, is unfortunately all too familiar. That some bishops covered up for pedophiles and seducers and enabled corrupt clergy to continue to prey on boys was equally disgraceful.
But to American Catholics, this is an old story. The priests have been defrocked, some sent to prison, like John Geoghan, who was strangled in his cell. Bishops have been removed. "Zero tolerance" has been policy for a decade.
Pope Benedict came to America to apologize for what these men did. And no one has been more aggressive in rooting out what he calls the "filth" in the church. And as the recent scandals have hit Ireland and Germany, why the attack on the Pope here in America?
Answer:
The New York Times is conducting a vendetta against this traditionalist Pope in news stories, editorials and columns.
"Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys," blared the headline over a Laurie Goodstein story that began thus:
"Top Vatican officials -- including the future Pope Benedict XVI -- did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys ...
"In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee's archbishop at that time."
The facts:
That diabolical priest, Lawrence C. Murphy, was assigned to St. John's School for the Deaf in 1950, before Joseph Ratzinger was even ordained.
Reports of his abuse of the deaf children surfaced in the 1950s. But, under three archbishops, nothing was done. Police and prosecutors were alerted by parents of the boys. Nothing was done.
Weakland, who became archbishop in 1977, did not write to Rome until 1996.
And as John Allen of
National Catholic Reporter noted last week, Cardinal Ratzinger "did not have any direct responsibility for managing the overall Vatican response to the crisis until 2001. ... Prior to 2001, Ratzinger had nothing personally to do with the vast majority of sex abuse cases, even the small percentage which wound up in Rome."
By the time Cardinal Ratzinger was commissioned by John Paul II to clean out the stable, Murphy had been dead for three years.
Yet here is Times columnist Maureen Dowd's summation of the case:
"Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed 'God's Rotweiler,' when he was the church's enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys."
In Goodstein's piece, Weakland is a prelate who acted too slowly. The controversy over his clouded departure from the Milwaukee archdiocese is mentioned and passed over at the bottom of the story. It belonged higher.
For Weakland was a homosexual who confessed in a 1980 letter he was in "deep love" with a male paramour who shook down the archbishop for $450,000 in church funds as hush money to keep his lover's mouth shut about their squalid affair.
According to Rod Dreher, Weakland moved Father William Effinger, who would die in prison, from parish to parish, knowing Effinger was a serial pederast.
When one of Effinger's victims sued the archdiocese but lost because of a statute of limitations, Weakland counter-sued and extracted $4,000 from the victim of his predator priest.
Dreher describes Weakland's tenure thus:
"He directed Catholic schools ... to teach kids how to use condoms as part of AIDS education and approved a graphic sex-education program for parochial-school kids that taught 'there is no right and wrong' on the issues of abortion, contraception and premarital sex. He has advocated for gay rights and women's ordination, bitterly attacked Pope John Paul II, denounced pro-lifers as 'fundamentalist' and declared that one could be both pro-choice and a Catholic in good standing."
Speaking of sex-abuse victims in 1988, Weakland was quoted: "Not all adolescent victims are so innocent. Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often streetwise."
Just the kind of priest the Times loves, and just the kind of source on whom the Times relies when savaging the Pope and bashing the church.
As the Catholic League's Bill Donahue relates, 80 percent of the victims of priestly abuse have been males and "most of the molesters gays."
And as the
Times's Richard Berke blurted to the Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association 10 years ago, often,
"three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals." [And now you know the dirty secret behind 'all the news that's fit to print'!]
Is there perhaps a conflict of interest at The New York Times, when covering a traditionalist Catholic Pope?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/04/2010 16:51]