The news media has failed to report both sides of the Catholic Church scandal. William McGurn had the singular courage to write of how money fuels the rhetoric.
When I wrote “Due Process for Accused Priests” for the Catholic League last summer, I pointed out the enormous challenge to due process faced by priests when sexual abuse accusations are decades old – which is just about all of them. Since then, it seems, the calls to abandon all due process for any priest accused have become louder and more numerous. The calls for an emotional mob response abandoning all reason and justice are not at all unlike the chant we heard during Holy Week: “We want Barabbas!”
The news media coverage of it all reached its highest frenzy as the Church celebrated Easter. The New York Times and The Boston Globe led the media charge, and the timing was no coincidence. The Globe’s Easter Sunday edition had the Archbishop of Canterbury denouncing the Church of Ireland’s handling of sexual abuse claims.
As I wrote last week, sex sells, and sex scandals sell best of all. We’ve all read that newspapers are desperate for readers and struggling for survival. About the last thing our culture needs right now is a news media that’s self-serving and desperate.
But there are some stand-out exceptions, and Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn is one of them. He brought justice and truth to the fray two days after Easter in a column entitled “The Pope and the New York Times” (April 6). If you haven’t read it, I hope you will. It’s rare that people in the news media openly criticize the work of other people in the news media. Mr. McGurn took New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein to task, and rightly so. The result was the truth, and you’ll know it when you see it.
ABUSE OF THE ABUSE SCANDAL
William McGurn is one of very few American journalists to actually name the elephant in the sacristy that reporters pretend not to see in the clergy sexual abuse claims. Most of the rhetoric calls for retroactive and draconian measures against priests accused, and open contempt for bishops for not acting in 1960 as they would in 2010. Most of the rhetoric also comes from people who have a stake in plundering your Church’s assets. The news media has a duty to report that fact, but it doesn’t.
William McGurn filled in an essential part of the story that Laurie Goodstein conveniently left out of the New York Times. Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer quoted at length by Ms. Goodstein isn’t just a lawyer “for five men who have brought four lawsuits” against the Church. He is a lawyer who has become ravenously wealthy suing Catholic institutions for decades. He is a lawyer who once boasted to a newspaper that he is “suing the sh– out of them everywhere.”
The information that Jeffrey Anderson has made a long career of suing the Catholic Church was well known to Goodstein and The New York Times. As far back as 1988, Mr. Anderson spoke of receiving referrals from other lawyers with clients interested in suing Catholic dioceses and religious orders. He appeared on the “Geraldo [Rivera] Show” on November 14, 1988 to speak of his representation of a man who had been in prison and was then suing a priest for sexual abuse. I wrote of this in “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” (Catalyst, Nov. 2005):
“Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country.”
Essentially, they exposed in 1988 what lawyers and reporters claimed to have exposed in 2002. Some might respond to this by suggesting that Mr. Anderson’s 1988 “Geraldo” appearance should have put the Church on notice that it was vulnerable to lawyers seeing dollar signs. That might have been true with serious – and fair – journalistic treatment of the subject.
By the way, some of the “Geraldo” titles in the weeks just before Jeffrey Anderson’s appearance in 1988 included, “Housewife Hookers,” “Digging Up Dirt on the Dead,” “Teens Who Trade Sex for Dope,” “Gang Rape: Macho Gone Mad,” “Doctors’ Sex Abuse,” and “Chappaquiddick: What Really Happened?”
Since then, Mr. Anderson has reportedly reaped more that $60 million in contingency fees “suing the sh–” (his own words!) out of the Catholic Church, but none of this was reported in the New York Times. William McGurn was the sole media voice to spell this out in the Easter media rush to slander the Pope and your faith.
THE MILLSTONE AROUND OUR CULTURE’S NECK
Before you read another news media opinion about the ills of the Catholic Church and priesthood, I have some hard questions to ask if you grew up in the Catholic Church. Were you ever sexually abused by a priest? While growing up, did you ever hear of one of your friends being sexually abused by a priest? Most people to whom I have asked these questions answer no to them. Yet many of the same people are willing to equate the Catholic priesthood with sexual abuse, and for only one reason: it’s what the news media has told them to do.
It’s the same kind of “availability bias” that I described in “Pop Stars and Priests.” And the media-with-an-agenda bias is not just on the left. There are far too many people manipulating this issue for their own ends on both sides of the culture wars (see “Postcards from the Edges“).
Do you remember my post “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden“? It profiled just a few of the people I keep company with these days. The point there is badly understated. I live daily with the effects of child abuse. This prison is filled with men of all ages whose lives spiraled out of control after childhoods scarred and destroyed by the unspeakable acts of others. Every step of the way, these men have been held accountable for their mistakes and crimes even when justice calls for some context to the lives they led – or were led into.
A few days ago, a 40-year-old man in this prison came to speak with me in the prison library. He spoke of the deeply felt hurt and resentment he had when he overheard a television sitcom joke. “Don’t touch me; you’re not my priest!” The prisoner told me – with rage in his voice – of the relentless abuse he suffered growing up in a state residential school. What he described was emotionally and physically brutal, and yet there isn’t a dime to be had in recompense, and none of it mitigates his crime. This is the same prisoner I described in my 2005 Catalyst article. “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” when he said:
“Let me get this straight. If I say that some priest touched me funny twenty years ago. I’ll be a victim; I’ll be paid for it; and my life will be HIS fault instead of mine! Do you have any idea how tempting this is?”
Have you read “Pornchai’s Story“? Please do before reading another New York Times headline about abuse in your Church. I live in a prison cell with a man who was brutally and routinely raped and physically battered when he was taken from his home and country at the age of eleven. As a preadolescent unable to even speak our language, he was driven into homelessness, hopelessness and despair on our streets. My friend summarized this when he first described it in “Pornchai’s Story.” “Welcome to America!” he wrote. It spoke volumes of the contradiction between what was promised to him and what was visited upon him in this country.
Pornchai is not the only one who lives with the wreckage of his stolen childhood and shattered life. I live with it too. I share a nine by twelve foot cell with him, and when he awakens violently in the night with panic attacks, I awaken as well. When his anxiety feels overwhelming, I feel it as well. Yet our society has held him personally accountable for every mistake he has ever made.
When Pornchai’s life fell apart, when he lost all control and killed a man who pinned him to the ground, no one – not a single soul – considered what he had endured as a child. No one cut him any slack whatsoever.
How do you think Pornchai Moontri feels when he reads that some unnamed man just remembered being touched by a priest thirty years ago and walks away with $200,000 for his “trauma”?
How do you think Pornchai feels when the Church in which he has found hope, and healing, and redemption is held up to open contempt and ridicule by reporters and pundits who don’t have a clue about what it means to be victimized by trauma?
On the very day of his Baptism as a Catholic, Pornchai read a story in the Easter Sunday edition of the Boston Globe about a Massachusetts priest removed from ministry by a claim of “fondling” alleged to have happened in 1971, and brought by a man who stands to gain a financial windfall for making the claim. His contingency lawyers and their enablers in the media are counting on you to have no frame of reference to put any of the claims of priestly abuse into context.
I do have a frame of reference, and I can tell you that the distortion being created by lawyers and the news media is deeply unjust – not only to Catholics and their priests, but to millions of adult victims of abuse whose suffering has been trivialized and cheapened by the distortion that only victims of Catholic priests are worth hearing and compensating.
I had a long conversation with Pornchai Moontri today. He’s angry at a lawyer who is suing the Vatican because the Pope didn’t throw out a priest accused between 1950 and 1970, and the news media has become this lawyer’s pawn. Pornchai wanted me to write about this, but I told him I was concerned that what happened to him should not be used to bring “perspective” to “our Catholic woes.”
Pornchai has been a Catholic for less than two weeks, and he just reminded me that these are his woes too. “It’s the truth,” he said today, “so write it! It’s time people heard the truth.” No one has a greater stake in the concept of healing from abuse.
This prison is filled with young men who have been robbed of their childhoods by physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. One friend to Pornchai and me is a physically powerful young man in prison for uncontrollable violence. For months every time I walked past him, he would spontaneously cover his face with his hands until I passed.
What do you suppose caused such an automatic response? So many people are afraid of this young man because he lashes out before anyone has a chance to lash out at him. How do you think this came about? He wasn’t born into violence. It was visited upon him by others and none of it was of his making. It was imposed on him as a child, and it shaped his life. Yet no one has even noticed this but me and Pornchai.
A few weeks ago, we sat down together and asked this man about his childhood. For the first time in his life, he told of the relentless beatings he endured from the only father he ever knew – a father who went to prison never to be seen again. This young man’s grief is very typical here.
Many prisoners lived their childhoods in a nightmare of abuse, but every step of the way they are held solely accountable for their own mistakes. No one was even remotely interested in hearing of what they went through as children. My friend still covers his face whenever I suddenly approach him. He declares himself to be a Moslem because it’s a faith that, he thinks, lets him live out his intense anger in a way that keeps others away and protects him.
As I described in “Fifty-seven Times Around the Sun,” Pornchai has helped many prisoners to come to terms with the wreckage of their stolen childhoods and ruined lives. He acquired this skill in the crucible of tormenting pain and suffering – suffering for which he has never acquired a dime and which society has not even acknowledged ever happened.
How do you think these men feel when night after night the evening news parades out lawyers claiming they are champions for the cause of victims by extracting “justice” from the Catholic Church for their clients? There is no justice in any of this. Most certainly, the lawyers and the news media have not brought anything like justice. It’s just one big profitable pretense, and Pornchai and our friend, at least, do not buy any of it. “What a scam,” Pornchai said today when he read the story of a lawsuit against the Pope.
“What a hateful, pitiful, destructive scam!”
PEGGY NOONAN ON THE PRESS AND THE POPE
I like Peggy Noonan, and always read her Saturday column in the Weekend Edition of The Wall Street Journal. She’s a gifted writer. Her commentary, “The Catholic Church’s Catastrophe” published on Holy Saturday was a tribute to her talent as a writer and observer of our culture.
On one point, however, I could not disagree with her more. Peggy Noonan absolved the news media of any dark motives in its continuing coverage of the Catholic Church’s woes. “The press,” she wrote, “has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the Church face it.” She stated that the media declined to pursue the story for a long time out of a possible fear of “a boycott from a few million Catholics.”
The truth seems just the opposite, and I wonder if Ms. Noonan truly believes what she wrote. In its arrogance, the news media seems to think Catholics will walk away from their Church, and not the newspapers, because of the relentless coverage singling the Church out as unique for its child abuse crisis. The news media had an opportunity to greatly impact the reality of child abuse in our culture, but it passed on that opportunity in favor of an illusion that this has been a specifically Catholic problem.
The news media issued an invitation to its open season on Catholic priests.
Peggy Noonan commended The Boston Globe for “winning a justly deserved Pulitzer for public service” for keeping the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in public view since 2002. She asserted that the news media has done a public service to both the Church and the world for its coverage of the scandal. This could have been true, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t because the Globe and the rest of the media put no context on the scandal.
They simply created an impression that Catholic young people are especially vulnerable to the predations of priests, and they left it there. Their service was not to the masses of victims of one of our society’s greatest social ills. The Globe overlooked the real wreckage left by child abuse in our culture.
The Globe served only the interests of contingency lawyers on a feeding frenzy.
From Pornchai’s point of view, only accusers of Catholic priests are seen as victims entitled to recompense. The irony for him is that he has found safety and hope in only one place – the Catholic Church – while recovering from the debilitating serial abuse he suffered. He’s not alone in that. I hear it on a daily basis from prisoners whose suffering has only increased under the distortion created by the news media and contingency bar. Strange bedfellows, that.
George Weigel, writing in First Things (March 29, 2010) cited a staggering statistic: “In the United States alone,” he wrote, “there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse.” According to the best available reports, there have been 11,000 claims of abuse by Catholic priests over a sixty year period. In other words, for every claimed victim of sexual abuse by a priest, there are 3,500 victims of childhood sexual abuse whose suffering remains unacknowledged and unaddressed because their abusers were not Catholic priests.
The Boston Globe and the New York Times had a chance to perform a monumental public service on behalf of the abused everywhere, but they let it pass. They left the impression that only victims of priests matter, and that only Catholic compensation brings justice. They left the reality of child abuse in our culture grossly distorted. They brought ample heat to the issues, but no light. None whatsoever.
The news media’s failure to pursue an open exploration of the extent of child abuse in our culture tells me that eradicating sexual abuse was never its goal. Its sole target was, and is, the Catholic Church. This has nothing to do with protecting children.
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How does an innocent clergyman, specifically Catholic priest, defend himself against unscrupulous accusers just looking to cash out. I am sure there are priests accused of all kinds of sexual abuse which are not true. How do they defend themselves? Even if they are exonerated, they will always live under that shadow.
When I was a child, I used to hear stories of the Catholic church having been under attack in times gone by. I would think, Thank God that’s over. Little did I realize that what is happening to the church today could ever occur! We are definitely under attack by forces far and near.
Three parishes to which I belonged during my life in NJ are now closed up for good. In the meantime, mosques are being built all over the place.
I pray for Christianity and all it represents.
God bless you, Father.
There are so many more teachers who have abused students. Should we bankrupt the educational system by sueing? Why is the Catholic Church the only group being sued? Greed and hatred are involved.
Father Gordon
I cannot do other than wonder if the Church is not targeted to “pay”, in many ways, as it were, for not only the sins/crimes of some priests who have broken the convenent entrusted to them, however sad and unjust that is, but also to pay for all those who haven’t and/or will never.
Could it be that the Church is singled out by victims’ lawyers to atone for all those who are guilty, be they priests, parents, neighbours or what have you? That is not to negate that some people also want to harm, if not destroy, the Church and are using this issue in that very hope.
Thank you for speaking out and please continue to do so. Count on my prayers.
Gérald C. LaJeunesse, ptre
Like you, Father MacRae, I was a bit incensed by the column written by Peggy Noonan in the WSJ.
She seems to think she is the voice of those in the pews and that the bishops are just not in touch with us. Actually it is ‘elites’ likes Ms. Noonan who step out of their limos and into the rareified air of their media kingdom.
Not only was she congratulating The Boston Globe for their so-called pursuit of the ‘pedophiles in the Church’ but she was patting herself on the back for her ‘brave’ accosting of Cardinal Law while telling him what she thought should be done. (Give me a break, Peggy, this is old news from years ago, and we all have moved on).
If I was falsely accused again, I would certainly not want Ms. Noonan on my jury. Hate to say it but she is just one of those self righteous Catholics who think they know better than the rest of the Faithful. That column she wrote last week did more harm than good and I would hope she is not considered a representative of our Church in the future, especially by the Catholic media.
Dear Father:
As happens so often I came across your blog and story by A “coincidence”, or as a priest friend of mine said by B “Godincidence.” I’m for B.
I have echoed this article slightly from the perspective of being a husband of a woman sexually abused by her father for many years, and is the sibling of another sister similarly abused, and 4 other siblings, all of whom were physically and emotionally abused by both parents. She is part of a family that has hidden from the truth, and been destroyed by the dysfunction of the lies.
I wrote about it here
http://freethroughtruth.blogspot.com/2010/04/its-not-about-sexual-abuse.html
and subsequently,
http://freethroughtruth.blogspot.com/2010/04/its-not-about-sexual-abuse-part-2.html
I have placed a link to your blog on my own, Father, and will begin to read about your story in the next few days. As sad as it is that you have been incarcerated, in just what I have read thus far, you have a ministry that could not have happened otherwise.
God definitely moves in strange and mysterious ways.
May He Bless You minute by minute as you seek His face in your fellow inmates.
God Bless You, Father
Michael Brandon
Powerful writing. How sordidly these lawyers use their skills and and they and the media prostitute the victims. No amount of money, however great or small, can truly compensate for the trauma suffered by those abused in any environment. What comfort does the money bring them? For some, it simply eases descent into substance or alcohol abuse. Yet those others fill their coffers and treasure-houses on the back of these victims. Truly sinful.
Thank you for thie powerful commentary Father. I find the relentless media campaign in some quarters chilling.They don’t bother to check facts they just print anything including lies and half truths.
These are dark times but in darkness even the frail light of a single candle can dispel that darkness. I sometimes think our individual faith is like a candle and if we can keep our individual candle burning bright we can create a river of light.
People are frightened. Especially people who have never experienced the faith. I feel it is more important than ever to remain calm and respond with love even when people speak ill of our faith. Some are like little children They don’t know any better and believe what some sections of the media are saying is an accurate picture of our church.
I simply keep reminding people that anyone who hurts and abuses a child is not LIVING in the way that the Church tells us to live. If everyone lived according to the teachings of the Church there would be no domestic violence no adultery, promiscuity or sexual abuse.
The problem is that people including a minority of religious stopped obeying God and the solution lies in a return to holy obedience.
I feel it is particularly painful for yourself and other falsely accused and convicted religious at this time because any chance of receiving a fair hearing of your situation becomes diminished but Jesus and Mary will steer you through it all
God Bless you, Pornchai and all those who have to carry their cross within the prison walls.