by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on October 13, 2010 · 24 comments
. . . False accusations are rare? Tell that to Mike Gallagher and the falsely accused men I described in “The Eighth Commandment.” Tell that to the twelve falsely accused men who appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” with Innocence Project attorney Barry Scheck on October 6, after they each were exonerated following an average of 20 years in prison accused of sexual assaults they had nothing to do with. Their stories, and the hundreds like them, will be the subject of a landmark film, Conviction, opening this Friday. Justice has turned on its head when men who stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars for making a false claim are automatically called “victims” by Church leaders now, while priests accused without evidence from decades ago are just as quickly called “priests-offenders” and “slayers of souls.” . . .
. . . The sole accusation that just destroyed this 8O-year-old priest’s good name is that he abused someone fifty-one years ago when he was 29 years old. Kelly Lynch, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston, announced that Father Menna was placed on administrative leave, barred from offering the Sacraments, and ordered to pack up and leave the rectory where he had been spending his senior years in the company of other priests. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on March 9, 2010 · 5 comments
. . . As a result of availability bias, humans tend to replace their beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs simply because a proposition has been repeated in the media and presented as widely believed. We are subjected to subtle cues of social pressure every day in marketing that convince many people to purchase things they don’t really need. We also face subtle cues and social pressure in the daily bombardment of news stories that cause many people to believe something based solely on its prevalence in the media. It is indeed possible that Michael Jackson and many Catholic priests became the subjects of classic, media-fueled availability bias. . . .
