Questioning the Pope

One of the disingenuous tactics of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in trying to blunt and deflect the truth about the world wide sex abuse scandal has been to endeavor the news outlets reporting on the constantly unfolding story as "anti-Catholic" and/or "anti-Catholic bigots." Indeed, the goal has been to try to spin the tidal wave of stories in a manner so as to depict the Church as the Victim rather than the central co-conspirator of a massive sexual abuse scheme that has victimized literally tens of thousands of children and minors. The Church's behavior - and that of its sycophants - has been disgusting and evidence of the moral bankruptcy that is now the norm at the Vatican. Money, power, control, image preservation, etc. are that matters any more. Fortunately, the New York Times which has borne the brunt of the dishonest attacks by the Church and its defenders has spoken out and taken the lying apologists to task. Here are some highlights:
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Hundreds of people have written to me. “I am outraged each time The Times intentionally disparages the Catholic Church, its pope and its bishops,” said Richard Kelly of Pittsburgh. Edwina and Gene Cosgriff of Staten Island wrote that The Times was guilty of “a yellow journalism hatchet job on a holy, venerable, outstanding religious leader.”
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Hardly alone among the world’s news media, The Times has been covering the widening Catholic sexual-abuse scandal, which in recent months has expanded even to the German archdiocese of the future Pope Benedict XVI. But one Times article last month struck a particularly sensitive nerve. Relying on documents from a lawsuit, it described how local church officials and the Vatican handled the case of a Milwaukee priest who may have molested as many as 200 deaf boys.
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It said that top Vatican officials, including Benedict when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, did not defrock Father Lawrence Murphy despite repeated warnings from American bishops that failure to act could embarrass the church.
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Many readers, including church officials, took the article as a direct attack on Pope Benedict. But much of their criticism does not hold up: . . . it is also perfectly appropriate for The Times, with a worldwide audience, to pay far more attention to the handling of a sexual-abuse case under the jurisdiction of the prelate who would eventually become pope.
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¶The presiding judge in Murphy’s canonical trial, Father Thomas Brundage . . . The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel later confronted Brundage with a memo showing that he actually drafted the archbishop’s letter officially abating the trial. Brundage posted a statement: “In all honesty, I do not remember this memo, but I do admit to being wrong on this issue.”
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The more important question is whether the documents were genuine and what they said about the case. I have read them and believe that Goodstein’s article is an accurate and reasonable account. Readers can interpret whether they showed a two-year lack of urgency about a horrendous case or, as Levada argued, a realistic judgment that it was “useless” to try a dying priest.
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[I]t would be irresponsible to ignore the continuing revelations. A day after the first article about Murphy, The Times published another front-page article that said Benedict, while archbishop in Munich, led a meeting approving the transfer of a pedophile priest and was kept informed about the case. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish. The paper’s critics have been mostly silent about this report.
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Like it or not, there are circumstances that have justifiably driven this story for years, including a well-documented pattern of denial and cover-up in an institution with billions of followers. Painful though it may be, the paper has an obligation to follow the story where it leads, even to the pope’s door.
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Obviously, if the Church truly believed that the Times articles lacked accuracy or truth, a simple lawsuit against the newspaper could be filed. However, the last thing the Vatican wants is a court case where documentation and facts would be reviewed and more probably than not support the Times. Few things could be more damaging that a court decision finding that the Vatican's disingenuous protestations are indeed a lie. Until the Church files such a lawsuit, the safest assumption is that the facts of the news accounts are accurate and that the Vatican is simply lying yet again.