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	Neuhaus, Me and Too Much Truth By Rod Dreher Beliefnet February 9, 2009 http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/02/how-much-truth-is-too-much.html In a USA Today column this morning, I reflect on how much truth is too much for the public to know. Excerpt: My mistake was to assume that I was strong enough emotionally to put analytical distance between myself and my subject. After I left Rome, I made a deliberate decision not to investigate scandal in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), my new communion. My family and I needed a church more than I needed to crusade against ecclesial iniquity. I felt, and still do feel, deeply conflicted about this decision. Did Jesus not say, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free"? But the truth that I helped tell about what some in the Catholic hierarchy had done to children did not set me free; in fact, it nearly destroyed my Christian faith. And yet, I could not in good conscience have remained silent. As an Orthodox Christian chastened by experience, am I behaving prudently, or am I being cowardly? In one of his final columns for First Things, Father Neuhaus praised me, faintly, for my decision. He wrote, "There are things (Catholics) really don't want to know about their church." The priest went on to defend his magazine's past refusal to run advertising for an unnamed abuse crisis book, in large part because "we thought there were some things people didn't need to know and didn't want to know, and for good reasons." Are there things people don't need to know? I do not believe Father Neuhaus was a cynic; he really did believe that there were certain things that ought to be concealed from the public for the greater good. And though it might be heresy for a journalist to say, as a matter of general principle, I agree with him. Very few of us are purists when it comes to transparency. A society in which all secrets were known would be monstrous. The problem in the Catholic case is that bishops abused their discretion not to shield the innocent, but to protect the guilty. It was only when the details of these sordid cases came to broad public light that the Catholic bishops were shamed into serious action. Nevertheless, if you reject Father Neuhaus' larger point, then be prepared to welcome the child pornographer and the rogue atom bombmaker to the public square. The question is not whether some knowledge should be suppressed for the public good; it's where to draw the line between what must be public and what must stay private.
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