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	Bearing False Witness against the Church By Timothy P. Carney Washington Examiner April 1, 2010 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Bearing-false-witness-against-the-Church-89710062.html It's something of a tradition in the media to use Holy Week as the venue for bashing the Catholic Church or other Christian institutions. This year, the New York Times has set the tone, and other liberal outlets have followed. Of course, the Church hierarchy has provided plenty of material for its enemies: Bishops inexcusably covered up for perverted Priests who raped and molested children -- mostly boys. This sin and crime by Priests is exacerbated by the Priest's position of power. The sins of the Bishops and the Priests both are exacerbated by how they bring scandal on the Church -- they make it harder for the faithful to obey, and easier for detractors to attack the legitimacy of the institution. That, however, does not excuse false and misleading reporting. Let's start with the Times, which published a March 25 article about a memo regarding a Priest accused of molesting boys -- the Priest was later returned to pastoral work. The key paragraphs: Church officials defend Benedict by saying the memo was routine and was “unlikely to have landed on the archbishop’s desk,” according to the Rev. Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar at the Munich Archdiocese. But Father Wolf said he could not rule out that Cardinal Ratzinger had read it. According to Father Wolf, who spoke with Father Gruber this week at the request of The New York Times, Father Gruber, the former vicar general, said that he could not remember a detailed conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger about Father Hullermann, but that Father Gruber refused to rule out that “the name had come up.” So that's the Times' scoop: while nobody has said Cardinal Ratzinger saw a memo, some people say it is not outside the realm of possibility. Next, there's Tim Fernholz of the liberal American Prospect, a Catholic and a former theology student who declares he is skipping Easter Mass. Fernholz says he has studied his catechism, and so I presume he knows that "the faithful are obliged to participate in the Eucharist on days of obligation, unless excused for a serious reason (for example, illness, the care of infants) or dispensed by their own pastor. Those who deliberately fail in this obligation commit a grave sin." Setting aside matters of Fernholz's soul, there's the matter of his journalism. In his latest blog post on skipping Easter Mass, Fernholz, writing on a 2001 letter from Ratzinger about sex abuse charges, quotes from a National Catholic Reporter article and summarizes it as saying, "Benedict told them to keep sexual abuse secret, but he really didn't mean it, you know?" That same section of the Reporter article, however, sums up thus: [H]ere's the key point about Ratzinger's 2001 letter: Far from being seen as part of the problem, at the time it was widely hailed as a watershed moment towards a solution. It marked recognition in Rome, really for the first time, of how serious the problem of sex abuse really is, and it committed the Vatican to getting directly involved. Prior to that 2001 motu proprio and Ratzinger's letter, it wasn't clear that anyone in Rome acknowledged responsibility for managing the crisis; from that moment forward, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would play the lead role. Again, there's plenty to criticize in the way the Church handled the sex-abuse problem. There's no reason to do so misleadingly. You can find more critiques of the media coverage of our current Pope's role in the sex-abuse scandal in this post and its links.
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