By Bruce Nolan
The Times-Picayune
April 1, 2010
http://www.nola.com/religion/index.ssf/2010/04/american_bishop_urges_catholics_to_besiege_new_york_times.html
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| Pope Benedict XVI washes the foot of a layman in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome on Thursday. The feet-washing ceremony symbolizes humility and commemorates Jesus' last supper with his 12 apostles on the evening before his Good Friday crucifixion. Photo by Alessia Pierdomenico |
Senior American Catholic clergy, lay conservatives and even some church critics are publicly pushing back, hard, at the New York Times, saying a March 24 story implicating Pope Benedict XVI in shielding an American priest-molester over-reached the facts and amounts to a calculated attempt to damage the church.
The high point of the counteroffensive so far may have come Tuesday night, when Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn used a Holy Week homily to call on priests and New York Catholics “to besiege” the New York Times.
Days earlier New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan took the unusual step of ending a Palm Sunday Mass with personal remarks broadly comparing the church to a wounded Christ afflicted by “certain sources” whose attacks were characterized by “inaccuracy, bias, and hyperbole.”
Beyond that, the Catholic blogosphere and social networking tools have been afire with analyses of the Times article, most of them arguing that the internal church documents Times placed online did not support the charges outlined in the story.
Some of the criticism comes from Catholic communities that have not been reflexively defensive — and sometimes have been sharply critical — of the bishops’ and Vatican’s handling of the sexual abuse crisis.
Referring to Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict’s name before assuming the papacy, “the Times article certainly suggests moral culpability even though the documents do not support the charge,” wrote liberal Catholic author Michael Sean Winters on the Web site of America magazine, a Jesuit publication.
The episode comes at a particularly perilous moment for the institutional church. Seven years after the sexual abuse crisis swept the United States, it broke out in Ireland, and now has erupted in Germany, Ratzinger’s homeland. Disclosures about his administration’s handling of an abusive German priest in 1980, when Ratzinger was archbishop of Munich, threaten to involve Ratzinger personally in the crisis.
But the U.S. battleground is a front page Times story headlined “Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys.”
Written by Laurie Goodstein, an award-winning veteran of the beat, the story used internal church documents originally acquired by two plaintiffs’ attorneys to trace the church’s handling, in Milwaukee and in Rome, of the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, an admitted molester thought to have abused 200 deaf children before 1974 in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Ratzinger is involved because he moved on to Rome as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which then handled certain sex abuse cases.
The report said officials in Ratzinger’s department did not defrock Murphy despite repeated pleas from his American superiors; that his Vatican office was more sympathetic to Murphy than his victims, and that church officials never notified police and prosecutors of Murphy’s crimes.
But in examining church documents the Times put on its Web site in conjunction with the story, critics assert that the newspaper over-reached.
They point out there is no evidence of Ratzinger’s involvement in the case; that the Vatican did not appear to have been notified of the Murphy case until 1996; that the church went so far as to waive the statute of limitations on Murphy’s crimes to authorize a complicated trial, and that Ratzinger’s deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, urged reluctant American bishops to impose penalties outside a trial in 1998 because Murphy was by then fatally ill and within four months of his death.
Critics also note that the Times reported in passing that Murphy “also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims,” but left that finding unexplored while focusing on the Vatican response.
Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.
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