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	A Stain of Sin By Lorne Gunter National Post April 7, 2010 http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=199ebda3-0447-42af-a1d1-44300a83a13b Here is the one salient fact in the child sexual abuse scandal now rocking the Roman Catholic Church: During the past half century, predatory pedophiles in priests' robes have defiled hundreds of thousands of vulnerable boys and young men without being adequately punished by the Church for their sins -- not their crimes, their sins. Since the first abuse revelations began to emerge three decades ago, the Church has reacted as a secular organization would -- focusing on protecting the institution, preserving its reputation, minimizing the public relations damage. This is human instinct, especially among those who love an institution, who understand its good side as well as its bad and see much ignorance of its traditions and teachings among those who are its most vociferous critics. But the Catholic Church is not a secular association. It professes to know, love and teach the will of God. So it cannot begin acting like Caesar rather than Christ during times of crisis and hope that the love of Christ it professes will shelter it from the storm. Has the world's press rushed to heap scorn on Rome in its hour of crisis? Yes. Has it misrepresented the Vatican's reaction as one of total indifference? Certainly. Has the coverage been one-sided and almost gloating? Sure. But none of that changes the one salient fact and until the Vatican acknowledges the pain and degradation caused worldwide by men it ordained (and all too often ignored), it will not be able to extract itself from this mess, nor should it be allowed to. I say that as one who, although a non-Catholic, hopes the Church survives this crisis and finds in it a chance to rebuild and restrengthen. But just because one has real enemies and those enemies are baying like hounds at one's misfortune, does not mean those enemies are to blame for the misfortune. One of the first surprises I received when entering journalism nearly 20 years ago was the depth of loathing for the Catholic Church among reporters and other cultural leaders. By no means are a majority of journalists anti-Catholic. But many have an easy disdain for Rome based mostly on its beliefs against abortion and female ordination. So in any dispute involving the Church and its secular critics, the natural tendency among a good many journalists is to side with the critics and portray Roman Catholicism as an antiquated, oppressive ideology. To be sure, this contempt has been facilitated in North America by bishops who themselves have often opposed Church teachings as old-fashioned or who at the very least have failed to enforce doctrine because it was not politically correct. How could reporters be expected to be more Catholic than the Catholics' own leaders? A March 25 article in The New York Times is a fine illustration of the default bias Western media have against Roman Catholicism. It claimed that a Wisconsin priest who abused 200 boys between the '50s and the '70s at a Milwaukee school for the deaf was "never" disciplined by the Church and that an investigation into his misdeeds was halted by Pope Benedict XVI when he was the cardinal in charge of handling abuse allegations. Never mentioned was the fact that the investigation into Father Lawrence Murphy was halted because he was dying and asked for clemency, nor that he had been stripped of his ability to celebrate mass or work with children (although he retained his ordination).
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