By John Birch Society
Selwyn Duke
April 19, 2010
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/6213-shameful-media-malpractice-and-the-catholic-church
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Who is really lying about sexual abuse, the Church or the media?
If the pen is mightier than the sword, misuse of it can be a murderous act. As my faithful readers know, I’ve devoted much ink lately to the media abuse scandal — that is, their abuse of the Truth in reporting on the Catholic Church. Now, it’s not my practice to fixate on one issue for so long, but determined propagandists call for determined defenses. And never have I seen the media so completely abandon proper journalistic standards as they have with respect to the Catholic Church.
As an example, Christopher Hitchens, today’s poster boy for militant atheism, has insisted that Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested for what he claims is complicity in a cover-up of sexual abuse. And while Hitchens should know better, it’s not surprising that he would take this view if he truly believes the nonsense he has been spouting.
In a hit piece called “The Great Catholic Coverup,” Hitchens discusses a supposedly “confidential” 2001 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) letter that the Pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger) sent to bishops warning them that anyone who reported child “rape and torture” was subject to excommunication. This certainly sounds damning.
The problem is that it’s also a lie.
In making his assertion, Hitchens repeated an accusation circulating in the darker recesses of the Internet and very popular at leftist e-wastelands such as Fark. In reality, however, the 2001 letter made no such threat. Its only purpose was to eliminate confusion about how sexual misconduct by clerics was to be handled. Moreover, while Hitchens claims that the Pope’s letter constitutes “obstruction of justice,” it actually stated that the statute of limitations for canonical prosecution of sexual abusers would be increased. This ensured that fewer transgressors would slip through the cracks and avoid justice.
Additionally, while many mainstream media claimed the letter was confidential, it is anything but. As Sean Murphy wrote in a very scholarly response to Hitchens, the letter “was published by the Vatican, appeared in English in 2001, and has been on the Vatican website (in Latin) since at least the middle of 2005.”
Now, Hitchens’ claim of an excommunication threat didn’t come out of nowhere. But, as Murphy points out, while he leads his readers to believe it was in the 2001 instruction, the passage that Hitchens quotes when making his claim is actually from a 1962 Vatican document titled Crimen Sollicitationis. Its directives are frequently mistaken for those in the Pope’s 2001 letter by Internet commenters, the leftist blogosphere and even, it appears, some supposedly reputable journalists.
But “excommunication” stills sounds damning (no pun intended), doesn’t it? Well, Hitchens, like so many others, has turned truth on its head. Crimen Sollicitationis does threaten excommunication, but to those who don’t report clerical sexual misconduct. So, again, the goal was to maximize the chances that transgressors would be brought to justice.
Then there is the critics’ claim that Crimen Sollicitationis prescribed oaths of secrecy. This is true, but there is nothing malevolent about it. As Murphy wrote, “analogous oaths of secrecy and confidentiality are taken by secular professionals and officials . . . confidentiality is usually maintained during secular investigations . . . [and] secular proceedings – Family Court hearings for example – sometimes proceed in secret.” Moreover, the oaths served the purpose of, he writes, “protecting the seal of confession, ensuring the integrity of an investigation, shielding victims from publicity and encouraging them to come forward, and protecting reputations before guilt has been established.”
But none of this was revealed by Hitchens. Instead, he took a passage pertaining to Catholic officials’ oaths of secrecy and perverted it through, writes Murphy, “selective quotation and extraordinary accusation.”
This brings us to something interesting. In 2004, Christopher Hitchens wrote a meticulously researched and reasoned piece exposing the lies and distortions in Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11. And in it he had this to say about Moore’s selective quotation, “if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised [emphasis mine].”
You were saying, Chris?
Now, I’ve placed Hitchens in the crosshairs because, as the highest profile militant atheist in America and a supposedly respectable journalist, the secular world gloms onto the untruths he utters, thus giving them great legs. Yet he is certainly not alone, as it is open season on the Pope. There is, for instance, the media’s treatment of the case of German priest Peter Hullermann, who had sexually assaulted some children in 1970s in Essen, Germany. After being transferred to the Munich diocese and undergoing therapy — the young victim’s parents chose not to report the abuse to the authorities — Hullermann resumed his clerical duties and also, shamefully, his targeting of children.
Critics accuse the Pope — who was Archbishop Ratzinger of the Munich diocese at the time — of approving the priest’s return to service. Yet this is without foundation. Moreover, many of Hullermann’s post-therapy transgressions occurred after Archbishop Ratzinger resigned from his Munich office to become head of the CDF (for more details on the case, read Murphy’s piece. He examines the matter at length).
Then there is the horrible case of Father Lawrence Murphy, who assaulted as many as 200 deaf boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin in the 1950s and 60s. While the mainstream media have accused the Pope of refusing to defrock the priest, this is contradicted by Father Thomas Brundage, who just happened to be the judge in Fr. Murphy’s canonical trial. Brundage says that he has “no reason to believe that he [the Pope] was involved at all.” Furthermore, Brundage makes a shocking revelation: Despite the media’s apparent zeal for reporting the case, not one major news organization approached him to get the facts. Once again: No major news outlet saw fit to contact the man who knows more about the Lawrence Murphy back story than most anyone alive.
This gross journalistic malpractice explains why the media have gotten even simple facts wrong. For example, when reporting on the Fr. Murphy story, The New York Times and other news gatherers have stated that for decades child sexual abuse cases have been handled by the CDF, which the Pope (again as Cardinal Ratzinger) led between 1981 and 2005. But this is untrue. Most sexual abuse cases during those years were heard by an entity called the Roman Rota; the CDF didn’t assume this responsibility until 2001.
This brings us back to Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2001 letter. It was simply one example of how he aggressively tackled the issue of sexual abuse once it was within his purview. In fact, the Church long ago came to grips with the problem, which is why most of the abuse cases are decades old. As Fr. Brundage writes, “The Catholic Church is probably the safest place for children at this point in history.”
It certainly is a lot safer than government schools, where, an Associated Press investigation tells us, child sexual abuse is rampant. But, since media abuse is rampant also, don’t expect to hear much about that. The schools push the left-wing media’s agenda, the Catholic Church does not. And it is political motivations such as this — not concern about children’s welfare — that really determine what news is “fit to print.”
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