Reading Eagle
July 1, 2011
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=317565
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The book arrived one day in an unassuming manila envelope.
I thought that if it turned out to be like most other books that come to me unannounced and unsolicited, I'd donate it to the office auction, someone would bid on it and the proceeds would be donated to a local nonprofit.
But this wasn't just another cookbook or a novel that I knew I'd never read. It caught my attention. And I did read it.
The book is "Double Standard: Abuse Scandals and the Attack on the Catholic Church" by David F. Pierre Jr., who, according to the back cover, has been writing for several years about the media and the Catholic Church.
The slim, well-researched paperback appears to have been published last year by his website, www.themediareport.com, Mattapoisett, Mass.
The most surprising aspect of Pierre's 160-page book is how much of what he said is consistent with many of the columns I've written about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
Over the last year or so I've been honored to tell the stories of Mark Rozzi and Joe Behe, who said they were sexually abused by the Rev. Edward Graff in the 1980s when they attended Holy Guardian Angels school in Hyde Park.
Graff died in a hospital in Texas in 2002 while awaiting trial on charges that he sexually abused a 15-year-old boy in a Catholic church rectory there.
Joe's and Mark's stories are difficult to listen to.
I am grateful beyond words for their courage in talking to me about secrets they've kept hidden for so long, about something so dark, so evil, so torturous. No child should endure what they said they endured at the hand of someone as divinely trusted as a Catholic priest. And that's why they shared their stories with me, they both said. They don't want it to happen to anyone else.
Laced throughout Pierre's assertions about a variety of wrongs that he said were - and still are, if I'm reading him correctly - committed by the media are admissions of certain facts.
For example, Pierre starts the book with: "The media didn't cause the abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. Priests and bishops acted wrongly, and they harmed children terribly. That's a plain fact."
On page 99, he writes: "It must be repeated that nothing can mitigate the devastating harm that Catholic priests committed upon innocent youth. Their criminal abuse ravaged families and extinguished their faith. Nothing can vanish this truth."
Among the topics Pierre covers are that sexual abuse of minors by other perpetrators is not as widely reported as abuse by Catholic priests, that the media does not report on the good done by most Catholic priests, the effect on priests who are accused of sexual abuse and that Amy Berg's award-winning documentary film from 2006, "Deliver Us from Evil," is anti-Catholic propaganda.
I'm grateful to Pierre for sending me his book. I have just one suggestion if he decides to write another one: Have someone proofread it.
As a copy editor, I'm troubled when the care I thought I used when editing a story wasn't enough and a mistake appears in the paper.
When a reader asks how she can trust the content of a story when we can't even spell a word right, it stops me in my tracks.
Pierre's mistakes include Detriot-based for Detroit-based; "doesn't bother correct Manly" is missing to before correct, misusing the word accentuated and confusing wrecked for wreaked.
None of these detracts from the passion of Pierre's polemic. I don't agree with much of what he wrote, but I'm glad to have read his work.
John Fidler is a copy editor and writer at the Reading Eagle. He holds a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago. Contact him at 610-371-5054 or jfidler@readingeagle.com.
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