Church Sexual Abuse in the Media

By Michael Mullins
Eureka Street
November 11, 2012

www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=34042

If there is anything amusing about the Iraq War, it is the reality-defying propaganda broadcasts of President Saddam Hussein’s information minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, otherwise known as ‘Comical Ali’. As the Americans were closing in on Baghdad in 2003, he extolled the invincibility of the Iraqi Army and the permanence of Saddam's rule.

Those paying close attention to media coverage of clergy sexual abuse might find Cardinal George Pell’s defence of the Church hard to swallow. He suggested to The Weekend Australian on Saturday that the Church has been unfairly vilified, and is no worse than other organisations. ‘Anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the few remaining prejudices ... among some circles’. 

Then in his Sunday Telegraph column yesterday, he wrote: ‘It is hard to name any other Australian organisation that has done more to produce a safe environment for young people [than the Church]’.

When you are being attacked by the media, it is natural to defend your turf, especially if you’re a Church leader and you firmly believe that the good the Church does far outweighs the evil. 

But in the context of a massive outpouring of public anger and emotion – not to mention an overwhelming body of evidence – it is surely better to approach sexual abuse in an empathetic manner before attempting to put facts on the table. Some kind of catharsis is needed as a precondition for reconciliation.

This is where Bishop Bill Wright of Maitland-Newcastle is leading the way. Fairfax reported yesterday that he plans to attend next month’s launch of Holy Hell, a book dealing with the abuse of an altar boy by a priest who later died in jail. 

The author is the boy’s mother Patricia Feenan. She has already lauded the bishop for his decision to attend. ‘He's a brave man. Almost as brave as my son who will come up from Tasmania for it,’ she said. 

Listening to victims without prejudgement could and should become the order of the day for the Church, perhaps in a systematic fashion, as long as it does not interfere with state inquiries. In the process, it may become clear which claims justify the most attention.

Empathy is something media investigations do well in that the victims can feel the benefit of powerful public support and understanding. But it is important that the reports not jump to conclusions and take the place of the court system.

The lesson from yesterday’s news of the resignation of BBC Director-General George Entwistle is that investigative journalism is fallible. One of the most highly regarded media investigation teams in the English-speaking world got it wrong, with its mistaken identification of a former government official as a pedophile by the BBC's Newsnight team. 

The announcement that all investigative reporting on the BBC Newsnight program is suspended indefinitely is a signal that we should regard the judgments of all investigative reporting with a degree of skepticism, though there is still important value in the catharsis that its interviews often produce. We should also remember that the much derided Comical Ali was eventually vindicated for one of his improbable claims, which was his assertion that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.