Going for the Vatican Jugular

By Bill Donohue
Catholic League
Advertisement in the New York Times
March 30, 2010

[This ad was scanned from the print edition of the New York Times by BishopAccountability.org. See also an image of the ad with a PDF. Donohue is discussing Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys, by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, March 24, 2010, with the documents posted on the web to accompany the article. See also For Years, Deaf Boys Tried to Tell of Priest’s Abuse, by Laurie Goodstein and David Callender, New York Times, March 26, 2010.]

Recent accusations against the Vatican deserve a response.

• Fr. Lawrence Murphy apparently began his predatory behavior in Wisconsin in the 1950s, yet the victims' families never contacted the police until the mid-1970s. After an investigation, the case was dropped.

• The Vatican did not learn of the case until 1996.

• Cardinal Ratzinger, now the pope, was the head of the office that was contacted. There is no evidence that he knew of it. But even if he did, he would have had to allow for an investigation. While the inquiry was proceeding, Murphy died.

• The Times questions why Murphy was never defrocked. But only the Vatican can do that, and since it never learned of the case until he was dying, it was never a realistic option.

• The Times says the Vatican's canonical inquiry was done in secret. Correct. The proceedings of internal investigations—even in organizations like the Times—are never shown on C-SPAN.

• The Times says repeatedly that Church officials did not report accusations of abuse to the police. The common response of all organizations, secular as well as religious, was to access therapy and reinstate the patient (I prefer the term offender). Today it is obvious that a more hard-line approach is necessary, though therapy is still popular in many quarters.

• The Times continues to editorialize about the "pedophilia crisis," when all along it's been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.

Here's what's really going on. The Times has teamed up with Jeffrey Anderson, a
radical lawyer who has made millions suing the Church (and greasing professional victims' groups like SNAP) so they can weaken its moral authority. Why? Because of issues like gay marriage and women's ordination. That's what's really driving them mad, and that's why they are on the hunt. Those who doubt this to be true need to ask why the debt-ridden Times does not spend the same resources looking for dirt in other institutions that occurred a half-century ago.

Bill Donohue
President

CATHOLIC LEAGUE for Religious and Civil Rights
450 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10123
(212) 371-3191 Fax: (212) 371-3394
www.catholicleague.org