UNITED STATES
GetReligion
As a rule, your GetReligionistas think that veteran religion-beat specialists do a consistently better job of getting the basic facts right, especially when their work is compared with general-assignment reporters who are shipped off to cover complicated stories that often have years, decades or centuries of past history.
At the top of the list of scribes whose work we frequently admire is Tim Townsend of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The man is a pro.
All of which makes we wonder if an editor or two monkeyed around with the top of the following story about the early work at the latest meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops. Pay close attention and think “history.”
ATLANTA — The U.S. Catholic bishops who gathered here for their annual spring meeting spent Wednesday morning grappling with the sins of the past, marking the 10th anniversary of the clergy sex abuse crisis that crippled the church. …
In June 2002, the bishops met in Dallas as the abuse scandal, which first erupted in Boston, was raging across the country.
The crisis began in 2002? That will be a shock to religion-beat veterans who have been covering the crisis since the mid-1980s, complete with magazine cover stories, a major book or two and even a made for television movie about one spectacular case that gripped the nation.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.