NEW YORK
NewsHounds
The alternate reality of Fox News was front and center during this morning’s Fox & Friends when Peter Johnson Jr. provided a glowing testimony to his recently deceased pal Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan. While Johnson stressed the highlights of Egan’s career, he downplayed, if not outright obfuscated the lowlights.
In the middle of his praise of Egan’s awesomeness, Johnson (Catholic Knight of Malta, Cardinal Dolan pal, Roger Ailes’ consigliore, and Fox “friend”) proclaimed that Egan “cracked down on the notion of the abuse and said to the priests and the archdiocese that there wasn’t going to be internal investigation any more, he would report folks to the district attorney which, in fact, he did.” In fact, his handling of priestly sexual abuse was not quite as sterling as Johnson claimed.
The NY Times, in its recent summation of Egan’s life, tells a different story. According to its report, when Egan was bishop of Bridgeport CT, he “tried to protect the church from liability” incurred as a result of sexual abuse claims. He was “accused of withholding information about accused priests and moving some from parish to parish.” It is also noted that while Egan condemned sexual abuse by priests, “he refused to divulge any cases and let priests who had undergone counseling continue to work. The bishop was accused in many lawsuits of shuffling accused priests from one parish to another.” He even claimed that his diocese was not liable for damages because priests were self-employed. (The Hartford Courant has more details)
The Times article also states that Egan believed that his diocese never did anything wrong in its handling of complaints and that most priests were innocent. And in what appears to be a contradiction of Johnson’s assertion that Egan reported abuse to the civil authorities, the Times writes that Egan said “the church had no obligation to report sexual-abuse accusations to the authorities, even though a law on the books since the 1970s dictates otherwise.”
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.