Are the Media Engaged in Catholic-Bashing with Scandal Reports?, Politics Daily, April 8, 2010

Are the Media Engaged in Catholic-Bashing with Scandal Reports?

Politics Daily
April 8, 2010

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/04/08/are-the-media-engaged-in-catholic-bashing-with-scandal-reports/

Like melody leads harmony, the latest news reports about sexually predatory priests are inevitably followed by accusations that the media are unfairly attacking the Catholic Church. For anybody who has long followed this story, this is a familiar song.

Guess the dates and authors of the following quotes:

A) "Not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, one can see underway an orchestrated plan for striking at the prestige of the [Catholic] Church. . . . Not a few journalists have confirmed for me the existence of this organized campaign."

B) "In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower. In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type."

C) The pope has been "mistreated by enemies of the Church, with unusual disrespect for the truth and an incredible display of cynicism. It is evident that harming the Church is what is behind this attack."

D) ". . . the crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance has been seized upon by the Church's enemies to cripple it, morally and financially, and to cripple its leaders. That was the subtext in Boston in 2002 (where the effort was aided by Catholics who want to turn Catholicism into high-church Congregationalism, preferably with themselves in charge). And that is what has happened in recent weeks, as a global media attack has swirled around Pope Benedict XVI, following the revelation of odious abuse cases throughout Europe."

Here are the sources:

A) July 2002. Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, of Mexico City.

B) December 2002, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and now, of course, Pope Benedict XVI).

C) April 2010, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima, Peru.

D) March 2010, George Weigel in "First Things."

I'm not about to defend every word in the media about the latest wrinkles in the scandal. To paraphrase then-Cardinal Ratzinger, reporters are also human, and errors are inevitable. Nor will I deny that there are people out there who do not much like the Catholic Church and are cheering every negative news report.

But when the pope's personal preacher uses the "some of my best friends are Jewish" defense to compare current media coverage of the scandal to anti-Semitism, he's ignoring facts about the story that have nothing to do with religion.

Start with size. Catholics claim more than 65 million members in the United States. That's about four times more than the membership claimed by next-largest faith group, the Southern Baptist Convention. It's eight times larger than the United Methodist Church, about 13 times larger than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as much as 20 times more than the number of Jews or Muslims in America.

As a world faith, the Catholics count more than 1.1 billion members. The next largest, trailing by about 100 million, would be Sunni Muslims – but they are fractured into many smaller sub-sects.

Those numbers mean that a widespread Catholic scandal will be huge compared with any other religion-- and therefore unusually newsworthy. To respond to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, even 1 percent of a big enough number is still a very large number.

Next, consider organization. Unique among the world's largest religions, the Catholic Church is a defined hierarchy with a single clear chain of command -- and accountability. Among relatively large faith traditions, only the Mormons have anything comparable.

When a Southern Baptist pastor is caught attacking a child, that denomination has no system of clergy discipline or even record-keeping. Every Baptist church considers itself autonomous and has the God-given right to tell any supposed Earthly authority to go pound sand. By contrast, every Catholic priest has sworn obedience directly to a bishop who technically reports directly to the pope.

So a reporter looking for whom to hold accountable has a much easier time with a Catholic scandal -- the story is clearer and the potential blame easier to correctly assign.

Then there are the unquestioned facts of the scandal: For many decades, in many nations, a relatively small number of priests repeatedly sexually abused minors. And some bishops protected some of those priests from legal and even ecclesiastical consequences, moving them to other parishes or other nations, or simply allowing them to move, where they repeated their offenses. This is a scandal that played itself out over decades, and whose details continue to dribble out.

And let's be clear: The scandal has two parts. The sexual attacks are bad enough. But the pattern of coverup so clearly identified by so many investigators is what really propels this story. As with so many scandals, a coverup elevates and prolongs the coverage.

Replace "Catholic Church" with any other proper noun. Imagine that a highly hierarchical organization that claims more than a billion members has had a few of its leaders sexually abusing children for decades -- leaders who were protected by the highest levels of the organization. And that every few years, reporters manage to dig out another fresh supply of lurid, painful and previously hidden details.

Does anybody really think the media attention would be less than it is now? Or that it should be?

Religion does add a frisson of intensity to the story. The Catholic Church makes unusually powerful theological claims about its priesthood and hierarchy. This is the rock upon which Jesus himself set his church, Catholics will tell you. And every priest is given unique sacramental power, such that a Catholic who has no access to a priest is spiritually disadvantaged.

Few other religions claim to invest such spiritual power in their clergy. That makes these kinds of offenses -- the abuse and the coverup -- seem even more hypocritical, even to non-Catholics.

Back in 2002, the U.S. Catholic bishops met in Dallas to come up with what became the "zero tolerance" policy that holds sway in this country. Bishop Joseph Galante, then coadjutor in Dallas, now bishop of Camden, N.J., was a member of the committee that drafted the policy. I asked him then whether he thought the media had gone overboard.

"The media is not the enemy. To use the Pogo expression, we have met the enemy, and it is us," he told me. "You know what I would be very disturbed at? If this was not news. It would mean there is no expectation, no sense of outrage that people who profess one thing may do something else."

The bishop did not respond to my request this week that he compare the coverage of 2002 to what we're seeing today. But the Rev. Thomas Reese was willing to engage. Reese is the former editor of America magazine and is a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

Is the media blowing up the story?

"Attacking the media is a failed strategy. It did not work in the U.S., and it will not work in Europe or the Vatican. It looks defensive and makes it look like the church is trying to downplay the problem," he said. "The best strategy is to condemn the abuse, acknowledge that church officials made mistakes, apologize and put in place policies and procedures to protect children."

Reese did mention a couple of matters he wished the media reports would include for context:

In the U.S., at least, the vast majority of the abuses are now decades old, and the current policy is quick to remove accused priests from duty. And in some cases, the most recent news stories concern whether priests had been defrocked or not, even though they had long ago been removed from priestly duties or access to children.

"Punishing him through forced laicization can take time and should follow due process. If he is already suspended from ministry and elderly, sick or dying, it is a judgment call whether to punish him by expelling him from the priesthood. You can criticize that judgment but make clear that it does not endanger children," Reese said.

Fair enough.

Whether or not Benedict XVI is a hero or villain in this story is still playing out. (John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter has the best, most detailed tracking of that question that I've seen.)

In any case, the media does have a bias. Reporters want to write about the largest, most important possible story. Many of us want to have an impact, to help right a wrong, to properly reveal the guilty. And we really hate it when people who have done wrong try to keep the details secret.

By all of those standards, the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has been, and will continue to be, a story that reporters will want to follow. No matter what they think about theology.