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	Chris Peck: Scandal's Documents Clear the Fog By Chris Peck Commercial Appeal April 11, 2010 http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/apr/11/inside-the-newsroom-scandals-documents-clear-the/ For decades, if not centuries, the sordid details of priests molesting boys under the robes of the Catholic Church could never have come out. Sure, rumors spread. The whispers, the tears, the shock of priestly betrayals have riven families and parishes for a long time. But the Catholic Church has long valued obedience, hierarchy and internal protocol, all of which have their place in human affairs. And when these internal values were applied to priests who abused, the truth too often was stifled, tucked away, brushed under the rug. Until now. The Internet, the rapid rise of electronic records and a focused network of victims' rights attorneys have combined to beam a searing ray of light on the Catholic Church today as it struggles to cope with renegade priests who have strayed far from their creed. That light shone in Memphis this past week. After a year of legal arguments, a judge awarded The Commercial Appeal the right to gain access to and to publish legal documents taken under oath that explain in excruciating detail how a few bad priests from the Memphis diocese pressed for sexual advantage with young men and boys for decades while the church looked the other way. The documents were first posted on the newspaper's Web site last week as part of our two-part series on bad priests in Memphis. They will be reposted this coming week on commercialappeal.com after attorneys edit the documents one more time to make sure the names of victims and of priests who aren't charged with violations are completely blacked out. When the documents go back up, you can read page after page of testimony from the victims of sexual abuse. You can read the words of priests and their attorneys as they struggle to explain these actions. You can read the depositions of psychologists, family members and others with knowledge of the abuses who discuss the impact of these events on their lives. Not that you have to go there. The newspaper has reported a good summary of what appears in the online documents. What has appeared in print is family friendly and less graphic. But the online access to the legal documents offers an additional level of verification about this scandal. The legal documents cut through the fog of suggestions that the news reports represent some kind of a witch hunt against the Catholic Church or particular priests. If you are concerned that the Catholic Church has gotten a raw deal in all of this, go read the documents. They leave no doubt that a few troubled priests who were granted enormous power and high social standing tried to use their exalted position for sexual gratification. The documents show that the institution that employed these men had inklings of their predatory habits, yet didn't take steps early to stop the abuse. Instead, troubled priests were shuffled off to other jobs, sometimes given letters of recommendation. What if a man in a private business, or a teacher or a policeman, had been caught with an underage boy? Would those businesses or institutions have simply shuffled offenders quietly away? These are the questions stunned Memphians are trying to understand. That's why the posting online of the legal documents represents an important part of what newspapers now do. Providing access to data, whether they are legal depositions, lists of violations of laws or accounts of toxic substances being released into the environment, reinforces a culture of accountability. Sure, public records laws provided a degree of accountability in the past. News media in this country have long used such laws to dig out information. But sharing that information hasn't been easy. Reporters had to find the documents in a courthouse, dig through boxes, hand-edit and sort to make sense of the data and to find nuggets of news. Now, technology has changed all that. Reporters -- and the public -- can now much more easily access electronic databases, legal records and business filings. Sorting the data is quicker and cleaner. Finding threads, making sense of numbers and statistics, uncovering correlations is more possible and increasingly will become central to what journalists do. Care must be taken, of course, to use data in ways that can protect reasonable privacy. Expertise must develop so that data-mining, the search for needles in a haystack of information, actually leads somewhere close to truth, and doesn't simply create a mountain of more hay that further confuses an issue. And records, by themselves, don't answer the most telling question in the whole issue of priests abusing members of their flock. No, the records can't fully explain what lurks in the hearts of men who surely knew better, but could not resist their own troubled temptations. Contact: peck@commercialappeal.com
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