Catholic Priest's Apology to Media Welcome, Even after All These Years

By Paul Janensch
The TCPalm
February 14, 2013

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2013/feb/14/paul-janensch-catholic-priests-apology-to-media/

I was surprised to read recently that a Vatican official thanked the U.S. news media for their aggressive reporting of child sexual abuse by priests.

For a long time this was not the usual line coming from the Vatican or from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The usual line was to denounce the media for an "anti-Catholic bias."

I am a Mass-attending Catholic. I am also a journalist who has been troubled by the Catholic hierarchy's reluctance to release information about accusations against priests of child sexual abuse and financial settlements with victims.

The thanks to the U.S. news media came from Father Robert Oliver, a canon lawyer from Boston and the Vatican's new prosecutor of child sexual abuse cases.

"I think that certainly those who continued to put before us that we need to confront this problem did a service," Oliver was quoted by the Reuters news service as saying at his first news conference.

"They (the media) helped to keep the energy, if you will, to keep the movement going so that we would, honestly and with transparency, and with our strength, confront what is true."

Oliver told the assembled journalists about a church forum called "Towards Healing and Renewal." He said about 600 cases of abuse — most of which occurred between 1965 and 1985 — are reported each year.

In 2002, revelations by The Boston Globe of child sexual abuse by priests in New England attracted national attention. Cardinal Bernard Law of the Boston archdiocese had moved abusive priests from parish to parish without saying why they were transferred.

Reacting to the damaging news coverage, Law declared, "We call down God's power on the media, particularly the Globe." He later resigned and was given a high position in Rome.

When The New York Times reported that Pope Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, spared an American priest from being defrocked for molesting some 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan (now a cardinal) accused the newspaper of "being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict."

A Latin American cardinal said child sexual abuse was "an American problem" and was "invented" by the media. But then similar scandals erupted in Ireland, Germany and other countries. Children had been molested by priests, and the crimes covered up by their bishops.

I, too, have felt the wrath of a Catholic official for daring to look into accusations against priests of child sexual abuse. In the early 1990s, 10 years before the investigative reporting by The Boston Globe, I was the editor of the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Mass.

Several men told us they had been molested by priests when they were boys. We found evidence to support their allegations, asked the bishop for his response and published news stories in which the accusers were named.

A monsignor who served as an aide to the bishop and knew I was a Catholic, telephoned me. "You are a disgrace to the church," he said.

Oliver, the Vatican official, was asked at his news conference whether some in the church are still in denial about child sexual abuse by priests.

According to Reuters he said: "Every single one of us begins with denial. I think it is one of the great things about the work that is being done here, that we all come to know that, in order to prevent this from happening, we all need to come to better understanding."

Paul Janensch, Vero Beach, was a newspaper editor and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University. His Treasure Coast Essay airs at 7:20 a.m. and 5:59 p.m. Mondays on WQCS, 88.9 FM.