UNITED STATES
TCPalm
Paul Janensch
Posted February 14, 2013
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. …
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.
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