WASHINGTON (DC)
The Buffalo News
September 12, 2018
By Jerry Zremski
The holy man’s words cut through the crowd at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Falls Church, Va., not like a prayer, but like an insult.
“Reporters are trying to destroy the church,” the priest said in the most ad hominem homily I ever heard. “Lawyers are trying to destroy the church.”
I heard those words a decade ago, six years after the Boston Globe delivered its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on pedophile priests in the Diocese of Boston and back when we were gulled into believing that such things never, ever happened to the same degree in Buffalo or Washington.
Still, those words made me seethe because they were both wrong and stupid. So, of course, I felt compelled to speak with the priest after Mass.
“Father, reporters aren’t trying to destroy the church,” I told him. “Reporters at the Boston Globe uncovered grave sins that the church ignored.”
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