SILVER SPRING (MD)
Knoxville News Sentinel [Knoxville TN]
May 3, 2026
By Terry Mattingly
In the spring of 1972, Catholic bishops gathered in Atlanta for a historic event — their first gathering under a policy that would allow journalists inside the doors of their meetings.
Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, the conference president, promised to honor the policy approved by the bishops, which did allow many sensitive topics to be discussed during closed executive sessions.
“Cardinal Krol managed to get his own back, after his own fashion,” wrote journalist Russell Shaw in his book “Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication and Communion in the Catholic Church.” He served, with different titles, as press aide for the bishops from 1969-1987 and wrote more than 20 books and thousands of articles for Catholic and mainstream publications.
“At the start of the meeting, after the bishops had prayed and taken care of preliminaries, the cardinal rose to speak. He spoke rapidly and at length — in Latin! Nervous coughing and the shuffling of papers could be heard from the press section.”
Eventually the cardinal faced the journalists with what Shaw called a “wicked grin.” Krol quipped: “We told you we’d let
you in. We didn’t tell you what language we’d talk.”
Krol was a conservative, but progressives have used similar tactics. I once asked Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, after tense debates about the morality of nuclear weapons, if several bishops — by switching to Latin at key moments — had “launched a preemptive strike” on newspaper headline writers. He smiled and said, “Yes.”
I recently marked the start of my 38th year writing this “On Religion” column, and I spent 20 years leading GetReligion.org, a website that critiqued mainstream coverage of religion news. Over the decades, I had many encounters with
Shaw. His January death, at age 90, reminded me that choices made by powerful clergy, as well as newsroom managers, often determine what news makes it into print.
One story loomed over Shaw’s career more than any other: decades of hidden and then public scandals about the sexual abuse of children, teens and adults by Catholic clergy. In “Nothing to Hide,” Shaw addressed the scandal at length but stressed how the secrecy that made sexual abuse possible has affected other parts of Catholic life. His warnings apply to religious groups and secular institutions, such as public schools and government agencies.
A crucial term is “clericalism,” which Shaw defined as an “abusive mindset” that supports structures, policies and behaviors that take “for granted that clerics … are intrinsically superior to the other members of the Church. … Passivity and dependency are the laity’s lot.”
Protected by clericalism, he noted, the “abuse of secrecy occurs in many areas of Catholic life: finances, the appointment of bishops and pastors, Church governance, and much else. It has a deadening, alienating effect wherever it is present. But the link between clericalism and secrecy can most easily be illustrated in the case of the clergy sex abuse scandal.”
While those hellish events shook the world, Shaw’s work also offered parables about how the attitudes of many, but certainly not all, bishops and priests often warp relationships between shepherds and the faithful during ordinary life in local sanctuaries and schools.
For example, Shaw recalled a conservative Catholic’s account of what happened when — in a discreet encounter after Mass — she asked the priest why he had edited the creed out of the rite. When he ignored her question, she added, “Father, you teach your people to be disobedient when you disobey the Church.”
After tense silence, the offended priest leaned forward and whispered: “You know what, honey? You’re full of it.” He then gave the woman and her husband a “single-digit salute.”
For Shaw, it’s important to remember that Catholicism is a “Communion,” not a government. Secrecy and dishonesty are even more destructive in sacred communities.
Obviously, he concluded, “Secrecy and confidentiality have their place in Church life. … But the special case of the seal of the confessional always excepted, the presumption in the Church’s day-in, day-out life should favor openness and accountability; the burden of proof should rest with those who advocate secrecy in any particular case.”
In the end, the “historical record strongly suggests that where secrecy is systematically abused, orthodoxy and morality sooner or later will suffer.”