April 9, 2010

The Times They Are A-Smearin'

Investor's Business Daily

Scandal: The New York Times is on the hunt, seeking the biggest prey since Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon. The Gray Lady wants to sink her claws into the pope.

The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Co., won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for its investigative reporting on sexual abuse of minors by priests. Anything the Times does now as a follow-up would be "been there, done that" — unless the paper managed to implicate Pope Benedict XVI.

The problem, however, for the newspaper that thinks of itself as "All the News That's Fit to Print" is that this isn't, as the Times coverage would have us believe, a story about an age-old institution being exposed as corrupt from the bottom all the way to the top.

The real story is the American left's agenda to undermine all traditional institutions in this country, with establishment media outlets like the Times and Newsweek leading the feeding frenzy.

William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, describes the politics of the thirst for papal blood: "Issues like abortion, gay marriage and women's ordination — that's what's really driving them mad, and that's why they are on the hunt. Those who doubt this to be true need to ask why the debt-ridden Times does not spend the same resources looking for dirt in other institutions that occurred a half-century ago."

Long ago is right, when it comes to the vast majority of abuse incidents by Catholic clergy. Thirty years ago, annual abuse incidents approached 800 in number; for the year 2009 the claims against 40,000 U.S. priests and tens of thousands of others come to a grand total of six — astoundingly small for an institution the size of the Catholic Church.

That decline is not happenstance. The U.S. Catholic Church has long had in place a zero tolerance policy against predators wearing the collar. The U.S. bishops' Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People codifies that "when even a single act of sexual abuse by a priest or deacon is admitted or is established after an appropriate process in accord with canon law, the offending priest or deacon will be removed permanently from ecclesiastical ministry, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state, if the case so warrants."

The U.S. bishops even sponsored an independent investigation by John Jay College of Criminal Justice on "the Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons" going back to the 1950s. That analysis concluded that "those dioceses in which church leaders took prompt and decisive action had fewer reports of abuse and fewer reports of severe abuse."

A key point because the various Catholic dioceses around the world, serving hundreds of millions of faithful, aren't — can't be — micromanaged by the Vatican (or even much macromanaged, truth be told).

The case of Wisconsin's Father Lawrence Murphy, who died before his trial for abuse was completed, is a good example. Milwaukee Archdiocesan judicial vicar Father Thomas Brundage was never contacted by the New York Times, and he was "shocked" when the media tried to implicate Pope Benedict in the case. Any honest reporter calling Brundage would have found there was no connection to the former Cardinal Ratzinger.

Has the public education establishment turned to independent outside groups to solve its rampant sexual abuse problem the way the U.S. Catholic Church has? Less than three years ago, an Associated Press investigation found thousands of cases of educator abuse.

"Most of the abuse never gets reported," the AP noted. "Those cases reported often end with no action ... many abusers have several victims. And no one — not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments — has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms."

Over seven months, the AP found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were "revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned" from 2001 to 2005 following charges of sexual misconduct.

Maybe it's time for the Times to stop seeking the pope's blood and seek instead the U.S. bishops' advice on how their successful solutions can be applied to other places where kids are abused.

SPONSORS
(Ads will not print)