Is all the news coverage just 'Catholic-bashing'?
Posted on 06/15/2002 1:00:11 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Is all the news coverage just 'Catholic-bashing'?
Some say yes; others say no reporting would signal low expectations
06/15/2002
Have Catholics been getting unfairly bashed during the past five months?
It's a fair question, considering the level of attention. It seems as if a new development in the Catholic sex abuse scandal leads the news somewhere in America every day.
Coverage reached a high-water mark this week with the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas. Almost three times as many journalists applied for credentials as the number of bishops who attended.
Priests and bishops have also been targets of humorists.
Last month, David Letterman combined the new Star Wars movie with the Catholic scandal in one joke: "In this episode, the Jedi take a vow of celibacy. That means in the next episode, they'll be transferred to another parish."
The satire web site and magazine The Onion produced a mock news story announcing that the pope had forgiven thousands of children for tempting hundreds of priests. "The pope's decision, observers say, is intended to demonstrate the church's willingness to put the scandal behind it and restore the public trust."
Some Catholics say the coverage represents nothing less than a frontal assault on a faith tradition that the reporters, editors and humorists just don't like.
Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras compared the media to Stalin and the Nazis in an Italian magazine article.
Harvard University law professor Mary Ann Glendon wrote that the tidal wave of critical attention is "about destroying the most influential and important institutional voice that the media has to face."
Deal Hudson, the conservative editor of Crisis magazine, wrote that "It should be very clear from the coverage of this scandal that the real object of the media feeding frenzy is the priesthood itself the 'unnatural' state of unmarried men living in a celibate state."
Some Catholics complain that their priests and bishops get bigger headlines than teachers, youth leaders and pastors of other faiths who have been caught abusing minors.
Those cases are out there. Several recent examples have come to light in Texas. A former pastor of a Lutheran church in Longview was sued for molesting boys and charged with aggravated sexual assault. The former pastor of a United Church of Christ congregation in Riesel pled guilty to molesting a 10-year old boy. A Dallas public school teacher admitted having sex with a 13-year-old student.
Those stories don't get the play of the Catholic scandal, some critics complain.
But U.S. Catholic bishops have generally not attacked the coverage. Dallas Coadjutor Bishop Joseph Galante is a member of the committee that drafted a policy on priests accused of abusing minors that was debated this week in Dallas. His comments about the media echoed statements made by several other bishops as the scandal rolled on this year.
"The media is not the enemy. To use the Pogo expression, we have met the enemy, and it is us," he said. "You know what I would be very disturbed at? If this was not news. It would mean there is no expectation, no sense of outrage that people who profess one thing may do something else."
It's not as if there is an indication that priests or Catholics are more prone to abuse than any other segment of society, said the Rev. Marie M. Fortune, head of the Center for the Prevention of Domestic and Sexual Violence in Seattle and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. She is a pioneer in the study of clergy sexual abuse.
"I really don't see any evidence that any of us are worse off than each other," she said. "It's an issue for the Catholics, but it's an issue for all of us."
There is a sense of piling on with the current coverage, said Michael Felling, spokesman for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, based in Washington, D.C. His organization tracks the amount of time that television news networks devote to major stories, and Catholics have been in the spotlight this year, he said.
"I don't think it's due to an anti-Catholic bias in the media. I think it's a pro-scandal bias," he said. "But this deserves attention. The Catholic Church has called this down on itself due to its lack of response over the years."
So what has made the Catholic scandal such a big story? In part, the answer may be simple demographics.
Catholics claim more than 65 million members in the United States. That's about four times more than the membership claimed by next-largest faith group, the Southern Baptist Convention. It's eight times larger than the United Methodist Church, about 13 times larger than members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as much as 20 times more than the number of Jews or Muslims in America.
That means there are a lot more people with a direct connection to this scandal than, say, the pedophilia reports that soiled the reputation of the Hare Krishnas in 1998.
Another factor contributing to the Catholic scandal may be the hierarchy of the church. Priests report to bishops and bishops to the Vatican through a clear chain of command and responsibility. And that means this scandal has had two parts: the abuse itself and the accusations of cover-ups.
Southern Baptists, for instance, have nothing comparable to a bishop and his authority. A priest is assigned to a parish by a bishop. A Baptist pastor is called by an individual church. Baptists resist having their conventions set policies on anything much beyond doctrine.
Southern Baptists have no system to track pastors, good ones or bad, said Dr. Jimmy Draper, head of LifeWay Christian Resources, an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention.
"There would be nobody outside of the [individual] church who would have authority to do anything. No church is forced into anything by any entity of Southern Baptist life," he said. "It's our strength and our weakness."
Baptists are ill-prepared to deal with an abusing pastor, he said.
"I think the average church member would not know what to do. I think people would call who they know," Dr. Draper said. "I don't think we are really set up to say, 'If you have a problem, here is who to call.' "
Anuttama Dasa knows what it's like to be at the center of a story about clergy sexual abuse. The national spokesman for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the formal name for the Hare Krishnas, has been living with his religion's public scandal for more than four years.
In 1998, the Krishnas' own magazine ended decades of secrecy and denial with a detailed article about the lives the more than 2,000 children who attended Krishna-run schools during the 1970s. One of the schools was in Dallas. Just as with the current Catholic scandal, the Krishnas were the target of media attention and lawsuits.
Mr. Dasa said he felt a familiar pain as the Catholic scandal filled the news.
"You just really can't help reading these things without being reminded of the pain and grief so many young people felt," he said.
His experience may offer some lessons for Catholic leaders about the best way to survive their scandal.
"I think the biggest message for people is that child abuse thrives in secrecy and ignorance," he said. "There's a sense in peoples' minds that this cannot happen to us. It seems that the general Catholic population was thinking like this. The Hare Krishnas certainly felt like that."
The impact of the publicity could be good or bad, he said.
"The downside to the attention the Catholic problem is getting is that ... [non-Catholics] may lull themselves into thinking it can't happen to them," he said. "The upside is that people should realize this is a huge problem."
E-mail jweiss@dallasnews.com
Two-thirds of bishops let accused priests work:
Catholic bishops and sex abuse - Database of
Diocese & Bishops Involved (Warning: LONG LIST!)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/700708/posts?page=3#3
Coverup
Fr. Frank Pavone, Priests for Life
The abortion industry is in trouble, and it's time to capitalize on that trouble.
In every state, sexual activity with underage children is illegal. Moreover, if a health care worker suspects that a minor is being sexually abused, or is the victim of statutory rape, that worker is required by law to report the information to the authorities designated by the law. (Remember, statutory rape does not mean an "attack." It refers to the age of the parties.)
For many months, my friends and colleagues at Life Dynamics in Denton, Texas have been gathering more information about what an abortion clinic is likely to do if an underage girl who has been impregnated by an adult asks for an abortion. The fact that the abortion or birth control that the clinic sells is "legal" does not take away the clinic workers' responsibility to report. The requirement under the law, furthermore, for the health care worker is simply to report, not to investigate. In other words, the very fact that an underage girl is pregnant indicates that there may have been criminal activity or abuse. The health care worker does not have to investigate whether there was or not, but simply report that there might be.
What Life Dynamics did is described in their own words on their website, www.childpredators.com: "Life Dynamics conducted a covert investigation in which we called over 800 Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation facilities across the country. Our caller portrayed a 13-year-old girl who was pregnant by her 22-year-old boyfriend. Her story was that she wanted an abortion because she and her boyfriend did not want her parents to find out about the sexual relationship. In every call the ages of the girl and her boyfriend were made perfectly clear. It was also unmistakable that the motivation for the abortion was to conceal this illicit sexual activity from the girl's parents and the authorities. The results were appalling. Even though many of these clinic workers openly acknowledged to our caller that this situation was illegal and that they were required to report it to the state, the overwhelming majority readily agreed to conceal this illegal sexual activity. Some employees of these organizations even coached our caller on how to avoid detection, how to circumvent parental involvement laws and what to say or not say when she came to the clinic."
So what should be done next?
First of all, spread the word. People, especially those who are parents, have a right to know about the risks their children and grandchildren face in legal abortion clinics.
Secondly, legislation can be introduced to stop these clinics and their supporting organizations from receiving state and federal funding. After all, recipients of these funds are required to use the money only in accordance with all state and federal laws.
Thirdly, massive litigation should be launched against the abortion industry for engaging in this illegal activity.
Along with changing laws and hearts, we simply need to put abortionists out of business.
Priests for Life
PO Box 141172
Staten Island, NY 10314
Tel. 888-PFL-3448, (718) 980-4400
Fax 718-980-6515
Email mail@priestsforlife.org
Subscribe to Fr. Frank's bi-weekly prolife column (free): subscribe@priestsforlife.org
So, all the news coverage on this topic is not Catholic bashing, just 90 to 95% of it is.
"Chain reactions" is right. The bishops should try reading their own documents once in a while. They might learn something.
This article says there are about 65 million Catholics in the U.S. We have a population of about 280 million, which means that some 215 million of us either practice no religion or are members of another faith. The overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians and identify themselves as belonging to one of the Protestant denominations. Both the news and entertainment media, which are populated largely by secular Lefties, have long demonstrated a virulent anti-Christian bias. So for them to pile on the Catholics isn't surprising. The worst I've heard has been on local talk radio. Here in L.A., the KFI radio hosts Bill Handel and John & Ken have been especially vicious.
Does pointing out the media bias and piling on in any way excuse priests who have committed such acts? Of course not! But neither should the media be excused for its excesses.
1) Other churches do not have the world-wide strict hierarchy and organization of the catholic church ... for many people, not just catholics, the Roman Catholic Church represents Christianity in general ... there's a direct line of reporting from every priest to the pope himself, and every priest acts as a representative the entire RC church. It's easier to dissociate ministers from other churches from the church itself than it is to dissociate priests from the Roman Catholic church.
2) While there are other cases of homosexual sex scandals in other churches, most of those reported are heterosexual, and most between adults.
Though those sins can be just as terrible and damaging to the victims, the underage and homosexual nature of the Roman Catholic scandal makes for a much greater focus of attention, in my opinion, in addition to the long-standing and well organized cover ups by the bishops and cardinals.
I'm not RC. Nevertheless I watch the Church from a respectful distance. The Corporation is big, but in trouble, and it has been in trouble for hundreds of years. They will have to clean up their act, or decline or stagnation is unavoidable. Who knows where this will lead, there is still a need for religion, but does it have to be RC in its current version?
I view the current problems in Islam, the terrorists, in a similar way. Islam lacks the organization that the Church has, but it will have to reform as well.
But the results have been very different from what the media intended. The propaganda attack got out of hand and took on a life of its own. I think it's now obvious to many Catholics that the problem is not priestly celibacy but priestly homosexuality. Likewise, the problem does not result from the ancient rules of the Church but from the violation of those rules by liberal dissenters and their bishop protectors.
More recently, the scandal has seriously undermined the power of liberal, dissenting bishops to cover up homosexual networks in their dioceses. That certainly is not what the press intended, but the story has escaped their control.
So, the original intention was ill, but, Deo volente, the final results may be good.
Hasn't undermined it quite seriously enough to date, but I'm hoping.
What a sick religion. People who are Catholics better remember that they are supporting perverts.
You have proof of this? Otherwise, it's just a lie. Stop it.
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