Media's deadly ammunition of half-truths

A retired Hollywood actor and Catholic convert whom I had the honor of sponsoring, regularly sends me clippings about the Catholic sex scandals from newspapers and news magazines -- his only source of news other than television, since he fastidiously eschews the world of computers. I do not know how much help he finds from his priest in sorting out fact from fiction in the daily media onslaught. One feels considerable sympathy for our priests, who doubtless feel besieged and confused by the anti-Catholic onslaught in the media and may prefer to ignore the issue in their homilies. The result, however, is the reinforcement of an unhealthy fortress mentality, where the Faith is increasingly isolated from the issues of the day and rendered irrelevant. Legions of parishioners like my actor friend need answers. Hence, the issues must be addressed.

In the latest envelope from my friend were (1) the Newsweek article by Lisa Miller, "A Woman's Place is in the Church," carrying the banner: "The cause of the Catholic clergy's sex-abuse scandal is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?"; (2) the Charlotte Observer syndicated column by Maureen Dowd, "Church's view of women fostered indifference toward children," in which Dowd compares her role in the "misogynistic" and woman-repressing "autocratic society" of Catholicism to the role of Saudi women, "living in a country where women's rights [are] strangled [by] an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men's club than a modern nation"; and (3) an article by Nicholas D. Kristof, entitled "A Church Mary Can Love" (New York Times), which begins with a joke about Mary having always wanted a daughter, and goes on to relate this to the sex abuse scandal in the Church: "It wasn’t inevitable that the Catholic Church would grow so addicted to male domination, celibacy and rigid hierarchies. Jesus himself focused on the needy rather than dogma, and went out of his way to engage women and treat them with respect." (Umm ... that must be why nobody warns against hell and damnation in the New Testament more than Jesus, and why Jesus gave the Great Commission in Matthew 28 to "make disciples of all nations" and "teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.")

The element of truth in the secular media's attack on the Catholic Church is specific: there have come to light, both in 2002 and more recently, cases of sexual abuse and subsequent cover-up by clergy stemming from some thirty or forty years ago. In some cases, the media are to be credited for their relentless investigation in uncovering the facts of these cases and in bringing them to light.

Beyond this, however, the secular media have unfortunately been collectively complicit in ignoring or suppressing other facts attendant to these cases, and then enlisting the yield of distorted half-truths in the service of the subsequent feeding frenzy of unbridled indiscriminate criticism the Church.

For one thing, because of the national media's own complicity in the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian subculture within society, it has studiously avoided calling the sexual abuse what it is: the homosexual abuse of teenage young men. At the bottom of the liberal media's quest for moral high ground against the scandal of sexual sinners within the Church is the masked hypocrisy of its promotion of a sexually promiscuous ethos that would countenance such national organizations as the North American Man/Boy Love Association .

For another, because of the Church's unshaken condemnation of sex outside of marriage, the media have not only reveled in exposing the hypocrisy of those clerics who were caught violating the Church's moral teaching, but also indulged in promoting the widespread impression that the Church's moral teaching and discipline itself is the uniquely pernicious cause of sexual abuse (read: sexual abuse of minors) -- and that such abuse is therefore uniquely widespread in the Church. If only the Church were not an "all male club" (Lisa Miller), an "autocratic society that repressed women" and clung to "outdated misogynistic rituals" (Maureen Dowd), so the suggestion goes, such a culture of child abuse would never have been permitted to develop.

Such incriminating suggestions have been widely permitted to pass in the media for statements of proven fact, despite the ample availability of evidence to the contrary. For one thing, as we have seen already, a 2004 special report by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights cites a study by Philip Jenkins published by Oxford showing that the percentage of pedophiles among clergy ranges up to 1.3% higher among Protestant clergy than Catholic.

For another, as George Weigel has repeatedly pointed out, the Catholic Church had already begun to address the problems of sexual abuse seriously in the early 1990s, then accelerated its efforts to discipline abusers and to create safe environments for young people throughout American Catholicism. And those measures have worked. He writes: "There are 68 million Catholics in the United States, and there were only six credible reports of the sexual abuse of a young person in the Church last year; that is, of course, six too many, but it completely falsifies the picture the press has painted of an ongoing crisis of sexual abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church in the U.S."

For another, if the media's concern here were really for abused children, then why their deafening silence about the rampant sexual abuse of children in the field of elementary and secondary school education where women rank prominently in administrative roles? The Catholic League's Special Report cites a 1991 study by Shakeshaft and Cohan, In loco parentis: Sexual abuse of students in schools, (What administrators should know), for the U.S. Department of Education, whose findings are astounding. In their study of 225 cases of educator sexual abuse in New York City, "all of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach." Shakeshaft determined that "15 percent of all students have experienced some kind of sexual misconduct by a teacher between kindergarten and 12th grade," ranging "from touching to forced penetration." Since the publication of the Catholic League's report, Shakeshaft has released the findings of a vast study undertaken for the Planning and Evaluation Service Office of the Undersecretary, U.S. Department of Education, titled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct with Students: A Synthesis of Existing Literature on Prevalence in Connection with the Design of a National Analysis" (PDF) (2004).

These ample facts, however, are conveniently ignored by the media.

It used to be the case that one could rely on the news media to reasonably report facts, and to distinguish such reporting from editorial opinion. If the myth of pure, presuppositionless objectivity could not be sustained in the news, at least one could count on reporters -- and editors -- to be even handed and fair minded in dealing with the facts. Clearly that day is long passed. The news media have rapidly fallen into the hands of those bent on employing them exclusively as instruments of partisanship, regardless of costs in fidelity to truth. This was seen amply during the last U.S. Presidential Election. We now see it in the attacks being mounted against the Church.

The Church cannot afford to ignore these attacks. Catholic laity, for its part, cannot afford to assume that the burden of responding to such attacks should be the borne by priests and bishops alone. Such an assumption stems from a debilitating clericalism that conveniently excuses the laity from their responsibility in this battle. The Church is not just the clergy. This goes without saying. All Catholics comprise the Church. The Church is now embattled on every side by those who employ the deadly ammunition of half-truths. The battle must be met by those who care for truth.

Related: T. Matt, "Abuse of a ‘boy’ or a ‘young man’?" (GetReligion.org, April 24, 2010): "Pedophilia is very, very rare among Catholic clergy. Ephebophilia is what is taking place — overwhelmingly."

[Hat tip to J.M. for the 'Related' item]