Our institutions are failing us.
The leadership of the Catholic Church has shown it cannot be trusted with the mission of expunging the evil of clergy sexual abuse from its ranks. And similarly, national media in the U.S. are showing they can’t be trusted with investigating this cancer.
In short, both the Church and the U.S. press have said to the Catholic layman: You’re on your own.
Pope Francis dodged questions this weekend about an 11-page letter claiming he knew and did not act on credible allegations that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sexually abused seminarians and minors.
The unverified letter, written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, alleges a conspiracy of silence and enabling, including that Francis allegedly empowered accused abusers to handpick bishops in the United States. If true, the 11-page document could have deadly serious implications for an institution that oversees some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. Francis’ curious and cowardly non-response should be setting off alarms.
But U.S. national media are not interested in chasing down the truth of these potentially world-shaking allegations. They’re more interested in investigating Francis’ conservative critics. Because with national media, the real story is hardly ever the alleged wrongdoing. The real story is that conservatives are “seizing on” (i.e. exploiting) a crisis for their own gain.
The New York Times, for example, published a report online Monday titled, “Vatican power struggle bursts into open as conservatives pounce.”
The headline in the Tuesday print edition is even worse: “Francis takes high road as conservatives pounce, taking criticisms public.”
The article is as grotesque as it sounds. It is a 1,550-word exercise in attacking the accuser. It downplays the allegations while also digging deep for delegitimizing details pertaining to the backgrounds of the pope’s critics. Pluck any paragraph at random, and you’ll likely find language portraying the pope as a heroic victim of a shadowy conspiracy and rank opportunism.
“Francis has infuriated Catholic traditionalists as he tries to nurture a more welcoming church and shift it away from culture war issues, whether abortion or homosexuality,” writes Times reporter Jason Horowitz. He adds elsewhere, “With the letter — released in the middle of the pope’s visit to Ireland — an ideologically motivated opposition has weaponized the church’s sex abuse crisis to threaten not only Francis’ agenda but his entire papacy.”
Then, there’s the New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias and Laurie Goodstein, whose Aug. 27 report, titled “Letter Accusing Pope Leaves U.S. Catholics in Conflict,” serves only two purposes: To posit that Francis is the target of a vast right-wing conspiracy and that conservatives are morally repulsive.
Reuters also published a story this week titled, “Defenders rally around pope, fear conservatives escalating war.”
Some commentators have even griped that the release of Vigano’s letter was strategically timed to catch the pope off-guard during his recent visit to Ireland, which is still reeling from a clergy sex abuse scandal of its own.
What’s missing from these complaints and the “conservatives pounce” reports are attempts to verify the 11-page letter. It publicly implicates the Pope in knowingly empowering an accused sexual predator. Whether it’s true or not seems like a fairly important question. But it looks like investigating conservatives is apparently more important than investigating whether the leader of the Roman Catholic Church enabled child sexual abusers.
We’ve come a long, long way from the Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight reporting on clergy sex abuse in the Boston Archdiocese, haven’t we?
