Together in mission: Contingency lawyer Jeff Anderson, Church crank Fr. Tom Doyle,
Frontline writer Sarah Childress, and producer Jason Berry

It is an ugly American bigotry as old as the hills.

Know-Nothingism was a widespread bias against Catholicism in this country, stemming from the suspicion that Catholics were not sufficiently patriotic or trustworthy, as they were controlled by the Pope and a secret Vatican cabal.

Now courtesy of your tax dollars, Know-Nothingism has made a 21st century comeback on PBS's flagship Frontline investigative program.

Last week, in a documentary entitled "Secrets of the Vatican," Frontline managed a remarkable feat: to haul out every old anti-Catholic canard that would make a Klansman beam. It was a 90-minute orgy of bigotry indulging every stereotype about the Church: criminal cover-ups, monetary corruption, gay clergy, and, of course, the ever-favorite and never-ending sex abuse storyline.

Confusing the Church with its members

As one sharp criticism has already pointed out, PBS employed the old strategy of targeting the individual sins of specific members of the Church as a way to launch a broadside attack on the entire institution of the Catholic Church.

And in a Church of 1.2 billion members, it is not very hard to find a lot of individual sinners committing every imaginable type of sin, including sex abuse. And PBS has already beaten the sex abuse horse aplenty. By one estimate, PBS has addressed the issue of sex abuse in the Catholic Church a whopping 48 times.

And as we have repeatedly pointed out, child sex abuse has been committed in all organizations that deal with children. Yet only with respect to the Catholic Church does PBS use such acts to disparage an institution as a whole.

But one would never would one read a media report or editorial concluding that because sex abuse and cover-ups occur in public schools that public education itself must be called into question.

A new face at the party

And as if we haven't heard the same criticism many times before, Frontline trots out the usual rogues gallery of Church cranks, bigots, and tort lawyers to parrot the usual sex abuse attacks on the Church: malcontent Fr. Thomas Doyle; Church-suing contingency lawyer Jeff Anderson (aka "Stuntsuit Anderson"); supporter-of-a-child-pornography-collector Jason Berry; and the hysterical Peter Isely of the anti-Catholic group SNAP.

However, Frontline did introduce to the dialogue Harvard psychiatry professor Martin Kafka, who actually spoke at a 2003 conference in Vatican City about sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

While Kafka was far from missing the mark completely in his Frontline appearance, you knew where it was eventually going. For instance, the purported expert claimed that Catholic priests abuse at a rate far higher than that of Protestant clergy stating:

"The number of Catholic clergy who are accused of or prosecuted for child and adolescent sexual abuse vastly outnumber the number of Protestant clergy."

Martin Kafka

(We emailed Dr. Kafka and asked him the sources for his claim. He kindly replied, but none of the studies which Kafka supplied to support his assertion actually set out to determine the rates of abuse among different denominations. In other words, Kafka's claim might make a nice sound bite for those at Frontline, but it is nonetheless simply untrue.)

And as if Frontline's rambling broadside against the Church were not enough, the PBS website also posted an article by writer Sarah Childress that included a graph claiming that hundreds of Catholic priests are accused of abuse every year in the United States. But Childress makes no mention of the fact that almost all of the accusations themselves allege abuse from many decades ago and that a significant half of all accused priests nowadays are long dead.

No other institution

While sex abuse is a grave societal problem, millions of our tax dollars are used to fund reporting about the issue almost exclusively about one single institution: the Catholic Church.

No other group, whether it be the Jewish community or the African-American community, would tolerate such relentless and one-sided reporting from a taxpayer-funded network.

But, rest assured, whether it is airing 90-minute Da Vinci Code-like specials about the "secret" Vatican or playing the sex abuse card yet again, the mainstream media have one standard for Catholics and another for all other groups.

Dr. Steve Taylor was arrested in April 2008 for "possessing more than 100 sexually explicit pictures of children."

Dr. Taylor worked extensively with SNAP in Louisiana for several years. He and his wife, Lyn, founded a New Orleans chapter of SNAP in 2003.

In her 2009 letter, Blaine reportedly asked the medical licensing board, in the words of Nolan, "to consider Taylor's humanitarian work and professional contributions to victims of childhood sexual abuse."

Church-bashing author and SNAP buddy Jason Berry also wrote a letter on the child-porn doctor's behalf.

Hypocrisy does not get much more glaring than this.

Over the years, SNAP leaders and spokespeople have been relentless and unforgiving in bludgeoning the few Catholic priests who have been guilty of possessing child pornography.

As The Catholic League aptly pointed out in an excellent press release (Mon., Aug. 8, 2011):

"[W]hy should it matter if Taylor has done some good work in the past? After all, SNAP has never shown the slightest interest in weighing the totality of an accused priest's record before condemning him publicly, and neither has Berry. Indeed, SNAP advises on its website that when a priest is accused, parishioners who support him should do so 'PRIVATELY.' [Its emphasis.] To support him publicly would be 'terribly hurtful to victims.'

"Blaine and Berry should immediately issue an apology to all victims, stating how contrite they are for causing such terrible hurt; they should also withdraw their public support for Dr. Taylor."

Of course, SNAP should issue an apology. It is highly unlikely that they will, however. In the organization's long documented history of dishonesty, TheMediaReport.com is unaware of SNAP ever apologizing for any of the wrong and hurtful actions it has committed.

[Previous: From April 2011: "SNAP Shocker: SNAP Trumpeted Shrink as a 'Leader' Even After His Child Porn Arrest"]

This discrepancy is significant for a number of reasons:

• A priest "with an allegation" does not necessarily represent "an abusive priest." An allegation is not a presumption of guilt. The 2004 John Jay study, to which Berry alludes, defined an allegation as "any accusation that is not implausible" (link). In addition, "The survey results do not include 'unfounded' or withdrawn allegations of abuse, but they do include allegations of abuse that were 'not substantiated' and allegations for which no investigation was conducted" (link, page 22). "More than ten percent of these allegations were characterized as not substantiated. In addition, for approximately twenty percent of the allegations, the priest was deceased or inactive at the time of the receipt of the allegation and typically no investigation was conducted in these circumstances" (link, page 25).
• As we reported in this post over the summer, a number of priests have vehemently denied the allegations against them. (In the post I identified one Los Angeles-area priest whose accuser received a settlement despite the priest's vociferous denial.)
• The Jay study covered allegations spanning over a half a century (1950-2002). Berry's article conveniently omitted this fact. A significant percentage of priests are deceased, and many were tagged with a single accusation after their death. We reported that in the case of the Los Angeles archdiocese, nearly 30% of the accused clergy were deceased at the time of the large settlement in July of this year.

Berry and the Los Angeles Times owe their readers a correction. The study did not "identif[y] about 4,400 abusive U.S. priests." (By the way, the actual number of individuals with allegations who were classified by the study as being an actual priest or bishop (as opposed to a deacon, seminarian, other, or unknown) is 4,078. See Table 3.3.5 here.)

[UPDATE, APRIL 2011: The number of falsely accused priests is much higher than we ever imagined. See this and this.]

Meanwhile, last month, the Associated Press published an explosive three-part series about our nation's schools. (Must-read AP report: Part 1, 2, 3.) It "found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct."

"The system fails hundreds of kids each year," the investigation found.

Yet the Los Angeles Times has not printed a single syllable about this stunning report in their newspaper. (I found a cached version of an latimes.com story from a couple of days ago with a reference to the AP study, but it never appeared in the print edition.)

The abuse by priests has been undoubtedly real, angering, and contemptible. But it's clear that it's not the harmful abuse itself that's important to the Los Angeles Times, it's who is committing the abuse. (We've reported before on the negligent coverage of the Church abuse scandal by the Times here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Berry's article comes across as a weak and desperate attempt to keep the church abuse scandal in the public arena. The end of the article reveals that Berry is directing a documentary film about the scandal "to be released next year." It sure seems that Mr. Berry has a vested interest in keeping this story alive and in the public eye. And the LA Times is all too willing to oblige.

Further analyzing Berry's article:

1. Berry also wrote:

The problem is that [Chicago's Cardinal Francis] George shows little indication of having internalized the lessons of the scandal. He displays a stunning insensitivity to the church's failures …

George did not apologize but defended [a] colleague [Kenneth Martin, accused of past abuse].

In fact, the Cardinal has issued apologies for the way he handled the scandal.

On February 13, 2006, the Chicago Sun-Times reported ("George extends his apology to churchgoers: Parishes get letter," emphasis mine):

In addressing his handling of sex abuse cases, Cardinal Francis George has issued apologies to priests, the media and members of affected parishes.

On Sunday, George extended his apologies to churchgoers throughout the Archdiocese of Chicago.

"I must apologize to all of you for the great embarrassment every Catholic must now feel in the light of media scrutiny of these events," George wrote in a letter he asked to be distributed at Sunday masses.

The two-page letter, addressed to "brothers and sisters in Christ," concluded: "I pray that a failure to act more quickly on my part will not harm the archdiocese itself. You are in my prayers; please keep me in yours. God bless you."

By omitting this, Berry flat-out misleads his readers by going out of his way to deliberately portray the Cardinal only in the most sinister light.

As far as Berry's charge that George "defended" the molester Kenneth Martin, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in March 2003 ("George Didn't Know Details of Guest Priest's Sex Abuse Case"):

Told the details of the Martin abuse case Friday evening, [Cardinal] George said, "That's a little bit sobering…. Those are things I wasn't aware of, nor of the details of the case.

"You trust the conclusions given you. We didn't ask for the details of the case. Perhaps we should have."

That's hardly emblematic of someone "defending" Martin. Again, Berry does not quite give the full story.

2. Berry also wrote of a situation at a school where a priest abused students (emphasis mine):

The archdiocese did take action against Barbara Westrick, the school's principal, who had called the police after she learned of the complaint against the priest [abuser Daniel McCormack]. She was fired in June. Although the archdiocese denies it, it seems likely that her criticisms of the church's response cost her her job.

"It seems likely"? Why? Berry offers no explanation whatsoever. Not cool.

3. Berry also added,

Displaying the callousness that has cursed so many Catholic bishops for so long, [Chicago auxiliary bishop Thomas J.] Paprocki insulted the victims of the scandals, as well as the attorneys and judges in their cases, with these words: "We must use our religious discernment to recognize that the principal force behind these attacks is none other than the devil."

"Insulted the victims of the scandals"? Berry refers to a homily that Bishop Paprocki gave in October. You can read the homily for yourself here (pdf file).

Paprocki's homily addressed the effects of the scandal and lawsuits on the Church:

While the sexual abuse of minors is a sin that must be addressed by the Church and a crime that must be punished by the criminal justice system, I would suggest that the current approach of awarding large monetary damages to victims is not only contrary to the purposes of tort liability theory, but also place an excessive burden on the free exercise of religion for Catholics in the United States. If such purposes seek to punish wrongdoers and deter wrongful conduct, the settlement or award of civil damages is punishing the wrong people, namely, the average parishioner or donor whose financial contributions support the Church but who have no role in the supervision of clergy. Instead of supporting the parishes, religious and charitable works that these donors seek to support through their contributions, these monies are being diverted to pay claimants and their lawyers.

Most of the bishops who were negligent in their supervision of clergy who offended 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years ago are long gone. Monetary damages taken from a not-for-profit entity do not punish the wrongdoers, but only serve to constrain the scope of the entity’s charitable, religious and educational activities.

Berry's perverse inference injures his journalistic credibility. Berry's response is a reflection of one who always seeks to infer the most dismal of motives from church officials. It reveals that his true motivation may not be the pursuit of truth and facts but an ulterior motive.

Not cool, Mr. Berry. Not cool.