Embarrassing journalism: Jim Mustian (l) and Bernard Condon (r) of the Associated Press

In the month of December, the Associated Press published no less than five biased articles attacking the Catholic Church over abuse accusations against priests decades ago. Yet if one actually takes the time to labor through the articles, one sees that the AP only offers its readers only two basic takeaways: 1) Contingency lawyers love the free money that the Catholic Church is doling out, and 2) accused priests are guilty no matter how long ago the accusations are and how nonexistent the evidence may be.

Nothing has changed in the AP's slanted reporting against the Catholic Church since it started reporting on the issue back in the 1980s. What is not even on the AP's radar in any meaningful sense is the question of whether most of these decades-old claims against Catholic priests are even true or not.

Missing the big picture

For example, one the AP's pieces was a lengthy article about Pennsylvania dioceses doling out some $84 million in free money to 564 accusers, yet AP writer Michael Rubinkam did not even blink an eye or bother to question the veracity of a 45 year-old bloke who incredibly claims that a priest somehow abused him "two to four times a week for five years" and who also claims abuse by a second priest who was laicized 55 years ago. Do the math, everyone.

Needless to say, Rubinkam also did not reach out to the accused men to see what they had to say in defense of themselves. Both are long deceased. How convenient.

(And another note to Rubinkam: The 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report did not "conclude" that "more than 300 predator priests had molested more than 1,000 children." We have shown that claim to be completely false.)

This is journalism?

Another meandering AP article – one by Bernard Condon and Jim Mustian – purports to be about a "wave of lawsuits" against the Catholic Church because states are lifting the statutes of limitations. The piece begins with the scene of a Church-suing contingency lawyer looking out of his office window at a cathedral and wondering out loud, "I wonder how much that's worth?"

Yet by the end of the article, readers learn little else and are offered a single takeaway: Suing the Catholic Church is a lucrative practice for tort lawyers. That's it. Powerful stuff, eh?

Never missing a chance to attack the Catholic Church

Nasty Nicole:
Nicole Winfield of the AP

In yet another hit piece by the AP's nasty Nicole Winfield – a "Vatican correspondent" whose hatred of the Catholic Church is palpable with every word she types – Winfield somehow sees an injustice that the Catholic Church has not recently telephoned an accuser whose alleged abuser was shipped off to prison over a quarter century ago (shortly after the accuser complained of his abuse) and then died in prison 15 years ago.

What does Winfield expect of Church officials? A phone call to the accuser asking, "How much more money do you want?" Unreal.

Wringing their hands over 'lists'

If it were not already clear already, the Associated Press really, really hates the Catholic Church.

A breathless article by the AP's Claudia Lauer and Meghan Hoyer – both of whom we already cited for a dumb article back in October – frets that the lists of accused priests published on many diocesean web sites are not "complete." Imagine that.

Yet in all the time the pair wasted poring over lists of accused priests, one obvious question never occurred to them: Why is the Catholic Church the only organization on the planet that is expected to compile such lists of its accused ex-employees (including those long deceased)?

Where are the lists of accused former teachers from Chicago Public Schools? Or California public schools? The Boy Scouts? Hollywood? The question is not even on the AP's radar.

It's a free country, and the AP is allowed to hate whomever it wants, especially the Catholic Church. We get it.

But the real story here is the groupthink that has created an overarching mindset that the Catholic Church is somehow failing in its goal to to provide restitution for victims and rectify for its sins from decades ago.

In truth, the Catholic Church has gone far above and beyond what any other organization should be expected to, especially since there has never been any evidence that the Church ever had a bigger problem than anyone else. Yet the media and the AP will never tell you this.

This is a bigotry that everyone can see.

The AP needs to find some new storylines, and we just gave them a bunch of possibilities.

We hope to see better reporting by the media in 2020, but we won't hold our breath.

Wild-eyed: SNAP's Barbara Blaine and CRR's Pam Spees

When an unknown and powerless group of bureaucrats from the United Nations somehow managed to question officials from the Vatican about the issue of sex abuse in the Catholic Church for several hours, the mainstream media was naturally more than willing to herald the event, which took place in Geneva, Switzerland.

But as is so often the case, the media missed the forest for the trees, reporting the subject with notable inaccuracy and a glaring lack of perspective.

A solution in search of a problem

The most egregious problem with the media's coverage of the UN-Vatican face off was that the issue was presented as if sex abuse is still a significant problem in the Catholic Church today. As we have relayed countless times before, it simply isn't, as much as haters of the Church may wish it to be otherwise.

In truth, in the United States, contemporaneous accusations against priests are extremely rare, and on average, only 8 allegations are even deemed merely "credible" by review boards each year.

Moreover, nearly half of all priests accused in recent years are long ago deceased, and the vast majority of accusations against priests allege activity that took place many decades ago.

But this context was sorely lacking in all the media coverage that we examined.

The mainstream media: SNAP's enabler

Nicole Winfield : AP Associated Press

In fact, this was SNAP's and CCR's second attempt to garner international media attention over old sex abuse claims. As we reported last June, the International Criminal Court (ICC, aka "The Hague") roundly rejected the pair's wacky petition to prosecute Pope Benedict XVI and other Vatican officials for purported "crimes against humanity" for their handling over decades-old abuse allegations.

The groups' effort was clearly a silly publicity stunt, as the ICC quickly recognized. But since the stunt gained the desired publicity, the groups then apparently decided to try the UN committee in hopes of obtaining even more media attention.

Following the sessions between the UN committee members and Vatican officials, SNAP and CCR presented a long and rambling "live stream" video, which only a die-hard bigot could possibly have seriously appreciated.

In fact, at times SNAP's Blaine appeared so discombobulated by the whole experience that she no longer made any sense in the video. At one point, Blaine uttered:

"I think we have to judge Pope Francis by his behavior, not his actions."
(18:40 on the video)

The media coverage was equally inaccurate and off point. After the Vatican released the statistic that it removed 400 priests over a recent two-year period, many mainstream outlets picked up on the breathless reporting by the Associated Press' Nicole Winfield, who appeared confused about whether the Catholic Church has the ability to jail any of its 400,000 priests worldwide.

Apparently trying to suggest that the Vatican's defrocking of abusive priests was still not a sufficient penalty, Winfield darkly wrote:

"The maximum penalty for a priest convicted by a church tribunal is essentially losing his job: being defrocked, or removed from the clerical state. There are no jail terms and nothing to prevent an offender from raping again."

Winfield may want to familiarize herself with the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Obviously, no organization has the authority to "jail" any of its employees, and unless a priest is a residing citizen of the Vatican, it cannot "jail" anyone.

Rev. Joseph Fessio is the editor-in-chief of Ignatius Press, which is publishing the interview book Light of the World, from which the Pope's notable remarks are gleaned. Fr. Fessio is quoted in the New York Times, "It would be wrong to say, 'Pope Approves Condoms.' He's saying it's immoral, but in an individual case the use of a condom could be an awakening to someone that he's got to be more conscious of his actions."

Dr. Janet E. Smith at Catholic World Report has an excellent explanation of the Pope's remarks. She also provides the actual interview exchange from the upcoming book.

Dr. Smith's piece is a must-read for those who wish to examine this story. Although the following snippet from Dr. Smith does not do justice to her entire piece, here is part of what she wrote:

We must note that the example that Pope Benedict gives for the use of a condom is a male prostitute; thus, it is reasonable to assume that he is referring to a male prostitute engaged in homosexual acts. The Holy Father is simply observing that for some homosexual prostitutes the use of a condom may indicate an awakening of a moral sense; an awakening that sexual pleasure is not the highest value, but that we must take care that we harm no one with our choices. He is not speaking to the morality of the use of a condom, but to something that may be true about the psychological state of those who use them. If such individuals are using condoms to avoid harming another, they may eventually realize that sexual acts between members of the same sex are inherently harmful since they are not in accord with human nature. The Holy Father does not in any way think the use of condoms is a part of the solution to reducing the risk of AIDS. As he explicitly states, the true solution involves "humanizing sexuality." …

Would it be proper to conclude that the Holy Father would support the distribution of condoms to male prostitutes? Nothing he says here indicates that he would. Public programs of distribution of condoms run the risk of conveying approval for homosexual sexual acts. The task of the Church is to call individuals to conversion and to moral behavior; it is to help them understand the meaning and purpose of sexuality and to help them come to know Christ, who will provide the healing and graces that enable us to live in accord with the meaning and purpose of sexuality.

Is Pope Benedict indicating that heterosexuals who have HIV could reduce the wrongness of their acts by using condoms? No. In his second answer he says that the Church does not find condoms to be a “real or moral solution.” That means the Church does not find condoms either to be moral or an effective way of fighting the transmission of HIV. As the Holy Father indicates in his fuller answer, the most effective portion of programs designed to reduce the transmission of HIV are calls to abstinence and fidelity.

In other words, there's a lot more to this than meets the eye. Careful analysis is needed in examining what the Holy Father said, and careful analysis is something that is too often lacking when the major media reports on issues related to the Catholic Church.

As Phil Lawler, from CatholicCulture.org reports: "Did the Pope really say that condom use is sometimes justified? No; that's not what he said."

As [the Pope] headed to the basilica, about 200 gays and lesbians staged a 'kiss-in' to protest his visit and church policies that consider homosexual acts 'intrinsically disordered.' Later, a few hundred women marched to protest their second-class status in the church and the Vatican's opposition to birth control.

First: Winfield tells us that "some 250,000" supporters attended the dedication. If there were 200 gay demonstrators, that would represent 0.08% (or 8/10,000ths) of all who were in attendance. At most, this minuscule "kiss-in" merits a passing mention. Yet with the article's headline, "Pope defends family as Spanish gays hold 'kiss-in'," the AP practically gives the gays equal billing.

Second: To claim that women have "second-class status" in the Church is a gross falsehood and misrepresentation. The Catholic Church firmly asserts, "Man and woman are both with one and the same dignity 'in the image of God'" (CCC 369). There is no such thing as a "second-class citizen" in the Church.

What prompted Winfield to state that women have "second-class status"? She doesn't tell us. But if it's because of the Church's male-only priesthood, Winfield reveals her ignorance of Catholic teaching. As we've written several times before, the ordination of priests is a sacrament in the Catholic Church, and it maintains that sacraments were instituted by Jesus himself. Jesus chose only men for the priesthood, and the Church simply does not have the authority to change the nature of a sacrament. The Church also asserts that the priesthood is about role, not power. In his Letter to the Romans (Rom. 12:4-8) and his First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 7 (all)), Paul teaches about roles in the Church. (For even more on this, check out: Mulieris Dignitatem (Pope JPII, 1988); Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (Pope JPII, 1994); and "Public acts of contrition in the age of spin control" (Mary Ann Glendon, 1997.)

Winfield should get kudos for one notable thing, however. Winfield's piece about the Pope and the Church may be the longest article I've seen in recent memory by a secular organization that didn't mention the clergy sex abuse scandals at all. Finally!

In a flimsy attempt on Monday (9/13/10) to portray the Holy Father in a negative light, Winfield published "Pope breaks own rule to beatify Anglican convert."

1. In discussing the upcoming beatification of 19th century Anglican convert John Henry Newman, Winfield falsely claimed that Pope Benedict would be "breaking his own rule," in that "under [Benedict's] own rules popes don't beatify, only canonize."

Although the new 2005 guidelines and procedures for the rite of Beatification indicated that diocesan bishops should normally preside at Beatification rites, the Vatican clearly asserts that "every Beatification is an act of the Roman Pontiff" (italics in original). In other words, popes are the ones doing the beatifying!

The same document also says, "[The Pope] can always choose to preside in the circumstances and ways he may deem appropriate." The Pope has chosen to preside at Newman's beatification, so he did not break any "rule."

Winfield is simply wrong.

2. Then there's this misleading shot by Winfield:

Benedict has a history of causing offense while on foreign trips – notably outraging Muslims in a speech in Germany by appearing to suggest the prophet Muhammad spread a message of violence, or suggesting while traveling to Africa that condoms hindered the fight against AIDS.

Winfield implies that Pope Benedict is wrong to say that condoms foster the spread of AIDS. However, as NewsBusters reported in March 2009, the director of Harvard's AIDS Prevention Research Project, Edward C. Green, a self-described liberal, agrees with the pontiff that condoms do not halt the spread of AIDS.

In March of 2009, Dr. Green spoke with Christianity Today about this very issue:

INTERVIEWER: Is Pope Benedict being criticized unfairly for his comments about HIV and condoms?
DR. GREEN: This is hard for a liberal like me to admit, but yes, it’s unfair because in fact, the best evidence we have supports his comments — at least his major comments, the ones I have seen.
INTERVIEWER: What does the evidence show about the effectiveness of condom-use strategies in reducing HIV infection rates among large-scale populations?
DR. GREEN: It will be easiest if we confine our discussion to Africa, because that’s where the pope is, and that is what he was talking about. There’s no evidence at all that condoms have worked as a public health intervention intended to reduce HIV infections at the “level of population.” This is a bit difficult to understand. It may well make sense for an individual to use condoms every time, or as often as possible, and he may well decrease his chances of catching HIV. But we are talking about programs, large efforts that either work or fail at the level of countries, or, as we say in public health, the level of population. Major articles published in Science, The Lancet, British Medical Journal, and even Studies in Family Planning have reported this finding since 2004. I first wrote about putting emphasis on fidelity instead of condoms in Africa in 1988.

In other words, the Church's position saves lives.

There's even more to say about Winfield's unfair effort, but we'll "call the fight" now.