Sure, “biased media, biased media” - it’s all THEIR fault, no one else’s. That is a weak excuse, and making excuses rather than addressing the problem is rather pitiful in my mind, when our innocent youth have been victimized, and when the faith of many is only made more tenuous by the actions of our Church hierarchy and the words of its see-no-evil apologists.
Yes, continue to focus only on maligning the Catholic Church. Let the more widespread abuse of children at the hands of other institutions continue thanks to the cover provided by relentlessly attacking the Church over misdeeds done by a small minority of men decades upon decades ago.
That’s
surely a moral, caring, and responsible way to act.
When abuse happens at a school or in someone’s home, there is no trans-national, extra-governmental organization like we have in the Church seeking ways to suppress the evidence in the interest of saving its own skin. It is the suppression and coverup that is as much the scandal as is the abuse that occurred, understand.
See, this is where the conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric part way with what the facts will support. The facts show failures by Bishops and Dioceses (often times by bureaucrats) - as well as state, local, and national governmental authorities and media institutions. The fictional narrative of the media and the bigots, on the other hand, insists that there was a conspiracy to enable pederasts and hide evidence from dedicated police and judges running up the chair of St. Peter …
They are always ever-so-careful never to implicate failings on the late Pope John Paul II, because that could provoke cognitive dissonance against their precious narrative. Pope John Paul II, seated those many years during which this “conspiracy” occurred is off-limits to their narrative, but the man they tried to smear as a “Nazi Pope” is fair game.
These folks are disingenuous hypocrites and cowards, not journalists.
City boards of public education hushing up molestations by teachers - transferring them, moving them to administrative duties - that’s all well and good? The newspapers (many internationally owned public companies) burying abuse reports because they couldn’t profit from them - that’s fine to brush under the rug? The fact that Protestants and Jews and non-religious groups of all stripes have the same or higher rates of abuse from those times and their cases weren’t widely publicized and scandalized - that’s just peachy?
But the Catholic Church … it has a central authority figure so that changes everything!
I don’t live in Boston, so I don’t know the details of the history of the situation. I do know, though, that what came to light there 10 years ago - came to light because of the reporting of the Globe and the rest of the national media - brought pretty big changes to our Catholic church in America, changes for the better.
Yes, you
didn’t live there, and you
don’t know the details.
The fact is that what come to light there
was kept in the dark by the very same Boston Globe you try to praise when it was convenient for the Globe and their parent company, the New York Times.
You also mistakenly attribute the changes in the Church to the Globe’s reporting. The reforms that curbed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church went into place
well before the 2000s. The changes in policy took place in the 1980s and 1990s - well before the Globe decided to cash in on the story they’d been sitting on for years. That’s why when you actually observe the rates of abuse and the times the abuse occurred you see a massive drop-off in the 80s and 90s to near nil by the time the Boston Globe decided to break their story. The changes that took place after the Boston Scandal were mostly for the sake of having clear, lawyer-proof evidence of posted policies to minimize further legal exposure by parishes, making public contrition, and trying to reassure victims of sexual abuse.
Of course, one of the leading figures in the Church who finally pieced the puzzle to see how widespread the abuse among the various dioceses was and implemented the changes that brought clergy sexual abuse to such a marked decline was none other than then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - they very man that the New York Times, its vassal newspapers, and the AP want to string up.
