The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is an absolute horror. No one should have any doubt about that, and if today’s charges are true, the most recent beneficiary of clerical cover-ups, a bishop in Belgium who abused his own nephew years ago, deserves defrocking and imprisonment.
I write not to mitigate that horror or to discourage it in any way, but to point out how selective it is in the mass media. Today, the New York Times wrote yet another denunciation of the Catholic Church’s handling of the crisis– as always, on page 1. Yet on the same day– discreetly on p. 6– the Times also sympathetically covers the release of Roman Polanski from extradition on charges of child rape, and the story is full of nuances, the difficulty of meting out justice after many years has passed, etc. This is of a piece with a Times article this spring (even more discreetly published on p. 19) about the dangers of lifting the statue of limitations for sex abuse cases in New York State for public institutions: justice is difficult to adjudicate with the passage of years, the ensuing lawsuits would threaten the finances of whole schools and communities, etc. Only at the end of this article does the Times concede that the problem of sexually abused children is as common outside the Church as inside it (Prof. Charol Shakeshaft has suggested it is more common).
Regardless of frequency, the Church should be held to the highest standard– which for many years it egregiously failed to meet– and The New York Times is right to address the sexual abuse of children in the Church. That said, the Times is also disproportionately and embarrassingly non-plussed about the pursuit of justice in relation to sexual abuse of children anywhere else in the US or around the world. Given that this pattern has been firmly in place for years, it constitutes strong evidence that in covering the very real scandal in the Catholic Church, the New York Times is not primarily motivated by a just and principled anger at the failure of diverse authorities– including Catholic authorities– to root out and punish abusers and protect children, but by what they clearly perceive to be the Catholic Church’s presumptuous and false teachings, teachings they hope to discredit or inspire others to change. In the pages of the Times, the abuse of children prompts very selective outrage indeed.
