Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Paul Haring | CNS

In strange ways, injustices I have known as a prisoner and a priest intersected the lives of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell who died just ten days apart.

February 8 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pope Benedict XVI passed from this life at age 95 on the final day of 2022. Ten days later, Cardinal George Pell died of cardiac arrest at age 81 while recovering from routine surgery at a hospital in Rome. Both of these men were giants in the Church as the many tributes to them from around the world make clear. They were also targets for much vitriol and injustice. It was in this targeted injustice that my path crossed with that of both men.

In “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae,” a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by famed Boston criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, he cited a ground-breaking book by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board entitled, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness, and Other, Terrors of Our Time. Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of writings about unjust sex abuse prosecutions that generated a spate of wrongful convictions of innocent people in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of her subjects in the book and subsequent writings spent decades in prison. I am one of them.

One of the tragically misguided prosecutions cited in the book is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels, then a 24-year-old nursery school teacher in New Jersey. Charged with multiple counts of child molestation in a witch hunt atmosphere, Kelly was innocent of the heinous crimes, none of which actually took place. The charges were fantastical and false, but the child abuse terror of the time resulted in easy convictions with no valid evidence.

The nature of the evidence in Kelly’s case was chilling. The prosecution’s child psych expert — who had no real expertise at all — fashioned a theory that young children who say that no sexual abuse happened actually mean the opposite. A vigilante jury bought that theory and convicted Kelly Michaels. At age 24, she was sentenced to 47 years in prison.

After failed appeals having nothing whatsoever to do with truth or justice, Kelly’s fate seemed sealed in wrongful imprisonment until Dorothy Rabinowitz began writing about it. Then New York civil rights attorney Morton Stavis came out of retirement to take the case pro bono. In her book, Ms. Rabinowitz revealed that Mr. Stavis sought the aid of a New York-based left-leaning legal think tank, the Center for Constitutional Rights that he himself founded. The CCR wanted nothing to do with this case. As Ms. Rabinowitz explained:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the politically progressive views held by many at the center. In the 1980s, as today, there was a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse was to undermine the battle against child abuse. It was to betray children and other victims of sexual predators.”

No Crueler Tyrannies, 17-18

The charges against me stem from the same time period, filtered through the same progressive political opinions, and hyped by the same prosecutorial mindset that to be accused of such things is to be guilty. It is the cruelest of tyrannies that even our Catholic bishops have cowed in fear under that progressive steamroller as priests so accused are discarded without defense. This was articulated in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

The heroic attorney Morton Stavis was not defeated by the progressive disdain for his effort from his own tribe at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He did not live to see his victory in this case, but he had put together a small team of righteous defenders who eventually prevailed by exposing the truth and winning Kelly’s freedom. One of these defenders was Robert Rosenthal whose prior legal briefs on my behalf are still on display at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

Kelly Michaels went on in life to marry a judge. She eventually recovered — to the extent one can — from the tyranny of wrongful imprisonment. She has corresponded with me in freedom, imparting as much hope for justice as she can by urging me to never give up. I haven’t, but I will be 70 on my next birthday and like Job, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25).

Vincenzo Pinto | AFP

Benedict’s “Crimes against Humanity”

However, reading Dorothy’s book was unfortunately not my final encounter with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Clinging to the progressive view that to be accused of sexual abuse is to be guilty, the Center for Constitutional Rights allowed itself to be duped and used by SNAP, the activist group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. I wrote a post some time ago that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of this organization's campaign to destroy any due process for Catholic priests. The post was, “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

Prior to writing that post, David Clohessy and SNAP manipulated the Center for Constitutional Rights into bringing a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was a shameless publicity stunt that had no hope of success, but was filed only to shame Pope Benedict and bring attention to SNAP.

Though I was aware of the charge, it was only after the International Criminal Court dismissed it that I learned that I was an unwitting pawn in this debacle. Journalist Joann Wypijewski, a reporter of courage and high integrity, wrote of it in her blistering review of the movie “Spotlight,” a film about The Boston Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the sexual abuse scandal. The following is an excerpt of her bold article, “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“The film’s advertisement for SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, faithfully represents the Globe’s affiliation. It elides SNAP’s belief that wrongful prosecutions are a minor price to pay in pursuit of its larger mission, something [The Boston Globe] did not much concern itself with either as it collected its Pulitzer for service in the public interest; something even the Center for Constitutional Rights disregarded in 2011 when it joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

“Liberals who cheer this sort of thing ought to ponder whether they have any principles at all ... . The CCR brief failed ... but to CCR’s shame, Father MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief, with respect to allegations of videotape (that is, child porn), which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

I was frozen in place by grief upon first learning of this. I knew that the charge had no substance. I also knew that in her WSJ investigation, Dorothy Rabinowitz confronted NH Detective James McLaughlin who first contrived the charge. Cornered, he finally admitted, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

This did not stop SNAP and CCR from including it in a falsified brief before the International Criminal Court. There was no repercussion for the attempt at fraud upon the court. Even now, as recently as a few months ago, biased NH reporter Damien Fisher— whose wife Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher has ties to my diocese — repeated the pornography allegation without even mentioning that it had been widely discredited, including by the dishonest detective who first raised it.

All the claims that Pope Benedict XVI enabled accused priests and failed to protect victims are of a kind with the above story. In the end, it was never any of this that really made him a target. It was his orthodoxy, his fidelity, his clear-minded exposure of Catholic truths. None of this could ever successfully be assailed, so instead they smeared him with a weapon straight from hell: false witness. Let that sink in.

The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

In the same manner that Kelly Michaels reached out to me upon her exoneration, it was because I had been so falsely accused that I reached out to Cardinal George Pell during his 400 days of unjust imprisonment. Having come to recognize signposts of dishonesty in such a case, I was certain that Cardinal Pell had been falsely accused. But because of prison rules barring direct contact with other prisoners, I could not contact in prison directly.

A friend, Sheryl Collmer, a Tyler, Texas writer for Crisis Magazine and other venues, was my intermediary. I know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this case it was perhaps a bit less deadly. There have been few really proud moments during my imprisonment, but my ability to detect and expose the truth in support of Cardinal Pell was one of them.

As a result, I found this excerpt in his published Prison Journal Volume 2 (Ignatius Press 2021). It was written from his prison cell:

“Friday, 2 August 2019: By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl Collmer, a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, ‘Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?’

“Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australia media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday, your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windshuttle, editor of the quality journal Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ (See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell,’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019).

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama's White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men.

“As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in 2015] . Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from the BTSW About Page], ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice]’”

Addendum

You may see — from Cardinal Pell’s last citation above — where Dorothy Rabinowitz got the inspiration for the title of her book, No Crueler Tyrannies. Once free from his wrongful prison sentence, Cardinal Pell was restored to his rightful position in Rome. From there, he reached out to me again in ways that I only learned about posthumously. He wrote to a mutual friend that he plans to refer to my situation in talks he is slated to present in Rome and Australia. He never got to present them.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Cardinal George Pell Faced Down a Hostile World” (January 13, 2023), Fr Raymond de Souza wrote that “His faith even during wrongful detention, was the crown of an inspiring Catholic life.” Reading his Prison Journal, I have no doubt been so inspired.

It is my prayer, and perhaps not even a necessary one, that Pope Benedict and Cardinal Pell both now stand in the Presence of God where they behold the fruition of all the graces bestowed upon them, and hopefully now upon us through them. We have not heard the last of them.

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

+ + +

Francesco Sforza | Osservatore Romano | AFP

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

Striking similarities exist between claims of Cardinal George Pell’s accuser and those in a discredited case hyped by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Rolling Stone magazine.

Back in 2016, before the American presidential election that shook our politics, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was quoted in a NewsMax article entitled “Trump Taps into Mass Distrust.” Dr. Donohue, who happens to be a well-published sociologist, cited a poll by the Media Insight Project and the American Press Institute that measured the confidence voters have in American institutions.

Topping the list of those earning the public’s trust were, in order: The U.S. military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion (yes, even still!), and America’s financial institutions. At the bottom of the list were the institutions Americans trust least. The last two came as no surprise. Only six percent of Americans reported having trust in the news media. Only four percent reported having trust in members of Congress.

Bill Donohue also cited another study. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to report facts truthfully. By 2011, that figure dropped to 25 percent. In the same poll in 1985, 45 percent of Americans thought the media was biased. By 2011, it jumped to 63 percent.

Bill Donohue gleaned from the fine print of these polls that the two most cited reasons for wide-spread mistrust of news media were inaccurate reporting and media bias. There is another reason, but it may not be so evident to casual consumers of the news. The media has abandoned skepticism in favor of quick and easy “gotcha” news.

The most articulate analysis of media bias comes from journalist JoAnn Wypijewski in a news-busting CounterPunch article about the Catholic priesthood scandal. Her against-the-tide article is “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” (For full disclosure my own charges are examined therein).

“I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers … I don’t believe the prosecutors who pursued tainted cases, or the therapists who revived junk science or the juries that sided with them or the judges who failed to act justly or the people who made money off any of this …

“I don’t believe the claims of all who say they are victims or who prefer the tough-minded label, survivor — because ready belief is not part of a journalist’s mental kit, but also because what happened in 2002 makes it difficult to distinguish real claims from fraudulent or opportunistic ones without independent research.”

This article would never win recognition for public service from the news media because it goes so vividly against the current tide of political correctness. The news media has abandoned the necessary skepticism that was once “part of a journalist’s mental kit.” To be merely accused today is to be guilty.

Manipulating the Court of Public Opinion

This, says JoAnn Wypijewski, is “the legacy of the courtroom of panic that made ‘the pedophile priest’ a cultural bogeyman, a devil, who need not be real but only named to light the fires of wrath.” I became a target of that courtroom of panic and those fires of wrath, and so, it now seems, did Cardinal George Pell.

In a time of moral panic, convictions happen in the public eye long before they happen in a court of law. For many prosecutors, arriving at the truth is now less important than winning. The necessary “independent research” cited by Ms. Wypijewski happens only when the smoke of an unjust trial clears, if at all.

The case against Cardinal Pell had already raised concerns for real justice even before it ended in a courtroom. One of the best commentaries on this has come from David F. Pierre, Jr., host of The Media Report, in “The Witch Hunt Against Australia’s Cardinal George Pell: Five Facts You Need to Know.” The five facts summarized by David Pierre are these:

• The Australian government began investigating Cardinal Pell over five years ago even though there had been no crime reported against him.

• Pell’s publicly known accusers include career criminals, admitted drug addicts, and others who have lodged similar complaints before.

• Even secular observers have admitted that Pell was not treated fairly.

• Accusations against Pell were widely circulated in a 2017 book that has been thoroughly discredited.

• Cardinal Pell vehemently and consistently denies the accusations against him.

Before the trial, some of the charges were withdrawn by prosecutors. Now there is a new source of grave doubt about the justice meted out to Cardinal Pell. An alert reader of These Stone Walls  first spotted this story in an account at LifeSite News by Dorothy Cummings McLean entitled, “Cardinal Pell’s Accuser Copied Testimony from Old Rolling Stone Report, Journalist Claims.”

The writer who first uncovered this is Keith Windschuttle, an Australian journalist and historian. He used the professional skepticism and deep-sourcing that were once mainstays of the news media but have sadly been abandoned in favor of quick sound bites and the strip-mining of news.

Mr. Windschuttle discovered some eerie similarities between the claims brought against Cardinal Pell and a lurid story of abuse by American Catholic priests that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in 2011. His findings listed a series of identical, sometimes verbatim, allegations seemingly lifted from the pages of Rolling Stone.

The magazine and that article would have been readily available to Pell’s accuser when he first described his “abuse” to police in 2015. The LifeSite News  summary of the article lists the similarities, and they leave little doubt, according to Windschuttle:

“What is the difference between this account of child sex abuse in a Catholic church in Philadelphia and the evidence given by a sole accuser in the Victorian [AU] court case that convicted Cardinal George Pell? … Not much. The two stories were so close to being identical that the likelihood of the Australian version being original is most implausible. There were too many similarities for the likeness to be dismissed as ‘coincidence.’”

Sabrina Rubin Erdely & the Predatory News Media

You may read for yourselves in the LifeSite News  article the striking similarities that raise a specter of plagiarism in the charges against Cardinal Pell. The 2011 Rolling Stone article from which Pell’s accuser seems to have copied his claims was “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” written by a now disgraced and discredited former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Readers may remember that name from “A Rape on Campus,” an explosive story in the November 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. Sabrina Rubin Erdely profiled the story of “Jackie,” a student at the University of Virginia who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a UVA fraternity party in 2012.  Rolling Stone’s front page cried out:

“A RAPE ON CAMPUS: Jackie was just starting her freshman year at the University of Virginia when she was brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat party. When she tried to hold them accountable, a whole new kind of abuse began.”

Erdely’s account depicted UVA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of the anonymous “Jackie” and, by extension, for the plight of other victims of sexual assault on campus. The story helped launch a national debate about rape on college campuses across the nation.

It contributed to a moral panic that went all the way to the Obama White House where legislation was promoted to drastically curtail the due process rights of accused college students. In the fallout from the story, UVA administrators called for resignations and expulsions even before all the facts were in. Like most such media events, the story was accepted as Gospel truth once it appeared in print.

But then someone began to do some of the independent research that journalist JoAnn Wypijewski calls for above. “Jackie’s” account turned out to be a massive lie, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. No one could corroborate any of “Jackie’s” story and Erdely never even bothered to try. She did no fact checking. She just ran with the story, riding a wave of public hysteria about sexual assault and abuse.

A civil trial took place just before the 2016 presidential election. From the witness stand, Sabrina Rubin Erdely cited the same tactic that countless contingency lawyers have used against the Catholic Church: “It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” she testified to excuse her disregard for journalistic standards.

“It is not unusual,” Erdely testified to explain away “Jackie’s” ever-changing details of her story. In the end, with streaming tears, Erdely blamed it all on “Jackie,” saying, “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”

The bar for proving defamation and negligence against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a journalist or media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for truth. In the end, when the entire account was heard, a jury found Rolling Stone  guilty of negligence and defamation, and imposed a $7.5 million dollar jury award to the falsely accused fraternity students.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely was found liable for actual malice in the writing and publication of this story. By the December 2016 edition of Rolling Stone, her name was removed from the masthead of contributing editors, and she disappeared from the world of journalism.

That Lying Scheming Altar Boy Again!

But there is another reason readers of these pages may recall Ms Erdely and Rolling Stone. A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of its own agenda would have scoured Ms Erdely’s previous work, but they did not. They did not because doing so would have required delving into another story by Ms Erdely that raises the same hard questions. It is a story that I have written about in multiple posts, including “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”

Three years before “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone  launched another moral panic by exploding a story of a Pennsylvania Catholic sex-abuse ring among priests in “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It is a story, as I have written elsewhere in These Stone Walls, that turned Father Charles Engelhardt into a martyr and Daniel Gallagher into a millionaire.

And lest you have questions about media influence on judges, Father Engelhardt’s judge, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, objected to a defense question posed to jurors:

“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”

Before falling for “Jackie’s” fraud, Ms. Erdely fell for a much larger one brought by Daniel Gallagher, assured anonymity by Ms. Erdely as “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It is this story, and Rolling Stone’s presentation of it, that is now the apparent source of copycat testimony in the case against Cardinal George Pell.

But, like Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus,” this story was also a fraud. It was written with the same malice and disregard for truth as Erdely’s other story, but it nonetheless launched a witch hunt in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with tentacles extending into the present day. Now it seems that some of those tentacles washed up in Australia as well.

The facts in this story are staggering, and though I have written extensively of them, the best source for a succinct summary is by journalist Ralph Cipriano writing for the January-February issue of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst in “The Legacy of Billy Doe.”

It is ironic that Cardinal Pell’s accuser picked this story to serve as a model to concoct false charges. Of course, this happened long before the story of Daniel Gallagher was exposed as a fraud. Up until last year it was a great success for the newly minted millionaire, Daniel Gallagher, who is yet to be brought to justice because it would be greatly embarrassing for Pennsylvania justice officials to do so.

I highly recommend Ralph Cipriano’s “The Legacy of Billy Doe.” In only two pages, he blew apart the narrative that has prevailed in the media to date. It is a narrative that now raises questions about the character of the case against Cardinal Pell as well. We owe it to him to make this known. There is a reason why no other news media figure has taken up this story as Mr. Cipriano has, and as I have here at These Stone Walls.

And it is a frightening reason, frightening for anyone concerned with the integrity of our news media and the tyranny it can create through false witness. No one has articulated this better than The Wall Street Journal' s Pulitzer Prize-winning expositor of truth in justice, Dorothy Rabinowitz, in her 2005 book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children. [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle. It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators. Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”

— No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18

And that, my friends — for anyone who has counted on the news media to champion truth and justice — may be the cruelest tyranny of all.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please help share this story with others. I believe we owe that much to Cardinal Pell.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Joseph Goebbels In ‘The Reckoning’

In substance and style, a report on Catholic priests by Attorney General Josh Shapiro mirrors one by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda in 1937.

I love westerns. One of my favorites was “Wyatt Earp” starring Kurt Russell as the famed lawman and Val Kilmer, as Doc Holliday. In one scene, Wyatt Earp singlehandedly pursued the Clanton gang across a shallow river. Against a hail of bullets, Wyatt gunned down one of the Clantons and two of their men. No trial, no testimony, just guns-a-blazin’. Looking on, one of Wyatt’s deputies asked, “Is this justice’” “No,” said Doc Holliday. “It’s the reckoning!”

Justice isn’t done this way anymore. Or at least I thought that until I saw a brief report in The Wall Street Journal by Kris Maher (January 12, 2019). From Josh Shapiro’s vast condemning grand jury report declaring that the Catholic Church in all of Pennsylvania covered up the sexual abuse of 1,000 children by 300 priests, only two cases have come to justice. There were no trials. The only two priests who to date could face charges from that report were offered lenient plea deals which they accepted. One 65-year-old priest got 2 1/2 years. The other, age 76, got 11 months. Mr. Shapiro was quoted in the article “There is a reckoning going on in this country.”

When I wrote “That Grand Jury Report on Abusive Catholic Priests,” I laid out a case for why the report on its face is no measure of justice. It was sensational (the news media loved it). It was vengeful (the #MeToo crowd gloated). It was destructive (Anti-Catholics gave it Biblical truth). But it was not justice.

It wasn’t even a tool for prosecution. It was designed and executed for persecution. Instead of making it a centerpiece of our Catholic summer of shame, Catholics should just pause to let its truth sink in. What the PA Attorney General did was as manipulative as the abuse he describes.

The whole affair calls to mind a famous quote from the legendary and much-maligned Sheriff Buford Pusser from my post, “Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment”:

“If you let ’em get away with this, you give ’em the eternal right to do the same damn thing to any one of you!”

Peter Steinfels: “It’s Inaccurate, Unfair and Misleading.”

Fortunately, there are some among us who are not letting Josh Shapiro get away with it aided by the complicity of our silence. There are voices of justice and fairness who are pushing against the hurricane-like headwinds that propelled this Grand Jury Report to do exactly what Josh Shapiro set out to do. Hear me out, please, and when I am finished you can be the judge of his tactics, his conclusions, and his intent. Let’s start with this statement:

“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of Catholic clergy. Unfortunately, it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension.

“Numerous priests have confessed. There is no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered-up and hidden by the hierarchy.”

Did you think that the statement above was part of Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s grand jury report? Or maybe an excerpt from one of his press conferences? It easily could be, but it isn’t… The statement above is from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich. The speech was delivered at a press conference on May 28, 1937 as 325 Catholic priests representing every diocese in Hitler’s Germany were rounded up and summarily sent to prison on trumped- up sex abuse charges. In the end, when trials of fact and evidence actually occurred, only six of the 325 priests turned out to be guilty reflecting a very different public image from the one Joseph Goebbels set out to convey.

Some may think this comparison to be extreme. However, one of the most well known priests to succumb to the Third Reich’s oppression of the Catholic Church was Father Maximilian Kolbe who was executed in Auschwitz on August 14, 1941, a martyr for truth and Divine Mercy. Whether by design or ironic chance, PA Attorney General Josh Shapiro chose August 14 to release his scathing Grand Jury Report.

It’s ironic that the Pennsylvania report also targets a similar number of priests —301— and opens with the same condemning tone: “Hear me,” Josh Shapiro pleads. “You may have read about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church, but never on this scale.” After highlighting the claims of horrific but unsubstantiated stories of rape, brutality, tying up victims with “altar sashes” and forcing others to “gargle with holy water” after “forced oral sex,” the report — now that it had everyone’s attention — went on to claim:

“All of these victims were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all. Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing, they hid it all.”

In the end, the Third Reich actually assured more justice and due process than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Of the 325 priest indicted by Joseph Goebbels, all of them were subjected to legitimate trials but only six were deemed guilty. Of the 301 priests accused in Pennsylvania, most are dead, none faced trials, and two accepted lenient plea deals.

Perhaps the strongest voice to actually read the whole ugly report and register opposition to its distortions is Peter Steinfels in a stunning article in Commonweal Magazine, “The PA Grand Jury Report: Not What It Seems” (January 9, 2019).

Steinfels, a career journalist of high regard for his integrity and accuracy, is formerly editor of Commonweal and religion writer at The New York Times, and is currently a Professor. Emeritus at Fordham University. His conclusion is that Josh Shapiro’s 1,356-page report is irresponsible, inaccurate, unfair and misleading. He presents a compelling analysis as follows:

The report’s conclusions are contradicted by its own evidence. Thus it is written in an inflammatory style, and in a length that would entice journalists and others to settle for reading only its long introduction, its most inaccurate and inflammatory part. In fact, a Pennsylvania judge also regarded it as inflammatory.

The report lacks all historical context by not providing any background for the reasons why Church leaders acted the way they did decades ago in their handling of accused priests. The report has no sense of history. It treats the seven decades from 1945 to 2015 as one block with no distinction between then and now.

The report presents no apparent awareness of changes in societal norms from the end of World War II to the present, the time period of its accusations. Like so many in this story, Josh Shapiro condemns the Catholic Church — and only the Catholic Church — for not acting in 1945 as it would in 2005.

The Pennsylvania report presents all its claims of abuse as though they are happening in the present. It covers-up the fact that not one priest in its pages was still in active ministry at the time the report was compiled. It also covers-up the fact that nearly half the accused priests are deceased while few others can legitimately face charges. (There have been but two so far described early in this post).

The report presents the utilization of treatment professionals and facilities as some malevolent effort to bury a problem when in fact the clear intent was to restore when possible and seek ongoing monitoring when not. How can any child advocate, argue today that simply throwing real offenders out into the street protects vulnerable young people? (I worked in ministry as Director of Admissions for one of these facilities, and I can attest to the great tragedy of their loss since the Dallas Charter which now opts to simply discard the accused).

Josh Shapiro’s Grand Jury Report Is “A Fraud”

I strongly recommend the article by Peter Steinfels. If its 11,000-word analysis is simply too much for you, then I suggest — an accurate and well-informed summary meticulously put together by David F. Pierre, Jr. of The Media Report entitled, “Speaking Truth to Power: Esteemed Journalist Calls Out PA Grand Jury Report As a Fraud.”

David Pierre notes a misleading aspect of the report that the news media has intentionally distorted. The report “ignored the fact that almost all of the accusations it details date back many decades and that many accusers did not even come forward until after 2002.” By that time, most of the accused priests were either deceased, retired or too elderly to refute anything. Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate characterized such claims in his 2004 article, “Fleecing the Shepherds”:

“There is reason to doubt the veracity of the newer claims which were brought forward only after it became clear that the Church would settle for big bucks.”

— Harvey A. Silverglate

This is consistent with research conducted by David F. Pierre, Jr. detailed in his book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, the Fraud, the Stories — (for full disclosure, one chapter is about me). He described the findings of a former Los Angeles FBI agent who investigated numerous such cases and found fifty percent of them to be fraudulent attempts to extort money from the Church with false claims.

It is also consistent with the 2004 findings of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice which revealed that seventy percent of the total number of claims were not brought forward as they occurred, but only years or decades later after 2002 as dioceses were forced into mediated settlements with no substantiation.

And lastly, Peter Steinfels’ conclusions are consistent with what I have exposed in “A Weapon of Mass Destruction Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.” That widely-read article published at LinkedIn Pulse exposed some of the fraud that has run rampant and unchecked throughout this crisis for the Church, and how the mainstream media has engaged in a cover-up by ignoring it.

While I’m at it, if you have room in your weekly inbox for just one more source of information, make it a free subscription to The Media Report by David F. Pierre, Jr. He has consistently led the Charge of the Light Brigade by exposing distortions in the news media and bringing the truth to light without ever denying or covering for the real sins of the Church and priesthood and the real pain of real victims in this story.

Harnessing the Power of the Press

In “The PA Grand Jury Report: Not What It Seems,” Mr. Steinfels charged that virtually no one has ever raised the questions he now raises about abuses of a grand jury, a crusading attorney general, or a diocese authoritatively pronouncing so many priests guilty of awful crimes without trials or any other opportunity to defend themselves. I can only presume that he means no one in the mainstream media, and that would be sadly true.

I risk sounding like the PA Attorney General, but “Hear me!” The mainstream media has been part of the problem. Consider the events of just weeks ago. Hundreds of thousands of Americans of conscience took part in the annual March for Life in Washington and across the nation while the mainstream media for the most part ignored them and stifled their message. On its heels, however, the media sent a viral shockwave, a heavily edited video bringing widespread condemnation of some students at Covington (KY) Catholic High School.

Near the end of the March for Life, oblivious to how they were being used, the teens became caught up in some footage that at first appeared to depict a racial incident between the Catholic students and a lone Native American drummer named Nathan Philips. It spawned instant condemnation and a knee-jerk media narrative.

Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean declared Covington Catholic to be “a hate factory.” Viral CNN coverage slandered the Catholic teens as instigators of a racist rampage. It was CNN’s most visible coverage of the March for Life. The most cowardly reaction came from Covington Catholic High School and the Diocese of Covington. They issued a joint statement of condemnation of the students and a threat of dire consequences.

Then an unedited version of the video appeared, and it told a very different story. The students were exonerated and the media was shamed to the extent that it can be shamed. This was a vivid example of how the news media not only reports news, but shapes it, choreographs it, and exploits it for a leftist ideological end. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro knows this, and in his lurid, twisted, deeply unjust grand jury report, he has harnessed it for his own ends.

Peter Steinfels knows this too, but he needs to look beyond the mainstream media for his allies in this. David F. Pierre, Jr. has raised the same challenges, questions, and critiques with some compelling online reporting at TheMediaReport.com. And these same topics have been at the center of Beyond These Stone Walls for a decade. Peter Steinfels’ own venue, Commonweal Magazine, once coldly responded to a TSW reader, “We will not be covering the story of Father MacRae.” It just didn’t fit the narrative. Mr. Steinfels failed to unmask another media “availability bias” at the center of its narrative. Early in his challenge of the grand jury report he asserted:

“In fact, the report makes not one but two distinct charges. The first one concerns predator priests, their many victims, and their dispicable acts. That charge is, as far as can be determined, dreadfully true.”

The entire news media, including Peter Steinfels, seem deeply invested in this narrative which, to date, has produced $3.5 billion in uncorroborated, unsubstantiated settlements in the United States alone. While we’re in the mood to challenge media narratives, another courageous journalist has taken on this one.

In the January-February issue of the Catholic League’s Catalyst, journalist Ralph Cipriano responded to Josh Shapiro’s grand jury report with “The Legacy of Billy Doe,” another Pennsylvania story of “predator priests” and “despicable acts”:

“In a civil settlement, the church subsequently paid [Daniel] Gallagher $5 million. There was only one problem — Gallagher, a former drug addict, heroin dealer, habitual liar, third-rate conman and thief, made the whole story up. And all four men who went to jail — including a priest who died there — were innocent.”

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Are you tired of seeing your Church, your faith, and your priests unfairly maligned in the news media? Share this post with others. And brace yourself, for next week in these pages a prestigious guest will offer the most compelling challenge of all to the distortions you have been subjected to in “The Reckoning.” Meanwhile, don’t stop here. There is more to the story:

• Catholic Scandal & The Third Reich: Rise & Fall of a Moral Panic

• Catholic Media Join the Sex Abuse Pile-On by David F. Pierre, Jr

• The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

• Will Fr. Charles Engelhardt’s Prosecutor Take a Plea Deal? [Hint: He did!]