PA Grand Jury Report: Part I

Part I of the Media Report can be found here.  

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***SPECIAL PA. JURY REPORT ANALYSIS*** PART I: Pushing Aside Media Hysteria: We Uncover Pennsylvania’s Dishonest Grand Jury Report

This is Part I of a special TheMediaReport.com analysis of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

A priest washed out the mouth of a young sex assault victim with holy water? Another priest sodomized a boy with a crucifix? Another priest assaulted another kid multiple times on an airplane? 300 "predator priests"? The Church "did nothing"?

Are these sickening stories all true? No, they're not, and we will show you explicitly in this special, two-part report.

Where does one begin to get at the truth of the recently released Pennsylvania grand jury report that has wrought breathless headlines across the globe? Here are two essential starting points:

1. The most important point to know is that a "grand jury report" is not really written by any jury members. As any lawyer will tell you, the report is actually written by government attorneys with a predetermined outcome. The folks in the "jury" are merely a formality, window dressing to make the matter legal. Jurors sit in a room eating hoagies and reading the newspaper while "listening" to the proceedings. There is no fact-checking, no cross-examinations, and no due process. Those cited in the report have almost no recourse to defend themselves. Accusations are assessed less on evidence and more on the desire for them to be true.

When the time comes, a jury member simply slaps his signature on the finished attorneys' report to make everything official. Press conferences ensue, and hysteria follows. [Highly recommended: "If it's not a runaway, it's not a real grand jury" by Roger Roots.]

In theory, a grand jury is supposed examine evidence to determine whether a crime took place and should be prosecuted. This was clearly not the intention of Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. In an 800+-page screed, Shapiro's report (and yes, it's really Shapiro's report, not a "grand jury report") does not recommend a single criminal charge, because almost all of the accusations are many decades old. The fact that countless tax dollars and unlimited government resources were expended on this escapade – while giving far-more-recent abuse in public schools, the Boy Scouts, and other organizations a complete pass – should raise serious questions about Shapiro's true motives.

2. Countless headlines have trumpeted that the report identified over 300 "predator priests." In truth, that is the number of those merely accused; and the listed men are not just priests but include lay people, deacons, and seminarians. Many, if not the majority, of the priests in the report are long dead and no longer around to defend themselves. This caper examined allegations dating back to the 1930s, some eight decades ago. (One of the priests named in the report was born in 1892, about the same time that light bulbs became popular.) Several men in the report vehemently deny the accusations against them, and some claims in the report are outright false. (Much more on this in Part II.) [HT: Catholic League.]

Unpacking a Shapiro whopper

Countless news stories have faithfully regurgitated one berserk line in particular from the report, a line which Shapiro clearly tailored for the media to seize upon:

"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."

There is no other way to put it except to say that this is a flat-out lie by Shapiro. Even a cursory look at the report debunks this absurd claim.

Take the case in the report of Rev. Joseph Mueller: In 1986, a man went to the Diocese of Pittsburgh to claim that Mueller abused him years earlier as a teenager. Then-Bishop Donald Wuerl immediately removed him from ministry and shipped him off to St. Luke's treatment facility. Based on its evaluation of the guy, St. Luke's advised that Mueller "not work with children or adolescents." A diocesan memo also declared Mueller "unassignable." So what did Wuerl do? He stripped Mueller of his faculties, and the dude never worked as a priest again. Sayonara.

That, dear readers, is not "doing nothing," as Shapiro claims, and he knows it.

In fact, if one takes the time to actually read the report, one will see that the first action by a diocese, even many decades ago, was almost always to immediately remove the accused priest from his assignment. In a bunch of cases, priestly faculties were stripped. Therapy was often provided to victims.

Josh Shapiro's claim that the Church showed "complete disdain" for victims is nothing but an ugly smear. "I met with every victim. Anyone that would come forward, I met with them and I'd have to say more than once shared a tear with them as they or their parents told the story," Cardinal Wuerl has told.

Sent off to treatment?

There are those who will want to castigate the Church for sending priests off to treatment, but, as regular readers of this site already know, that was exactly what so-called psychological experts advised bishops to do in a 1985 report. And even the Boston Globe (yes, the Boston Globe!) was trumpeting therapy treatment for child sex offenders as recently as 1992.

"From the 1950's to the 1980's, these treatment-based interventions for sexual criminals were not only enormously prevalent in the United States, but surveys of ordinary citizens showed that they were enormously popular …

"[T]he science of human sexuality and sexual offending is extraordinarily young. Virtually all of the information we utilize today regarding the treatment and supervision of sexual offenders has been discovered since 1985."
– Dr. Monica Applewhite, Ph.D.

Yet in almost every media account, the media has failed to provide this important historical context that the Church was following the then-reigning advice of experts in the field to send accused priests to treatment.

"No one would hold a brain surgeon to today's standard of care for professional decisions he made in 1970. Yet the decisions made in 1970 by Catholic bishops, who routinely consulted with mental health professionals about sick priests, are being judged by today's standards. Today, the confidence of the mental health community about the likelihood of curing sexual disorders is far less than it was in 1970."
– L. Martin Nussbaum, "Changing the Rules" (America magazine, 2006)

Just plain wrong reporting

It would be no surprise to regular readers of this site that the media's reporting on the Pennsylvania report has been atrocious, not only just lacking context and uncritically repeating the claims of the report, but also getting important facts flat-out wrong.

Unfortunately, even reputable Christian writers have been irresponsible in their reporting. Our favorite Methodist-turned-Catholic-turned-Eastern-Orthodox writer claimed in a post about the report:

"[I]n 1991, Bishop Wuerl approved pedophile Pittsburgh priest Father [Ernest C.] Paone's assignment in the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas. That priest continued to work there — without Pittsburgh telling them that they knew he was a pedophile — until the Boston scandal broke in 2002."

In truth, when then-Bishop Wuerl wrote his 1991 letter, he was completely unaware of any accusations against Paone. It was not until 1994, three years later, that a woman approached the Diocese of Pittsburgh to claim that her brother had been molested by Paone some three decades earlier. Upon receiving this news, Wuerl immediately fired off a letter (pdf) to the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas in which he wrote:

"Very recently, an allegation was made by a woman who claims that more than 30 years ago her brother was molested by Father Paone …

"Had I been aware of this allegation in Father Paone's past, I would not have supported his request for a priestly assignment in your diocese. Nor would I have written to you indicating that he was a priest in good standing."

In other words, this popular writer completely misinformed his audience. As soon as Wuerl had information on Paone's past, he immediately spread the word. He also urgently recalled Paone back to Pittsburgh to address the claims against him and send him off to St. Luke's.

Moving on

So what do we make of the alarming stories in Shapiro's report that have been blared loudly in the media about a priest washing out the mouth of a child after a sexual assault? What about the other one claiming a priest sodomized a boy with a crucifix?