Thanks to Rob for his commentary and juxtaposition of the Clark Hoyt “Questioning the Pope” (The New York Times, April 24) and Ross Douthat’s “The Pontiff and the Press” (The New York Times, April 21). As is the case with Rob, I am not surprised by the Hoyt piece’s conclusion.
I have stated in the past that sexual abuse of and sexual misconduct with children by anyone is sinful and probably criminal. I also find that the media often do provide an important service to the public by bringing to our attention this plague so that it can be stopped. Most members of the Church have learned some hard lessons in this regard, and I think we’ll be learning some more in the future. But I also hope that the rest of society, including the media, will learn that no one can victimize anyone else, especially children and pretend that these sins and crimes never happened.
Having said this, I think Mr. Hoyt and those who agree with him on the focus of his article need to be asked some additional questions. One of them concerns the role of plaintiffs’ counsels in trying cases in the media—or, more accurately, turning over sensitive documents (probably from discovery) to reporters and other media representatives who may not understand the context or the language in which they are written. This has happened before, and I think it likely to happen again. This is a matter—a grave problem in my estimation—that he quickly dismisses.
Elsewhere, Mr. Hoyt raises a good and obvious question presented by others: “why it (the Times) isn’t giving equal effort to sex abuse in public schools, or in other religions”? But he avoids answering the question he poses, and instead he contends that “it would be irresponsible to ignore the continuing revelations.” It seems that these “continuing revelations” only involve Catholics. I would suggest that, in addition to what happened in cases involving Catholics and sexual abuse and sexual misconduct, it would be irresponsible to ignore the continuing revelations from sources such as the Department of Education’s 2004 report [Download US Dept of Education Educator Sexual Misconduct] synthesizing literature on educator sexual misconduct that include by extend beyond the Church. Tragically, what this report contains is about the present day and the victimization of young people that Mr. Hoyt’s remark dismisses.
His journal, The New York Times, and the Church sometimes share the same or similar perspectives on important issues. However, there are other occasions when the two do not because of different values or different motivations. For example, during the Second World War, the Times praised the efforts of Pope Pius XII; however, in the late 1990s, this influential member of the media ignore its past reporting and was vocal in its criticism of Papa Pacelli without taking stock of what it had said of him a half century earlier. Why, I ask? New values?
On another front, the Times, while generally complimentary of Paul VI’s October 1965 address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, had to criticize him in an editorial published shortly after the pope’s UN intervention by calling the pope’s concerns about artificial birth control “an unnecessarily narrow, old-fashioned interpretation of natural law doctrine.” I, and I know many others, did not then and do not now find Paul VI’s words to be “unnecessarily narrow” or “an old-fashioned interpretation of natural law doctrine.” But, how to explain the disagreement with the Times? A different set of values, perhaps—the pope’s based on the foundation of an objective moral order; and the Times’, well, some other source, I gather.
I hope I am wrong, but I see accumulating evidence that this gulf between the Church’s teachings and the values will continue to grow with the positions of some in the influential media outlets. Should the gulf of values continue to expand, I pray that the Church and her members will stay to serve as counterpoints to the views and values of a contemporary culture that condemn only some sins and crimes but not all others.
RJA sj
If you haven't read this weekend's assessment by the New York Times' public editor of the newspaper's coverage of Pope Benedict and the sex abuse crisis, you should. (The conclusion -- Surprise! -- is that the paper has behaved responsibly.) I still think Ross Douthat has had the best and most concise advice:
I think the last month’s worth of press coverage would have played out very differently if Rome had greeted the [original Munich] story, not with circle-the-wagon defensiveness, but with a clear, “bucks stop here” statement from the pope that 1) took responsibility, as the head of the Munich archdiocese at the time, for mistakes made by his subordinates, 2) acknowledged that the Vatican bureaucracy had been too slow, in the past, to reckon with the crisis, and 3) summarized in detail the labor that’s been done during this pontificate to come to grips with the scandals. . . .
I just posted the paper that was my contribution to BYU's symposium on rights of conscience in health care. Titled Individual Rights vs. Institutional Identity: The Relational Dimension of Conscience in Health Care, it is taken in significant part from my book on the subject. The papers from the symposium will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Ave Maria Law Review. Feedback on the paper (or book) is always welcome.
Evelyn Waugh described his masterpiece Brideshead Revisited as a story about "the operation of divine grace on a diverse but closely connected group of characters." Yesterday, I had the profoundly moving experience of witnessing the operation of grace on a particular person and a diverse group of people who were connected to each other through him. That person, Hadley Arkes, the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College, was received into the Catholic Church in a beautiful ceremony in the chapel of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. Enveloped in the love of his many friends and admirers, Hadley was baptized, confirmed, and received his first communion.
Hadley is an outstanding political philosopher and constitutional theorist who has dedicated much of his professional life to defending the dignity and rights of the child in the womb. In remarks after the service yesterday, he explained that his faith in Christ had come through the Church. The Church's moral witness, especially on the sanctity of human life and on marriage and sexual morality---a witness that has in our time made the Church a "sign of contradiction" to the most powerful and influential elements of the elite sector of contemporary western culture---persuaded him that the Church is, despite the failings of so many of its members and leaders, fundamentally "a truth-teaching institution." In teachings that many find to be impediments, Hadley found decisive evidence that the Church is, indeed, what she claims to be.
Speaking of his Jewish identity, Hadley said that he neither would nor could ever leave the Jewish people. His entry into the Church was for him, he stated, a fulfillment of his Jewish faith, and in no way a repudiation of it. Invoking the testimony and authority of the late Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, he declared that he was and would always remain a Jew, though a Jew who, like the earliest Christians, had come to accept Jesus as "the Christ, the Son of the living God."
Hadley's sponsor was Michael Novak, who read aloud some charming verses he had composed for the occasion. The other speakers were Daniel Robinson of the Philosophy Faculty at Oxford University, Michael Uhlmann of the Political Science Department at Claremont Graduate School, David Forte of the Cleveland State University Law School, and your humble correspondent. The chapel was overflowing with people who had come from all over the country. The spirit of joy was extraordinary. Part of the reason for that, I believe, is that every person in the room had become a better Christian as a result of Hadley's friendship, long before Hadley himself entered the Church. More than a few people credited Hadley for their own conversions (or reversions). Like G.K. Chesterton, he spent years leading others into the Church before he walked through the door himself.
