Europe and America have been rocked in recent weeks by the
scandal of a Roman Catholic priest in Germany who molested
children several decades ago and escaped serious punishment. But
one detail has been missing.
The New York Times has run more than a dozen
articles on the issue since the story first broke on March 12,
under such headlines as “Memo to Pope Described Transfer of
Pedophile Priest.”
The most salacious part of the story has not been details
of the sexual abuse (there have been few, there being, after all,
only so many ways to molest) but the posited lack of interest of
the miscreant priest’s superior, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now
Pope Benedict XVI. The gravamen of the story is becoming “what
did the cardinal know and when did he know it.” Fair enough,
perhaps. But we’ve been down this cover-up story line before,
when the Times went after President Nixon. It now
appears the Times is trying to pin the Watergate
cover-up tail on the Vatican donkey.
The real issue is limned not only by the Times’s
headline,
“Memo to Pope Described Transfer of Pedophile Priest,” but also
by a remark the Rev. Klaus Malangré, the Catholic Church’s
personnel chief in Essen, Germany, made to the Rev. Friedrich
Fahr, his counterpart in the diocese of Munich to which the
offending priest, Fr. Hullermann, was being transferred. Malangré
suggested to Fahr that Hullermann could be allowed to teach
religion “at a girls’ school.”
At a girls’ school? Why would that be safe? Look up
“pedophile” in the dictionary and you will find that it means an
adult who is sexually attracted to young children. Wouldn’t the
pedophile Hullermann be sexually attracted to young girl children
too?
Well, he might be, if he were only a pedophile. But then
what would have been the point of Malangré’s suggestion to
Fahr?
Clearly, Malangré was warning Fahr that Hullermann was a
homosexual.
Of course, you knew that already, somehow. But that somehow
was not because the New York Times told you. The word
“homosexual” does not appear a single time in all the articles
the Times has run since the story first broke.
That is the curious incident in this story.
Scotland Yard detective Gregory asks Sherlock Holmes, “Is
there any other point to which you would wish to draw my
attention?” Holmes replies, “To the curious incident of the dog
in the nighttime.” Gregory responds, “The dog did nothing in the
nighttime.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
Here are four possible interpretations of the
Times’s curious omission of Hullermann’s homosexuality.
One, that the Times reporter didn’t know that Hullermann
was a homosexual — and wasn’t curious enough to find out. Two,
the editors of the Times assumed all its readers would
assume Hullermann was a homosexual. Three, the people at the
New York Times thought the fact irrelevant. And four,
the people at the Times are in thrall to the homosexual
community and didn’t want to disparage it.
One and two are implausible. If you could figure out
Hullermann was a homosexual, so could a reporter for the New
York Times. And since when did the newspaper of record omit
an important fact just because many readers would know it anyway?
Three is absurd: clearly the homosexuality of the offender would
be one of the most important parts of the story.
Leaving the fourth reason: the Times made a choice
to speak no ill of homosexuals.
But in fact, the third reason would probably be the one
given by the Times. The people at the Times
think — or say they think — that homosexuality is irrelevant to
pedophilia. Bill Keller, the Executive Editor of the
Times, wrote in March 2002 that “there is no known
connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.”
The Times may believe that, but other experts
—and probably most Americans — would disagree. Besides, that’s
not exactly the issue. The issue is whether there’s a connection
between the homosexuality of the priests and the molestation of
the boys.
The pedophilia story really begins more than forty years
ago, when the Roman Catholic Church began accepting known
homosexuals into the priesthood. The traditionalists objected,
but the sixties were when enlightened, progressive, sophisticated
life began. Like children who think they are the very first to
discover sex, the sixties’ liberals thought that any restrictions
on what homosexuals could do must be wrongly discriminatory. For
a liberal, everything goes. So, everything went, including
homosexuals to seminaries.
In the years since then, we — the Catholic Church in
particular, but all of us, really — have reaped the fruits of
what was sown in those turbulent years.
There are, in fact, at least three scandals here. One, that
a priest molested boys thirty years ago, is scandal to be sure,
but alas, hardly news now, given the number of such stories over
the past decade — including one in California that came to light
only this past week.
The second, and underlying, scandal is that it’s the
homosexuals allowed into the priesthood in the sixties who have
been causing most of the trouble.
Are all homosexuals child molesters? Certainly not.
Are most child molesters in the Catholic Church
homosexuals? Almost certainly.
But try finding that story in the New York
Times.
Isn’t this the key question: Are homosexual priests
more likely to molest children than non-homosexual
priests? If we don’t know, shouldn’t we find out? Because if they
are, wouldn’t it make sense to pay special attention to the
assignments given to homosexual priests?
In fact, wouldn’t it make sense to pay special attention to
the assignments given to homosexual priests until it was
certain that they were not more likely to
molest children than normal priests?
Not, apparently, to the New York Times. That would
require it to be critical of supervisors who failed to identify
priests who were homosexual and who assigned them to positions
where they could abuse children. It’s much easier for the
Times simply to pile on after the abuses have happened,
and write about a cover-up.
What is the primary public-policy goal of a news story that
exposes a cover-up? Presumably, to put future offenders (or their
superiors) on notice that eventually they are likely to be
detected and perhaps punished. The hope is that that knowledge
might make those in positions of authority more vigilant in
assigning, supervising, and punishing priests who might abuse
children.
But wouldn’t identifying the likely perpetrators, or a
class of people likely to be perpetrators, and supervising them
more carefully before they perpetrate be even more
likely to serve the public policy of preventing abuse of
children?
Again, surely yes.
And that is the third, and most serious, scandal. There is
almost surely a cover-up here. But it’s a cover-up by the New
York Times of a group of people whose lifestyle the
Times celebrates. The Times seems to be more
interested in protecting its friends in the homosexual community
than the youngsters in churches — and in any other institutions
where they might fall victim to predatory homosexuals.
One part of the “crisis” in the Roman Catholic Church is
probably over. Abuses have declined since 1980, and the church
has stopped letting known homosexuals into the priesthood.
Scandals of this particular type won’t be happening in the
future, certainly not on the scale they have been. That is good
news, though because of its cause — fewer, or no, homosexuals in
the priesthood — you may not find it highlighted in the trendy
papers.
But we shouldn’t expect that the decline in scandals will
persuade the Times to admit it was wrong. When the
Times is asked in years to come why the abuse of
children declined so precipitously in the Catholic Church, it
will be all set with the perfect explanation.
Climate change.
