Bill Donohue of the Catholic League consistently goes out of his way to defend priests accused and convicted of sex abuse or covering it up, claiming that journalists have an anti-Catholic bias. According to Donohue, the crimes aren’t the alleged child abuse or the cover-ups, but the publications of journalists who are investigating the issue.
Today, Donohue released a classically-rambunctious statement criticizing the National Catholic Reporter, an independent Catholic newspaper, and Catholic journalists Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews. Just last year the National Catholic Reporter won an award for “general excellence” from the Catholic Press Association. But in Donohue’s world, Catholics are anti-Catholic if they don’t want to cover up charges of abuse, and even exacerbate the sex abuse crisis:
Without getting into the gutter with those whose prurient interests make ordinary voyeurs appear normal, it will not be repeated here exactly what was said.
Among the most offensive chroniclers is psychologist Mary Gail Frawley O’Dea: her anger, which is so over the top as to require professional treatment, wrote a piece in the National Catholic Reporter that is impossible to top. Last month, the Philadelphia Daily News went tabloid with its “made for Hustler” contribution. Maureen Dowd’s affection for lurid accounts was on display yesterday in the New York Times, and it so impressed the increasingly unhinged Christopher Matthews that he read a selection from it last night on the air.
We know what’s going on: get Catholics so riled up that they will demand the Church adopt the liberal agenda on sexuality. They just don’t get it: it was the detour from orthodoxy that allowed the abuse scandal to take hold in the first place.
