The Catholic League is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.Some comments of my own. I’ve been following this subject for years in the papers and on the electronic media. My own reaction has been disgust. Indeed I think that attending to the media even with a moderate amount of concentration will produce the undeniable impression that these media are strongly prejudiced toward religion in any form and toward Catholicism above all—this last emphasis due not particularly to any specific features of Catholic theology but a reflection of the general size, strength, and cohesion of this church which does not look like it will weaken, thin out, secularize, and become, de facto, a mild cheering section for a gentler sort of materialism. The fact that papers have “religion” pages on which articles have quite a different slant than elsewhere does not negate my impression at all.
We’ve been parents of children who have attended both Catholic and ordinary public schools. In all those years we knew of only a single case of alleged abuse of a pubescent minor. It took place in one of the public schools our girls attended, and the party under suspicion was a coach who gave himself some freedoms in touching girls. The school went through all kinds of procedural motions; indeed we frankly felt as if we had done something questionable rather than that jerk, the coach. And, as it turned out, the teacher remained in place—although, after these events, his behavior became extremely circumspect. All institutions tend to behave in similar ways.
The media also treat some religious persuasions as if they were, indeed, untouchable. But that’s another story. All forms of biased reporting, for or against—all disrespect for those who exercise their conscience, whether approved by modernist ideology or not, falls outside the pale of professional journalism. It is too bad that the Catholic League has to expend big bucks to put a balanced view of priestly abuse in the New York Times—rather than encountering that view, as a matter of course, in the pages of the newspaper of record.
