In the wake of a horrific grand jury report detailing the rape and sexual abuse of over 1,000 Pennsylvania children at the hands of hundreds of Pennsylvania Catholic priests, Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote an op-ed for the website CNS News (an affiliate of the right-wing Media Research Center), where he claimed to ‘debunk’ the report released by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as an “obscene lie.”
According to Donohue, the accounts detailed in the grand jury report are “all accusations, most of which were never verified by either the grand jury or the dioceses.” He then says that a CBS News report on the story was wrong to suggest “that all of the accused are priests.”
“In fact, some were brothers, some were deacons, and some were seminarians,” Donohue writes. It’s a bizarre non-defense, considering that brothers, deacons, and seminarians are all part of the Catholic Church.
“How many of the 300 were probably guilty? Maybe half. My reasoning? The 2004 report by the John Jay College for Criminal Justice found that 4 percent of priests nationwide had a credible accusation made against them between 1950-2002,” he continued. “That is the figure everyone quotes. But the report also notes that roughly half that number were substantiated. If that is a reliable measure, the 300 figure drops to around 150.”
This is Donohue’s “debunking” of the story. It gets worse.
At one point in the rambling piece, Donohue declared that rape accusations against the priests are a “myth.”
“This is an obscene lie,” Donohue declared. “Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word ‘rape’ means.”
Donohue goes on to say that his assertions are not meant to be a “defense,” but an attempt to “set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.”
In other words, it’s a defense.
https://twitter.com/ArtimusFoul/status/1030487356325945344
At another point in the piece, Donohue says that the “on-going crisis” in the Catholic Church related to child sexual abuse is also a “myth.”
“There is no on-going crisis—it’s a total myth,” he writes. “In fact, there is no institution, private or public, that has less of a problem with the sexual abuse of minors today than the Catholic Church.”
This pathetic lie almost isn’t worth refuting. All one has to do look up the astronomical figure the Church has doled out in relation to its sex abuse scandals. As of 2015, the U.S. Catholic Church racked up nearly $4 billion in costs related to the priest sex abuse phenomenon in the previous 65 years, according to an extensive investigation of media reports, databases and church documents by the National Catholic Reporter.
Donohue had another clarification to make: This is not a pedophile problem; it’s a gay problem.
“Let me repeat what I have often said. Most gay priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters have been gay. Not to admit this—and this includes many bishops who are still living in a state of denial about it—means the problem will continue. Indeed, there are reports today about seminaries in Boston and Honduras that are disturbing.”
In sum, the Media Research Center allowed a pedophile apologist to publish an op-ed on its platform. It’s another sign that accountability for the largest religious institution in the world being a pedophile ring continues to be elusive.
Featured image via screen grab/YouTube
