In an inventive moment, broadcaster Paul Harvey might have called this “The Other Side of the Story.”

Even Catholics who hated to see the very public laundering of a burgeoning Church scandal at the beginning of 2002 were ready to acknowledge by year’s end that it was a matter which had to be dealt with openly. But if the story began with a stream of allegations implicating the clergy at various levels, it does not end there. There were more signs of progress at the bishops’ meeting in Washington in November that year than at Dallas in June. But the problem was not about to go away quickly.

Many bishops clearly were caught off guard when this erupted on a national scale at the beginning of the year. But advance warnings dated back at least to publication of a significant study a decade earlier. In Lead Us Not into Temptation, Catholic journalist Jason Berry sent up an early trouble flare with a detailed account of clergy misconduct that bubbled up in the early 1980s in the Lafayette, La., Diocese. More recently, Catholic World Report launched its own ongoing review of the problem with a heady and honest analysis of “The Gay Priest Problem” in its November 2000 issue by a discerning Jesuit, Father Paul Shaughnessy. Lurid stories about the Boston Archdiocese that started popping up in January 2002 made one thing apparent: A creeping spiritual malaise had set in among some members of clergy.

Trying to brush the matter under the rug had not solved the problem. A quick glance at the most glaring examples shows why:

• The Diocese of Dallas agreed in 1998 to pay more than $30 million to settle an initial court judgment of $119 million awarded to 11 former altar boys, all of whom said they were molested years earlier by expriest Rudolph “Rudy” Kos. Kos was later sentenced to life in prison in a criminal proceeding against him.

• Bishop Anthony O’Connell resigned in early 2002 as head of the diocese of Palm Beach, Fl., after admitting he enticed a young seminarian into sexual misconduct in the 1970s at a seminary run by the Jefferson City, Mo., Diocese. Bishop Wilton Gregory, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, labeled it a “travesty” that the diocese failed to notify other Church officials of past allegations when O’Connell was promoted to the Florida post to replace a predecessor who had resigned for similar reasons.

• Two pedophile priests were convicted on various criminal charges, long after they were shifted from parish to parish by the Boston archdiocese in the face of clear signs of their predatory behavior. Based on court documents unsealed by a judge in early March, press investigation showed Rev. John Geoghan was accused of molesting more than 100 boys. Cardinal Bernard Law had been warned about Geoghan — once by an auxiliary bishop — up to 15 years before Geoghan was finally defrocked.

A third Boston cleric, Paul Shanley, remained an active priest for several years in the 1980s, despite allegations he had abused young children on several occasions. Court documents showed Shanley had spoken publicly in favor of sexual contact between men and boys in the late 1970s at a meeting that led to the formation of NAMBLA — the national organization espousing man-boy “love relationships.” Shanley was finally arrested in San Diego in early May 2002 on various felony charges.

Yet the legal culpability of bishops, even in Boston, was not as simple as it seemed to one of their most vocal media critics. Despite heavy badgering by Fox News Channel’s Bin O’Reilly on the evening of Shanley’s arrest, Boston University Law School Dean Ronald Cass insisted that Massachusetts law left it far from clear whether Cardinal Law should or even could be charged with any kind of felonious behavior, despite signs that archdiocesan leaders had exercised appallingly poor judgment in their handling of suspect priests for an extended period. Time has proven Cass right. It was pressure from members of Law’s own flock that led to his eventual resignation.

Alarming disclosures about traumatized victims of sex abuse perplexed bishops, embarrassed people in the pews and threatened to taint the work of honorable priests as well. But there was more than that at work here: Sexual predators in clerical garb had not only drawn members of the Church into a moral minefield. They drew members of the media there as well, with hidden risks some did not foresee.

As both a journalist and a Catholic, I think the media at its best did the Church a service by airing out this story in an effort to clear the minefield.

But I promised “the other side of the story.” It has less to do with the story itself than with how it was sometimes told after it first came out. The most dispassionate reporters exposed the facts of clerical misconduct to the light of day, preferring to let the cards fall where they may. But at strategic moments, this grim drama also cascaded forth in ways guaranteed to offend the sensibilities of even the most sophisticated Catholic observer. Acting on the principle that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, some of our country’s most prestigious media outlets were responsible for some of the worst flaws in the way this story was covered. Increasingly, we live in an era when “objective” news coverage is tinctured with the ideology of the storytellers involved.

One curious evaluation of the media’s role was offered by Peggy Noonan, a longtime loyal Catholic and a gifted speech writer for two GOP presidents. In a mid-April column for the Wall Street Journal Web site, Noonan singled out the Boston Globe for special praise for its persistence in pursuing the story of priestly abuse in its circulation area. Given the particulars of that situation, most Catholics who followed it (myself included) would likely be inclined to agree with her.

Her defense of the Globe stopped short of a blankcheck endorsement for media coverage in general, but mostly by implying other publications and media outlets had lagged behind in airing this story out. They did so out of fear of being accused of harboring “an anti-Catholic bias,” in her view. Ms. Noonan will forgive me, perhaps, if I harbor some serious doubts about any excess of media sensitivity toward Catholic opinion.

If she had waited a little longer, she would have seen reporters and commentators galore overcome their alleged fear of giving the Church her comeuppance — and then some. Call me an old curmudgeon if you wish, but I speak here as a longtime copy editor who has spent four decades in the secular media and waded through hundreds of stories on clerical abuse in 2002 as part of my job. Subtle old newsroom biases sometimes refuse to die a natural death.

That is not to denigrate the conscientious efforts of many of my confreres in the trade. But a persistent anti- Catholic virus still infects the opinion-molding sector of the news biz from time to time. It resurfaced in 2002 in the media elite’s condescending efforts to reshape what the Catholic faithful should believe (in their view, of course), as opposed to what the Church actually teaches as the authentic faith. After Pope John Paul II took office in late 1978, then refused to discard “outmoded” Catholic teachings or to embrace the zeitgeist — especially the now fashionable mantra of sexual freedom and abortion rights — the Church herself eventually became a prime target of major media skepticism. Michael Schwartz’s “Persistent Prejudice” still lingers in the mustier corners of America’s newsrooms today.

Take a look at the following intro to a story co-authored by Dan Barry and Robin Toner. It was pumped out across the country by the New York Times News Service in late March, in the wake of the worst disclosures out of Boston:

Bob Dugan, Roman Catholic, says he is no fan of his local diocesan leadership or, for that matter, of Pope John Paul II. He dreams of a Catholic Church in which priests can marry and have children, women can be ordained as priests, and homosexuals can feel welcome without question. He is also beside himself with anger and sorrow over recent revelations of sexual abuse that have so rocked the Church he loves.

That is right: Dugan may be a dissident, but he loves his Church and would never dream of leaving his faith. Doing so, he said, would be like denying that he is of Irish- Slovakian heritage, or that he lives in Liverpool, N.Y., just outside Syracuse.

His faith, he said, is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, and not on what he calls the man-made rules of the Church’s political hierarchy. He will continue to serve as a lector at St. Joseph the Worker parish, he said, while working for change through his involvement in Call to Action, a progressive Catholic organization (italics mine).

This feature story, you’ll notice, literally ripples with warm-puppy vibrations emanating from its carefully chosen hero. He not only loves his Church, the reader is assured; the narrators saw to it that he “loves” her twice within the first two paragraphs. While their overt news peg was the sex abuse crisis, the Times reporters quickly linked the problem directly to the Church’s adamant refusal to change certain doctrines and disciplinary practices. We are encouraged to conclude, they delicately suggest, that an “all-male, all-celibate priesthood” probably laid the groundwork for all the abuse. Or as the story implies, the scandal might well clear up if only the Church’s “political hierarchy” would quit standing in the way. The reader is carefully led to believe the real path to progress for the Church is the one chosen by futuristic dreamers like Bob Dugan.

The real challenge for a Catholic reader trying to digest this story, however, lay not with the pope’s refusal to listen to his people, but with the Times’ own unwillingness (or its inability) to call things by their right names, as George Orwell might have put it. Gullible readers were the intended “beneficiaries” of its tilted vision.

Spiritually and intellectually, the real tension in the American Church has shifted from the old conservativeliberal dichotomy to an ever deepening split between orthodox and heterodox Catholicism. Based on all the things he wants to change in the Church he professes to love, the parishioner-protagonist of this story is hardly a “Roman Catholic” in the classic sense of that term, despite what the Times wanted its own flock to believe. He is a heterodox American Catholic of relatively recent vintage, the kind of selective new believer whose shifting loyalties are just what avant garde types in the media now find so endearing. But then, truth in labeling was never the Times’ strongest suit.

Unlike a truly believing Catholic who feels obligated to defend, or at least embrace and support the church through thick and thin, heterodox Catholics want to have their cake and eat it, too. While most of them would likely deny they are embracing outright heresy, they reserve the right to pick and choose what to believe, always leaving open the door to dissent from those aspects of the faith they prefer to reject. Doing so helps Bob Dugan and others like him (not to mention the Times) cling to the illusion they are more in tune with Christ’s teachings than the pope himself.

By definition, orthodox Catholics know only too well why they’ll never be allowed to enter the Times Gallery of Honor for Heterodox Catholic Heroes. They simply don’t have the dissonant brand of “faith” needed to qualify for

Predictably, reporters Barry and Toner enlisted the services of Fr. Richard McBrien to help advance their cause later in the story. Longtime Notre Dame theologian McBrien is a news source long portrayed by media powerhouses as the voice of “moderates” in the American church. In fact, McBrien is far closer to being the Great Pretend Catholic Centrist who serves as the leading media trailblazer for the path to a heterodox faith they find far more acceptable for a pluralist society. He consistently offers both dissenters and media elitists the cover of academic respectability — and just as consistently raises doubts among other papists about why he still holds an honored place on Notre Dame’s faculty.

McBrien did just what was expected of him with one of his patented put-downs of conservative Catholics. Normally, he asserted, conservatives might lambaste him for daring to “criticize the good cardinal (Law),” but the scandal in Boston left them in “stunned silence,” he told the Times. The ever wily padre apparently hadn’t kept up with the news. Conservative icon William F. Buckley, one of the better known Catholic voices in the media, was one of the first voices in the country to publicly urge Cardinal Law to resign. WFB was nowhere in sight in the Times story.

Begging Peggy Noonan’s pardon once more, therefore, this slanted feature struck me as one of the more patronizing and manipulative treatments of the Church to appear in the media’s hyperactive coverage of this crisis. Yet unintentionally, the Times did our bishops a favor by dramatizing the kind of do-it-yourself Catholicism that now afflicts the U.S. church. Coupled with Times commentaries like Bill Keller’s insulting column entitled “Is the pope Catholic?”, stories like this refocused public attention on just how much the church’s prophetic voice has been muted in America in recent years. Too many bishops, sad to say, have been willing to “go with the flow” of secular culture — politically correct in downplaying their prophetic role and therapeutically correct in playing up their pastoral role. Striking a balance between those two is never easy. But from the time of Christ onward, Christ’s bride the Church has relied on both — even at times when her prophetic role put her in a countercultural mode to carry out her spiritual mission.

Church leaders who initially underestimated the gravity of the trauma felt by victims of misconduct are relearning the hard way just how indispensable the prophetic role can be. Even pastoral counsel, the compassionate side that reaches out to people in need of comfort, counsel and forgiveness, tends to lose a sense of direction when the church’s prophetic voice, the one that defends unchanging truths, is allowed to lapse.

Ironically, the deeper problem arose simultaneous to the Second Vatican Council — not because of the council but in spite of it. The revolution of the ’60s in secular culture, with America on its cutting edge, launched an expanding demand for sexual expression freed of old constraints. The electronic media especially played a critical role in the public unbridling of the human libido in contemporary culture, both on screen and off. A slow trivialization of what should constitute freedom of speech simultaneously seeped into our courts. Hard-core pornography, once sequestered on shelves behind the counters of newsstands and drug stores that offered it, gradually snuck into the living rooms of homes equipped with cable TV, while soft porn became easily available on the magazine racks of supermarkets across the country. Civil libertarians, meanwhile, kept up the illusion that an appetite for porn bore no relationship to the actions of adults who liberally indulged in it . . . even to the point of addiction. The stage was being set for the sexual seduction of the young.

That is not to suggest any of this takes lagging bishops off the hook. The scandal of sex abuse by the clergy is only one of the sorrier results of the failure to defend, in season and out, all facets of Catholic teaching and the Christian code of sexual ethics. But those who would exempt secular institutions from any responsibility for an indirect influence on the crisis in the Church should take a closer look at the recent Supreme Court decision in Ashcroft v. the Free Speech Coalition. It was a ruling that treated adult access to virtual (computer-generated) child porn over the Internet as a First Amendment “right.” Constitutional scholar Robert Bork, a respected former U.S. appellate judge, thinks the court burrowed its head ever more deeply into the shifting quicksand of the moral and cultural relativism of our time. “Why is pornography within the rights of adults to hear and see?” he asked in a contributing column in the Wall Street Journal. “And why,” he added, “are the rawest forms of profanity exempt from regulation” on cable TV?

Why, indeed? In a nutshell, our nation’s highest court had slid further down a slippery slope of its own creation. The morally ambiguous role that has often gripped the nation’s media is just as ominous. A prime example was the Los Angeles Times’ choice of psychologist Judith Levine to receive its annual book award in 2003, for a work entitled, Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. In it, the author embraces the idea of “consensual sex” between adults and children as potentially healthy — a rite of passage, if you will, for young teens in particular to learn to “accept their sexuality” as adults. Consensual is the operative word here. But what does it mean in the case of an adolescent of 12 or 13? Isn’t this the very kind of behavior that drew such widespread censure, when priests engaged in it? Apparently, truly “enlightened” souls in academe and the media elite are privy to lofty moral insights that elude the rest of us.

Much of the attack on the priesthood came from those who periodically parade, as if it were a badge of honor to do so, their skepticism of the Church’s “negative view of sex.” Invariably, they miss the point. If anything, this scandal proves the opposite about what the Church really believes. The Catholic faith has never taught that sex abuse is wrong because sex itself is evil, a Manichaean notion that would make the idea of abusing sex a contradiction in terms (how do you “abuse” an evil?). Sex abuse is wrong because it is a grave misuse of a gift of God intended for a far higher purpose: a gift that can become a sign and symbol of love between a man and a woman in marriage, and their willingness to pass on that love, through procreation, to a new generation of the human family.

No one is likely to change the media’s propensity to make the most of any scandal that happens along. But in this case, they found “an issue hatched in hell,” as I heard one of the founders of Women for Faith and Family once describe it. It was an issue, in other words, that could not only harm the guilty and innocent alike; it put the integrity of journalists themselves at risk, based on the motives they brought to their task. There was far more to the feeding frenzy of 2002 than an altruistic interest in “protecting the children,” as reporters with the gleam of Pulitzers in their eyes liked to believe.

Let me put it in terms that film fans of “Lord of the Rings” would understand, by projecting J.R.R. Tolkien’s two wizards into advisory roles for modern journalists. Within the media, there were honest reformers who did their best in reporting the scandal of 2002 to live up to the wise counsel of the noble Gandalf, pursuing information about clerical misconduct as part of a larger quest for the truth. But unmistakably, others were seduced by the malignant counsel of the dark wizard Saruman — sensationalizing this story to the max or tincturing it with their own self-serving agendas and ideological spin. As we shall see, it was not only errant priests and bishops who managed to smear the Church’s reputation. Some storytellers went out of their way to join in that project.

Let’s zero in on four major media temptations and their fallout to show why.

TEMPTATION 1: THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE FACTOR

This distortion, unlike the other three, was not always intended but was nonetheless real. Metaphorically speaking, the Church’s enemies got help from some strategic allies in the media in hanging a big scarlet letter “A” around her neck. By implication, she was somehow guilty of adulterous complicity in the criminal acts of her misbehaving sons. She made an easy target in the court of public opinion: These were her priests, weren’t they? But at the risk of belaboring the obvious, let me play the fool for a moment on a crucial point of logic: Only a small percentage of priests had in fact flouted the counsel of their spiritual mother, the Church, while thousands of other members of clergy and millions of lay people did not. Yet as we shall soon see, everyone was sideswiped at times by overly zealous watchdogs using the same broad brush to tar and feather the Church in general. Another test of logic: A flood of stories clearly pinpointed the Boston archdiocese as the epicenter of this scandal. Yet grim as its story was, Boston was far from synonymous with the Church as a whole. (Neither, for that matter, was Dallas, Phoenix or other dioceses with severe leadership problems.)

There are hard-core secularists, both outside and inside the media, who tend to view the Catholic Church essentially as a human institution, governed and guided solely by fallible men like those in Boston. In fact, the Church is a far more elusive mystery than that and should be recognized, even by skeptical reporters, not only for the follies of men who sometimes lead her astray but in light of her long-standing claims to a divine origin. Convinced Catholics see her as the Mystical Body of Christ, a channel of grace for Jesus’ followers, even in the most troubled times. They obviously cannot expect everyone in the media to share their beliefs — but they have a right to insist on a fair and accurate rendition of what the Church truly represents in the marketplace of ideas. It is rooted as much in her own definition of herself as the spouse of Christ as in how secular analysts may want to portray her.

One persistent tendency in scandal reporting was the blurring of critical distinctions. By inference or insinuation, the public was initially led to suspect every accused priest was a closet pedophile. Yet various surveys have since shown this crisis involved a relatively small number of hard-core pedophiles — i.e., repeat offenders who targeted young children and engaged in a long series of offenses before getting caught. The majority of offenders were in fact linked to misconduct with teenage boys. A matter not to be taken lightly, to be sure: With a consenting older teen, the priest’s behavior is still grievously sinful in the Church’s eyes, even when it is not criminal in nature. Yet the distinction is worth making. Human nature being what it is, it is plausible to believe some priests felt an early twinge of remorse over what they had done and sought the help they needed to end it. Many apparently were linked to a single victim. They should have known that what they were doing was so wrong as to jeopardize their future as priests; but the gravity of their misconduct pales in comparison to that of the worst pedophiles.

What’s more, the con artistry and clandestine ways of serial abusers meant that they were as willing to manipulate Church leaders as much as they did their victims. The bottom line is that the Church as a whole was simply not what her worst critics portrayed her to be: a welcoming refuge for a small army of hundreds of John Geoghan clones. An in-depth survey by the National Catholic Register in mid-2002, in fact, showed many U.S. dioceses had already begun to address this crisis by the mid-’90s, when they set up review boards to investigate complaints of abuse. The secular media all but ignored that aspect of this story. Even with very imperfect results, it was at least a preliminary, good-faith attempt by some Church leaders to wrestle with a growing problem.

TEMPTATION 2: THE SEDUCTION OF DOUBLE STANDARDS

Consider the confusion created by a single descriptive, but subtly misleading, phrase that cropped up in early April 2002. 1 first saw it come across the newswire at my own paper. Wire stories always carry what people in the news trade have long called a slug — an identifying word or phrase such as “Enron collapse” or “Texas tornado”— when stories appear on computer screens at local papers. The slug is a quick way for a local wire editor to identify stories for possible use. Once the Boston scandal went national, “priest abuse” reports (a story designation that few sensible editors would quibble with) started cropping up in other cities as well. But at one point in April, a stray scandal story suddenly hit the newswire under the slug of “church abuse.” By the end of the month, the new phrase was pouring routinely across the wire into our newsroom as a catchall title for countless Associated Press and other wire service stories on the same subject. As you might expect (local copy editors being impressionable people), the phrase “Church abuse” soon hit print as an actual label head above a story on priestly misconduct in a nearby regional daily I’m familiar with. It’s a good bet it was appropriated for use in headlines in some other papers as well, reaching tens of thousands and quite possibly hundreds of thousands of readers.

Now notice what an editor’s seemingly harmless guideline had done. Once the noun “Church” had been converted into an adjective subordinated to the word “abuse,” copy editors across the country were being invited to view the Church itself as the real culprit in the way they played up this story. Catholics with their heads on straight knew better: They had no more reason to condemn their Church for this sex scandal than their fellow Americans ever had to condemn our entire country for the Nixon or Clinton administration scandals. The AP, in effect, had allowed a harsh new standard of suspicion to surface as a benchmark for passing judgment on the Catholic Church.

It’s a good guess I was far from the only Catholic newsman in the country who found that phrase offensive. “Church abuse” was not just a demeaning stereotype; it was a grievous distortion of the truth that smeared 60 million Catholics with the taint of corruption initiated by a few hundred errant priests. Even if the phrase was carelessly coined as a label of convenience rather than as a conscious act of anti-Catholic bias, the question arises: Why on Earth did the nation’s leading wire service continue to traffic in it for months on end? In effect, a wire service had taken a quantum leap in guilt-by-association that might have made Sen. Joe McCarthy envious.

Let’s examine another relevant case: a Los Angeles radio station’s feverish push to sensationalize dubious sexabuse allegations leveled at Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles by a 51-year-old Fresno woman. The accuser’s claim was based on a shaky memory that was, to say the least, fuzzy at best. When the story broke, the accuser could only recall being knocked unconscious while fighting with other students at her high school more than 30 years earlier, and waking up to find Mahony allegedly standing above her. “I don’t know if he molested me, but he could have,” she told the Fresno Bee. In an honest and factual report, the Bee also noted she’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she was taking medication for depression at the time, and a state reduction in disability payments suddenly prompted her to seek a cash settlement from the Church for the alleged abuse. From the moment it hit the news, this story, if it did not hint of outright blackmail, at least bore all the earmarks of a tall tale ready to go up in smoke.

Yet KFI-Radio soon chose to publicize the contents of a series of some 60 of the cardinal’s personal e-mails that were intercepted over the Internet by a nosy radio listener who passed them along to KFI. They concerned how the L.A. archdiocese was responding to the scandal. The Associated Press promptly picked up the story of the email flap and passed it along to its own subscribers. Yet try as it might, KFI could find no “smoking gun” to implicate Mahony in any abuse of his alleged “victim.”

The KFI intercept was roughly equivalent to a neighbor snooping in your mailbox in search of damning information to use against you — an act subject to prosecution under federal law, should he get caught. Even more pertinent is a famous case involving the Cincinnati Enquirer, forced into the open by Chiquita Brands International in the late 1990s. It all started with a damaging series of articles carried by the newspaper, based in part on voice-mail messages stolen from Chiquita’s computer systems. One Enquirer reporter who was fired over the incident later pleaded guilty in court to two felony charges tied to illegal interception of communications.

In the supercharged atmosphere of early 2002, however, e-mail communiqués by Catholic leaders became fair game for the media thought police. The L.A. archdiocese protested the gratuitous use of the cardinal’s e-mail as an invasion of privacy, to no avail.

If the subtleties of the invasion-of-privacy dilemma were too complex for KFI to figure out, its news director should have consulted with the leaders of SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. It was the emotionally devastating invasion of their own privacy that led to the foundation of SNAP a decade ago. Insiders who feel honor-bound to defend the media against any sign of double moral standards have been hard pressed to explain away the ambivalent coverage applied to two notorious incidents from the late 1990s. At the time, media elitists were increasingly mounting the ramparts to protect America’s newest victim class from any and all signs of “homophobia” on the part of America’s Great Unwashed.

Almost everyone in the country is familiar with the brutal slaying of gay college student Matthew Shephard in Wyoming. But few people beyond Arkansas’ borders have heard of the equally brutal sexual abuse and slaying of grade-school student Jesse Dirkhising by a pair of suspected gays in Little Rock. The first incident turned into a kind of “national hate crime” that met the demands of politically correct outrage. The second was largely treated as a routine local homicide, eliciting little more than a prolonged media yawn. Even the mainstream bowed to a double standard on those two incidents.

As gays’ victim status gained acceptance, news perspectives shifted with it. Another controversial case that comes to mind was the gruesome slaying of well-known jet-setter Gianni Versace in Miami’s fashionable South Beach in the summer of 1997. The fact that Versace was a talented gay fashion designer turned this incident into cause for shock and sorrow, both in the news and in the gay community. The prime suspect was a man named Andrew Cunanan. The chase was on, until Cunanan was found shot to death in a nearby houseboat from an apparent suicide. When news surfaced that Cunanan — described as a “gay gigolo” by his own mother — was believed to have tested positive for the AIDS virus and was suspected by the FBI of targeting other gays in slayings in several other states, interest in him flourished for a moment, then quickly subsided.

The lament for Versace continued, while Cunanan’s name soon disappeared from the news. The media had accommodated East Coast activists by returning Cunanan’s corpse to the closet. Gay men, after all, are always the targets of hate crimes, never the perpetrators, right?

TEMPTATION 3: THE WORST CASE SCENARIO

When credible evidence of abuse surfaced in individual dioceses, Church leaders often felt pressed into negotiating out-of-court settlements — not only to protect the Church from costly lawsuits, one suspects, but at least partly out of respect for the harm done to victims. In retrospect, that response was inadequate, in terms of what we know now, even for bishops who thought they were dealing with a local problem. But almost from the moment those agreements first came to light 10 or 15 years ago, accusatory language emerged in news accounts of the situation. Bishops were presumed to be cutting shabby deals by having Church lawyers bribe sex abuse victims with “hush money.” An otherwise understandable effort to avoid giving scandal was perceived as a scandal itself.

The hush-money link was almost certainly true in some cases. But why assume every diocese with a problem priest acted in the same devious way as the worst ones did? Confidential agreements in legal cases are common practice among lawyers all over the country, and are struck in part to protect the interests of clients victimized by wrongdoing from the need for painful adjudication in open court. Yet in the priest-abuse scandal, reporters cut almost no slack at all for the people on one side of the fence. Confidentiality was rubber-stamped as a sure sign of “Church secrecy” to be abhorred, every out-of-court settlement as proof of another cover-up. The possibility that some victims themselves might have preferred confidentiality was simply brushed aside.

The semantic jargon of guilt-by-association was in season again: The villains always seemed to be working for the Church.

Under pressure from SNAP to build sympathy for victims, it became commonplace in 2002 for media analysts and scandalmongers alike to scoff, “The bishops only got what they deserved.” But did they or not? Excluding for a moment a handful of flagrant cases of corruption that came to light, consider the much more typical bishop’s dilemma when he faced an allegation of abuse in his midst in the 1980s or ’90s. If he sided with an accused priest after finding the evidence against him unconvincing, a bishop might very well be accused of cold-heartedness and lacking in compassion for a wounded member of his flock, if the allegations were true. If he found an allegation credible, then sought legal advice on arranging a private settlement with the victim to help with professional counseling or associated costs of recovery, the bishop would later get assailed by the media for “buying the silence” of the victim. He was caught coming and going.

Despite the gross mishandling of priests in a few dioceses that clearly merited sharp criticism, a broad-brush smearing of bishops in general was never really called for. Millions of papists in America’s hinterlands like myself could identify intelligent, compassionate leaders who were working among us all along. Many played no part in the recycling of pedophiles into more corruption. One decidedly admirable bishop has been rumored to be working in Denver. Several more have been sighted in places like Memphis, or in Omaha and Lincoln, Neb., and yes, even in Boston. Still others were spotted in the Philadelphia and Newark areas, and . . . well, you get the idea. Their names simply never turned up in the news while there was juice to be squeezed from the bitter fruit of a scandal. It was far easier for the media to focus on the deeds of the derelicts.

The hot pursuit of any hint of a scandal cover-up, veri- fiable or not, had turned into a virtual Garden of Eden for muckrakers itching to take a hefty bite out of the apple.

But to coin a perverse paradox, “the best of the worstcase scenarios” was a scurrilous and suspect story that reemerged in late April 2002 in a way clearly designed to cast an ominous shadow on the very heart of church leadership in Rome. After ABC-TV went on the air with a “20/20” update of allegations that first surfaced five years earlier in Hartford, Conn., ABC NEWS went online with an Internet version of the same thing. The timing seemed amazingly “coincidental:” Reporter Brian Ross’s story came out right after the filing of two lawsuits against Church leaders in U.S. federal courts.

Was there a direct link between the U.S. legal action and ABC’s apparently unrelated report from Rome? The reader can judge for himself. Several American bishops and dioceses, as well as the Holy See, were named defendants in those two suits, both of them based on the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. ABC promptly revived highly dubious old allegations of sexual misconduct directed at Fr. Marcial Maciel, the widely respected 82-year-old founder of the Legion of Christ, a thriving young religious order in the Church. The online headline over the ABC NEWS.com report, “Priestly Sin, Cover-Up,” made it impossible to miss the point. But what was left unsaid in this report was far more important than what was reported. The result was a story with a horrendously lopsided tilt to one side of a controversial issue. It was enough to make leaders of the Society of Professional Journalists blush.

Allow me to digress for a moment to illustrate. The recent case history of U.S. tort law sheds a good deal of light on contemporary culture and why a major voice in the secular media was so ready to stir up public suspicions of a RICO-Rome axis at work.

Over the last decade or so, there’s been a major upsurge in class-action lawsuits on behalf of clients, sometimes (but by no means always) with legitimate claims for redress of harms they had suffered. Perhaps the most prominent were the tobacco and asbestos lawsuits. The boost in emphasis on corporate liability in America was accompanied by a de-emphasis on personal responsibility for things that went wrong. The prototype case is that of the smoker who contracts cancer and takes a cigarette maker to court in search of a hefty financial judgment — only after indulging his own smoking habit for decades in the face of repeated surgeon general warnings about the health hazards involved.

There’s also been growing legal pressure on the medical profession, causing malpractice insurance costs to soar and prompting an alarming number of doctors to cease practice entirely or threaten to do so in states as far flung as Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey and Nevada. Most lawyers, it’s safe to assume, were not working pro bono for plaintiffs in those cases.

The lure of the judicial quick fix has so tainted the cause of justice in America by now that it has prompted repeated calls by the Wall Street Journal and other analysts for major tort reform as a legal and moral constraint on skyrocketing lawyers’ fees and damage judgments awarded by courts.

Along came the Great RICO Diversion, with enterprising lawyers fishing for creative new ways to use a federal statute aimed at curbing racketeering. The wonder of it is that no newsman at the time seemed willing to ask: Were the RICO lawyers in the Church cases really driven by an altruistic thirst for justice for their clients . . . or by an oldfashioned lust for gold and glory for themselves?

The classic instance of trying to manipulate RICO for a devious purpose was the abortion’s industry’s long battle with pro-life activists in NOW v. Scheidler, the federal court case in Chicago that ended up in the Supreme Court. That case more than any other prompted law professor G. Robert Blakey, who drafted the RICO statute as a Senate counsel in 1970, to speak out repeatedly against an alarming tendency to stretch this law far beyond its original intent. RICO was enacted essentially to help the government deal with extortion by organized crime and mob bosses, corrupt labor/management practices and other infractions driven by a hunger for economic gain.

Yet once the high court gave NOW permission to pursue a civil liability case under RICO in the early 1990s, it opened the door to a hefty court judgment imposed on the defendants at a jury trial. Despite a conspicuous lack of evidence to link the defendants directly to any clinic violence, the jury was led astray by NOW’s strategy of tarring and feathering the entire pro-life movement in court with an image of extremism associated with the violent acts of a handful of anti-abortion loners. On appeal, the high court spotted the key injustice dealt to the defendants in this case: There was no proof of extortion for personal gain on their part. The lower court was reversed by an 8-1 margin.

With that in mind, was it anything but gross legal overkill for a group of ambitious lawyers to use RICO to target the Holy See last year? Even U.S. bishops who mishandled errant priests were hardly driven by extortion as a motive. RICO plaintiffs in sex-abuse cases may have had good reason to expect Church leaders to acknowledge the betrayal of their trust. But they also needed to look down the road to where their lawyers were leading them: John Paul II’s credentials just didn’t fit the description of a good mob boss.

All of which brings us back to “20/20” and the report that turned up on ABC NEWS.com. The ABC story concerned sworn affidavits submitted to the Vatican by eight accusers of Father Maciel, all former members of his own order. The documents alleged they were molested as teens in a Legion seminary about a half-century ago, allegations that Maciel has vigorously denied several times. Yet with a world-class “scandal” target in sight, ABC displayed only a passing interest in the harm done by sex abuse itself, and showed no inclination at all to address the possibility of defamation arising from false charges. Its entire narrative rested on a single unstated assumption: Where clerical misconduct was concerned, an accusation alone was equivalent to a declaration of guilt.

In this case, there were a host of rock-solid reasons to believe otherwise.

The allegations against Father Maciel first appeared in early 1997 in the Hartford Courant, under the dual byline of Gerald Renner and Jason Berry. Berry had made a significant effort to deal with a budding crisis as the whistle blower in Lead Us Not Into Temptation. But based on his track record since that time, he had become a role model for heterodox Catholics attracted to questionable “solutions” to various problems.

Anyone who reviews the Maciel flap on the Internet might be inclined as I was to give the Courant the benefit of the doubt in airing its initial story on Feb. 23, 1997. Had I been living in Hartford at the time, however, I would have been progressively more skeptical of how this series proceeded. By the time the fourth and final segment turned up eight months later, the reporters’ willingness to give either the man accused or the Church itself any benefit of the doubt had totally vanished. An Oct. 23 Courant story was generously larded with critics of Father Maciel and his appointment as a papal delegate to a Church synod scheduled in Rome at the time. Predictably, one of those critics was the media’s favorite anti-hierarchical Catholic hit man, Father McBrien of Notre Dame. McBrien accommodated the two Courant reporters nicely with appropriately belittling pot shots at Church leadership.

A flurry of exchanges took place over a period of years between Maciel’s defenders and his detractors. After reviewing background stories and the Legion’s own defense of its founder, almost any fair-minded observer would be amazed at the amount of evidence raising sharp doubts about the credibility of his accusers, and how appallingly little of that evidence was allowed to surface in media reports. Part of it was either downplayed or shunted aside by the Courant in 1997. Five years later, most signs supporting Maciel’s innocence were blatantly ignored by “20/20.” After resurrecting questionable allegations against the Legion founder, ABC’s heavy-handed suggestions of a cover-up in Rome began to resemble a kangaroocourt proceeding aimed at discrediting the two most visible leaders in the Church — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Pope himself.

Among the sources who directly contradicted key parts of the accusers’ claims were a Cardinal and a physician, both based in Mexico; a Chilean bishop who had earlier participated as a monsignor in an intensive Vatican investigation of Maciel’s character on unrelated matters; and another ex-Legion member, a one-time fellow accuser who later recanted his story, indicating he was pressured by Maciel’s critics into making false statements about him in order “to show him up.”

Most enlightening of all, however, was the investigation of Father Maciel that took place in the late 1950s, when the Vatican chose to sideline him for two years after two members of his order accused him of such things as drug abuse, rebellion against Rome, financial mismanagement and the like. Medical tests done by three physicians cleared Maciel of any sign of drug use. He was completely exonerated of other charges as well by a team of investigators who spent months in Mexico living among Legion members and interviewing them personally on a one-toone basis. More to the point, the review occurred toward the end of the time period when the alleged “sex abuse” took place. His accusers, who first advanced their claim in the 1990s, were 17-24 years old and still members of the Legion in the late ’50s. Yet despite the receptive setting for those who questioned Father Maciel’s leadership at the time, the subject of sex abuse was simply never brought up.

To say the least, it was a strange if not bizarre afterthought that prompted his accusers to wait nearly four decades to “go public” with their seamy allegations. The April 2002 rehash of the Courant story on “20/20” suggested one thing: ABC was far less interested in telling both sides of this story than in fanning the fires of scandal for its own sake. Its animus toward the Church was showing conspicuously.

If they appointed juries for high-profile cases in the court of public opinion, and I were named foreman on the Maciel case, I’d feel compelled to persuade my fellow jurors to find him innocent on all counts. Anyone interested in the defense portion of th Maciel “court record” can review it at www.legionairefacts.org, a detailed Web site the Legion felt obliged to create on their founder’s behalf. Communications director Jay Dunlap, who earned his spurs in the secular media himself, believes the Legion had unassailable reason to do so: Father Maciel’s media “Prosecutors” assigned themselves the roles of judge and jury in tossing out almost all of the defense’s best evidence.

Somehow or other, a snake had been turned loose in the woodpile of secular news coverage — to paraphrase one of my late father’s favorite sayings. To put it charitably, the story alleging a Maciel “scandal” was deeply flawed from the very beginning.

In the face of all this, some mixed signals came out of the June 2002 meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas. Most participants wanted to come to grips with flawed responses to the problem in the past. Many bishops were clearly moved by painful stories of betrayal recounted by victims of abuse invited to speak. The meeting ended with adoption of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, and a pledge to remove abusive priests from active ministry and to work with civil authorities.

But the devil was still lurking in the details.

Leaders of SNAP left the meeting voicing fears the bishops had not gone far enough. Yet some Church leaders at Dallas clearly worried they might be going too far and moving too fast. Pressured by a drumbeat of support for bringing wrongdoers to justice, Cardinal Avery Dulles of Fordham’s theology faculty courageously urged the bishops to face up to a dilemma some apparently preferred to avoid: Hasty decisions made in the panic of intense media pressure could lead to new problems. In particular, an overly broad definition of sex abuse sparked Dulles’ concern that innocent priests could be caught up in the sweep of an ecclesiastical dragnet, without resolving the overall problem.

Dulles and others stressed a risk that was being overlooked by the bishops’ critics: The suspension of errant priests is more of a punitive than a preventive action. The press at large paid little attention to his remarks, but there was good reason to view them as a wise word of caution. The need to remove offenders was an indispensable first step; but in the long run, prevention was likely to prove far more important than punishment in ending the crisis.

At Rome’s direction, a U.S-Vatican panel of bishops met later and modified the Dallas accord to bring it into working harmony with Canon Law. In spite of SNAP’s worst fears, protection for innocent priests was not synonymous with exonerating the guilty ones.

At the heart of this crisis was the nether world of the sexual revolution. Analyst Mary Eberstadt aptly labeled it “The Elephant in the Sacristy” in a June 17 cover story for The Weekly Standard. Long before this became front-page news across the country, some heterosexual young exseminarians — plainspoken but disillusioned by the moral collapse of priest-formation programs they had left behind — had grown tired of telling tales of deviant seminaries when they found their words falling on deaf ears among doubtful or disinterested Catholics outside the walls. The evidence now available has made their point too obvious to ignore. Bizarre war stories about seminary teachers and rectors shaping a gay sexual agenda for their young charges were grounded in harsh fact in at least some cases. (In the 1980s, I met one of those ex-seminarians when he was a grad student at St. Louis University. A brilliant young Jesuit-in-training, he left the order in disgust in his 20s after finding his situation intolerable for a straight male. He later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and joined a campus faculty elsewhere before I lost track of him.)

Once the scandal erupted in Boston, the news biz jumped onto the bandwagon to belabor church leaders about the dirty laundry in the Catholic closet. It has since become obvious (to some of us, at least) why a sizable segment of the media elite had ample reason to sound the alarm as loudly as they did: The Church’s plight helped to divert unwanted attention from the piles of dirty linen in their own closets. The elitist culture’s readiness to defend “gay rights” had slowly merged into a willingness to gloss over any negative impact the gay lifestyle might have on the social fabric. There was more than one kind of coverup at work in the media’s response to sex abuse by some members of the clergy.

That brings us to the final great media temptation in the frenzy of 2002. Let’s call it . . .

TEMPTATION 4: THE STACKING THE DECK SYNDROME

Consider two brassy attempts to pre-empt the bishops on an unmentionable issue that threatened to surface at their 2002 meeting in Dallas: the dark side of the gay subculture. A May 20 cover story in Time magazine and a June 12 USA Today feature, both of which went into print as the bishops were about to meet, were heavily stacked with heterodox and gay Catholics as their primary news sources. The comments elicited were carefully weighted to hide perhaps the major cause of this crisis behind the three most fashionable media bogeymen of the moment: (1) Nonhomosexual pedophiles were somehow the primary instigators of the Church’s problem; (2) an aloof and autocratic hierarchy had done little or nothing to stop it; and (3) homophobic attitudes, allegedly based on Catholic teaching, were making life miserable for sensitive gay clergymen.

Perish the thought that a gay lifestyle itself might have anything to do with the problem of sex abuse in the clergy.

Both publications managed to ignore — or disingenuously set aside — one of the most defining facts of this scandal staring them in the face: A preponderance of reported cases involved clerical abuse of teenage males, or far less frequently, of prepubescent boys, by grown men. It didn’t take a clinical psychologist to read the handwriting on the wall. Heterosexual males are not normally in the habit of seeking sexual favors from altar boys or testing their prowess on compliant young male seminarians. By definition, those sound a lot like the acts of people with an overt or latent homosexual tendencies.

There was in fact hard evidence available in some court cases — and not only in Boston — that flatly contradicted any attempt to portray even serial child abusers only as sick heterosexuals who somehow went off the deep end. Father Rudolph Kos, a convicted Dallas priest, not only had a case history of being abused as a child, like many other pedophiles. He also described himself as a gay man.

The solution to this crisis, in short, could not be found by blaming it on heterosexual priest-pedophiles who somehow masqueraded as gays. The most persuasive evidence pointed instead to a crisis largely ignited by gays masquerading as priests. And unless a forthright attempt is made to address that problem at seminaries where it is relevant, it could resurface. Ironically, growing signs suggest young candidates for the priesthood have been drawn in increasing numbers to seminaries where the term orthodoxy is not treated as a synonym for political or social intolerance, but as an ancient religious concept that is an indispensable compass pointing the way to Christian unity. The real puzzle is why the normal definition of orthodoxy was spurned by some seminary leaders who helped turn their sites into training camps for spiritual corruption.

Yet the Time piece in particular, a feature story deceptively titled “Inside the Church’s closet,” took an oozingly sympathetic view of gay priests who felt prodded by their sexual appetites to redefine the priesthood into something more amenable to their preferred lifestyle. By hints and innuendo, “straight” Church leaders were suspected by the homosexual heroes of this narrative as being on the verge of a sweeping purge of gay clerics — or at least itching to scapegoat homosexuals as a class for the abuse crisis. With a devilish gift for hyperbole, one Jesuit dissenter claimed victim-status-in-advance for all gay men of the cloth by telling Time’s fawning reporter they were like Anne Frank’s family in the attic, “waiting for the Nazis to come.”

Incredibly, the article made no effort at all to explore the kind of pariah status many straight candidates who supported orthodox Church teaching have said they faced at seminaries where heterodox rectors or gay faculty members had achieved a dominant influence. That kind of takeover not only occurred in some major urban areas of the Midwest and Northeast, according to Michael Rose’s well-researched study, Goodbye, Good Men, but at seminaries scattered across the country. It can hardly be crossed off simply as an urban myth created by “rigid” archconservatives hostile to gay rights. It was in fact the liberal Catholic gadfly, Father Andrew Greeley, who coined the term “lavender Mafia” to describe the gay intrusion into seminaries. Yet Time’s willingness to accept gay clergymen’s critiques of church teaching at face value had the net effect of brushing aside the traditional priesthood as little more than a quaint relic of the past — even though it is clearly intended to attract heterosexual men vowing to lead holy lives in persona Christi, by a commitment to chastity, celibacy and service to Christ’s followers. In a shabby effort to recast the Catholic priesthood in terms acceptable to the dominant secular culture, the magazine’s entire storyline was tainted with the odor of ideological manipulation. Truth was the first casualty, not because Time falsified facts outright, but because it went overboard to slam the church by seeking out those anecdotes that put the right spin on its own politically convoluted aim: shielding the gay subculture from any criticism based on orthodox Judeo-Christian thought.

Not to be outdone, USA Today followed suit three weeks later. Much like the blind Indian trying to describe an elephant by examining only its tail, “The Nation’s Newspaper” ran a front page story heavily skewed to the gay viewpoint on what the bishops were up to in Dallas. Social Justice Review 77 May/June 2004 Perhaps the worst doublespeak in its swipe at the Church came from the professed willingness of one gay protester from Ohio to “reject Church teachings” in order to change her. “I’ve never felt condemned by God,” he blithely told the reporter. “It’s just the Church that’s the problem.” But if the Church was such a hopeless fraud, as his assertion implied, why didn’t our roving reporter pose the obvious question: Why come all the way from Columbus to Dallas in a patently hopeless effort to “reform” an institution you apparently love to hate so much? Why not just leave it?

If genuine reform was near the top of either publication’s cultural agenda, it was nowhere obvious in either of these two reports. The voice of the real victims of abuse, in fact, was lost in the hands of storytellers who bent over backwards to protect gays from any real link to sex abuse in the clergy. Their prime “news” sources were people with personal axes to grind. What both publications had done was create a false dichotomy of choice for the church: Either embrace the gay rights agenda in full or risk being portrayed in the media as a fortress of intolerance worthy of the Taliban.

Both these pre-Dallas reports carried a hidden message behind a facade of objectivity. A sizable segment of America’s media elite had seized on a historical moment of weakness in the church to launch an undeclared guerrilla war against her — in effect, a war of ideas over doctrinal matters essential to what she had to teach. Any elitist who cares to label me a hardheaded cultural conservative for saying so can be my guest. I’m in good company, at least:

• “In 2002, the furor over child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy provided a public outpouring of anti- Church and anti-Catholic vituperation on a scale not witnessed in this country since the 1920s,” Philip Jenkins noted on page 2 in his latest study, The New Anti-Catholicism. “Reasonable and justifiable critiques of misconduct by particular Church authorities segued effortlessly into grotesque attacks on the Catholic Church as an institution, together with sweeping denunciations of Catholic faith and practice.” The author is distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University.

• Catholic analyst E. Michael Jones saw the crisis in the clergy opening the door to a new kind of Kulterkampf against the Church. As the editor of Culture Wars magazine, Jones is a well known defender of the Catholic tradition.

• On the other hand, Peter Steinfels, longtime religion writer at the New York Times, hardly qualified as a mouthpiece for conservative pique. Yet in a column written for the London Tablet in September 2002, he questioned the hefty amount of time and space devoted to this scandal at his paper’s corporate sister ship, the Boston Globe.

• A prominent Hispanic Church leader, considered a possible successor to the aging John Paul II as this was being written, argued from much the same perspective I have here. In a May 2002 interview with the Italian magazine 30 Days, Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga — a multilingual cardinal from Honduras — accused the U.S. media elite of using the sexabuse scandal as payback for the church’s stance on social and moral issues the elitists do not share, especially on abortion. At least two other Latin American cardinals, plus a third one in Rome, raised similar objections of their own in succeeding weeks.

When I stumbled onto the Rodriguez interview on the Internet, I was a bit guarded at first about the analogy he used to back his boldest allegation. U.S. media powerhouses, he argued, were aping the great tyrannies of the past by simulating a “show-trial” expose of corrupt Church leadership. As a newsman myself, it seemed to me Catholics, Jews or any other minority group should be wary of crying foul too quickly at critics when something goes awry in their own ranks. But give credit where it is due. Rodriguez also made it clear to 30 Days that he was not using media excesses as an excuse to brush aside the gravity of sex abuse. He saw it for what it is: an urgent issue that must be resolved.

I then came across columnist Bill Keller’s May 4th broadside at the Pope in the New York Times. Almost single- handedly, he had made a potent case for Rodriguez’s assertion that a key segment of the U.S. media had turned this scandal into a new kind of persecution of the church. Keller’s egregious attack may have made sense to disgruntled ex-Catholics like himself; but it also confirmed the most stinging part of the cardinal’s allegations. Let’s take a closer look at one Times man’s malignant view of the church to see why:

“This is a crisis of the pope’s making,” Keller noted in his column in a signal of things to come. “. . . like the Communists,” he went on, “John Paul II has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable to a reformer. He has strengthened the Vatican equivalent of the party Central Committee, called the Curia, and populated it with reactionaries” (italics mine).

Keller’s metaphorical fixation on the “Kremlin connection” soon found an echo not far up the road in New England. The Boston Globe, which merited praise for digging out the harsher facts of the Boston situation, showed it too was willing to take the low road at times with some cheap shots of its own. In a Globe magazine piece in late July, entitled “The bishop’s quandary,” staffer Charles Pierce set the stage by inviting unwary readers to witness a procession into St. Peter’s Cathedral in Belleville, Ill., for a celebration to honor older priests in Bishop Gregory’s own diocese. Pierce portrayed the event like this:

“Wilton Gregory stands out in the procession, and not simply because of the accouterments of his office . . . Consecrated a bishop when he was only 35 years old, today, at 54, he’s a generation younger than several of the priests whom he is honoring . . . Also, he’s African- American, and this line of priests is whiter than the Politburo ever was” (italics mine).

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what both Pierce and Keller were up to. They were testing the waters of hostility to the Church by implying she harbored the same inflexible mindset that drove the world’s greatest totalitarian empire of the 20th century.

The poison dart Pierce aimed at the Church and its older priests carried a thinly veiled hint of racism in the Church’s governance. Not only did it seriously mar an otherwise well-intended effort to evaluate Gregory’s leadership; Pierce seemed blissfully unaware of a steady upswing of black and Hispanic bishops and Church leaders that has occurred under John Paul II’s leadership. Two promising young black bishops — Terry Steib and Edward Braxton — passed through my archdiocese alone in recent years, before they were assigned to expanded responsibilities elsewhere. All of which raises an obvious question: Would the Boston Globe fare as well as the Catholic Church in an up-close encounter with minority representation in its own executive suite? Don’t bet on it.

One is forced to wonder whether these two men had been reading from the same journalistic playbook. As part of a single media conglomerate, both the Globe and Times share a remarkably congruent secularist vision of religion and politics in contemporary society. It was that vision which gave rise to the twisted theory of moral equivalence indulged by both Keller and Pierce in placing the Vatican on a par with the Kremlin.

Even the most skeptical reporter, if he wants the public’s respect, must be faithful to the principles that breathe life into his craft — particularly an accurate rendition of the facts that are every journalist’s stock in trade. The Keller and Pierce analogies were grotesque precisely because they rested on a gigantic contradiction of historical fact. The Soviet empire and its leaders incurred widespread condemnation by systematically killing off tens of millions of dissidents and other presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, U.S. bishops and diocesan leaders faced a tidal wave of public criticism last year because some of them went too far to protect their supposed “friends” in the cloth from the consequences of their errant behavior. It wasn’t tyrannical repression but a lax exercise of ordinary Church discipline that led to the problem.

Keller’s attack was truly bizarre. Boasting of his credentials as a “collapsed Catholic” was hardly the sign of honesty he meant to project, but rather a calculated effort to degrade the Church’s role in a democratic society — as if thumbing his nose at her somehow defined him as an “objective” newsman. Voices like his put Times credibility on trial long before the Jason Blair fiasco of mid-2003. Catholics should not hold their breath over the Times’ willingness to clear the toxicity out of the air in its newsroom. Keller was later named executive editor to succeed the deposed Howell Raines.

In any case, it was unnecessary for media critics to endorse everything Cardinal Rodriguez said to grasp his main point — that “payback time” had turned justifiable news coverage of a scandal into the feeding frenzy of 2002. If anything, the cardinal seriously understated his case on two hot-button issues: the media elite’s uncritical embrace of gay rights, and its devious tilt in handling abortion news over a period of three decades.

Before the 9-11 terrorists ever struck American soil, abortion had left its imprint by stirring up our own homegrown culture of death. In the wake of the Roe decision in 1973, America’s prestige press did its best to co-opt both the pro-life movement and the church by hitching public support for abortion to the defense of women’s rights. If ever there was a shotgun marriage of ideas aimed at a mass audience, this was it. In elitist jargon, pro-lifers slowly came to be defined as “anti-choicers” — and by implication, as anti-woman as well. The humanity of the preborn child also was lost in the artful news dodge of reducing its status to that of a fetus — a mere object of scientific curiosity.

Yet the cultural time bomb in all this kept ticking away. It lies not in the fate of the unborn child but in abortion’s crippling impact on women themselves — an impact virtually blacked out of public discussion for years by the same editorial illuminati who promoted “freedom of choice” with a pathological obsession. The Internet may eventually change all that. While the elitists kept their heads burrowed in the sand, pro-lifers were creating a new wave of Web sites to educate pregnant women across the country with the truth told in full, and it isn’t pretty. Among abortion’s unwanted “benefits”: an increased risk of depression, breast cancer, divorce, even suicide, for women who have had one.

If the U.S. Supreme Court was responsible for creating Roe v. Wade, it was our media elite that institutionalized it. The elitists have a short attention span: Those who touted Roe as a landmark in advancing women’s rights have forgotten that Dred Scott was once a “landmark” itself — for the protection of property owners’ rights. The latter ruling asserted the right to deny freedom to a slave; the former, to deny life to an innocent child.

Once the Rodriguez interview hit the Internet, one of the more predictable ironies of 2002 was that a high-pro- file liberal Catholic would go after him with a vengeance. In a syndicated column in midyear, E.J. Dionne dismissed the cardinal’s appraisal of media Church tensions with the back of his hand, alleging he completely misunderstood the media’s role in modern society (which apparently includes the right to embarrass the Church endlessly, without a peep of protest from her leaders). But Dionne himself failed to connect all the dots by ignoring the cultural background of what Rodriguez described as the “fury” behind U.S. scandal coverage. His 30 Days interview could be understood better in its broad historical context. Both clerical sex abuse and the abortion struggle occurred roughly in the same time period. Ideologically, the media’s diametrically opposite reactions to them were not as unrelated as it might seem at a glance.

Historically, papal protests against slavery were once viewed with suspicion and disdain by slave traders in colonial times; so too has the Church’s defense of the unborn become a bone in the throat of America’s chief ideological empire builders in our own era, the modern media elite. The molestation scandal served a purpose beyond the fleeting news value of stories linked to the scan itself. Once the Church was subjected to a flood of damning publicity over errant priests flouting her code of sexual ethics, why should anyone heed her moral guidance on the equally contentious issue of abortion?

Was such a result consciously sought? The elitists would surely deny it. But a certain connection is inescapable: The most critical and even hostile coverage of the sex-abuse scandal in 2002 came from some of the same media juggernauts that were among the most zealous supporters of Roe v. Wade. E.J. Dionne may have joined the staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post for otherwise valid reasons. But he’s precisely the “culturally correct” kind of Catholic newsman both papers have come to esteem — one willing to earn his spurs with the establishment by staying dutifully silent on what abortion means in practice. Roe was in fact not a real expansion of human rights at all, but a euphemistic throwback to Dred Scott’s defense of property rights linked to the ownership of slaves. In essence, every exercise of the “abortion right” reduces the babe in the womb to a piece of chattel, to be disposed of at its “owner’s” whim. And it all goes on with the media elite’s blessing. In light of the Church’s adamant defense of the unborn’s right to life, is it any wonder so many elitists wanted to keep her under a cloud of suspicion?

(Memo to E.J.: Since I was obviously willing to give Cardinal Rodriguez far more operating room than you on this, it’s also obvious Catholic journalists don’t all think alike. Ask yourself one thing:Was it dispassionate reporting of sex abuse alone that riled the cardinal, or was it scandal-mongering smears like “20/20’s” Maciel segment, or media misadventures like it, that set him off? Draw up a shopping list of the biggest abortion promoters in our profession and you’ll find the spark that ignited the fury behind the frenzy of 2002. Has the death of any aborted child yet been deemed too ugly for the media elite to rule out of bounds for a civilized society? It has now become a kind of respectable crime of convenience against humanity they think we should all tolerate. Yet abortion is wrong not only because the Catholic Church says so. All the best scientific evidence points to the unmistakable humanity of the unborn child as well.

(Keep in mind we’re not arguing here over the First Amendment right of Times or Post editorialists to entertain any illusion they want on this subject; that doesn’t relieve the rest of us of the obligation to sift illusion from reality. We already agree on one thing: It’s a sad fact that errant priests have disrupted the lives of as many as several thousand kids in the past 30-40 years. But is that any sadder than America’s abortionists killing off roughly that many every day. If I may be so cheeky as to ask: Which scandal is worse? And why have your media employers in New York and Washington worked so hard to cover up the “other” scandal for so long — especially the harm it has done to women? Forgive me, E.J., if their treatment of abortion sounds like a textbook case of psychological denial to me. In the world of journalism, it’s a new landmark in cultural hypocrisy . . .)

CONCLUSION: BEYOND SEXUAL REVOLUTION

I hasten to add one thing here: At a time when their leadership was being sorely tested, Catholic bishops could ill afford to fall back on any of this to excuse their own lapses in judgment of corruption in the clergy. If they hope to restore the confidence of the faithful, media muscle- flexing now makes it all the more imperative for them to re-engage the battle over ideas in America head-on. Karol Wojtyla’s landmark Love and Responsibility, written long before he became Pope John Paul II, offers a great starting point to dialogue with the Church’s critics. This penetrating work in personalist philosophy has stood up well under the test of time, because this work spoke so clearly to the modern mind. Its author dramatized the spiritual dignity of the human person while directly engaging the meaning of man’s sexual nature. One of the misleading legacies of the sexual revolution, developing at the time he wrote that book, was the temptation to treat sex, not as the servant of love intended by nature, but as an alluring goddess filled with impossible demands on those who worship at her altar. It was Wojtyla’s particular genius, by subordinating sex to the service of love, marriage and the traditional family, to show they are still the best antidote for what ails so much of modern society.

One more digression is necessary here to make some distinctions even conservatives need to acknowledge. Political views often divide us; but in a moral sense, homosexuals have as much right to be respected as persons as anyone else. Many are people of achievement in business, the arts, and other areas of endeavor. They can hardly be held responsible, as an undifferentiated group, for the abusive actions of priests involved in this scandal, any more than all white Americans were responsible for the lynching of Southern blacks a century ago. Some gay activists say they have in fact found sex abuse of the young just as abhorrent as others have. That is entirely possible. Neither can anyone claim heterosexual priests, by definition, are immune to sexual misconduct. A New York bishop reminded us of that fact by resigning in midsummer 2002 after word of an affair with a woman suddenly turned up in his background.

But a critical link here simply cannot be ignored. Just as racist whites were involved up to their necks in Southern lynchings, so also did a host of gay clerics plunge deeply into the moral quicksand that touched off the sex-abuse scandal. Gay publications face an impossible task in proving a same-sex attraction poses no added risk for a candidate for the priesthood. Seminarians, after all, are trained in a predominantly male environment.

Yet even before the Vatican began pressing its case for the U.S. Church to tighten its guidelines for seminary candidates, activists were spreading fears of a ruthless purge of gay priests, including those with no link to sex abuse. Since a good many bishops were amazingly shy about addressing the gay issue at all in 2002, those fears were not only ill founded but a bit disingenuous. At the bishops’ midyear meeting in June 2003, in fact, Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things, expressed concern in an enlightening interview on KMOX-Radio in St. Louis that many U.S. bishops still lacked the courage needed to tackle the gay problem directly.

Let me rephrase the orthodox Church view of the priesthood, therefore, in terms the most hard-headed secularist can understand. Becoming a priest is neither a civil right nor an equal-employment opportunity for gays or women — or even for a heterosexual male, for that matter. For centuries, the priesthood has been considered a special calling for the men selected. It’s a living tradition based on the Church’s understanding of what Christ expects from her as His spouse, and on what she seeks in candidates chosen to fulfill the priestly role. Many live up to their calling. Some do not.

So it’s time to strengthen that tradition, not to abandon it.

Historically, there’s a direct link between the media grandstanding of a small cadre of dissenting clerics over Humanae Vitae more than three decades ago and the disarray that faces the Church today, between the permissive culture that has affected the contemporary world as a whole and the sex abuse tolerated in the Church for so long. Let’s call it the Curran Option: In the wake of a new culture of dissent launched in America in the 1960s, a fashionably heterodox view of the Catholic code of sexual ethics slowly became coin of the realm in at least some seminaries, and in more than a few parishes and dioceses around the country as well. Some bishops clearly recognize those connections. The challenge now is whether those who do can gain ascendancy over those who do not by persuading their brother bishops to face up to what needs to be done. The corrective action already taken in some dioceses must spread elsewhere.

One of the strongest outcries raised by the leaders of SNAP in 2002 was to bring wrongdoers to justice. However legitimate that aim may be, punishing errant priests alone cannot end the scandal without trying to uproot the problem at its source. Catholics should not delude themselves: At seminaries where it is needed, preventive action is in order, even if the bishops face a new surge of criticism over how they go about it. The same watchdogs who hammered them all along are now unlikely to applaud the kind of spiritual housecleaning needed - at least not if it involves a more careful effort to screen out prospective seminarians with homosexual leanings.

On a late August trip to New Orleans in 2003, I happened to tune into a fascinating segment of the “Today” show on NBC-TV, just before I left my motel room one morning in West Memphis, Ark., to return home. “Fascinating,” I say, because it called attention once again to the media’s own credibility gap on the delicate issue of gays in the clergy. As the show was about to go on the air, the network touted what it called a ground swell of support for optional celibacy in the priesthood. The clear implication: A married clergy might somehow ease the Church’s vocation crisis and ward off sex abuse as well.

The “ground swell” in fact involved a single letter in support of optional celibacy. Even before it was presented to the nation’s bishops, the National Catholic Register later noted, the 160 priests who signed it in the Milwaukee archdiocese had leaked a copy to the secular media, as if the press should serve as mediator for their cause. One of “Today’s” two guests, a former priest who has since married, came on the air to defend the proposal. The other invitee, President Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, challenged the idea of a married clergy as a fictitious solution to the crisis in the church. Yet when Donohue traced much of the sex abuse problem to gay priests, “Today” co-host Ann Curry quickly steered the debate back to optional celibacy. An orthodox view of the Catholic priesthood clearly held no interest for her. Any link between gays and sex abuse simply disappeared from NBC’s radar screen.

The bottom line: An elitist protection game, driven by a mystifying urge to attach a Smiley face to America’s gay rights agenda, is one of the worst-kept secrets of the news trade in our time. However varied the gifts or talents gays may offer as persons in other ways, their sexual inclinations plainly tend to put them out of sync with the kind of spiritual commitment demanded of a Catholic priest.

That should not dissuade the Church from trying to cultivate friendlier ties to the mass media wherever it can. However one measures its faults, the media also presents a unique opportunity to spread Christ’s message to a wider audience than what is available from the pulpit. This scandal caused many bishops to recoil from that challenge in 2002. Yet in fact, a year in turmoil was a wakeup call for just the opposite. A courageous new kind of leadership is needed to engage the secular culture in a dialogue that involves not only the good of the Church but what is best for society as a whole.

Put simply, a bishop must be willing to buck the prevailing winds at times, if he is committed to an authentic defense of his faith. On touchstone issues like gay rights or abortion, that means dissenting from the public dissenters lionized by Time or the Times. A bishop may be skewered for the moral stand he takes on those issues. But he may also discover in the process the stuff that saints are made of.

As a longtime Catholic newsman, let me offer a final parting shot across the bow. One of the more alarming side effects of this scandal was the disruption it caused to the ecumenical pursuit of a new culture of life in our country. It’s a pursuit that has united Catholics with Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews and even religiously unaffiliated pro-lifers in a common goal. Even in the body politic, some liberals have broken ranks with their cohorts and joined hands with conservatives in pushing this project. Those facts alone make it imperative for U.S. bishops to rejuvenate their credibility by continuing the effort to resolve the abuse issue as forthrightly as possible — most of all, to ensure it does not recur.

Victims of sex abuse are far from the only people who have a personal stake in the outcome of all this. So, too, does the babe in the womb — our country’s great hope for her own future.

The paradox is this: In 2002, U.S. Catholic bishops as a class were tried and found wanting in the court of public opinion for ignoring young people at risk — a verdict some of them richly deserved. But make no mistake: Hidden heroes in the hierarchy were often lumped together with sinners suddenly made visible. The scandal coverage was inevitable; the frenzied obsession with it was not. What it did was divert the bishops’ and the country’s attention for a long moment from matters of equal or greater import.

Where protection for innocent human life is concerned, many of the same media elitists who eagerly held court over the bishops are still on trial themselves for their arrogant refusal to recognize abortion for what it really is. The deeply flawed reporting of this deadly act is a scandal of seismic proportions itself.