Tell the whole story on priest sex abuse

There is absolutely no doubt that the sexual and physical abuse is a global plague. In the U.S. alone, there are reportedly 39 million victims of childhood sex abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6 to 10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years.

Now lets compare that to other recent studies. 2 percent of sex offenders were Catholic priests - a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid 1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops annual audit, in a Church of approximately 65 million members).

My question is a simple one. Why has the global media made the sexual abuse story almost entirely a Catholic story?

One recent story to back up my charge. The New York Times on March 25, 2010 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent Father Lawrence Murphy of the Milwaukee Archdiocese from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

There were two sources for the story: documents from lawyers with a civil suit pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and retired disgraced Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee.

Laurie Goodstein, the author of The New York Times story, also has a history with Archbishop Weakland. Last year, upon release of the his autobiography, she wrote an unusually sympathetic story that buried all the most serious allegations against him (New York Times, May 14, 2009).

Obviously all sexual abuse is wrong and a crime but the problem for most of us is that we need a press that is morally honest in reporting facts. We are basically totally reliant on the press to report all the facts honestly and completely.

Larry T. O'Neill

Palatine