Following the publication of a Pennsylvania grand jury report on clergy sexual abuse, many states are considering launching a grand jury of their own.

Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey and New York have announced investigations, and other states are weighing doing the same. Radical activist groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights are asking for a federal probe, though there appears to be no congressional interest in that effort.

The Catholic League position is clear and concise: there should be no grand jury investigation of the Catholic Church unless all other private and public sector institutions are included. To single out the Church smacks of bigotry.

Where are the calls for grand jury investigations of Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, and Protestant organizations? Wherever adults intermingle with minors on a regular basis, there is the possibility of abuse. Most important, why is no one calling for an investigation of the public schools?

The identity of the victimizer should not matter: what should matter are the victims. Moreover, given the great strides that have been made in this country since the Dallas reforms of 2002, it makes it all the more unjust to examine only the Catholic Church.

Bill Donohue wrote a letter to the attorneys general in all 50 states, and it was copied to thousands of state lawmakers across the nation, asking them to include all religious organizations, private non-sectarian entities, and the public schools in their probes. It was a big undertaking, but it was necessary. See p. 4.

We need to know who knew what and when about the predatory behavior of Theodore McCarrick, and we need assurances that the seminaries are not gay enclaves. What we don’t need are endless panels and investigations of what happened decades ago. We already have a good grip on that.

Catholics are angry about what has happened, and who can blame them? However, it is important not to be played.

To be specific, we should not let all other institutions off the hook—we should demand that they be investigated—otherwise we wind up playing right into the hands of our adversaries. That’s what they want: they want us to do their bidding for them. Remember, most of the cases surfacing now are about offenses committed decades ago, and most of the offenders are either dead or no longer in the priesthood.

Our job is to defend the Church against wrongdoing; we are not here to defend wrongdoing by the clergy. It is also our job to insist that priests and bishops are entitled to the same due process afforded everyone else. Sadly, that needs to be emphasized today.

Looks like our campaign against Samantha Bee’s TBS show, “Full Frontal,” is paying dividends. In the August 15 edition of her show (reruns were aired over the past few weeks), Bee ran 23 advertisements; on September 12, there were 19.

We have been able to pick off seven of her most prominent sponsors: Verizon, Procter and Gamble, Wendy’s, Ashley HomeStore, The Wonderful Company (maker of pistachios), Popeyes, and Burger King.

What we are most pleased with is a change in Bee’s script. We started to target her sponsors because of two things: her relentless anti-Catholic assaults, and her use of the c-word to describe the president’s daughter.

Bee has subsequently stopped attacking the Catholic Church and has not employed vulgarities to assail public persons or institutions. We are delighted that she has decided to pivot.

Do we trust Bee? Not at all. Any person with her record of bigotry and obscenities is not to be trusted. But her producers know that it was her antics that triggered a public revulsion against her, and that the Catholic League has played a major role in that effort.

We will continue to monitor Bee’s show, and will resume our campaign if and when she starts acting out again. It is a sorry state of affairs in this country that it takes a stern reaction from groups like the Catholic League to get the likes of Samantha Bee to zip it.

No entity in America today, private or public, has more institutionalized mechanisms in place to check for the sexual abuse of minors than the Catholic Church.

That is why in the last two years for which we have data, only .005 percent of the clergy have had a credible accusation made against them (see the Annual Reports on this subject, July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017, and July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016; they are posted on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops).

Yet the media continue to advance the invidious stereotype that the Church has an on-going problem.

The institutionalized mechanisms that account for the progress are the reforms made by the USCCB and the dioceses.

The USCCB issued its first guidelines for reporting alleged offenses in 2002. Titled the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” it was revised in 2005, 2011, and 2018. Once a diocese learns of an accusation, it notifies the local law enforcement officials.

Many dioceses have also implemented their own strictures. To cite one example, the Archdiocese of New York instituted an Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. It is aimed at uncovering abuse allegations and making compensation once the cases have been authenticated.

These reforms were responsible for the proceedings against Theodore McCarrick (formerly a cardinal). It wasn’t law enforcement that exposed the allegations against the former New Yorker, it was Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York.

Recently it was reported that Father Kevin Lonergan of the Diocese of Allentown (Pennsylvania) groped a 17-year-old girl and sent nude photos of himself to her. How did his case come to light? It wasn’t law enforcement—it was Allentown Bishop Alfred Schlert who notified the authorities in early June, right after he learned about it.

This case proves once again that the system works. But the media are not reporting it fairly.

The headline posted by USA Today Network about an Associated Press story on Father Lonergan reads, “Pennsylvania Priest Faces Charges As Sex Abuse Fallout Grows.” This is indefensible. It suggests that this one case comes right on the heels of similar cases, when, in fact, the grand jury report was about old cases dating to World War II.

The Daily Beast, a far left-wing media outlet, ran a story on Father Lonergan without ever mentioning that it was the Diocese of Allentown that reported this case to the authorities.

Reuters, the British news agency, was worse: it falsely reported that “The Allentown Diocese removed Lonergan from his duties after prosecutors alerted them to the case.” The New York Post picked up this bogus story, thus leading readers to think that the diocese acted after it was notified by law enforcement, when it was just the opposite.

The Catholic Church should be subjected to the same degree of scrutiny that is afforded all other institutions in society. But the corollary is also true: it should be treated just as fairly. It isn’t, and that is the problem.

“Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity.” That was Father Richard John Neuhaus’ answer to the clergy sexual abuse crisis that exploded in 2002. It still is a great tonic, but it is incomplete: courage is also needed.

Priests need to practice fidelity to Church teachings, in both their spiritual and behavioral life. They also need to exercise courage: when one of their fellow priests, or bishops, is guilty of serious misdeeds, they need to be confronted. Keeping quiet is not only cowardly, it is un-Christian. Here are a few examples.

After the disgraced Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland stepped down—he not only admitted to sexual relationships with men, the diocese paid $450,000 to settle a claim with his boyfriend, Paul Marcoux—he confessed that he did not believe in the Church’s teachings on sexuality.

Weakland rejected the Catholic Catechism’s labeling of homosexual inclinations as “intrinsically disordered.” “Those are bad words because they are pejorative.” It’s a small leap from thinking homosexuality is normal to actually engaging in it.

“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” Weakland said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?”

If Weakland were an honest man, he never would have sought ordination. He joined an organization whose strictures on seminal matters he could not support, lived a double life, and expected the faithful to pay for his lifestyle, as well as his lawsuits. To this day, he is lionized by left-wing Catholics, the ones who call themselves social justice advocates.

Weakland is a prime example of what happens when fidelity is absent. He is also a prime example of what happens when those who knew of his gay lifestyle remained silent. Their lack of courage allowed him to engage in sexual activity with men for years.

Msgr. Kevin Wallin is another splendid example of what happens when fidelity and courage are not practiced.

In 2013, Wallin went to prison for dealing crystal methamphetamine. He was the former pastor of the Cathedral of St. Augustine in Bridgeport, Connecticut and was secretary to Bishop Walter Curtis in 1987. He was also secretary to Bishop Edward Egan (who would later become Archbishop of New York and a cardinal).

Wallin was more than a drug dealer. He was a cross-dressing, clinically diagnosed narcissist who lived a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. Lots of people knew he was a sicko, and none did anything about it.

“Neighbors said men streamed into Monsignor Wallin’s apartment,” the New York Times noted, “many of them arriving in cars like BMWs and Corvettes. Sounds of sex could be heard. He stored cases of good wine in the basement, as well as glass pipes and bottles of butane. He was seen doing his laundry, which included lace panties and other articles of women’s clothing.”

But no one said a word, including his fellow priests. In a session with other priests, in which they spoke of God’s mercy, Wallin turned to them and said, “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

When I read that in 2013, I knew I would never forget it. It was not Wallin’s lack of fidelity to the teachings of the Church that struck me the most, it was the lack of courage on the part of his cohorts. When a priest confesses to other priests that he no longer believes, and they do nothing about it, they are as bad as him.

Fortunately, there are priests who are coming forward, and one of them is featured in this edition of Catalyst (see pp. 8-9).

Father Robert Altier gave a startling homily on August 19, one that was widely disseminated by the Catholic League. He is a priest at the Church of St. Raphael in Crystal, Minnesota. I have shortened his homily to fit our page limitations.

It is clear that Father Altier loves the Catholic Church and is sickened by recent revelations of old cases of priestly sexual abuse. I am grateful that he gave us permission to publish an excerpt of his remarks.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the extraordinary courage exhibited by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. It is he who is responsible for blowing the whistle on Theodore McCarrick, forcing his resignation as cardinal.

To be precise, it was the New York Archdiocese’s Independent Compensation and Reconciliation Program that enticed one of McCarrick’s victims to come forward, and it was Cardinal Dolan who then acted on the accusation. Bias against the hierarchy, stemming from some members of the laity and even the clergy, accounts for why Dolan is not being given the credit he deserves.

Most priests and bishops are good men. Unless we have reason to believe otherwise, we should give them our support and not allow those who are stampeding against them to prevail. A mob mentality is dangerous.

The following is an excerpt from an August 19, 2018 homily given at the
Church of St. Raphael in Crystal, Minnesota by Fr. Robert Altier.

In the last couple of weeks, we have heard some pretty unfortunate things. A cardinal of the Church who abused children and young men, and now in Pennsylvania the grand jury report 301 priests violated more than a thousand children. And on top of that we have the episcopal cover-up, the word episcopal means bishops, so the cover-up by the bishops. And, it’s not just simply a cover-up, it’s an agenda.

If you’ve listened carefully, since 2002 when all this broke, the bishops keep on coming back to the same point, pedophilia, it’s pedophilia, it’s pedophilia, it’s pedophilia. No, it’s not.

In fact, the John Jay Institute, the group that the bishops themselves hired to look at what was going on, came back and said this is a homosexual problem. 86.6% (if I recall correctly) of all of the abuse cases were on post-pubescent males, and the bishops told them “no you go back, and you rewrite it and you say that it isn’t a homosexual problem.” So, they came back and said well 86.6% of this is all about post-pubescent males, but it’s not a homosexual problem; like really?

Now we need to make an important distinction, there are some very, very good people who struggle with a homosexual orientation. All of us struggle with different things, that doesn’t mean that we’re a bad person just because we have certain weaknesses. And the Church recognizes that that orientation is not evil, it is the activity which is evil. And so, for these men who want to live a good life and who are trying to fight against those temptations and the struggles, this is a cross. And it is a huge cross that they have to carry. In fact, you can think how much God loves these people if he allows them to carry a cross that is that big; it’s huge.

Now we need, as again we look at our own selves, we can say alright there are some for instance who struggle with alcohol or people who struggle with pornography, whatever. If they’re really trying to fight against those temptations these are good people with a weakness.

That’s different for instance from the drug dealer, or from the guy who is making pornography, or the guy who is trafficking the women or something; those people are pigs. The guy who is struggling and trying to live a good life is a good person with a weakness. And that is the distinction that we need to keep in mind.

And so, the Church is very clear that even for men with a deep-seated homosexual tendency, that they are not to go to the seminary. That’s not because the Church is being discriminatory or hates these people, but rather because the same principle if you look at it and say: would you take somebody who is struggling with an alcohol addiction to a bar? It’s a point of temptation. We don’t allow men into women’s convents because it’s not going to be long before somebody’s going to be having problems. And that’s what the Church is looking at to say this is not good.

Go back to when I was in college seminary. I was having a conversation with another seminarian, in the midst of the conversation he looked at me and said would you ever consider taking a shower in the women’s locker room? I said certainly not. He said well why not? I said well the temptations and the problems…and he said you’re right, now you know what I have to go through when I go into a men’s locker room. I thought oh my goodness…yuck. This is why the Church says even for these good men who are struggling and trying to overcome this, we don’t want to put them in a point of temptation.

So those are not the people that we are having a problem with. The people that we are having a problem with come from two different groups and understand there is an intentional and malicious infiltration of the Church for the purpose of destroying her from within. This is what you need to understand.

When I was in the seminary, it was one of the worst seminaries in the nation. 1983 is when our seminary was at its absolute worst; I started in ’85. It was getting slightly better. But these people were so arrogant.

I should point out when I was in the seminary if you were not homosexual or a radical feminist you were in big trouble. One of the professors actually was arrogant enough to stand up in front of the class and say “Martin Luther had the right idea, but he did it the wrong way – he left the Church. You can’t change the Church from the outside you can only change it from the inside, so we’re not leaving.”

So, these are people with an agenda. And what are the two groups? The two groups are: number one, a group of predatory homosexuals. They started their infiltration of the Church in 1924. You want to look it up?

There is a book called The Homosexual Network written in 1982, so this is 20 years before all of this stuff hit. A man named Enrique Rueda looked at all of this, studied all of their own publications (they were publishing every year the number of seminarians, priests and bishops they had), he traced it back to when they started, it began in 1924. And then five years later, in 1929, the communists began their infiltration of the priesthood and the two groups did exactly the same thing.

You want to read about the communist one? There is a woman by the name of Bella Dodd who was a deep-seated communist who got out of communism and converted to the Faith.

She testified before Congress in 1953 and in that testimony she said that “we got the instructions from Kremlin in 1929 as to what we were to do,” and she said “we were to take the best and the brightest, the guys who were smart enough to live a double life, good looking guys who were sociable so that they would be noticed by their bishop, and they would get promoted, they would become vocation directors, they would become bishops, they would become rectors of seminaries, they would have influential positions” and she said “we were successful beyond our wildest imagination.”

Dodd admitted, “I am personally responsible for more than 1,200 seminarians, priests and bishops.” And in 1953 mind you, again, now they started in 1929, in 1953 she said: “we already have four cardinals in the Vatican.” That was 1953, it’s way worse today.

You can also read a book that was written in 1932, Toward Soviet America, by William Foster. He ran for the president of the United States in 1924, 1928 and 1932 for the Communist Party USA. In his book, he said “we aren’t being able to get to the Americans because of three things, their morality, their family and their patriotism.” And he said: “so the way that we are going to attack these three things is through homosexuality and radical feminism.” They have been extraordinarily successful.

So, what are we dealing with? We are dealing with a group of predatory homosexuals who became priests not to serve the Church but to destroy her from within. In this, they are at every level.

There is an article that just came out from the National Catholic Register in which six priests from the Newark diocese were interviewed and they spoke about the homosexual network in their diocese. It’s in all of them, not just in Newark. They cover up for one another, they share their victims with one another, they do all kinds of horrible things.

And people ask, why don’t the good priests speak up? I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, he looked at me and he said: “I’ve known about this for 50 years and you’ve known about it for 40 years.” Yep, it’s about time it’s coming out.

So why didn’t somebody speak up? Number one if I would have stood here even a couple of years ago would you have believed what I am telling you? Number two, who were we supposed to go to? It was at every single level all the way to the top. You wanted to be ordained a priest, you couldn’t say a word. And even as a priest you can’t.

Again, these priests that were interviewed in the Catholic Register were interviewed only because of anonymity. It required anonymity because they were afraid of what was going to happen to them if the bishops and the people at the chancery found out who it was that spoke. These people have that much power. And so, we need to realize that.

So, again just to tell you a quick story about how bad things were. When I was in the seminary, they would put up their communist propaganda, I would rip it down and every time I would do that there would be an announcement “Whoever is taking the notices off the bulletin board…” When I would put up a notice that says we were going to pray the Rosary, that would get torn down immediately and there was never anything said.

Now having said that, thankfully the seminary today is way, way better than it was. These young guys are not having to deal with this trash, but that was the climate at the time.

You now understand why all that we get is fluff and stuff instead of good homilies? You understand why there are problems in the world that aren’t being addressed? That’s what it is about. Where is the doctrinal integrity? Where is the moral teaching? Someone that is not living it is not going to teach it.

Now there are, after this grand jury report came out a few days ago from Pennsylvania, there are several more states already talking about doing their own grand jury investigation. It will probably go all over the place, so I say that to simply say there is going to be more in the news coming up.

And as sad as this is we have to recognize that it is actually something very good. It is the purification of the Church and that is going to lead ultimately to her crucifixion. Not many are going to remain faithful, unfortunately. But when we look at it and say: “well if this is what is going on in the Church what are we supposed to do?” We are supposed to look at Jesus and say exactly what St. Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Jesus founded one Church and that one Church is the only institution in the world for the salvation of souls. It was founded for that purpose and it will remain to the end of the world for that purpose.

I have spoken with a number of people in the last week or two about what’s going on, prayerful, holy people and they have all concurred on the same point—Our Lady’s work has finally begun. Praise God!

Dear Attorney General:

In the wake of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on the Catholic clergy, many states are considering a similar probe of offending priests. They should do so, providing they also investigate the clergy of all other religions, private non-sectarian institutions, and public sector entities. Not to do so would be manifestly unjust and indefensible.

No attorney general or lawmaker would convene a grand jury on criminal behavior and then decide to focus exclusively on African American neighborhoods. They would have to include white-collar crimes, the kinds of acts that are mostly committed by affluent whites.

That is why it smacks of bigotry to single out the Catholic Church when investigating the sexual abuse of minors: We don’t own this problem, and indeed there is less of a problem today with this issue in the Catholic Church than in any institution in society, religious or secular.

For the last two years for which we have data, .005% of the Catholic clergy have had a credible accusation made against them. In the case of Pennsylvania, all the offending priests are either dead or have been thrown out of the priesthood. The same pattern exists elsewhere.

If you want to pursue molesters, you must begin by launching a grand jury probe of the public schools. And that means they must be explicitly mentioned in any bill that would suspend the statute of limitations; otherwise they will be exempted under the antiquated doctrine of sovereign immunity. There are many good reasons why the public schools command scrutiny.

Consider two investigations of sexual abuse in the public schools. Published nine years apart, by two separate media outlets, they found that when it comes to removing abusers from the teaching profession, little has changed.

In October 2007, the Associated Press (AP) published a series of articles, “Sexual misconduct plagues US schools,” based on its investigation. It found that between 2001-2005, 2,570 educators had their teaching credentials revoked because of sexual misconduct. It detailed 1,801 cases of abuse: more than 80 percent of the victims were students, and most of the offenders were public school teachers.

What happened to the molesters? “Most of the abuse never gets reported,” the AP said. Moreover, far too many of the offending educators were able to remain in the teaching profession. Often this was done by simply moving the “mobile molesters” to another school or district, a practice so widespread that it’s called “passing the trash.”

In December 2016, USA Today published its own series on abuse in the public schools. It found that “passing the trash” was still the norm: abusive teachers were able to move to new teaching jobs, or to other employment working with youth.

USA Today found the same resistance to change as reported by AP: (a) “Administrators have pursued quiet settlements rather than public discipline” (b) “Unions have resisted reforms,” and (c) “Lawmakers have ignored a federal mandate to add safeguards at the state level.”

USA Today also found the same reasons why change proved elusive: (a) It cited “examples in every state” of secrecy agreements, many of which were “cemented in legally binding contracts”; the agreements even committed school districts to be neutral or even to offer positive employment recommendations for educators who leave under abuse allegations (b) most states refused to abide by a 2015 federal law requiring states to ban such secrecy agreements (only five states—Connecticut, Texas, Missouri, Oregon and Pennsylvania—had such bans in place), and (c) incredibly, the federal government still “does not maintain a database of teachers who have sexually abused children.”

Regarding the last point, in 2009 Congress tried to rectify this by passing the Student Protection Act. It would have required the U.S. Department of Education to maintain a national database of educators terminated from a public or private school, or sanctioned by a state government, for sexual misconduct with a student. But, USA Today found, it “died amid fierce opposition from national teachers organizations, which had concerns about due process for teachers accused of misconduct.”

In conclusion, if a grand jury investigation of Catholic dioceses is warranted, then fairness dictates that the public schools be subjected to one as well. Indeed, they should be your first priority.

Sincerely,

William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
President

The outpouring of support and commendation for Bill Donohue in the aftermath of his debunking of the Pennsylvania grand jury report was overwhelming. He is especially delighted with the reaction of priests and bishops. This is what led us to pay for a Spanish version of his analysis.

Not surprisingly, there was also a wave of hateful and often obscene phone calls, emails, and tweets. Our policy is straightforward: We don’t reply to the crazies.

A few years ago when Donohue was talking to Alan Dershowitz about some issues—the famed lawyer has also been the target of much vitriol lately—Dershowitz said something to the effect that “Bill, I’m older than you. I’ve lived through McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, but never have I seen more hatred in America than today.”

Matters have only gotten worse. To cite one example, there was an article by Andrew Ferguson posted online by the Weekly Standard that reeked of hatred. Never once did he challenge anything Donohue said in his analysis of the grand jury report. All he did was rant.

“Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report Debunked.” That’s the fairly unremarkable title of Donohue’s article. But it sent Ferguson reeling—he accused Donohue of choosing a “grandiose and self-congratulatory title.”

Donohue’s first sentence also pushed Ferguson over the edge. “Unlike most commentators and reporters,” Donohue wrote, “I have read most of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.” Again, fairly pedestrian stuff. Here is what Ferguson said about that one sentence:

“This is what the philosophers call an ‘argument from authority,’ with a special twist: the authority Donahue [sic] cites is his own. While all you bedwetters were getting your panties in a twist, old Bill D was stayin’ up doin’ his homework.”

Ferguson’s piece continued to go downhill from there. Never once did he show that anything Donohue said was false. He couldn’t. Indeed, he marshaled not a single fact. His entire screed was an ad hominem attack on Donohue that was strewn with name calling, and void of any empirical evidence, data, logic, or reason.

It is impossible to argue with such folks. But the next time Ferguson flies off the handle he should at least learn to spell Donohue’s name right.

Scandal brings out the worst in some friends, as well as many foes. Some of those organizations associated with the “pro-Church” side are using news reports of clergy sexual abuse as a pretext to raise money (as if they are going to do something constructive with the cash), while a lot of the Church’s foes are going for the jugular. Both are exploitative, though only the latter are motivated by hate.

The letters-to-the editor page in many newspapers, as well as the op-ed page, are rife with anger visited on the Catholic Church by professed ex-Catholics and atheists. For example, Timothy Egan, a self-confessed “somewhat lapsed” Catholic, argues that the Church’s teachings on sexuality “have no connection to the words of Jesus.”

This is the kind of sophomoric comment we might expect from a high school dropout, not an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Perhaps the Jesuit-educated Egan missed last Sunday’s Gospel: Jesus condemned “unchastity,” “adultery,” and “licentiousness,” among other sins.

Garry Wills, another angry ex-Catholic, also fantasizes that Jesus did not advocate sexual reticence. In the pages of the New York Review of Books, the former seminarian accused the Church of promoting “sexual sillinesses” by counseling against such things as “gender choice” and “abortion.” Wills thinks it is not silly for a cross-dressing man to conclude that he is a woman, or for a pregnant woman to conclude that she is not carrying a human being.

“Are You an Atheist? How to Leave the Catholic Church.” That is the title of a piece by Andrew Hall on patheos.com. “Common Heathens” is a podcast that is reveling in news stories of old cases of clergy abuse, as is the “Naked Diner Podcast”; both are available on patheos.

Freedom From Religion Foundation, an extremist atheist entity, is begging the public for money so it can get Catholics to quit the Church. American Atheists and the Center for Inquiry have sent out “Action Alerts” targeting the Catholic Church. And Americans United for Separation of Church and State, founded as an expressly anti-Catholic organization, is beating the drums for more investigations of the Church.

This is what we have come to expect. Not one of these persons or media outlets has said a word about current cases of the sexual molestation of minors taking place in venues outside the Catholic Church. It is not the victims of sexual abuse who energize them; it is who the alleged victimizers are.

So why would they specifically go after the Catholic Church and give everyone else a pass? Egan and Wills provide the answer: What animates them is a deep-seated hostility to the teachings of the Church on matters sexual. Their goal is to deny the Biblical source of those teachings—even though the strictures are grounded in Scripture—so that Catholics will push for more relaxed rulings.

Ironically, it is libertinism—the exact opposite of the Church’s teachings—that created the scandal in the first place. But the truth does not matter to ideologues—winning does.

Bill Donohue

In the wake of the Pennsylvania grand jury investigation of the Catholic Church, many states are now weighing probes of their own. To cherry pick the Catholic Church is unjust: If the goal is to root out predators, then no institution, private or public, should be spared. But this is not the goal, which is why only the Church is under review.

Consider some of the leading players behind this “Let’s get the Church” effort. I know them well.

Let’s begin with the Pennsylvania grand jury investigation. What triggered it? A probe of wrongdoing allegedly committed by Brother Stephen Baker at Bishop McCort High School in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown in the 1990s. Guess who the lawyer was for the alleged victims? An attorney from Massachusetts, Mitchell Garabedian. How did he find his way to sue the Pennsylvania Catholic high school? He is no ordinary lawyer—he is an activist with a vendetta against the Catholic Church.

In 2006, Garabedian sued Father Charles Murphy of Boston for inappropriately touching a minor; the girl said the incident occurred 25 years earlier. On the eve of the trial, the woman dropped her suit. In 2010, Garabedian sued Father Murphy for allegedly fondling a man 40 years earlier. The accuser was deep in debt and his credibility was questioned even by his own family! After a six month probe by the archdiocese review board, the priest was exonerated.

When Father Murphy died in 2011, he was a broken man. Brian McGrory wrote about him in the Boston Globe saying that what Garabedian did was a “disgrace.” After reading the story, I called Garabedian to see if he had any regrets about pressing charges against Father Murphy. He went ballistic: He started screaming like a madman accusing the archdiocese of operating a “kangaroo court.” I asked him to calm down but he would not. Indeed, he made sweeping condemnations of all Boston priests.

A few weeks after my phone call, Garabedian spoke at a conference held by SNAP, a professional victims’ lobby that has been totally discredited. “This immoral entity,” he said, “the Catholic Church, should be defeated. We must stand up and defeat this evil.” This not the voice of reason—it is the voice of a hater.
SNAP is leading the way calling for grand jury investigations in all the states. Its leadership has been devastated but it is now trying to resurrect itself. Here is what I wrote about it last year:

• It accepts kickbacks from attorneys
• It is motivated by a pathological hatred of the Catholic Church
• It has no respect for the rights of accused priests
• It lies about priests
• It lies about survivors
• It lies to judges
• It lies to the media
• It seeks to intimidate and silence its critics
• It blindsides diocesan officials with leaked lawsuits
• It abuses donations
• It exploits survivors by offering unlicensed counseling services
• It spends practically nothing on servicing survivors
• It manipulates the media by staging events
• It retaliates against employees who question its operations.

These are not baseless charges. To read more about it see my article, “SNAP Implodes” on our website.

BishopAccountability is a website that is gleefully pushing grand jury investigations in the states. The media trust it as a reliable source. I don’t. Its director, Terry McKiernan, once accused Cardinal Timothy Dolan, behind closed doors at a SNAP meeting, of “keeping the lid on 55 names” of predator priests. That’s a lie. I have several times contacted McKiernan to give me the names, but he never does.

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke is also behind the grand jury investigations. She is not an impartial observer. She believes that priests should not have constitutional rights. In 2006, she said a priest should be removed from ministry on the basis of a single unsubstantiated accusation. “We understand that it is a violation of the priest’s due process—you’re innocent until proven guilty—but we’re talking about the most vulnerable people in our society and those are children.” She never said whether non-priests should also be denied their constitutional rights.

Rebecca Randles of Kansas City, Missouri is demanding a statewide investigation of Catholic priests. She is the same dishonest lawyer who sued me and lost in a trumped-up libel case against me. Her hatred of the Catholic Church is palpable.

Randles is best of buddies with Jeffrey Anderson, the most sue-happy lawyer in the nation. He has sued the Vatican several times and lost, and now he is leading the effort in Minnesota to launch a grand jury investigation of the dioceses. He once described himself as a “dedicated atheist.” His goal, he says, is to “sue the s*** out of them [the Catholic Church].”

These are the kinds of persons seeking grand jury investigations in the states. They are motivated by hate, not justice. It’s about time Catholics opened their eyes to this reality and not allow themselves to be played by these people.

When we read that a cardinal asked young seminarians to sleep with him, thus corrupting them before they became ordained, and when we read that a few Pennsylvania priests used sacred objects like the crucifix to molest their victims, we cannot plausibly say that this is simply the work of men gone bad. No, it is the work of the devil. What other source would provoke such monstrosities?

The Apocalypse (12:7-9) speaks of Satan as the one who “seduceth the whole world.” Jesus referred to Satan as the Father of Lies who perverted the truth. The Catholic Catechism says Satan’s “seductive voice” seeks to turn us against God.

If Satan tempted our Lord in the desert, he is surely capable of tempting the clergy, and sometimes winning. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen put it well when he said, “Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance.”

Demands for accountability matter, but without prayer, this crisis will not be resolved.