If you’re a Catholic priest, then you’re probably a pedophile.
This is the message the New York Times has been trying to communicate for the past month.
After the German weekly Der Spiegel ran a well-publicized account of sex abuse in a Berlin Jesuit high school in the 1980s, some journalists on the other side of the Atlantic thought they, too, would jump on the pedophile-priest train and criticize the Church and the pope.
Don’t get me wrong, the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland and the United States did a terrible job of handling these scandals, and the Irish bishops themselves are responsible for the anti-clericalism prevalent in Ireland today.
However, the Times and other media outlets have completely distorted reality.
Many media critics of the Church blamed celibacy for these scandals. If abolishing celibacy will end pedophilia, then we should ban marriage. After all, the research of Philip Jenkins plainly shows that in the U.S., most pedophiles are not priests but married, middle-aged men.
Meanwhile, a report prepared in 2004 for the U.S. Department of Education by Carol Shakeshaft reveals that the rate of pedophilia among teachers in public schools is 100 times greater than among Catholic priests.
Throughout March, the New York Times’ coverage of these scandals ranked a close second behind the daily weather report. Is there really nothing interesting in the world other than corrupt German priests who abused altar boys three decades ago?
Finally, the Times and other like-minded news outlets do everything to lay the blame on Pope Benedict XVI. For example, they blame him for abuse that happened in Wisconsin in the 1960s. What?
Canisius Kolleg, the elite Berlin high school recently accused of abuse, is run by Jesuits. If any senior religious authority should be blamed, it should not be the cardinal from Munich but the Jesuit provincial.
And this is the most tasteless part of this media spectacle. Pope Benedict XVI should be praised for his handling of the whole affair.
His recent letter to the faithful of Ireland not only harshly condemns the perverted priests, but the bishops who protected them. For instance, he writes that many Irish are so disgusted by the affair that they may never want to enter a church again.
Benedict has also forced Irish bishops who failed to respond to the scandals to resign.
Pedophilia is a problem in the Church, as it is in every other human institution. However, the way Der Spiegel, The New York Times and other like-minded media outlets have portrayed the problem recently shows a profound ignorance of the problem and in the place of journalistic objectivity, anti-papal, anti-Catholic ideology.