Out For Blood: MPR and the Archdiocese

“A journalist is a person who is writing out of their depth, on a deadline, for money. Why would you trust a thing they say?” – Dr. Thomas D’Andrea
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” – Winston Churchill

Since September 23rd, with the publication of a story about Fr. Curtis Wehmeyer’s sexual abuse of two boys, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) has been on a crusade. What began in April with the resignation of Jennifer Haselberger from her job as the top canonical lawyer of the Archdiocese, continued through the breaking of the Wehmeyer story, the resignation of Vicar General Fr. Laird, accusations against Rev. James Shelley has all been catalogue and commentated on by the public radio station. Creating a centralized page for all the stories relating to the Archdiocese, MPR has been publishing a new story at least every other day, with a team of six reporters producing them.

“Twin Cities Roman Catholic Church leaders have been under fire over their handling of the Shelley case and another involving the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer.” says one MPR report. These two revelations are the gas on which Minnesota Public Radio has been running their coverage. They suggests “conspiracy,” “smoke and mirrors,” corruption going all the way up to the Archbishop.

The public radio station’s coverage is nothing short of unprecedented. Though its number of articles is increasing daily, they always refer back to the cases of Fr. Wehmeyer and Rev. Shelley. These two priests have somehow merited the kind of coverage usually reserved for a presidential election. As I will show below, the facts of the case do not support the claims MPR is making with them. MPR has in the past has misreported stories in order to make them more appealing. They continually make reference to a supposed support group for victims of clergy abuse, though this group has a dubious and spotted record itself. Finally, a prominent Minnesota lawyer, with a lot of money to be made, might be using both MPR and the support group to fuel his lucrative legal practice. We’ll start at the beginning.

Please note: I am not here with the purpose of proving the innocence of any one member of the Archdiocese. My suspicions on the amount of corruption or lack-thereof are beyond the possibility of substantiating with evidence. What is not beyond my scope and what is compelled by the evidence, is a suspicion and perhaps a condemnation of the reporters at MPR and other prominent figures currently hounding the Archdiocese. What I present here is an investigation of the investigators. This is a judgement against those who are judging. It is, to borrow a phrase Juvenal, a watching of the watchmen.

SNAP: Victim’s Group?

David Clohessy was out in front the the Chancery of the Archdiocese on Thursday October 10th. Clohessy is the Executive Direct of SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests). SNAP has been given alot of positive publicity by MPR in their coverage of the Archdiocese. They are the ‘Victims Group’ in this story: ‘Victims group dismisses archdiocese review of clergy sexual abuse cases as ‘nothing but a smokescreen’.

However, there is ample reason to question the groups credibility and reason to ask why MPR considers them a trustworthy source. David Clohessy was deposed on January 2nd, 2012. During that deposition he revealed that SNAP is almost all hype with no substance.

Source: David Clohessy Deposition

A report from Bill Donohue helps put this deposition into perspective. Clohessy was ordered to be deposed by a Missouri judge following his involvement in cases of priestly sexual abuse. He asked to release internal documents (something MPR has been pushing the Archdiocese to do) but resisted. Once on the stand, he refused to answer many questions, taking refuge in a Missouri law protecting rape crisis centers. When asked directly about SNAP being a rape crisis center, Clohessy began to crumble:

Question: Did you identify yourself as a rape crisis center?

Clohessy: I don’t know. (pg. 87)

Question: Do you have any formal education or training with regard to rape crisis counseling?

Clohessy: I do not. (pg. 19)

Question: Does SNAP have any licensed counselors in the State of Missouri?

Clohessy: We are a-as I said at the beginning, we’re a self-help group. We are not-we don’t hold ourselves out to be formal licensed counselors. (pg. 19-20)

Question: You mentioned that what, publicized proven sex offenders; was that right?

Clohessy: Proven, admitted and credibly accused.

Question: How do you define the word “credibly accused?”

Clohessy: You know, there are all kids of criteria. (pg. 110)

Question: Has SNAP to your knowledge ever issued a press release that contained false information?

Clohessy: Sure. (pg. 39)

The Director of SNAP, an organization which has accused the Archdiocese of “putting up a smokescreen”, admitted that he is aware of putting out false information to the press. How then can they be a credible source for MPR?

The Haselberger we never hear from.

Perhaps a more credible source for MPR is Jennifer Haselberger, the former Chancellor for Canonical Affairs. She is the “whistleblower” in this story. Alongside her leaked documents, MPR frequently quotes her reason for resigning: “I had come to the conclusion that it had become impossible for me to continue in that position given my personal ethics, religious convictions and sense of integrity.” They also quote her demands on the Archbishop: “I asked then, as I ask now, that Archbishop Neinstedt take his responsibilities towards the protection of the young and the vulnerable seriously.” But MPR has never quoted the following which appeared in Haselberger’s statement of October 5th:

I have the utmost respect for and confidence in the vast majority of priests serving in this Archdiocese, and I was honored to work on behalf of them, the men and women religious, and the lay faithful of this local church.

According to CatholicHierarchy.org, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul had 444 total priest in 2012. MPR has been covering the story of Fr. Wehmeyer and Rev. Shelley. The former is in jail, that latter has admitted to downloading adult pornography. That means that MPR is refusing to report on the more than 99% of priest in the Archdiocese who are serving their parishes in a loving way worthy of Christ. Perhaps those priests in the diocese who are having their vocation smeared by the recent (and exclusively negative) coverage ought to march down the streets of St. Paul chanting: “We Are the 99%” We’ll call it Occupy Cedar Street.

These priest are the “vast majority” Haselberger is speaking of. But MPR didn’t quote her because they already had another source, which condemned the whole of the Archdiocese:

Sara Fleetham, faith formation coordinator for the Guardian Angels Catholic Church in Oakdale, was less generous.

“The system is broken,” Fleetham said. “It’s completely broken and it doesn’t work and something has to be done.”

Fleetham said she has deep distrust of the archdiocese.

“It feels as if we, as in church workers, are getting kicked in the face repeatedly because this is so wrong on so many levels, because it’s not getting fixed,” Fleetham said.

Fleetham’s quotation came in the same story as the spokesperson for SNAP. Someone ought to comfort Fleetham with the fact that 99% of priest in the Archdiocese are upstanding men of God, serving their parishioners day in and day out.

One reporter has distorted facts before.

Sadly, this is not the first time MPR has been selective in their sourcing of a story. During their coverage of the Marriage Amendment, Sasha Aslanian didn’t just omit unappealing source material, she went further and fabricated the premise of an entire story.

MPR ran their series in cooperation with KARE 11 news. They traveled across the state to see how debate over the marriage amendment was taking shape in different communities. I first heard about the coverage when Concordia student Rebeeca Julius called me to ask if I wanted to be on the radio. Rebecca and I had gotten acquainted after a friend sent me her post on the website ‘Exposing the ELCA’. As the one conservative opinion columnist at the campus newspaper of Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM), I had published a story in opposition to so-called ‘gay marriage’. Julius was planning a protest against Pride Week at Concordia college. When we met, I was thinking that we could team up in support of the proposed marriage amendment to define marriage in the state constitution as between one man and one woman.

Source: Rebecca Julius’s Blog Post about ‘Sin is Sin’ t-shirts.

But I soon found out that Julius had different motivations than I did. Where I was interested in a reason oriented defense of marriage aimed at passing the marriage amendment, Rebecca was concerned about a point of moral theology within the Lutheran Church. She was never concerned about the marriage amendment, as her original post makes clear:

I don’t want to be mistaken for a supporter just because I am in an environment where the majority supports this sin. So this year, when my ELCA college puts on its pride week – covering the campus in rainbow flags, putting on presentations and telling stories celebrating one’s “coming out,” and giving no acknowledgement to the truth of my God’s true Word, I want to do more than refuse to participate. I don’t want to hate, I want to make a stand.

I’ve designed a t-shirt (http://www.customink.com/lab?cid=xak0-000p-trkk#shared) that I plan to wear during my college’s “Pride Week” in early October – black for sin and opposite of all the rainbow “love is love” t-shirts the straight-gay alliance on campus will be handing out.

Those shirts become a lightning rod for the press and Aslanian contacted her for part of their series on the marriage amendment, and asked if Julius had any other friends who would be willing to sit down and talk…that was when my phone rang.

Aslanian was very pleasant She talked about the project and how they wanted to report on how the different cities were handling the marriage amendment. At that point Rebecca pointed out that she was making a point about theology and that Christianity cannot include open support of homosexual acts. I jumped in (rather selfishly) to say that at MSUM the debate was centered around the marriage amendment, since my column was a response to a letter to the editor urging students to “vote no.” Aslanian took all this in stride and commenced with the interviews.

We were interviewed separately. In this Kare 11 coverage, you can see me at the thirty second mark. After Rebecca had finished, I talked with Aslanian about the different rational justifications for the conjugal view of marriage. I explained that children do better with a mother and a father (as this recent study suggests, along with others). She replied that she had just been to Iowa and everything there seemed fine. I encouraged her to look at the social science coming out of places in Europe where SSM had been the norm for a while. After that we traded pleasantries about the Catholic Church. She told me she had a friend who was becoming a Jesuit priest, and “I’m so proud of him.” She gave me her card and told me when to expect the interview to air.

She never aired our discussion. What she did air and publish was that Julius was motivated by the marriage amendment. Her story was titled “‘Love is Love’ vs. ‘Sin is Sin’ in Moorhead marriage amendment debate.” She framed the whole of the Moorhead story around t-shirts that were making a theological point. Nowhere in Rebecca’s statement of intent did the Minnesota marriage amendment surface. She didn’t care about that because she was living in North Dakota. That didn’t stop Aslanian, who took the campus debate to be solely about the November vote, as if there was no other reason to debate the relationship of homosexuality and Christianity. She used Julius’s address as the punchline for her article:

Although Julius has made her views known, when it comes to the marriage amendment, the slogan on her T-shirt will have to do. Most of her fellow students have something Julius doesn’t — a Minnesota address.

Because Julius lives in Fargo, N.D., she won’t be able to vote on it.

Of course she won’t be able to vote on it. She never wanted to.

So what does Aslanian’s shoddy reporting have to do with the recent rash of MPR stories targeting the Archdiocese? Aslanian is listed as a contributor to at least four of them as of this writing.

If I wrote for MPR, Aslanian’s distortion of the facts to suit her story would be sufficient evidence to call all the stories she touches a sham. But I don’t write for MPR and all Aslanian’s story shows is that she has in the past distorted facts. She may be doing that in her capacity as a contributor to the coverage of the Archdiocese, but I cannot prove that.

Sexual Abuse: The Actual Statistics.

But there is something else MPR has forgotten to report on. The Catholic Church as a whole has fewer sexual assaults than public schools. A study which was prepared for the United States Department of Education by the Policy and Program Studies Service took a synthesis of existing literature and studies to discover as accurately as possible the prevalence of sexual abuse in public schools. One of their findings:

Because of its carefully drawn sample and survey methodology, the AAUW report that nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career presents the most accurate data available at this time.

Source: Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature

Timothy Cardianal Dolan made a similar point in 2011 when he was confronted by a man at a Denver airport about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. From this report:

Dolan, in the post, said he responded by telling the stranger that the “rate of sexual abuse among public school teachers is 10 times higher than that of priests.” When asked where the statistics Dolan cited were from, a spokeswoman for the New York Archdiocese cited a NYS Special Commissioner of Investigation report that substantiated 78 abuse cases by teachers in 2009, and 73 such cases last year. Another 2009 study from John Jay on incidence of priest sexual abuse was also cited.

Source: John Jay Study

It may be objected that there have been no news stories about sexual abuse in schools. That is precisely the point and the problem.

Specialist John Spebbins, 20 years ago, was pinned down under heavy enemy fire in an event know as ‘Black Hawk Down’. For his heroism on that day, he received the Silver Star. Yet, when the film based on the events was released, the character based on him was marked with a different name. This is because Stebbins is currently serving a 30-year jail term for child molestation. Even heros make mistakes. Stebbins, the rate of sexual abuse among public school children and even the shocking prevalence of pornography in our culture all point to an obvious but unreported fact:

Sexual abuse is not just a Catholic problem…it is a human problem.

Belief in the Nicene Creed and in the Real Presence is not an indicator that a person is more likely to have a disordered sexuality, precisely the opposite is true.

Is Secularism the Answer?

A secular worldview doesn’t provide a reason to support the dignity of children, whereas a religious worldview does. Secular superstar Richard Dawkins has written numerous times about how “mild pedophillia” is not a problem. He writes of being sexually molested by a school master as a boy. Further, when pressed on the issue during a debate which aired on Al-Jezerra, Dawkins insisted that being told about the existence of hell and being told that someone who didn’t have the true faith would go there “is worse than having a priest put his hand (down your pants).” This video and the other numerous comments can all be found in a report by The Blaze.

In this case Dawkins does have a point. It is very difficult in a godless universe to assert dignity. This is not to say that all secular people don’t think pedophillia is a big deal. I have secular friends who absolutely loath sexual abuse, but as I tell them, they don’t have a good argument for what they believe. Most people, unconsciously or not, adopt a view that human sexuality is in some way sacred. That sacredness is much easier to establish philosophically if God has created mankind in his image than if we are all just the by product of chance and our sexual organs are only there to continue the spread of our genes. The Catholic Church, in her teachings and in her saints, provides a strong witness to the dignity of human sexuality. Blessed John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, while presenting a positive vision of sexuality also provides reasons why abuse of human sexuality is a grave sin.

Concluding Remarks

In other words, MPR and all other critics of clerical abuse have to adopt the Catholic Church’s view of human sexuality in order to justify the volume with which they decry Fr. Wehmeyer, Rev. Shelley and the Archdiocese. But MPR has given evidence that they would throw the baby out with the bath water. They haven’t investigated the legitimacy of their sources but rather cite SNAP as being reputable. They didn’t quote Haselberger’s affirmation of the “vast majority of priests” in the Archdiocese. They haven’t acknowledged that sexual abuse is a problem in other sectors of the nation and at least one of their reporters has fudged information in the past to make her story more appealing. But I am left with one big question. MPR is supported by listener donations. My family used to be members. It takes a lot of money to run the type of reporting schedule they have been. Where are they getting the support? I have my suspicions, which we will come to tomorrow.