CBS Lies About the Catholic Church

CBS Evening News lied about the Catholic Church last night:

For decades, priests in this country abused children in parish after parish while their superiors covered it all up. Now it turns out the orders for this cover up were written in Rome at the highest levels of the Vatican....

CWNews already has a response today:

A CBS network news report, claiming that the Holy See orchestrated a cover-up of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, is based on a gross misinterpretation of a 1962 Vatican document.

In a sensationalist report aired on August 6, CBS Evening News claimed to have discovered a secret document proving that the Vatican had approved -- and even demanded -- a longstanding policy of covering up clerics' sexual misdeeds.

The document cited by CBS does nothing of the sort....

See The Bias in Mainstream Media.

This case, by the way, is reminiscent of how the New York Post lied about Pope John Paul II back in December: New York Post Defames Pope John Paul II.

And I'm telling you what both cases are really about: lawyers desperate to find some way — any way! — to sue the Pope and/or the Vatican over the pervert-priest situation. Both of these lying "news" stories were instigated by lawyers.

P.S. The Catholic League has put out a news release:

.... First, the document did not apply to sexual misconduct — it applied only to sexual solicitation. Second, the only venue the document addressed was the confessional. In other words, it was meant to deal only with cases of sexual solicitation by a priest of a penitent in the confessional. Third, because the policy was specifically aimed at protecting the secrecy of the confessional, it called for an ecclesiastical response: civil authorities were not to be notified because it involved a sacrament of the Catholic Church, not a crime of the state. Fourth, if a priest were found guilty, he could be thrown out of the priesthood. Fifth, if the penitent were to tell someone what happened (perhaps another priest), he or she had 30 days to report the incident to the bishop or face excommunication. If anything, this proves how utterly serious the Vatican was about such an offense — it threatened to punish the penitent for not turning in the guilty priest. Sixth, the 1962 document was superseded by the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the norms established in 2001 for dealing with serious crimes involving the sacraments....

I would like to point out, again, that the document in question was merely particular legislation regarding obligations that had been set down as long ago as 1917.

[Follow-up: More On That 1962 "Smoking Gun".]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 08/07/03 01:49:09 PM
Categorized as Most Notable & Religious.