“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Fifty Years after Watergate Comes the January 6 Committee
A news commentator described the January 6 Committee hearings as the most fascinating since Watergate, but I have yet to find anyone who has watched any of them.
A news commentator described the January 6 Committee hearings as the most fascinating since Watergate, but I have yet to find anyone who has watched any of them.
July 20, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Many of our readers know that I was asked awhile back to serve as a Registered Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. Besides its slightly ego-inflating title, the position actually means very little and comes with no perks at all — not even a discount on my annual subscription. The voluntary position requires only my commitment to participate in regular surveys about the news, about how it is gathered, reported and delivered, about marketing, and about various WSJ features. As a result I regularly publish commentary on news and opinion at WSJ.com.
I suspect that this led to a more surprising invitation. A few months ago I was asked to participate as a journalist and agree to an interview for the Pew Research Center 2022 Survey of Journalists. I have just received the full report of this survey on the state of journalism and the news industry in America. The Report has surprising results — the most important of which is a very wide disconnect between the perceptions of journalists and those of the public about the news. Here is a summary:
The Pew Research Center 2022 Survey of Journalists
“Washington, D.C. (June 14, 2022) — From the economic upheaval of the digital age to the rise of political polarization and the Covid-19 pandemic, journalism in America has been in a state of turmoil for decades. In this major new study, The Pew Research Center shares the perspective of journalists about the news industry they work in and their relationship with the public they serve.
“While journalists recognize challenges facing their industry, the Center’s survey of nearly 12,000 U.S. journalists finds that they express a high degree of satisfaction in their jobs and 77% say they would pursue a career in journalism again.
“At the same time, when asked to describe their industry in a single word, 72% used a word with negative connotations. The most common are words that relate to “struggling” or “chaos.” Specific areas of concern for journalists were widespread. They include disinformation, freedom of the press, and partisan coverage of the news. Here are some key findings of the Report:
Just 14% of journalists surveyed think the U.S public has a great deal or fair amount of trust in the news media.
About seven out of ten journalists (71%) say made-up news and information is a big problem for the country. This was significantly higher than the 50% of the adult public that said the same thing.
In a separate survey, 82% of the American public says that journalists should keep their views out of whatever they are reporting on. Among journalists, only 55% agree while 42% report that they feel unable to keep their own views out of their reporting.
Over half (55%) of journalists say that in reporting the news every side does not deserve to have equal coverage while only 44% said equal coverage of the news is a goal.
Journalists press far more concern than the public about politically like-minded people clustering around the same news outlets. 75% of journalists report this as a major concern while only 39% of the general public shares the same concern.
Two thirds of journalists surveyed say that social media has a negative impact on the state of journalism while only 18% say it has a positive impact.
The survey results reveal that journalists recognize that the public views their work with deep skepticism. When asked what one word they think the public would use to describe the news, the majority of journalists answered with “inaccurate, untrustworthy, biased, or partisan.”
Journalists and the public stand far apart on how well they think news outlets perform their key functions:
67% of journalists report that the quality of their coverage of important news is very good or good compared to only 41% of the public.
65% of journalists say they report the news accurately compared to only 29% of the public.
52% of journalists report that they fulfill their role as a watchdog of government. Only 29% of the public agrees.
43% of journalists say that they manage or correct misinformation in their reporting. Only 25% of the public agrees, and 51% of the public says that journalists do a poor job at correcting misinformation.”
The Journalist / Public Disconnect
Though not a part of this survey, other media surveys report that the only U.S. institution with less public trust than journalism is Congress. Perhaps nowhere is this journalist/public disconnect in perception more evident that in the work of the Congressional task force known as the “January 6 Committee.” It has been conducting hearings about the events of January 6, 2021 and the chaotic transition of power at the U.S. Capitol. After the Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas and the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, it seems that far fewer people have been paying attention to the January 6 Committee hearings.
I was interested at first, and even began to follow the hearings. Then I heard one of the Committee members or an associate complain that the Uvalde, Texas tragedy was “a distraction” that took public attention from the partisan hearings. Like many Americans, I lost interest after that.
I have long admired and respected Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, and I frequently publish commentary on her column in the WSJ Weekend Edition. However, I suspect that she was misreading the nation in one aspect of her June 25, 2022 column entitled, “Trump and Biden Both Face Rejection.” She attached to the January 6 hearings an awareness and importance to the collective consciousness of America that just doesn’t seem to be there. She did this, as her excerpts below attest, by drawing a comparison with the 1972 media coverage of the Watergate scandal. Ms. Noonan wrote:
“There has been criticism that the 1/6 committee isn’t the Watergate hearings, which the entire country watched and which in the end turned public opinion. Totally true. We had an entire country that watched things together once. But the Watergate story was often hard to piece together in those hearings. Not so here.
“The 1/6 committee has been knocked for hiring television producers, but that’s part of why it is yielding a coherent story. They made it tight, not cheap. And after they aired, the Watergate hearings disappeared because there was no internet. The 1/6 hearings will be telling their story forever — on C-Span and YouTube … and they will be heavily viewed.”
With all due respect to Peggy Noonan, I could not disagree more. The Watergate hearings of 1973 were iconic. They left a lasting impression on the American political psyche. The public was riveted to them. The hearings resulted in the production of a major motion picture — All the President’s Men — which won numerous Academy Awards and still enthralls 50 years later. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, remain household names 50 years later as icons of journalistic pursuit and integrity. No one in today’s news media has a similar reputation.
I was 19 years old when the Watergate burglary was reported at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC on June 17, 1972. I was 20 when the Watergate Congressional hearings took place and led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Along with the entire nation, I was riveted to the unfolding story and its fascinating cast of characters.
America was a different nation in 1972, and it was a different time. There was no Internet, no Facebook, no Google. The most memorable newsman in America was Walter Cronkite. As Washington correspondent for CBS Evening News, he established a reputation as a trust, paternal figure. As a result, his reports on the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair greatly influenced public opinion. Today, no one in the news media evokes a similar reputation for trust that comes even close. I cannot say that the news media is better off for having generated no one of similar character and prestige over the last half century.
These Are Not Your Father’s Watergate Hearings!
I admit that I write from a peculiar vantage point. I cannot jump on the internet to take the pulse of the nation, but I am in touch with a lot of people who speak from varying points of view. So over a recent week, I informally polled some of them about their awareness of the January 6 Committee Hearings. This is by no means a scientific survey, but here is a sampling of the underwhelming results from some honest observers. I have not excluded any results that spoke from a contrary point of view:
Law enforcement officer #1 : “I know the hearings are going on, but they are totally one-sided. When I heard that Trump wanted to send troops to stop the Capitol riots but Nancy Pelosi declined, I stopped watching. No one I know watches any of this.”
Law enforcement officer #2 : “I haven’t watched. If they gave equal time to the Joe and Hunter Biden scandal, I might watch.”
Parish priest : “I have not seen the hearings, and none of my parishioners ever even mention them. There are way more important things going on like the reversal of Roe v. Wade.”
High school teacher #1 : “The hearings came as school was ending so I watched a little. I just don’t trust MSNBC which seems to be the main network covering (or exploting) the story.”
High school teacher #2 : “I got pretty disgusted when I heard one of the Committee members complain that the tragedy at Uvalde was taking attention away from Jan. 6 hearings so I lost interest.”
High school teacher #3 : “I don’t follow the hearings after Nancy Pelosi declined to allow the participation of two prominent Republican Committee members. It is a one-sided political panel.”
Retired obstetrics nurse : “After the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, I don’t think anyone even knew these hearings were still going on.”
Federal Government Employee #1 : “I followed a little at first, but it seems totally one-sided. They just want to ‘get Trump’ while the country is moving on.”
Federal Government Employee #2 : “I haven’t watched the hearings, but I hope they can get Trump! Can’t stand him!”
Ten random prisoners: “Hearings? What hearings?”
The Rise and Fall of the News Media
In 1972, The Washington Post sent two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to cover the story of a break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Office Complex. The Post editors made a decision early on to allow that story to go where the facts led. As a result, Peggy Noonan was right. The whole country watched entranced as the Nixon Administration dissolved before our very eyes.
Fifty years later, Washington political scandal has not changed at all. What has changed is the news media. The Washington Post is now arguing in its editorials that George Washington University must change its name because of its namesake’s association with slavery 300 years ago. The Post is conveniently not applying the same argument to its own name. As historian, Barbara Tuchman wrote in The March of Folly, “There is nothing more unjust than to judge men of the past with the ideas of the present.”
The Washington Post and other news outlets today join the partisan Congressional framers of the January 6 Committee hearings to exaggerate public interest or decry the lack thereof. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins demonstrated journalistic courage in covering anew a story that most in the news media and the Democratic side of Congress helped to actively suppress.
In “Hunter and the Press: Who’s the Real Degenerate?” (WSJ July 2, 2022) Holman Jenkins revealed a series of evolving Washington Post headlines about the now notorious Hunter Biden laptop in late 2020. The Washington Post coverage leaves no doubt that the paper was actively suppressing that story in order to help facilitate a desired election outcome without regard to the damage it was doing to journalism, not to mention democracy. There was no hint of The Washington Post of the Watergate era. In the Hunter Biden story, The Post showed no consideration at all to its Watergate-era determination to “let the story go to where the facts take it.”
In this age of partisan spycraft and woke politics, the news media that was once the underpinning of democracy is now in a state of determined self-destruction. Most in the news media have chosen a partisan political side to the detriment of journalism, and perhaps the nation itself.
I hope, with the small voice given to me, to remain a purveyor of truth, and let the story go where the facts take it. Please do tell me anytime you think I might be screwing this up!
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading. Please continue to take the measure of the news media with these related posts:
Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell
Hitler’s Post, Nazi Crimes and The New York Times
The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe
From Hong Kong to America Freedom Is under Siege
Is America ready to surrender free speech and other civil rights? A daring escape from Hong Kong and its encroaching Communist Chinese regime should raise alarms.
Is America ready to surrender free speech and other civil rights? A daring escape from Hong Kong and its encroaching Communist Chinese regime should raise alarms.
Just a few weeks before America shuddered in abhorrence over a post-election mob raid at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, something remarkable unfolded in Hong Kong. Two young Danes — Thomas Rohden, age 25, and Anders Storgaard, age 26 — choreographed a young democracy activist’s escape from Hong Kong. It’s a story worthy of a John le Carré novel. The story was first written in The Wall Street Journal as “A Hong Kong Dissident’s Daring Escape” (Jan. 13, 2021) by Editorial Page writer Jillian Kay Melchior, and it’s fascinating.
The two young Danes, in opposite political parties, belong to a group called the Danish China Critical Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness among Danish citizens about human rights abuses in Communist China. After meeting with some Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in Copenhagen last year, they remained in contact with Mr. Ted Rui, age 38, a Hong Kong legislator who has openly dared to protest legislation that threatens free expression for Hong Kong citizens.
Last summer, China imposed a new law on Hong Kong citizens that outlaws any form of dissent. Mr. Hui’s protests resulted in an arrest for which he was out on bail awaiting prosecution. He had begun to notice that he and some of his family were being followed since the arrest. Other members of the Hong Kong freedom movement have been assaulted. Though Mr. Rui had not yet been charged under China’s new dissent law, he knew that its penalty is life in prison.
A little history: Hong Kong island and the Kowloon Peninsula were ceded by China to become a British dependency in 1841 and 1860 respectively. Over the next 150 years, Hong Kong became a global financial center and one of the world’s largest trading ports.
An agreement signed by the British and Chinese governments in 1984 provided for China to resume sovereignty over Kong Kong and the region in 1997. The agreement was that Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region with its laws guaranteeing its citizens rights for a period of fifty years. The “One State - Two Systems” agreement remained in place until Beijing began to crack down on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in recent years. The massive pro-democracy protests were sparked by a bill introduced in the Hong Kong legislature giving Beijing arrest and extradition authority in Hong Kong.
After Ted Hui was released on bail, Thomas Rohden and Anders Storgaard concocted a bold plan to host a fake climate change conference in Copenhagen and invite Mr. Hui in an effort to get him and his family to safety. Fearing that his telephone might be monitored, they never told him that the planned conference was not real when they invited him. He had already been considering finding a way to go into exile when the invitation came.
Postponing the exile plan, he told the Danes that Hong Kong courts wanted to review the climate change conference before Mr. Hui could accept the invitation to Copenhagen. The Danes put something together in haste while Mr. Hui booked flights for his wife and two children to go to London. Ted Hui arrived in Copenhagen ready to address climate change without ever even suspecting that the conference was a ruse. He was relieved beyond words that he and his family had escaped Chinese communist tyranny.
Beijing and Hong Kong were not amused. Beijing has asserted that its anti-dissent laws also apply to citizens of other countries who conspire to free Chinese residents. Rohden and Storgaard now must avoid travel to or through any country that has an extradition agreement with Beijing. The most important part of this story is Ted Hui’s reaction to his freedom:
“The message I want to take for the Danish people is not to take freedom for granted. Freedom is very fragile. It can go away in months or weeks. The hand of tyranny can extend very quickly, and can influence the world.”
The Rise of Socialism
The United States has just witnessed firsthand the need for a warning like Ted Hui’s, formerly of Hong Kong, that “freedom is very fragile.” Exactly as he has warned, “it can go away in months or weeks.” In the month since the mob attack at the U.S. Capitol, forces in this nation have shamed Americans using progressive ideology and the “cancel culture” pandemic to accept without dissent the open suppression of three foundational civil liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.
After years of denials by Facebook and Twitter that the platforms suppress conservative points of view, that suppression is now in the open and inflicted without apology. As information technology, these venues have also suppressed freedom of the press. Here is the example that comes most readily to mind: In October, 2020, the New York Post, this nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, covered on its Front Page a potentially explosive story that has since emerged as both factual and with hard evidence and witnesses that back it up. That story was about the business practices of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, blocked the story from exposure through social media. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did so as well. The rest of the mainstream media, taking their marching orders from Twitter and Facebook, suppressed the story as fraudulent. It was not. The obvious reason for the suppression was the fact that the story emerged a month before an election, but it had little to do with the election. The business practice that was exposed in the story was an allegation that Hunter Biden had received millions in profit from foreign entities through “influence peddling” by selling access to his father during the administration of President Obama.
It was and is an ugly story involving three of the most politically contentious foreign enterprises now faced by President Biden’s administration: China, Russia, and the Ukraine.
My purpose in writing of this is not to denigrate the current president, nor is it to determine truth and falsehood. That is for the Justice Department to do. It turns out that the FBI has been investigating Hunter Biden for many months, and that investigation now includes allegations of multi-million dollar deals within China while his father was vice president. That said, Hunter Biden deserves, and should have, the full spectrum of due process rights afforded to him, but the suppression of news coverage is not one of those rights.
The arrogance of some in the mainstream media being what it is, admissions of culpability are as rare as the unnuanced truth. The story remains suppressed by most of the mainstream news media, but that is changing as the DOJ investigation can no longer be ignored or covered up. Under public pressure, Facebook and Twitter have finally stopped removing the story or suspending the accounts of those sharing it. U.S. foreign policy has been critical of the Chinese Communist government for its suppression of news, but I have been hard pressed to see the difference.
That is the real harm caused by media suppression of this story. Repressive regimes that balk at America’s claim of having a free press all know of it. The mob that attacked Washington all knew of it, and it lent fuel to their insistence that the election was not a free and fair election. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff both knew about it even as they dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.”
The greatest harm has been to President Biden himself. This story will not go away. The fact of its pre-election suppression will cause it to expand and fester. It will haunt his term in office for the next year as he is drawn further into it. Freedom of the press has been abdicated in favor of a deeply partisan bias about the news we should be allowed to see and hear. The institution in our society that should act as a bipartisan government oversight for and by the people has openly betrayed that role. Freedom itself will suffer for it. So will we all.
The Assault on Freedom of Speech
The mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 — purportedly Trump supporters all — inflicted far more damage on Donald Trump and his presidency than any of his political enemies could accomplish. This mob attack at the heart of democracy was not an example of freedom of expression, but it is one of the core rights of our democracy —freedom of speech — that now suffers for it. And, again, so will we all.
Back in 2016, I wrote a pre-election post entitled, “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” That seems almost a reserved and innocent time when compared with the unfathomable chasm between left and right that the four years hence have wrought. I had no frame of reference then for just how relatively fair Mrs. Clinton was being when she relegated a mere half of Trump voters to “a basket of deplorables.” There is now a highly charged and partisan effort to lump all 74 million Trump voters into that basket, keep them there, and silence them.
Blacklists are now emerging among publishers. Simon & Schuster just cancelled a forthcoming book by Senator Josh Hawley entitled, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Remember Mike Lindell? He’s the contagiously happy guy who sells pillows and “Dream Sheets” on TV. Exposed now as a Trump campaign donor, several large U.S. retail outlets have ordered his products pulled from their shelves. I could fill pages with similar examples of political suppression.
It is a credit to Hillary Clinton that she only called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. The other half, she said with candid honesty, “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them; nobody worries about what happens to their lives and futures ... Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
President Biden should call upon Democrats to end this blood lust for Republicans who cannot in conscience embrace cancel culture, identity politics, and a partisan disregard for the most inherent civil right of all, the right to life. Our newly elected president did not get off to a good start when he called for unity and healing with the insistence that “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” It seems clearly to me right now to be rather the other way around.
Catholics Still in the Basket of Deplorables
There have been some unfortunate — scandalous is a better word — examples of the suppression of free speech even among Catholic leaders since the mob scene of January 6. A reader sent me a very troubling article from America magazine by Father James Martin, SJ entitled, “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol” (Jan. 12, 2021).
The article is little more than a shameful attempt to use the events of January 6 to score political points against the author’s perceived theological and ideological enemies. I found it to be profoundly sad. Father Martin singled out Father James Altman, Father Ed Meeks, Father John Zuhlsdorf, Father Richard Heilman, Father Kevin Cusick, Bishop Richard Stika, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, among others, to be examples of “priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life (but) helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.”
These names, and others like them, are the heroes of traditional Catholics and the Catholic pro-life community. They are deeply respected for speaking openly and with fidelity to Church teaching about the Holocaust of our time, the infanticide of 60 million aborted Americans who have no free speech rights of their own. By denigrating and accusing them so duplicitously, Father Martin scored some ideological points, but only within his own tribe — far left Catholics who would likely be far more comfortable in the U.S. Episcopal church. Frankly, no one else would even be reading America.
In his unfortunate America article, Father James Martin contributes to the atmosphere of tribalism that has so separated Americans in recent years. And clearly, he separates Catholics along the same sad partisan lines.
President Joe Biden’s greatest challenge may not be the conversion of Republicans to more progressive ideologies. It may well be the conversion of the progressive left to the tolerance and unity he rightly calls for. Trump is gone. The Democrats control the House and the White House and have the deciding tie-breaker vote in the Senate. But Portland, Seattle, and other Democrat controlled cities are still rioting, as they did all last summer. CNN blamed it all on Donald Trump then, and is still calling these “peaceful protests.”
Portland, Oregon police reported that the “peaceful protesters came armed with pepper-ball guns, tasers and other electronic crowd control weapons, fireworks, rocks, and shields.” Some were armed with molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray, and crowbars. In Seattle, the January 20 peaceful protesters burned American flags and caused damage to an ICE headquarters. In Portland they carried signs reading, “We don’t want Biden. We want revenge!" They identified themselves as anarchists and antifa protesters responding to racism, fascism, and police brutality.
They also attacked the Democratic headquarters. Police made multiple arrests at the peaceful protests.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like a related post that is mentioned in the text above:
Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables
And for an example of media duplicity and coverup:
Please share this post!
The State of Our Freedom, The Content of Our Character
Washington DC Archbishop Wilton Gregory, the Becket Law firm, and social justice warriors at The New York Times have cast a shadow over the state of our freedoms.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Character matters, so may it not come up short as the world watches what America does with our hard-won freedoms in this age of discontent. What becomes of them determines what becomes of us. Character matters for me, too, but sometimes there is just no way to retain it except by writing the bare-knuckled truth. I admit that, like most priests in America, I fear the repercussions, but there is just no safe, politically correct way to write what I must now write.
There had been a decades-long progression of examples reflecting patently dishonest character and leadership in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. When Archbishop Wilton Gregory succeeded Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who in turn succeeded Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of Archbishop Gregory’s first messages to his people was, “I will always tell you the truth.”
In light of that promise of transparency, what a disappointment the downward slide has been. In “The Death of George Floyd: Breaking News and Broken Trust,” I wrote of a visit by President Donald Trump to the Saint John Paul II Shrine in Washington. After the visit, Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory stated that he learned of the visit only on the night before, adding:
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree… Saint John Paul II was an ardent defender of the rights and dignity of human beings. His legacy bears vivid witness to that truth.”
Many now find it far more baffling and reprehensible that Archbishop Gregory would so blatantly mischaracterize the long-planned purpose of the President’s visit and snub it with both his absence and his disdain. It turns out that the Archbishop did know of the visit. He was invited by the White House to participate in it, but declined the invitation to be with the President due to a “previous commitment.”
Archbishop Gregory should also have been well aware of what took place before and during the President’s appearance at the Saint John Paul II Shrine on the 2nd of June, 2020. Its significance was spelled out in “A Big Step for Religious Freedom,” (June 12, 2020) a Wall Street Journal editorial by Nina Shea, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute who served as a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom:
“[I]n a rare ray of light this dark spring, America’s defining right has been recognized at the highest level as a ‘moral and national security imperative.’ This is more than a symbolic gesture. On June 2, President Trump signed an executive order that declares support for religious freedom a foreign policy ‘priority.’ It mandates that ‘the United States will respect and vigorously promote this freedom’ abroad… The Trump administration has elevated the cause of religious freedom since the president came into office.”
Ms. Shea refers to Religious Liberty as “America’s defining right,” highlighting its importance as the most fundamental of our freedoms. It is President Trump’s emphasis on this right that Archbishop Wilton Gregory dismissed as “reprehensible,” and denigrated its culmination in a presidential visit to the Saint John Paul II Shrine as a “Catholic facility [that] would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated” for a partisan political purpose.
Nina Shea writes in the WSJ that the President’s executive order puts teeth in the International Religious Freedom Act’s listing of severe religious persecution in countries like Nigeria and China, notorious for their suppression of religious freedoms. The order allocates funding for programs that protect religious rights in communities abroad through economic sanctions and other measures against oppressive governments.
Wading in the Washington Swamp
It would be informative to know whether Archbishop Gregory objected when President Barack Obama received an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame ignoring his global promotion of abortion. To dismiss President Trump’s visit to the Saint John Paul II Shrine as “reprehensible” is… well… reprehensible. In a recent comment on These Stone Walls, a reader from Texas expressed a widely felt dismay:
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Archbishop Gregory denigrated the visit by President Trump to the Saint John Paul II Shrine. Turns out the Archbishop was invited to be with Trump but declined. This after he claimed to not have known about the visit. What an embarrassment!”
The drama in Washington became more mysterious six days later. At a time when the Archdiocese was still under a ban from public Masses and an order to maintain social distancing, priests of the Archdiocese received a highly unusual June 8 email from the Chancery Office. They were asked to participate in a protest in front of the White House.
The email specifically asked that the priests wear a cassock or black clerical clothing along with a mask. It instructed them to bring protest placards. Several priests of the Archdiocese said they were surprised by this given the volatile atmosphere of the protests descending into riots at that time and the fact that priests of the Archdiocese were still under a conflicting order to maintain social distancing and refrain from any gatherings related to their ministry.
Two priests spoke with the Catholic News Agency on condition of anonymity because they, too, feared repercussions from the Archdiocese. So much for religious freedom and freedom of speech. The priests told the Catholic News Agency:
“We have been told for weeks that we cannot meet in groups of the faithful, open our churches, serve in our parishes. Now they want us to take to the streets.”
Other priests objected that media photographs of them in clerical garb protesting in front of the White House had the appearance of doing exactly what Archbishop Gregory accused President Trump of doing: creating a photo opportunity for partisan political purposes “manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree.”
Was there any reason to believe that the rights of priests would be protected against media criticism of such a clerical protest? Archbishop Wilton Gregory was no champion for the rights of his priests. As President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, Archbishop Gregory extended invitations to SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to address the Bishops’ Dallas conference representing the voices of victims.
SNAP director, David Clohessy, and founder, Barbara Blame offered emotional, but highly contrived testimony while bishops tripped over each other to get their tears on camera. There was no rebuttal except that propounded by Cardinal Avery Dulles who opposed the Dallas Charter in “The Rights of Accused Priests.”
The objections of Cardinal Dulles were ignored. Under the leadership and direction of Archbishop Gregory, the standard employed for removing accused priests from ministry was the lowest standard possible. If an accusation is “credible” on it’s face — meaning only that it cannot be immediately disproven — then the cleric is out forever or until he is indisputably able to prove his innocence. In First Things magazine, a shocked Father Richard John Neuhaus described the end result:
“Zero Tolerance. One strike and you’re out. Boot them out of ministry. Our bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting in the Dallas Charter a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and unCatholic approach to sin and grace. They ended up adopting a policy that was sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost everything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
Scandal Time, 2002
“Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest?”
One of the main developers and proponents of that standard was also one of Archbishop Gregory’s predecessors in Washington, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick whose own history is about to be published in a soon-to-be-released Vatican report. SNAP and its director, David Clohessy, were also later accused of extensive corruption in a lawsuit from a SNAP employee reported by Bill Donohue and the Catholic League in “SNAP Exposed” and by me in “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”
In the 12 Century, Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the King, excommunicated some of the corrupt barons of King Henry II after they summarily executed two accused priests. The King raged at Becket’s affront to his authority saying, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Four of the King’s men, taking that as a directive, murdered the archbishop at Mass in his cathedral on December 29, 1170. In the end, King Henry had to accede to canon law and the jurisdiction of church courts over clergy. As for Becket, he became a saint and martyr canonized in 1173.
It pains me greatly that an organization I deeply respect, the Becket Law firm, defenders of religious liberty taking its name from the legacy of Saint Thomas à Becket, published a defense of “credibly accused” as sufficient for denying the civil rights of Catholic priests, but no one else. Maria Montserrat Alvarado wrote on behalf of the Becket Law firm:
“In ‘Diocese of Lubbock v. Guerrero,’ the plaintiff, a Catholic clergyman, sued for defamation after the Diocese of Lubbock included him on a list of credibly accused clergy. The lower courts sided with Guerrero [saying] that because the Diocese published the information that could be seen… outside the confines of the church [it] could be used to sue the Church… The lower court’s strange view runs counter to Pope Francis and USCCB’s specific call for greater transparency”
The above was posted by Becket Law on Twitter, but These Stone Walls does not have the reach that the Becket Law firm has. My rebuttal was but a mere whisper, posted nonetheless, so maybe you can make it a bit louder by sharing this post:
“I must register my objection and grave disappointment with Becket Law for statements about the defamation lawsuit by a priest whose name appears on his bishop’s list of the ‘credibly accused.’ Becket’s website cites Pope Francis in a call for transparency. Pope Francis also said in 2019 that the names of accused priests should only be published if the accusations are proven. The U.S. bishops adopted a ‘credible’ standard that does not even come close to that. It is of deep concern that Becket Law appears to either not know this or not care… for the great damage done by this practice.” (See “The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests”)
For over a decade on These Stone Walls, I have warned against the practice of bishops citing a false and unjust “transparency” as justification for publishing lists of priests who have been merely accused with little to no effort at real substantiation. This is the legacy of the Dallas Charter and “credibly accused.”
It is for good reason that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, reflecting on my own case on NBC’s “Today” show on October 13, 2005 said:
“There is no segment of the American population which has less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”
A Dire Threat to Freedom of the Press — from Within
Another grave threat to our freedoms is the diminishment of Freedom of the Press by stewards not quite up to the task. Most people who read newspapers have seen the term, “op-ed,” but few know its true origin. It began as a feature of The New York Times once America’s most respected flagship newspaper but now slowly collapsing under the weight of its own hubris. “Op-ed” was newspeak for “Opposite the Editorial Page.”
Its meaning was both literal and figurative. It was a feature by a guest writer invited by the Times for an opinion piece that would appear on the page opposite the newspaper’s own main editorial page. Over time, it also came to be symbolic of the Times’ commitment to integrity in journalism. The “op-ed” also provided a forum in which writers could reflect positions that were opposite of those the editors propounded on their editorial page. Thus, “op-ed” came to have a double meaning.
The old liberal order for which The New York Times and other newspapers became a sometimes honorable mouthpiece has given way to a more radical form of liberalism and what today is manipulated as news coverage. Along with its rise, two of America’s signature freedoms, Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech, have fallen.
The most recent evidence for that is something that just happened in the editorial offices of two formerly liberal newspapers, The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the Times, a revolution has occurred in the newsroom when Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, wrote an op-ed defending President Donald Trump’s statement that the 1807 Insurrection Act could be invoked to call upon the military to quell rioting and massive destruction in our cities.
Senator Cotton alluded (as did I in these pages in recent weeks) that Democrat President Lyndon Johnson summoned the military to quell riots following the 1968 assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King. And Republican President George H.W. Bush also invoked the Insurrection Act to call for military intervention against 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of four L.A.P.D. officers who brutally beat Rodney King. Today, the progressively manipulated media wants us to believe that this was an original but unconstitutional idea of President Trump.
A Wall Street Journal editorial referred to the Times reporters as “social justice warriors” who ransacked an opinion piece by Senator Cotton because it expressed a view that “millions of Americans support if the police cannot handle the rioting and violence.” As a result of the Times reporters’ rebellion and rage over allowing such views in public view, The New York Times demurred and accepted its Editorial Page editor’s resignation.
The once honorable concept of the “op-ed” is now dead, murdered by activist reporters whose politics now take precedence over the news. The long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer was also pushed out because that newspapers’ own activist reporters revolted over an opinion piece headline, “Buildings Matter, Too” by Architecture Critic, Inga Saffron. It was seen by the reporters as an affront to the “Black Lives Matter” movement and a demand was made to remove it, and remove its author.
This all began unchecked in America’s universities where sensitive ears cannot bear to hear opposing views and college administrators cave as militant protesters scream down conservative voices. I recently had a headline posted on Facebook and Google along with a link to my post, “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek.” The headline was “Eternal Life Matters.” It was seen and “liked” by several readers before being silenced by both Facebook and Google, both of which deny placing limits on conservative viewpoints.
In “I Have a Dream,” The Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous ode to liberty, he included the moving sentence:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The great irony for Martin is that his much needed voice would not be heard today had not his very life been forfeit. And the irony for me is that I could not be free to write today had not freedom itself been taken from me.
It is the content of our character that determines the state of our freedom. America is at a tipping point, but it is not too late to save our freedoms from madness. The content of our character is what unites us, not as Black Americans, or White Americans, or Native Americans, but as Americans.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: My late friend, father Richard John Neuhaus, said there are only three things required to address the madness of our time: Fidelity, Fidelity, and Fidelity. I thank you for yours. Please Subscribe to BeyondThese Stone Walls and Follow us on Facebook. You may also like to read and share these related eye-openers: