Media rubbishing Church

In the past week two stories were carried which can be described as examples of media rubbishing the Church. One story comes from Russia where the media are trying to link a brothel with the Franciscans. The other comes from Australia. Some media outlets in a very subtle way tried to tarnish the certificate of innocence that was given to Archbishop George Pell of Sydney.

Archbishop Pell was accused of child abuse. As soon as he was informed of these accusations, he stood down from his position on August 20 pending the outcome of the investigation headed by a retired judge.

Archbishop Pell has been formally cleared of these sex abuse charges. Some of the broadcasting media, on reporting this piece of news, said that the inquiry was held in secret and that Archbishop Pell was cleared because the accusations were levelled against him after a very long period of time had elapsed.

What are the facts? Retired Judge Alec Southwell, who conducted an independent investigation, has released a 31-page report in which he concludes that the evidence does not support a charge that Archbishop Pell molested an 11-year-old boy at a summer camp in Victoria nearly 40 years ago.

In fact Judge Southwell gave a number of reasons on which he based his conclusion. These were (i) the very long delay, (ii) some valid criticism of the complainant's credibility, (iii) the lack of corroborative evidence and (iv) the sworn denial of the respondent.

It is very unfair for the media to pick on one of these reasons and project it as if it were the only reason. The unfairness of the situation becomes more clear when an attorney for the archbishop's accuser said he felt that he had received a "fair hearing" in the Southwell inquiry.

In a detailed examination of the evidence, Southwell pointed out that no witness could support the accuser's charge that Archbishop Pell had engaged in inappropriate conduct. All other witnesses suggested, on the contrary, that there had been no evidence of inappropriate behaviour, he said.

The accuser's credibility was also undermined by his past record, which showed alcohol and drug problems, and a criminal record involving drug trafficking, assaults, bookkeeping, and tax evasion.

Crossing seas, mountains, etc., will take us to Russia, where a series of spicy reports in the Russian media linking the Franciscan Conventuals to a Moscow brothel have been published. One must remember that in recent months the Catholic Church in that country has been under constant attack.

On October 7 Russia's largest circulation newspaper published an account of how a five-room flat in the city centre owned by the Franciscans was being used by young women charging $50 a session for sexual services.

The article in the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda was accompanied by a large photo of a young man in a monastic habit praying with a near-naked young woman wearing a nun's veil in the background.

In the days following the article's publication, two television channels aired reports juxtaposing the bordello's activities and those of the Franciscans.

Neither report sought Catholic comment, Fr Nikolai Dubinin, a spokesman for the Franciscans, said. Moreover these television programmes showed an excerpt from a video taken by the police of the Franciscan superior trying to open the door. The police had accompanied the prior and asked him to try and open the door in an attempt to close the place down. The context of the video was not mentioned on television.

The truth of the matter is that while the Franciscans own the flat, they have been trying since April to expel the bordello operators, who have changed the locks and threatened Russia's Franciscan Conventual superior, Fr Dubinin said last Monday.

The case has all the trappings of another part of the anti-Catholic campaign that has been going on in Russia. This year, Catholic leaders have faced the worst persecution since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. When the Vatican elevated four Church jurisdictions to dioceses in February, the politically powerful Russian Orthodox Church accused the Vatican of launching a "Catholic expansion".

Anti-Catholic protests followed in at least a dozen cities. The Russian government entered the fray by expelling foreign Catholic clergy, including one of the country's four bishops.