What Really Happened In Fr. Murphy Case? (Jimmy Akin)
The NYTwits at the New York Times have been guilty of some really sloppy reporting.
But they've done us the service of putting online a big cache of primary source documents regarding the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy and the sexual abuse he committed.
These documents paint a very different picture of what happened with the Vatican--and what Cardinal Ratzinger's role was--than what the Times and other outlets are suggesting.
So what are the real facts of the case, drawn from the documents themselves?
GET THE STORY.
What Pope defenders seem oblivious to is the fact that public opinion accurately reflects the credibility of the Church, even after you factor out the anti-Catholic bias. There's a good reason why the media and the public no longer give the Church any benefit of the doubt. We may be right on a handful of selected facts that happened to have received sloppy treatment by aggressive journalists, but to stand on this is a lot like the makers of the Titanic taking pride in dispelling specific errors by reporters over precisely how their great ship sunk. The point is, sloppiness in reporting and documentation notwithstandng, the unsinkable ship sunk. Catholics should just accept this as a sunk cost, pardon the pun.
Otherwise, we just look like we're still only interested in convincing ourselves the Church cannot do wrong. This is the opposite of repentance and humility, which the Fathers teach is the unceasing, unyielding posture of the Christian. This is no time to be counting pennies when we owe a mountain of debt to God and to victims for our sins as a Church. So no, I don't think I'll "get the story" when the story has already been laid out repeatedly for those who have eyes to see it.
