The National Catholic Register is one of the Catholic newspapers in this country best known for being an unquestioning mouthpiece for the Catholic hierarchy, no matter how many dastardly deeds and outright lies in which the men who lead the Church are caught red-handed. But, boy, the NCR has really outdone itself in its defense of the news out of the New York Times that NYC Cardinal Timothy Dolan was caught, once again, telling untruths in service of the worldwide pedophile ring he helped to enable while in Milwaukee.
Dolan strenuously denied paying go-away-and-shut-up money to priestly pedophiles while he was leader of the Milwaukee archdiocese, acting at the time as if merely asking the question was an attack on his personal integrity.
Well, as the NYT is reporting this week, Dolan did pay pedophile abusers up to $20K to help Dolan cover up their crimes. And now the NCR is spinning those payments thusly:
Apparently this isn’t even the only headline the article has had, because at the bottom of the column, in tiny, hard-to-read grey print, it says:
A version of this article appeared in print on May 31, 2012, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Cardinal Authorized Payments To Abusers.
That would have been even more misleading — implying that the Cardinal (who we soon learn is Cardinal Dolan of New York) was authorizing payments to abusers in New York.
But regardless of where the alleged paying of abusers took place, there is still a further misleading aspect to the headline — and to the article itself. It is the word “paying.”
Consider this: Suppose you are walking down the street and a homeless person approaches you and asks you for some money. You give him the money. Would that justify a headline saying that you have been paying the homeless?
Or suppose you were with your teenage son or daughter and they asked if they could give some money to the homeless person as an act of kindness and you said Yes. Would that justify a headling saying that you authorized paying the homeless?
Or maybe you send your grandchild $20 for his birthday, because he’s at that age where he’s hard to buy for and what he really wants is money. Have you paid your grandson?
Not all disbursements of money constitute “paying.” Gifts, grants, charitable donations, and other forms of transferring money from one person to another do not automatically count as “paying.”
By using this word, Goodstein calls to mind certain connotations. Specifically: When we pay someone we typically do so as a fee for some good or service they have provided us with. At a minimum, we do so as some kind of compensation or reward — things that are not part of the previously-mentioned forms of giving money.
So Goodstein has framed the matter in a way that that suggests Cardinal Dolan was rewarding pedophiles for their behavior.
These people are mentally ill, and I just wonder when the good Catholics in the pews are going to rise up and tell the lot of them how evil they are. That they can equate giving charitably to a homeless person with giving hush money to pedophiles just proves it.
Also, who the hell pays child abusers their pensions after they are caught? I knew of some child sexual abuse going on when I was little, and nobody had to tell me it was wrong. I just knew it. But these guys still insist that “times were different back then.”
If you can stomach it, you can read the rest of the NCR article here.
Sick. They’re just sick individuals.
