Dishonest right-wing Catholic Bill Donohue has spent much of the year whining that people keep reminding us of the massive sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, serving up the usual dubious deflections that they don’t reflect the state of the church today, some allegations are too old to be fully substantiated and even if they happened, the priests who committed the offenses were mostly gay (not actually true). Donohue whined again about this — complete with one of those deflections — in his Nov. 16 CNSNews.com column:
An editorial in the November 13 edition of the Washington Post claimed that “high-level sexual misconduct and coverup in France shattered illusions of progress by the church toward establishing a culture of transparency and accountability in its hierarchy.”
The evidence? A retired cardinal and archbishop in France admitted to sexual misconduct with a teenage girl 35 years ago. Oh, yes, it was recently disclosed that allegations of abuse extending back decades were made about another French bishop; he was removed from his post.
There are over 5,000 bishops in the world and the Washington Post found two of them who were involved in sexual misconduct decades ago. The paper argues that this shatters “illusions of progress.”
What it really shattered is the credibility of its editorial board.
As I recounted in The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse, no institution has made greater progress in combating sexual misconduct than the Catholic Church.
Donohue then played whataboutism, complaining about a sexual abuse scandal at CBS that purportedly would have ended sooner if the Post hadn’t killed a story about it. He concluded by huffing: “Sexual abuse should always be condemned, but when those doing the condemnation come to the table with dirty hands, they ought to shut their mouth.”
But Donohue is usually too busy playing the deny-and-deflect game to actually condemn the sexual abuse that went on in the church for decades.