Welcome to Wednesday. Longtime NCR contributor Jason Berry writes about how he became a source for the Vatican's report on former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Priests who say they were falsely accused of sexual abuse are suing for defamation, yet another problem for the church stemming from the scandal.
The task of compiling the 449-page Vatican report on former cardinal Theodore McCarrick was largely in the hands of Jeffrey Lena, a lawyer based in Berkeley, California, who has defended several cases against the Holy See in U.S. courts on jurisdictional grounds
Lena was a background source for Jason Berry on reporting trips to Rome, writes Berry in a commentary for NCR. It has been several years since Berry had last seen Lena, but he received a phone call from the lawyer in early September.
"He wanted information about the impact on news media in 1994 when a man dying of AIDS withdrew his abuse lawsuit against Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, saying he could not trust his memory," Berry writes. "In Vows of Silence, Gerald Renner and I wrote about the overnight shift in news coverage from investigations of bishops concealing predators to a new focus: 'false memory,' quack therapists, vagaries of the mind."
"Circling like a lawyer in a deposition, Lena kept asking me about the aftermath of the Bernardin events. Intrigued to be a source for a Vatican report, I obliged, providing source citations and comments via phone and emails, my curiosity mounting about his report."
You can read more of Berry's commentary here.
More background:
As U.S. dioceses continue to pay out big settlements for lawsuits, the church is facing another nettlesome problem stemming from the abuse scandal: Priests who say they were falsely accused are suing for defamation.
In August 2018, shortly after a Pennsylvania grand jury report listed more than 300 priests in six dioceses in the state who had been credibly accused of abusing more than 1,000 minors since 1947, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson asked the three dioceses in his state to turn over files on church personnel credibly accused of sexual abuse since 1978.
Archbishop George Lucas of Omaha complied with that request, and in November 2018, the Omaha Archdiocese published a list of the names of 38 priests and deacons who had faced "substantiated claims" of abuse in the archdiocese.
The fallout from that list reverberates today. One of the priests whose name was on it — Fr. Andrew Syring — is suing the Omaha Archdiocese for defamation, counted among those priests who say they have been unfairly swept up in the church's effort to repair its reputation and put the crisis behind it.
You can read more of the story here.
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Final thoughts
On the final day of the Economy of Francesco conference, Pope Francis encouraged participants to respond to "the urgent need for a different economic narrative," while the young adults attending laid out their own ideas for what that vision is. The conference sought to draw from the perspectives of young adults and their ideas for new economic models and ways for the world to define what human flourishing looks like. Sign up to receive EarthBeat Weekly in your inbox so you can stay informed on all of our climate news.
Until Thursday,
Stephanie Yeagle
NCR Production/Online Editor
[email protected]
Twitter: @ncrSLY
