The fact is that VOTF (known in my circle of friends as "Voice of the Apostates") has an agenda along the lines of We Are Church, and similar dissident organizations, who wish to distort the teachings and governance of the Catholic Church until it is unrecognizably Catholic. They're advancing this agenda under the guise of concern for the victims of pederasty, and the current atmosphere of hysteria and demoralization contributes to people's not looking beneath that apparently benignant surface. Before resigning his position, Cdl. Law forbade parishes in the Boston Archdiocese from extending their facilities to the VOTF. Unfortunately, Abp. O'Malley rescinded that order soon after the $85M settlement was reached, very unwisely in my opinion. I have suspected, though I have no evidence of it, that Abp. O'Malley's action was in fact a condition of the settlement. If not, I question the wisdom of removing an archbishop, Cdl. Law, of demonstrated theological and disciplinary orthodoxy (recall his response to the Common Ground Initiative's request for "dialogue": "There's nothing to discuss!") and intellectual achievement, and replacing him with a relative unknown.
It cannot have escaped notice that "the scandal" has become a universal excuse for dissent from Catholic teaching. Groups of many different, even opposing, persuations have found something in it on which to hang their hats. It is now de rigeur, whenever the Church pronounces on any moral or doctrinal issue, to use "the scandal" as excuse to cry, "Hypocrisy!" and self-servingly ignore the substance of the statements. The RadTrads, always disposed to take delight in gloom, use the presumed malfeasance of the bishops to further excuse their defiance of the hierarchy. The Leftists, like the VOTF, seeing reality as politically defined rather than objective, seek to make use of the trumped-up "urgency" to address the problem as a means for advocating "change". Precisely which "changes" is a question they try to leave ill-defined, but when pinned down to specifics, it becomes clear that what they want can be found in any number of liberalized mainstream Protestant denominations. (Why, then, not just convert? Because it is the Catholic Church they wish to destroy.) Anti-Catholic bigots use "the scandal" as confirmation of their worst prejudices, though there are similar problems to be found to a similar extent within their own ecclesial communities. The legal establishment has revealed its hostility to the Catholic Church in advocating, for example, in California: suspending statutes of limitations and engaging in blatantly unconstitutional ex post facto prosecutions, and in Massachusetts: allowing the state government to vet priestly assignments and break the seal of the Confessional, both clear violations of First Amendment protections. And, despite the public moralizing of the respective Attorneys General, grand juries in both Boston and Rockville Center could find no indictments to return. The general public tends to see "the scandal" as further evidence of how out-of-touch (dare one say medieval?) the Church is with life as it is (nihilistically) lived in 21st century America. Is it any wonder some rank-and-file Catholics are duped by groups like VOTF, and so many good priests demoralized?
After my experience during the Clinton era, I find it useful to ask, in cases like this, "Cui bono?" Was the coverage in the Boston Globe, which has never let an idiotic thought of the dissent ex-priest James Carroll (he of Constantine's Sword) go unpublished, likely to be unbiased? I doubt it. In the past, when considering the journalistic merits of the Globe, I concluded that it made excellent fishwrap and budgie-cage liner. I have seen no reason to alter that assessment.
I cannot do justice to his balanced presentation (he's much more sympathetic to the Globe than am I) in a brief quotation, but Philip Jenkins writes in Chapter 7, entitled "The Perp Walk of Sacramental Perverts" after Maureen Dowd's nasty characterization, of The New Anti-Catholicism:
The media has to know just how distorted is the picture of the legion of pedophile priests shielded by an uncaring Church hierarchy. They know about cases involving other denominations, and they can see that the vast majority of the clergy abuse stories involve older teenagers or young adults. They are also aware that a proportion of lawsuits against the Church are driven as much by a quest for multi-million-dollar damages as by any notion of justice, and that at least some charges are quite false: recall the allegations against Cardinal Bernardin. It is distressing to see how many of the accusations stem from victims whose charges are based on memories supposedly "recovered" many years after the event. Such recovery is all the more questionable when memories are assisted by therapy, a profoundly controversial procedure that has repeatedly produced suspect and simply fictitious claims. As media attacks on the Church reached new heights in the spring of 2002, the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal remarked: "Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties, or the lurid details of Bill Clinton's impeachment. All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s."... Many of the most damaging attacks against the Church derived from internal sources rather than external critics: Dowd, Carroll, Quindlen, Kennedy, Wills, and Sipe would all describe themselves as faithful Catholics. Yet their rhetoric deploys an often ferocious range of anti-Church arguments, which are readily adopted and amplified by the most fervent anti-Catholics. In this view, the Church is of its nature un-American, abusive, and totalitarian; clergy are closeted perverts. The effects of the clergy abuse crisis ... have been far-reaching. Over the last fifteen years, we have seen the massive revival of an ancient anti-clerical and anti-Catholic image that had largely been excluded from respectable discourse. Today, though, the priestly caricature has returned to the social mainstream.
I do not seek to minimize the real damage done to legitimate victims of abuse, only to cut through the hyperbole and emotionalism which promotes rash action, and wrong-headed attempts to address the problem, which is essentially spiritual in nature. And, since I'm not actually so high-minded that I won't take my own side in a fight, to show that the issue is not specifically Catholic in nature. Indeed, as William Donohue has pointed out, the problem is twice as prevalent, on a percentage basis, among public school teachers as it is among clergy of any denomination. Since there are far more public school teachers in the country than the approximately 46,000 Catholic priests, if sanity were to prevail, parents would be better advised to pull their children out of the public schools than to keep them away from church.
That said, I can't help but notice the "coincidental" timing of this exposé. It comes in the wake of a vicious, baseless propaganda attack on the integrity of Pope Pius XII, which has left the general public, which is unlikely to do the digging necessary to get the other side of the story, with the impression that the Catholic Church supported Nazism and sat by idly observing the Holocaust. It comes in advance of a renewed effort to ban partial-birth abortion, and, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, to legalize homosexual marriage, a move to further undermine the strength of the family, the fundamental social institution which shields the individual from the excesses of the State. It seems clear that "the scandal", the defamation of Pius XII, the blasphemous products of the art and film industries, the Democrat filibuster of Catholic judicial appointments, etc., are all part of an organized program to discredit and marginalize the Catholic Church in American political discourse. Only with the Church conveniently out of the way can the Leftist agenda be advanced unimpeded, since the Church remains the single, largest, most rational, and most vocal opponent of it.
As faithful Catholics, it behooves us to recognize the situation for what it is, and not cooperate with it by yielding to the panic, emotionalism, and demoralization our enemies desire for us.