A crisis at Crisis

July 03, 2003 In an article published in the December 2002 NOR ("The Astounding Naïveté of Crisis Magazine"), I responded to a lengthy piece that appeared in the September 2002 issue of Crisis. The article, penned by Crisis Senior Editor Brian Saint-Paul, probed my "integrity." Its very title, "A Question of Integrity: Michael Rose and the American College of Louvain," signaled Crisis magazine's intent to blacken my reputation.

In my NOR piece, I presented an enormous amount of evidence indicating that Crisis was wrong about the five-page section of my 264-page book Goodbye, Good Men it focused on. The disputed section detailed the harassment and dismissal of Joseph Kellenyi from the American College seminary at the University of Louvain. In the March 2003 Crisis, Saint-Paul responded with a six-page rebuttal ("Responding to Michael Rose"). He was not pleased with my NOR piece. In fact, his follow-up article plainly confirms what the NOR has been told over several months: Many Crisis readers expressed profound displeasure with the original Crisis article on the topic of Michael S. Rose and Goodbye, Good Men.

Many Crisis subscribers have indicated to me that they wrote letters to the Editor of Crisis, objecting to Saint-Paul's September article for one reason or many. Nevertheless, not even one was given ink in the pages of Crisis. Many others indicated that they have canceled their subscriptions to Crisis or that they have simply decided not to renew. Rather than printing the letters of objection, Crisis undertook its defensive article in the March 2003 issue as a last-ditch damage-control measure. In short, there is a crisis at Crisis.

But the Crisis defensive began even before my NOR article was published. In the December 2002 Crisis, Saint-Paul responded to a letter to the editor written by Joseph Kellenyi (not a subscriber to Crisis), the former seminarian at the American College of Louvain. The September Crisis article suggested that Kellenyi is a liar and a crackpot. In his letter, Kellenyi objected to this portrayal, correcting Saint-Paul on several issues. Nevertheless, Kellenyi's attempt to set the record straight about matters pertaining directly to himself was obstructed by a response from Saint-Paul, who took the opportunity to reiterate his conclusion that Kellenyi is nothing more than a disgruntled ex-seminarian of dubious character.

What Crisis readers would not know about Saint-Paul's response is that the Crisis Senior Editor consistently gets his facts wrong in pursuit of a refutation to Kellenyi. For the sake of keeping this article to a readable length, I will offer just a few examples, although these examples are indicative of a larger pattern that characterizes Saint-Paul's overall response to Kellenyi.

First, Kellenyi pointed out that Crisis would not meet with him to discuss in person his side of the story when that periodical was investigating that five-page section of Goodbye, Good Men. Saint-Paul responds in December by saying that "over the course of several e-mails (May 29, May 30, May 31, and June 2) I repeatedly requested that he [Kellenyi] send me his evidence. He refused. While I appreciated his invitation to meet, I wasn't able to do so since the copy deadline for the article was July 1 and the earliest he could come to Washington was several weeks later" (and Saint-Paul repeats this claim in his March 2003 article). But the excuse of a July 1 deadline is preposterous. If one consults the footnotes of his September Crisis article, they clearly indicate that Saint-Paul interviewed me for his article on August 2, more than a month after Saint-Paul's supposed copy deadline! Most certainly, there is a crisis at Crisis.

But that's not all. In the first week of July (never mind the earlier overseas e-mails), Kellenyi, who had just returned to the U.S., again offered to meet with Saint-Paul in Washington, D.C., at his own expense. At that time, according to Kellenyi and confirmed by Saint-Paul (yes, I asked him during our August phone interview), Saint-Paul stated to Kellenyi that he had no interest in meeting him in person. There was no mention of a July 1 deadline at that time. Also, according to the footnotes of his September article, Saint-Paul interviewed Kellenyi by phone on July 11, which further betrays Saint-Paul's claim of a July 1 deadline.

So why didn't Kellenyi just send Crisis all the written documentation requested by Saint-Paul? Well, that brings up another interesting point. In Saint-Paul's rebuttal to Kellenyi, he makes the astounding claim that "Regnery Press - the publisher of Goodbye, Good Men - has decided to remove the section on Louvain from all future editions of the book." But this also is not true. According to Publisher Alfred S. Regnery, as well as Regnery's attorneys, Crisis never contacted anyone at Regnery to verify or falsify this assertion. So where did Saint-Paul get this false information?

It may well have something to do with the fact that the American College of Louvain engaged a Philadelphia law firm in June 2002 to threaten a law suit against Regnery Publishing if the Washington, D.C.-based publisher would not agree to expurgate the offending section on Louvain from Goodbye, Good Men. But there's more: As part of the demand, the American College at Louvain wanted Regnery to get me, the author of Goodbye, Good Men, to agree in writing not to conduct any further investigation into the American College and not to publish anything more on the subject of this Belgian-based seminary run by the U.S. bishops. In other words, the American College engaged attorneys in order to prevent me from responding to the PR piece for Louvain published by Crisis last September. I, of course, did not agree to any such demand, and my NOR article on Louvain was published in December (and since then the lawyers for Louvain have not been heard from again).

I call Brian Saint-Paul's original article a "PR piece" because Barbara Henkels, a wealthy Catholic from Philadelphia, brought the American College's objections to the five pages in Goodbye, Good Men to the attention of Crisis. You see, Barbara Henkels is on the Advisory Board of the liberal American College of Louvain. And when I wrote my NOR article, she was also on the Publication Committee of Crisis, though more recently she has been given a promotion, as she now sits on the Executive Board of Crisis. More importantly, according to sources close to Henkels, she and her husband (also on the Executive Board of Crisis) have been major sustaining donors to Crisis over the years. Any self-respecting magazine editor or journalist at a Catholic magazine that presents itself as conservative would understand that a serious question of journalistic integrity may well exist in defending this liberal seminary. Why didn't Saint-Paul recognize this? Maybe he did, but he has admitted to me that the job of defending the liberal American College of Louvain was assigned to him by the Publisher and Editor of Crisis, Deal W. Hudson. So then, why didn't the big-wig fundraiser Deal Hudson understand this?

As for Kellenyi, he saw a possible conflict of interest, and that's exactly why he was reluctant to send his documentation to Crisis, which he felt was working directly for the American College of Louvain. Kellenyi was advised that he might possibly be sued by the American College - in fact, he hoped that the American College would sue him so that he could present his case in a neutral venue - and he did not feel that it would be prudent to relinquish all his personal documents to Crisis, which he feared would then forward them to representatives of the American College and their Philadelphia-based attorneys.

Instead of Saint-Paul's false assertion that "Regnery Press - the publisher of Goodbye, Good Men - has decided to remove the section on Louvain from further editions of the book," it would have been accurate to assert that attorneys hired by the American College of Louvain have threatened Regnery Publishing with a lawsuit unless the publisher of Goodbye, Good Men agrees to remove the section regarding Louvain from the book. Furthermore, in order to give teeth to the threat of a lawsuit, a wealthy board member of the American College has offered to finance litigation against Regnery. Neither Kellenyi nor I would object to that kind of honest reporting.

It is instructive to note that Saint-Paul does not repeat his false assertion about Regnery in his March article. Nonetheless, that follow-up Crisis article ("Responding to Michael Rose") makes a number of other assertions that are false or misleading. Again, for the sake of brevity, I will only focus on a few of Crisis's errors. Again, these few examples are indicative of a larger pattern that characterizes Saint-Paul's overall response.

Crisis says that Kellenyi accused then-Rector of the American College, Fr. David Windsor, of carrying on a "gay affair" with one of the seminarians. Yet nowhere in Goodbye, Good Men, nor in my NOR article, is this stated. I never make such an accusation. But that doesn't stop Crisis from making those accusations a focus of its attack on Kellenyi's veracity, and mine. Saint-Paul's March article says: "Michael Rose makes serious charges about…Father Windsor…." I do? No, I don't. (During my research, I discovered that Kellenyi felt strongly that he was being harassed by a fellow seminarian, and that his concerns were not addressed appropriately by the American College. After sorting through the evidence, interviewing Kellenyi in person several times for many hours, and talking to others off-the-record, I discerned that what Kellenyi was stating in regard to sexual harassment from that seminarian was certainly credible. I presented Kellenyi's side of the story as well as official written denials from then-Rector Fr. David Windsor, who was instrumental in having Kellenyi dismissed from the American College. The accused seminarian is not even mentioned by name in Goodbye, Good Men. He was, however, subsequently named in the September Crisis article as now-Father Patrick Van Durme of the Diocese of Rochester.)

Another howler in Saint-Paul's follow-up article is his claim to know what certain people told me in interviews that I conducted. Saint-Paul writes that Rose called Luke Melcher, a former seminarian classmate of Kellenyi's. The conservative Melcher eventually left ACL [American College of Louvain] and can hardly be accused of shilling for the seminary. While Rose apparently hoped Melcher would buttress his story, the opposite turned out to be the case. Melcher told Rose the same thing he later told me: "I found no evidence of any sort of an affair between the rector and Father Van Durme. They were gentlemen and men of integrity." Why didn't Rose mention this important conservative counter-witness?

How can Saint-Paul know what Melcher said to me or why I did not quote him? First, Melcher did not utter to me the quote Saint-Paul cited above, although he may have said such a thing to Saint-Paul. In fact, I never asked Melcher about any "affair" between the Rector and Van Durme. Again, this was not a focus of my concern, and was never mentioned in Goodbye, Good Men or my NOR article. Furthermore, the reason I did not mention Melcher is that he spoke to me "off-the-record"; in fact, he was adamant about this. In other words, I did not have his permission to quote him, even pseudonymously. So how can Crisis claim to know that what Melcher told me did not "buttress" my reporting? I am still bound by confidentiality. But somehow Crisis knows? Oh, come now! Crisis's strategy here is journalism at its lowest and most defensive. Truly, there is a crisis at Crisis.

Saint-Paul also mischaracterizes Melcher's status. First, Melcher was not a "former seminarian classmate" of Kellenyi's. In fact, Kellenyi had no classmates. Kellenyi was the sole man in his class. Second, Saint-Paul states that "Melcher eventually left" the American College. That makes it sound like Melcher left on his own volition. But that is not the case. Melcher's bishop was the one who decided that the philosophy student would not undertake his subsequent theology studies as a seminarian at the American College. The fact is: Melcher is still a seminarian, and a promising one, though now at another seminary. One bad word about the American College from a current seminarian could mean serious repercussions for an aspiring priest. Recall that Fr. Bryce Sibley, as mentioned in my December NOR article, was silenced by his bishop for six months after he publicly criticized the American College as "effeminate."

Another howler of a claim in the March Crisis article is that it doesn't matter that those who know Kellenyi best thought very highly of him, respected him, and looked up to him.

Doesn't matter? Only if you're attempting to make Kellenyi out to be a raving crackpot. The September Crisis article is based on the sole claim that Joseph Kellenyi is a raving crackpot - and a liar. Indeed, Saint-Paul even admits in his March article that he failed to give any personal background about Kellenyi. Failure indeed! The point of my NOR article was to show that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Kellenyi was not the absurd character that Crisis made him out to be. Rather, he was a well-respected member of the Department of Theology at the University of Louvain, where he chose to finish out his degree.

Crisis backpedals on the liar claim in its follow-up article, and even goes so far as to admit that "Kellenyi may not be lying. With a few exceptions, most of the people I [Saint-Paul] interviewed - all of whom rejected Kellenyi's claims [about a "gay affair" between the Rector and Van Durme] - nevertheless think Kellenyi truly believes what he says." So Crisis is back to claiming that Kellenyi is a raving crackpot.

In my more than two years of research for Goodbye, Good Men, I interviewed at least 150 people. In addition to that, I conducted brief (and sometimes lengthy) e-mail correspondence or telephone conversations with many others. In each case I had to discern whether or not that particular person was a reliable source. This was done in a variety of ways, including interviewing others who know the particular interviewee, comparing notes with others on the subject matter at hand, and being alert to inconsistencies. I had to dismiss some of the claims of those whom I interviewed.

I did meet a few crackpots along the way, some of whom, I am afraid to say, are now ordained priests. However, you will not find their testimonies in Goodbye, Good Men. Joseph Kellenyi was not and is not one of the crackpot crowd. Giving personal background about the man is very much pertinent to the matter at hand. Crisis errs when it suggests that Kellenyi is an ass-headed clown.

Another example of Crisis's preternatural omniscience comes by way of Saint-Paul's assertion about Dr. John Fraunces, a Catholic psychologist from Pennsylvania, who interviews seminary candidates for the Diocese of Allentown. I showed Fraunces, among others, the peer evaluation of Joseph Kellenyi written by Patrick Van Durme. I quoted Fraunces's criticism of the evaluation, in which he stated that "this is high-school prose that should never have been accepted by his superiors." Saint-Paul dismisses such criticism by saying that "this is the way most American adults write." Yet all of the other evaluations of Kellenyi, written by both student peers and faculty members, were presented professionally and articulately.

What I find most amusing about Saint-Paul's criticism is that he claims to know which version I sent Dr. Fraunces to evaluate: "What Fraunces neglects to mention - perhaps he does not know - is the evaluation he read was a draft, not the final version." Again, how does Crisis know which version I sent to Dr. Fraunces? Whence comes this curious faculty of omniscience? As a matter of fact, I sent Dr. Fraunces the final version, not the draft.

More importantly, Fraunces criticizes Van Durme's peer review as having "sexual undertones" and that it "uses the type of verbiage that would put most heterosexual men on guard and give them second thoughts about staying in the seminary." But that's not convincing enough for Saint-Paul, who calls Dr. Fraunces's criticism "ridiculous." Instead, Saint-Paul takes it upon himself to forward the evaluation to someone he feels is more qualified, someone who is not Catholic and someone who has ostensibly never dealt with Catholic seminary candidates. He enlists a Dr. H. Newton Malony, a professor of psychology at the liberal evangelical Fuller Seminary in southern California. Well, Malony contradicts Fraunces. Not much of a surprise there.

I don't think one needs to have any sort of degree in psychology to evaluate Van Durme's peer review of Joe Kellenyi. It's interesting that Crisis assures us that Van Durme is an "ex-Army, tobacco-chewing, pickup truck-driving, gun-toting redneck." Now, would such a tough hombre write the following, as Van Durme did in the final version of his peer evaluation of Joe Kellenyi:

"[Kellenyi] is known as having a wild tongue and is known for crossing the line between what is appropriate and inappropriate." "[Kellenyi] is very critical of any of the concerns that are part of the church today. Women's issues, gay issues, marginalized - all these are absolutely not important to Joseph." "[Kellenyi] only hangs out with the youngest members of the community and has no interest in close contact with the more senior members [such as Van Durme himself] even after advances were made…. Joseph…. does not initiate any conversations on his own with me…." (Let's put this in context. In Goodbye, Good Men, I quoted Kellenyi as saying this about Van Durme: "After he told me he thinks of me all the time, he went into great detail about how my body, my body language and my physical presence affected him. It was obvious that he was staring at and watching me all the time. He told me one time that the way I was sitting in my chair made him want to fly across the room and grab me.") "Those people that he [Kellenyi] likes he spends time with but he avoids those that will challenge him to grow [i.e., Van Durme himself]." "Only the youngest members of the community [not Van Durme] seem to have his attention." Do these statements really seem like those of a gun-toting redneck? Well, do they?

Another tack taken by Crisis is to point out my use of an allegedly misspelled name and an allegedly inaccurate date. (I could easily have pointed out that in his original article Saint-Paul got the name of my publisher wrong [it's Regnery Publishing, not Regnery Press] and that he consistently misspelled Wolfgang Diedrich's name [Saint-Paul spelled it "Dietrich"]. Moreover, in his follow-up article he identified me, not as Michael S. Rose, but as Michael Rose, who is, as any urbane hipster knows, a Jamaican reggae star.)

So Saint-Paul says that Fr. Sibley's visit to the American College was "in 1998 (Rose says it was 1997)." O.K., if Saint-Paul wants to nitpick, let it be known that the visit was made during the last week of 1997 and the first few days of 1998. Saint-Paul also corrects me on the spelling of Fr. Innocent Aguwuom: "(Rose misspells the name as 'Iaguwuom')." This is journalism at its absolute pettiest. Again, it was I, not Saint-Paul, who interviewed - in person in Belgium - the Nigerian priest who is currently a graduate student at the University of Louvain. Fr. Innocent spelled his own name out for me. I had no reason to doubt him, and given the fact that the prefix "Iagu-" is common in Nigeria, I had further reason to believe the good reverend. How does Crisis know it's "Aguwuom" - and why is this so important?

Oh, but Saint-Paul's piddling doesn't stop there. He informs Crisis readers that I have misled them by confusing the American College at Louvain with the Catholic University of Louvain (in Flemish, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). Crisis states that "I get my target confused." This is probably where the neophyte Saint-Paul shows his ignorance the most. He takes me to task for criticizing the Theology Department at the Catholic University, claims that I'm criticizing the wrong theology department. The fact is that there is no "theology department" at the American College. In fact, there are no "departments" at all. American College seminarians take their academic courses in theology at the University of Louvain, without which there could never be any such thing as the American College of Louvain.

As I pointed out, it is Fr. Innocent who laments that "It's easy to lose your priestly identity here," meaning the Theology Department at the University, where all American College seminarians take their courses. Many U.S. bishops are aware of this and similar problems at the University of Louvain. That's why out of the 184 dioceses in the U.S., now only four bishops send theology seminarians to the American College of Louvain (there are now only five theology seminarians there!) despite the fact that it is one of only two overseas seminaries run directly by the U.S. bishops. The other is the generally orthodox North American College in Rome which has approximately 140 students (versus Louvain's five) from dioceses all across the U.S.

There is so much more in the Crisis follow-up article that deserves rebuttal. Nevertheless, it would be a consummate chore for readers to have to go on reading about it. If I were to answer to all the claims made by Saint-Paul in his follow-up defense, I would need a running series in the NOR for several months. So enough!

I must, however, make one correction to my December 2002 NOR article ("The Astounding Naïveté of Crisis Magazine"). The most commonly repeated complaint I received about my article was that I concluded that Crisis was simply being naïve in its reporting, and that the Crisis article was "strangely out of character" for that periodical. I've heard no end of complaints about that conclusion. In my subsequent travels throughout the U.S. and England, I've kept hearing that the smear piece on Michael S. Rose was not at all "strangely out of character" for Crisis; that it was and is very much in character.

So I am obliged to admit my shortcomings here: I did not do sufficient research in order to establish the veracity of that particular assertion. I did not go back and evaluate the previous two or three years of Crisis. If I had, I may have discovered what many others are asserting, that Crisis is just another schmoozer publication that seeks to charm the hierarchy and court rich donors, upon whose support they rely heavily for their continued existence. One further indication of this is that Crisis has joined the National Catholic Register, another schmoozer publication, and Our Sunday Visitor in banning the NOR's hallmark ads.

Michael S. Rose is an investigative journalist, and the author of The Renovation Manipulation, Ugly as Sin, and of course Goodbye, Good Men. His next book is Priest, to be released in July. He can be reached at: romatermini@fuse.net . Reprinted with permission from New Oxford Review.

Editor's Note: I encourage anyone who is not a subscriber to NOR to do so immediatly. I say this simply because I beleive NOR is one of the few magazines not unafraid of politics. I have not been compensated for this editorial note.

Oh me. When I was at Ramstein Air Base, we often had "Louvain priests come down to say mass, including Raymond Collins, a noted Biblical scholar. Yes, the place is liberal and the priests are liberal. One sad case. An English priest who came to take theology lessons had his faith shaken. No, if I were a bishop I would never send a priest there.

The real point is not the American College--it is Crisis Magazine which sponsored a hit piece against Rose on behalf of the American hierarchy.

Rose's continued whining confirms him to be the cry-baby some of us thought he was last year. I wonder if his threatened lawsuit is still hanging over the head of that young Minnesota priest?

His fifteen minutes are up, and writing 2000 word screeds in defense of his "integrity" are just boring.

Rose is the clear winner here. Crisis is the clear loser. Count me among the former Crisis subscribers and former Hudson fans.

Sometimes you have to make a choice between schmoozing up to the rich and powerful, and doing what's right. Michael Rose chose to do what's right. Deal Hudson chose to attack a good man to curry favor with the rich and powerful.

Why is it whining to defend yourself against lies? On the contrary, he is winning support with these counterpunches, proving that those who have attacked his credentials are themselves base liars and journalistic frauds. Bravo for Rose!

Deal Hudson is a neo-Catholic sell-out who kisses up to the plutocrats who run this country.

I recall listening to him on Catholic radio last year extolling the virtues of Clinton attorney Bob Bennett who had just been named to the newly created Bishop's Review Board. He could barely contain his excitement.

Basically, for the past several years, "Crisis" and its neo-Catholic ally, "The Wanderer", have taken turns trashing Traditional Catholics.

When Traditional Catholicism is restored, as it inevitably will be, their sorry record in defending the detructive novelties that have invaded the Church over the past 40 years will be obvious to all true Catholics.

Basically, for the past several years, "Crisis" and its neo-Catholic ally, "The Wanderer", have taken turns trashing Traditional Catholics.

LOL!!

The Wanderer is "neo-Catholic"? And ole Deal's a real radical.

I guess you're an SSPXer, too, huh?

Well, I once you've drunk at the Woods-Ferrara trough, everybody looks like a screaming liberal.

Nobody ever said neo-Catholics were "screaming liberals." They are conservative and ready to pillory bad bishops--provided you don't include Rome in the criticism and give the Pope a pass. But since this is impossible--it is Rome, after all, which supports the Novus Ordo establishment and has promoted many of its worst prelates and excesses--neo-Catholics are on the horns of a dilemma. Their idea of a solution to the present crisis is to turn for help to the same Vatican which created the crisis in the first place. This is like asking arsenists to put out a fire.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.