How Fair are Anonymous Accusations Against Priests? | David F. Pierre, Jr. | Catholic World Report
Media reports often presume accused priests are guilty until proven innocent, doing irreparable damage to the lives of the wrongly accused.
When a Catholic priest is publicly accused of the crime of abuse, it is typical for the media to trumpet the name of the cleric, while allowing the accuser to remain completely anonymous throughout the ordeal.
Although this situation is not unique to Catholic priests, it is a practice that clergy have frequently griped about in private, and it is an issue that has received almost no public attention.
For example, last August in Hawaii, a criminal jury took just minutes to acquit Father Bohdan Borowec, a Ukrainian Catholic priest on vacation from Canada, of charges of kidnapping and sexual assault stemming from an incident alleged to have occurred months earlier. Father Borowec had never had any other accusations of wrongdoing against him in decades in ministry.
Throughout the process, Father Borowec had his name and picture plastered across media reports as a “priest charged with rape.” Yet never did the media publish the woman accuser’s name.
Following the exoneration of his client, the priest’s attorney, Shawn A. Luiz, spoke to the Hawaii Catholic Herald and pointed out this glaring double standard. “In cases of being falsely accused, the priest’s reputation is effectively destroyed while the accuser, on the other hand, enjoys anonymity and suffers no loss of reputation or negative material consequences,” Luiz said.
Luiz’s remark may have been a rare instance of such an observation being aired publicly, but it surely is a topic that has been discussed frequently among priests.
Firsthand experience
Rev. Roger N. Jacques was among the clerics swept up in the avalanche of sex abuse claims in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002. It took nearly four years for the previously unblemished priest to clear his name following a bizarre abuse accusation stemming from a claim of “repressed memory” uncovered through hypnosis.
Can he sue for libel?
Posted by: Jeff Olson | Friday, May 11, 2012 at 06:34 PM