Just makin' up some facts: Rev. Thomas Doyle
In 2002, Church-bashing attorney Jeff Anderson filed the suit John V. Doe vs. Holy See, an attempt by the contingency lawyer to generate sensational headlines and blame the Vatican for the abuse committed decades ago by a priest in the United States who was laicized in 1966 and died in 1992.
Ten years later, the legal wranglings in this case continue, and now TheMediaReport.com has found itself caught in the crossfire.
In a recent declaration in the case, professional Church critic and dissident priest Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, O.P., who is acting as an expert witness for the plaintiff, falsely accused defense attorneys for The Holy See of obtaining information from TheMediaReport.com and then using it in a reply brief.
Doyle claims that lawyers for The Holy See used information about him from the profile that we posted of him last month.
The facts are the facts
However, TheMediaReport.com posted its profile of Doyle on May 15. Attorneys for The Holy See had already filed its brief on May 9, six days earlier.
In other words, in his declaration, Doyle has it completely backwards. TheMediaReport.com used information from The Holy See's brief, not the other way around. (TheMediaReport.com has been monitoring this historic case and has viewed much of the docket.)
[Click to read the relevant page from Doyle's June 1 declaration]
Doyle accuses The Holy See's lawyers and this site of "erroneous and inaccurate statements," but he fails to point out any specific examples. Doyle resorts to claiming that some of his recorded remarks and statements have been "taken out of the proper context." Other times he resorts to parsing and hair splitting.
Doyle asserts that The Holy See's claim that "Doyle has long criticized Catholic institutions" is "polemical, slanderous, and incorrect."
Really? What else can be concluded from someone which such a long and storied history of animosity against Catholic teaching and Catholic leaders? Doyle is the same guy who once told a national television audience, "They (The Catholic Church) ought to sell the Vatican to the Mormons or to Disney or something and go out and start all over again."
Doyle should come clean about his dissent. Meanwhile, as we have stated before, Doyle is hardly the unbiased "expert" that the media purports him to be. As his incorrect broadside against The Holy See and TheMediaReport.com illustrates, Fr. Doyle can improve his regard for the facts and the truth.
I have not had any luck (though I’m not expert) trying to find this ‘document 326 of Doyle’s online; any possibility of a link to the entire 14pp?
But just the page published here gives rise to thought.
His insistence (at No. 33) that his graduate or post-graduate studies in the governance dynamics of Marxism-Leninism don’t affect his view of the governance dynamics of the Church don’t strike me as altogether credible. If you have spent a great deal of time and effort amassing an advanced-level knowledge-base in a subject, then it seems counterintuitive to declare that all that work and knowledge (let alone emotional stance) aren’t going to affect studies of the same topic sited in a different venue.
This strikes me as disingenuous, shading toward duplicitous.
My surmise is supported, I believe, by what Doyle then says (at No. 36): he says he didn’t mean to compare Nazisim and Catholicism but rather that he simply meant that “one knew that Nazism was totally corrupt”. This seems – at the most charitable reading – to be a distinction without a difference. In his view, apparently, the Catholic Church (or at least Vatican governance – it’s not clear from what’s on this page) is as demonstrably and obviously and indubitably and “totally” corrupt as Nazism.
That surely indicates a certain and rather substantial negative stance toward Catholicism, the Church, and/or the Vatican.
I’m also unimpressed with his claim (at No. 35) that clearly negative emails sent by him making a comparison between Nazis and Catholic bishops (As to their governance style? Their credibility? Their essential moral status?) are – in his mind apparently – irrelevant in assessing his stance toward the Church/bishops/Vatican because they were “private emails” that “found their way” (magically?) onto his recipient’s website.
I don’t see the irrelevance: he made the statements, presumably truthfully, setting forth his opinions. Does he consider such emails to be ‘secret’ for all practical purposes? Or somehow legally privileged? (I offer a bit of snark here: will he claim that he is a rape-crisis-counselor under applicable statutes and thus he was ‘counseling’ when he sent the emails and they are thus ‘privileged’?)
Like SNAP, it seems to me, he doesn’t like being under the same scrutiny that is to be applied to the Church.
And like SNAP, when you do turn over the rock, you always seem to find some palpably unsavory stuff.
Nor does it help that (at No. 37) he claims that in the Nazi references he merely wished to “illustrate … that many bishops cloaked their inept handling of sex abuse with pious platitudes”. The Nazis are not widely known for “pious platitudes”.
But they were known for insisting that in the pursuit of what they saw as their Cause no mere obstructions of law and due process nor any first principles of Western justice could be allowed to interfere. Which – not to put too fine a point on it – seems substantially the presumption underlying so much of what we are seeing in all these matters nowadays, ably assisted by Doyle’s assertions.
And to imply any sort of equivalence between the moral bankruptcy and the wrack and the ruin caused by the Third Reich, on the one hand, and the Church’s handling of sex-abuse matters (in those cases where genuine abuse can be established) is something that shades very close to demagoguery and the propagandistic skeins woven by that master public-opinion manipulator of the Reich, Goebbels.
What is going to happne to Doyle for putting false things in a legal brief?
It seems Mediareport.com as others attempting to protect the hierarchy and church finances do it by persecuting those that seek justice for victims of sexual abuse by bishops, priests, nuns and some of the laity. When will the hierarchy become honest about the coverups and threats that have gone on for far to long.
Amen! Defend victims, not pompous perps!
PUBLION:
"………….This strikes me as disingenuous, shading toward duplicitous……….."
You must be referring to Catholic Church leadership in the United States with this statement. They've honed disingenuous and duplicitous down to a fine science and art.
Thank you!
Fr. Doyle is not a dissident priest, but one of integrity who has spoken truth to wayward authority on many occasions. If the bishops has listened to him in 1985, they may not have ended up creating such a disaster in covering up for abusers.
Exactly!
Fr. Doyle has submitted a formal public statement to a court under pains and penalties and it is being assessed. To what sort of mind could this be "persecution"? In what way is analysis and assessment of his formal statements characterizable as trying to "protect" anything?
Of what relevance is the peanut-gallery-level one-liner that I "must be referring" to anything else? I was clearly analyzing Doyle's own public statements.
If Fr. Doyle were merely a "dissident priest" he would not be characterizing the Church and/or the Vatican as the equivalent of Nazis and "totally" corrupt. If Fr. Doyle were merely concerned for sexual abuse within the Church then in light of all available researched material indicating the low level of it, why is he not happy with the current level and trajectory of developments in the Church?
The assortment of peanut-gallery comments above – demonstrating such refusal or inability to engage the statements and ideas - indicates, as if on cue, the presence of the demagogic dynamic that I mentioned in my initial comment.
palpably unsavory stuff…………….
propagandistic skeins……………..
peanut-gallery-level one-liner…….
Publion, if nothing else, you sure are entertaining. If you were in Father Doyle's position, how would you have proceeded over the past 25 years?
You are well-advised to look less for entertainment and more for intelligent substance. Then perhaps your comments might rise above the one-liners. Entertaining the gallery might pass for 'thought' and creds in the circles in which you prefer to travel, but these sites here are part of a larger world. And the peanut-gallery one-liners won't get a free pass here.
Were Doyle purely concerned as a 'dissident' but committed priest of the Church, and were he purely concerned for the rectification of the clerical abuse problem, then at this point in time – which is the focus – he would be commensurably consoled and that would be reflected in his current positions and statements. Your question, then, was answered in my prior comment. Perhaps it was too entertaining to have engaged your conceptual capabilties.
But instead, Doyle continues now a script developed out of a situation "25 years ago".
So at this point Doyle's actions and statements present an effect without a cause. So the next question is ….
I copied this: Bill Donohue assesses the reforms that were authorized ten years ago when the bishops assembled in Dallas:
Tomorrow the bishops will meet in Atlanta, ten years after they instituted reforms to combat the sexual abuse of minors. Though there is room for honest disagreement on why the problem has abated—it has almost disappeared—it is indisputable that the Catholic Church has the best record of any institution today regarding this matter, religious or secular. In the last three years, there has been an average of 7 new credible accusations made against over 40,000 priests.
Millions of employees and children have gone through programs to combat this problem. The “zero tolerance” policy that was adopted has won much praise, though in practice it has had a deleterious impact on the rights of the accused. Moreover, spurious accusations abound. For example, one week ago today an allegation was made in Montana against a nun who was said to fondle a boy in 1943, two years before the end of World War II.
Two years ago we investigated which entities in the media, education, and religion had adopted a “zero tolerance” policy for handling cases of sexual abuse: we found few that did, and none that had anything analogous to the Dallas reforms.
Today attention has turned to the public schools where sexual abuse is still rampant, as well as to elite private schools such as Horace Mann in the Bronx; the Orthodox Jewish community is currently facing dozens of cases. Still, it is old cases involving priests that garner most of the press: in Philadelphia, Lynne Abraham, the D.A. who started the grand jury hearings over a decade ago, never once investigated other religions, though she was explicitly asked to do so. Her bias is palpable.
In all of these institutions, homosexuals account for a disproportionate share of the abuse, yet it is almost never reported. Even now the media (especially in Philly) tag Jerry Sandusky as a pedophile, though yesterday his first accuser identified the former Penn State coach as a homosexual.
Great Spirits like Tom Doyle have always met with violent opposition from mediocre minds, like, well, you know.
Albert Einstein
Reviewing all of the above comments, the readership is heartily invited to assess which are from mediocre minds. And which minds are so mediocre as not to be able to notice the difference.
Presuming that he is not actually speaking from the Beyond, it is anybody's guess what the significance of "Albert Einstein" might be. Perhaps it was a sophomorically maladroit effort to equate Fr. Doyle with the late Dr. Einstein. If so, it demonstrates just how very easily impressed some minds are.
It has also struck me about all these groups in the Catholic abuse matter:
Although 1) they claim the most horrific experiences and although 2) they demand the most serious and far-reaching consequences, yet the level of thinking they seem to deploy (and demand from everybody else) is so simplistic and – really – primitive or at least un-developed and sophomoric.
And when you do try to think-through their demands and agenda, they recoil like – I’ll say it – vampires to holy water.
"However, TheMediaReport.com posted its profile of Doyle on May 15. Attorneys for The Holy See had already filed its brief on May 9, six days earlier.
In other words, in his declaration, Doyle has it completely backwards…."
OR, perhaps there is a connection between this blog and the legal team that defends child rapists and will do anything to prevent the whole truth from coming out.
With 11 million already spent on Lynn's trial alone, this blog would be a bargain in this conspiracy of silence and corruption.
I believe Publion and themediareport are either the same person or closely affiliated.
We are not the same person. We are not affiliated.
Publion has his own site.
I just came across the most recent ('L Brown' and TMR) comments.
As TMR-Mr. Pierre says, I am not the same person nor am I closely affiliated in any way. Mr. Pierre and I do not know each other, have never met or exchanged any communications with each other whatsoever. The extent of my acquaintance with him is limited to reading his site, reading his comments here and on the Philly trial site and NCR, and that's it.
But what difference would it make even if I were "closely affiliated"? My ideas are right out there in my comments, to be read, considered, and thought-about. If the ideas can stand on their own then what possible difference could it make whether I knew Mr. Pierre or not? It is a cartoon-type thought to reach for an "afilliation" in order to … what? To somehow (in the commenter's mind) discredit or dismiss my ideas? To damn one or both of us by association?
I'd say that what goes on in the mind of somebody operating on this level is: I don't have to deal with the ideas he puts forth because he is "affiliated" with that other person whose position I totally don't like.
I am not the first person to suggest this, but I'll say it: what we are seeing in so many of these comments is the mindset that drives and has been driving so much of the SNAP/BishopAccountability mentality and agenda. I don't think we are seeing a few 'rogue' whackos in these types of comments: I think we are seeing the mentality of SNAP/BishopAccountability at work out in the open.
Mr. Publion, it was Albert Einstein who spoke about great spirits like Tom Doyle meeting opposition from and mediocre minds like yours.
I apologize for not making that more clear. I assumed you were familiar with Einstein's quote and your place inside it.