Clown Show: Two More Phony State AG Reports Issued to Uncritical Media Applause

Political advantage over principle: Sleazy politicians
Atty. Gen. Anthony D. Brown, Maryland (l) and Atty. Gen. Kwame Raoul, Illinois (r)

I guess it was inevitable. Following the international frenzy in the summer of 2018 surrounding the phony Pennsylvania grand jury report against the Catholic Church, publicity-seeking attorney generals across the country looked on with envy at the glowing media attention that then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro garnered for himself. Outlets all around the globe showered the egomaniacal Pennsylvania AG with praise. It is probably no accident that Shapiro earned himself a promotion for his dark efforts and is now governor of Pennsylvania.

Five years later, we are still seeing the fruits of that envy. In recent weeks, attorneys general from both Maryland (Anthony G. Brown) and Illinois (Kwame Raoul) have released their own reports about the Church involving often decades-old allegations against long-since-dead priests which amount to little more than gossip by the states' top legal officials. And, of course, their reports did not even yield a single criminal charge against anyone.

In other words, these reports were little more than pieces of hyped-up campaign literature for attention-starved politicians. Brown and Raoul both knew that their reports would be red meat for a Church-loathing media eager to publish any hit piece on the Church, no matter how old or crazy. (Extra credit to Brown in Maryland for releasing his report during Holy Week. Classy.)

[The Maryland report (April 2023) (pdf) ... The Illinois report (May 2023) (pdf)]

National Enquirer under state seal

Of course, there is really no such thing as a "state attorney general's report." It is a recent, made-up term by state attorney generals to spend taxpayer monies to prepare a compilation of old claims committed by one organization, the hated Catholic Church, to garner media attention.

Brown's report claims, "Over 600 children are known to have been abused by the 156 people included in this Report," and Raoul's report asserts, "451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers abused at least 1,997 children." Both claims are untrue. In fact:

• Those whom the reports indicate as "victims" are actually just accusers, who make their accusations under the protection of anonymity and often stand to gain big bucks from the Church. Nearly all of the cases in both reports were never adjudicated in a court of law or even by Church protocols.
• The vast majority of accused priests chronicled in these reports are long dead and no longer around to defend themselves. So discerning what actually happened is impossible.
• In both Maryland and Illinois, information was gathered in part through a "hotline," allowing just about any crank to say just about anything without any scrutiny. (This was not unlike the time in 2018 when an anonymous "tip line" was established for anyone to accuse Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sex crimes during his confirmation hearings; and, in the words of a Washington insider, "Every whack-job in the world called in to that thing.")

Both the Maryland and Illinois reports are filled with calumny for which the politicians publishing this stuff should be ashamed, and the complicit media even more so. Take the case in the Maryland report of Fr. Joseph Hill, whose date of birth is not even known but was ordained during World War II. Twenty years ago, a man came to the Archdiocese of Baltimore to report that Hill had abused his "older sister." How did Fr. Hill respond to the accusation? Well, he died in 1990. And despite having an unblemished record until his death, Hill is still listed in the report as a verified abuser.

Stenographers of the gossip

Predictably, reporters at the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune acted as mere stenographers for all this nonsense and reported every unsubstantiated claim in the reports without even a hint of skepticism or curiosity, even amping up the crazy claims. So much for reporters with integrity. Today, all news is partisan politics, and all politics is news.

But such is today's media landscape. Skepticism, inquisitiveness, and any pretense of truth-seeking and fairness are long gone.

For now, it's just on to the next phony AG report.

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Want to learn about the rampancy of false accusations against priests?:
- "False Accusations Against Catholic Priests Are Now At Epic Proportions" (May 2019)
- The book: The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church by David F. Pierre, Jr. (Amazon.com)