At first glance last week, it might have looked as though The New York Times had beaten the Journal Sentinel on a Milwaukee story.
Last Thursday morning the Times published an account of a former Milwaukee Catholic priest that was so big the JS ran the Times story on its own front page. It told how the late Rev. Lawrence Murphy allegedly abused as many as 200 boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf during Murphy’s time there from 1950 to 1974. A primary angle of the Times story was the role that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — may have played in quashing formal church proceedings against Murphy in the late 1990s. Murphy died in 1998.
It was reminiscent of another occasion in which the JS got scooped by national news media on a Catholic sex-scandal story in its own backyard. That was the revelation that the Archdiocese had paid $450,000 to Paul Marcoux on behalf of then-Archbishop Rembert Weakland. Marcoux went public with an appearance on Good Morning America in May 2002, and the JS — which had been working on the story — found itself playing catch-up.
In the Murphy case, though, the JS had covered much of the story already, producing a powerful two-part investigative piece in 2006 by now-retired reporter Mary Zahn. (The online version of the Times story included a link to Zahn’s piece.) The Atlantic Monthly writer and blogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been commenting for years on the running scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic church (Sullivan is himself Catholic; he’s also gay), linked to Zahn’s stories in one of his posts on the topic.
(An aside: Elsewhere, Sullivan defends former Archbishop Weakland to a degree in response to the pope’s defenders’ attacks on the press in the Murphy matter. Meanwhile, the Dairy State also figured into another Sullivan item — his barb at Madison Bishop Robert C. Morlino for criticizing nuns and the Catholic Hospital Association, who broke with the church and supported the recently passed health care bill.)
What sets the Times story apart, of course, is the treasure trove of new documents it unearths. The papers are the fruit of discovery in the case Marshall v. Archdiocese of Milwaukee, currently pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court. So once again, the JS had to go with a second-day lead in which the church lashes back with accusations of “a smear campaign.”
Interestingly, though, even the Times wasn’t first to hint at the original Murphy story. Legal scholar (and outspoken advocate for abuse victims) Marci Hamilton summed up the documents’ import as part of a Feb. 4 column for FindLaw, an online news and reference site:
“Because civil authorities were cut out of the process, Murphy’s misdeeds were never known — until today, when civil litigation led by pathbreaking litigator Jeff Anderson has finally led to the discovery of the first hard proof that we have in the United States that the Vatican itself has actively participated in orchestrating and directing its grossly deficient practices for handling child sex abuse within the institution. Finally, too, the unearthing of this evidence proves that the civil law is yielding far better results for society than permitting the Church to operate within its secret sphere. It is apparent that the civil clergy-abuse lawsuits, like the Irish reports, are essential in learning the truth, aiding survivors, and protecting children.”
In fairness, it’s not that those documents have been sitting around in the Milwaukee County Courthouse quietly gathering dust, ignored by the Journal Sentinel‘s religion or courthouse reporters. Instead, the aforementioned Jeff Anderson — a Minneapolis lawyer who has specialized in clergy-abuse lawsuits — appears to have chosen to pass them on to Hamilton and then the Times rather than the JS.
We’ve called Anderson to ask about that decision. If we hear back, we’ll let you know. But we see a couple of possibilities at work: recent turnover on the JS religion beat; the Journal Sentinel‘s past ambivalence in its coverage on the whole abuse topic, which has ranged from cautious to aggressive over the years; and the pragmatic calculation that the Times as a national paper would give the story more legs than the JS. (The Times reporter on the Murphy story is Laurie Goodstein; she broke the story last fall about Father Henry Willenborg, who fathered a child with a woman whom he counseled in the 1980s in Quincy, Ill. Still another Wisconsin angle: When the Times published that story, Willenborg was removed from his post as senior pastor of Our Lady of the Lake church in Ashland, Wis.)
You can see the Times’s follow-up story on the Murphy case here, and Milwaukee News Buzz’s roundup here.
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