More media malpractice - Irish Broadcaster spreads false charges against Catholic priest.

Via CNA:

Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ is likely to face charges of anti-Catholic bias following a soon-to-be-published report into why it falsely accused a priest of raping a minor and fathering a child.

“The report must ascertain what misjudgments were made that caused Fr. Kevin Reynolds to be so badly libeled and who made the key decisions?” Irish social commentator David Quinn of the Dublin-based Iona Institute told CNA April 2.

The independent inquiry was launched after RTÉ’s current affairs series “Prime Time” broadcast an episode titled “Mission to Prey” in May 2011. The program wrongly accused County Galway priest Father Kevin Reynolds of raping and impregnating a minor while working in Kenya as a missionary 30 years ago. It also falsely alleged that Fr. Reynolds secretly provided financial support for the baby over many years.

Prior to broadcast, Fr. Reynolds had volunteered to undergo a DNA test to prove his innocence but RTÉ refused. He was subsequently removed from his home and parish ministry. His innocence was later proven however by two separate and independent DNA tests.

In November of 2011, Fr. Reynolds agreed to accept substantial damages from RTÉ in an out-of-court libel settlement. The broadcaster’s Director-General Noel Curran apologized and admitted it was “one of the gravest editorial mistakes ever made” in the stations 51-year history.

“Why did RTÉ not accept Fr. Reynolds’s offer of a paternity test? Has the presumption of innocence being lost in the case of priests?” Quinn asked.

“Will RTÉ bias only ever be exposed when a black and white scientific test is failed, or will some other criteria be developed to determine when bias is at work in the making of programs about the Catholic Church?”

The country’s official broadcasting watchdog, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, has now sent a copy of their independent investigation to RTÉ along with notification of the financial sanctions it plans to impose.

RTÉ could be fined up to 250,000 euros or $333,000 U.S. dollars. It will be given 14 days to respond to the broadcasting authority’s conclusions. At the end of the process, the authority will officially publish its report along with notification of the financial penalties imposed.

The Truth - It can surprise you sometimes.

How many individuals have claimed to have been raped by Catholic priests.  Based on the publicity of the issue you might be excused in thinking - as did the Mormon troll at Theology for Dummies - that the number is "tens of thousands."

If fact, though, the real number is nowhere close.

Here is an article from Spiked - which is a Brit libertarian/secular site - that runs the numbers on the number of claims against Catholic priest for rape.  The Bottom line is that there were 68 such alleged victims in Ireland over an approximately 90 year period and 1,200 in the United States over a 50 year period.

For the United States the analysis is as follows:

The term ‘paedophile priest’ has become such a part of everyday cultural lingo that most people, when they read in last week’s relatively respectable UK Independent that ‘over 10,000 children have come forward to say they were raped [by Catholic priests]’, would probably think, ‘Yeah, that’s possible’. But it isn’t true. The Independent was referring to a study commissioned in 2002 by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was published in 2004 under the heading ‘The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States’. This study covered the period of 1950 to 2002, and it did indeed find that 10,000 individuals in the US - 10,667, to be precise - had made allegations of sexual abuse against priests (against 4,392 priests in total, around four per cent of the 109,694 Catholic priests active in the US between 1950 and 2002). But this doesn’t mean that these 10,000 ‘[came] forward to say they were raped’.


The 10,667 made various allegations, ranging from verbal abuse (being forced to indulge in sex talk) to being shown pornography to being touched by a priest over or under their clothing. Then there were the more serious allegations, which included being coerced into mutual masturbation, oral sex and, in some instances, rape. Yet where 3,553 of the individuals claimed to have been touched over their clothing and 3,981 to have been touched under their clothing, a smaller number claimed to have been subjected to what is described in the report as ‘penile penetration or attempted penile penetration’, that is rape or attempted rape; 990 boys and 213 girls made this allegation – a total of 1,203 individuals, not 10,000.

Moreover, if we are serious about such Enlightened ideals as justice and equality before the law, then we have to accept the fact that not all of these allegations were ultimately proven to be true. Out of the 10,000-plus allegations made against priests in America, 3,300 were not investigated at all because they were made after the accused priest had died (surely even the most riled anti-pope commentator accepts that a man who is no longer around to defend himself cannot be convicted of a crime). Of the 4,392 priests in America who were accused of sexual abuse in the period of 1950 to 2002, 1,021 were investigated by the police, and of these, 384 were charged, of whom 252 were convicted. So around six per cent of all American priests who had allegations made against them were finally convicted. (Of course there are many reasons for this relatively tiny number of convictions: some alleged victims were pressured to keep quiet; some (25 per cent in the US) didn’t make their allegations for more than 30 years after the alleged incident occurred; and in some instances there was just a lack of evidence.)

So nothing like 10,000 individuals in America ‘say they were raped’ by Catholic priests. In truth, 1,203 made this allegation. And not all of them resulted in a conviction. Every allegation of rape should be treated seriously, of course, but what happened to the idea of innocent until proven guilty? How did a complex US report about all manner of allegations against priests come to be translated in the words of the Independent into the idea that ‘over 10,000 people have come forward to say they were raped [by priests]’? Because in the outlook of certain sections of the intolerant New Atheist lobby, everything from sex talk to fondling to being shown a porn flick is ‘rape’ - if it’s done by a priest, that is - and every priest is guilty of what he is accused of despite the question of whether or not he was convicted in a court of law.

1,202 is the known ceiling of allegations.  There may be more such allegations, but that is speculation.  What we do know is that many allegations are false, so the number of true allegations should be adjusted down.  The amount of that adjust ought to take into account the approximately 50% of false rape allegations, based on the Indiana study on rapes, and the 25% conviction rate for molestation reported to the police.

The Irish numbers are even more surprising:

A similarly warped conflation has been made in relation to Ireland, now widely looked upon as a country where crazy priests spent most of their days handing out communion wafers and/or raping children. When the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was published in May 2009 - with its analysis of accusations of abuse made by individuals who had attended Irish reform schools between 1940 and 1999 - the media reported it as if it had uncovered apocalyptic, Caligulan levels of sexual depravity. ‘Thousands were raped in Irish reform schools’, said the Independent. ‘Thousands raped in Ireland’s Christian Brothers schools’, said the Belfast Telegraph. ‘Thousands raped and abused in Catholic schools in Ireland’, said the Guardian.


So were thousands of children - in particular boys, the main focus of the media reports - raped in Irish reform schools? No - 68 were, allegedly. Two-hundred-and-forty-two male witnesses made 253 reports of sexual abuse against the staff of Irish reform schools at the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse - and of these, 68 claim to have been raped. Once again, not all of the allegations resulted in convictions. Some witness reports involved priests who had died, and out of the 253 male reports of sexual abuse, 207 related to the period of 1969 or earlier; 46 related to the 1970s and 1980s. How did 68 claims of anal rape made against the staff of Irish reform schools over a 59-year period translate into headlines about thousands being raped? Because once again, everything from being neglected to being smacked to being emotionally abused - which thousands of Irish reform-school kids were subjected to - was lumped together with being raped, creating a warped image of a religious institution that rapes children on an almost daily basis.