My Offer to Help with the McC Report

From the editorial…

Wouldn’t it be nice if the church realized a mistake born of a colossal blunder and allowed Father White to return to his adoring parishioners in Martinsville and Rocky Mount?

…I appreciate the kind encouragement. Thank you, dear editors. That certainly sounds like a good idea to me. I adore the parishioners, too.

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I mentioned last week how the Vatican’s McCarrick report hides its sources of information, making it practically impossible to verify what it says. Quoted sources have taken to the airwaves to dispute the report’s claims.

The report quotes well-known Catholic psychologist Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons repeatedly. The report includes a letter purportedly written by him.

Dr. Fitzgibbons has written that the report contains “falsehoods and fabrications” about his work. On a Catholic radio show, the doctor said, “in that document are pages and pages of total fabrications…totally untrue…They have a letter they claim that I wrote. Totally a lie.”

To hear what Dr. Fitzgibbons had to say, start at 22:00 here:

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The lawyer who put the report together is Jeffrey Lena. Apparently, Lena made some false assumptions in his investigation. I would summarize them as follows:

1. The report does not comprehend an important fact: For every victim of McCarrick’s predations that the Vatican knew about over the years, there are likely five or ten (or twenty or fifty) that they didn’t know about and still don’t know about.

Lena gets himself tied up in knots in a footnote on page 242. He does not understand how McCarrick referred to a mediated settlement in a January 2006 letter, when that settlement wasn’t actually reached until over a year later. But maybe there was another settlement?

On page 281, Lena assumes that the priest to whom Dr. Richard Sipe refers in a letter is Lena’s “Priest 1.” But it could just as easily be another victim, about whom Lena knows nothing.

False assumption by Lena: “I know about all the abused priests and all the settlements.” More likely truth: You do not know the half of it, sir.

2. Crucial pieces of information in this report apparently come from McCarrick himself.

On page 314, Lena refers to a letter McCarrick wrote to the Vatican Secretary of State in September 2008. Lena acknowledges, however, that the letter was not in the Vatican archives. How does Lena know about the letter’s existence then? One assumes the answer must be: McCarrick himself.

When I came across this, I realized: Lena’s #1 source is McCarrick himself. McCarrick himself shaped the narrative of this report.

McCarrick is a pathological liar. He continues to lie to himself about the most-decisive facts of his own life. Soon he will die and meet The Judge, and he will have to face with genuine, crushing shock the full toll of the damage that he himself has done.

Having the unfathomably dishonest McCarrick as the primary source of information makes this report highly unreliable, to say the least. In the spring of 2002, McCarrick bamboozled the journalists of New York, New Jersey, and Washington–a fact that Lena lays out. Lena does not see, however, the extent to which McCarrick has bamboozled him, winning his sympathy to keep him from seeing the obvious: McCarrick is a depraved man, a master manipulator who knows no real truth other than his own compulsive desires. You cannot trust him about anything.

3. Lena makes a glaring error as a lawyer in his summation of McCarrick’s canon-legal situation as of 2009 (pages 340-341.) Lena claims that, at that point, there have been no “findings of fact” about McCarrick’s crimes.

This is false. For years before then, all the parties, including McCarrick, agreed that McCarrick many times slept in the same bed with seminarians, priests, and other young men.

This is a highly significant fact, in and of itself. I will explain the importance of it in a subsequent post. For now, I simply want to point out. Lena is wrong. This fact was never in dispute. It was a settled “finding of fact” all along.

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We need to have every factual assertion in the Vatican McCarrick report verified by an independent investigator. The Vatican needs to give such an investigator access to all the secret source material that underlies this report.

I hope that Bishop Knestout heeds the Bulletin editors’ call. I hope we can get back to normal in the parishes here.

But: If that is not to be, I offer my services to conduct the independent investigation of the underlying source material of the McCarrick report. I would be glad to put together a team to double-check Mr. Lena’s work, from a more-realistic perspective.