In Seattle on Sept. 5, the president of the U.S. bishops' conference not only enlightened Catholic journalists about his job — and what the Catholic Church is — but he gave them some sound advice on how they could do their job better.

Bishop Wilton Gregory spoke to the religion writers at their annual convention in Seattle. He told writers from USA Today, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and scores of other news outlets to balance the intense scrutiny the Church continues to undergo, especially on the issue of child sexual abuse. Our own Jay Dunlap was there, and we thought it worth passing on the information he reported.

Noting that in early 2004, the John Jay College of Law will release a study commissioned by the U.S. bishops' lay National Review Board on the extent of the sexual abuse problem in the Church, Bishop Gregory urged the religion writers not to take the study as the basis for more sensationalistic coverage and noted that their papers need to examine other groups with the kind of intense scrutiny so far focused only on Catholic priests.

He mentioned the need for research on sexual abuse in families, school systems and “in all forms of professional and volunteer work with young people.”

“Since there has been no other study like this of any other profession, it has no context,” Bishop Gregory said. “Will the result be to highlight the problem of sexual abuse as it exists among Catholic clergy?

“From the saturation coverage of 2002, some might like to think that sexual abuse of children in our society could be eliminated by eliminating Catholic priest abusers,” the bishop said. “We all know that is not a rational proposition; yet throughout 2002, I can find only minimal attempts on the part of the media to discover the extent of the problem outside the Catholic priesthood.”

Bishop Gregory focused as well on the coverage of the norms for dealing with clerical sexual abuse drafted by the U.S. bishops in Dallas in June 2002. In particular, he criticized media reports citing anonymous sources that the Holy See “rejected the original essential norms” drafted by U.S. bishops.

On the contrary, he said both he and Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who headed the bishops' delegation in its discussions with the Vatican, found that the Holy See only strengthened the Dallas norms.

“As someone responsible for dealing with the Holy See directly on this matter, I can tell you that the Holy Father and his advisers have been committed to assisting the bishops as much as possible,” Bishop Gregory told the reporters. “In fact, working with the officers of the Holy See during this entire crisis has been a personal lesson in collegiality that I could never have envisioned — it has strengthened my faith in the Church that I love even more deeply.”

Bishop Gregory also gave the writers an ecclesiology lesson, noting that there is in fact no such thing as the “American Catholic Church.” He noted the independence of each bishop in his diocese, answerable only to the Holy Father, and that the U.S. bishops' conference is not a legislature.

The conference “may identify common concerns and suggest possible approaches, but we do very little that is binding back home,” he said. That is why the Dallas norms required and received “the approbation of the Holy See for ‘particular canon law in the U.S.' for those parts of the charter which became the Essential Norms.”

We're accustomed to journalists telling bishops what to do. It was encouraging to hear Bishop Gregory explaining how the Church actually works — and telling the media a thing or two for a change.

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