MAITLAND-Newcastle Bishop Michael Malone described the Newcastle Herald as
‘‘the enemy’’ in a bitter but ultimately unpublished message to
Catholics in 2007 after the newspaper first exposed Church knowledge of
notorious Hunter paedophile priests.
The message, titled ‘‘Trial
by Media’’, has not seen the light of day until now after the NSW
Special Commission of Inquiry released hundreds of documents to the
public last week, including previously secret Church documents dating
back to the late 1940s.
The documents form part of the
commission’s investigation of Church and police handling of allegations
involving paedophile priests Denis McAlinden and Jim Fletcher.
The then Bishop Malone’s ‘‘Trial by Media’’ message was written for the diocese’s Aurora magazine after Herald articles
in September and October 2007 quoted documents proving Catholic Church
officials knew about McAlinden and another notorious paedophile priest,
Vince Ryan, for decades.
In it Bishop Malone:
● accused the newspaper of a ‘‘concerted attack’’ on the diocese;
● accused journalists of ‘‘personal attacks’’ on clergy;
● accused the newspaper of raising allegations against clergy only after they were dead;
●
accused police of providing intelligence to the Herald which resulted
in ‘‘attention [being] diverted from their own inability to process
these matters adequately’’;
● accused the Herald of being
‘‘irresponsible’’ and ‘‘dishonest’’ in the reporting of child sex abuse
cases within the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, of ‘‘play[ing] on the
susceptibilities of vulnerable victims’’ and being ‘‘judge and jury to
deceased prelates’’;
● praised radio and TV media in the Hunter
for choosing ‘‘not to be involved’’ in coverage of matters involving
church knowledge of child sex offenders.
‘‘Even for the Herald (Newcastle),
described recently by one of our priests as ‘that grubby little rag’,
the concerted attack on the diocese of Maitland-Newcastle commencing
late September 2007 has been quite extreme,’’ Bishop Malone wrote.
‘‘I resent having to pay $1.20 for the paper, but I do so to learn what ‘the enemy’ is saying!’’
Bishop Malone attacked the Herald for articles critical of Bishop Leo Clarke, Monsignor Patrick Cotter and Father Denis McAlinden, and accused the Herald of condemning them ‘‘now that they cannot defend themselves’’.
‘‘Watch the paper when I am dead!’’ he said.
He ended the message by saying: ‘‘We must always remember that a newspaper exists to sell copy. I buy it, but reluctantly!’’
Although ‘‘Trial by Media’’ included the line: ‘‘Readers of Aurora will
know that I am usually happy to co-operate with the media’’, a
statement from Maitland-Newcastle diocese said it was ‘‘written for no
intended audience and, as such, was not sent to Aurora for consideration to be published and has not been published before”.
Previously
secret Church documents released by the NSW Special Commission of
Inquiry last week include a 1949 request from an Irish order to the then
Hunter Catholic Bishop Toohey to accept Father Denis McAlinden.
The priest was described as ‘‘difficult’’.
The Church acknowledged McAlinden had hundreds of victims, possibly in as many as four countries, following the Herald’s first reports in 2007, which ultimately led to the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry.
The released documents include Herald and NSW Police reports and emails from 2007.
Comment by Joanne McCarthy
BISHOP Michael Malone was right in 2007 when he wrote that the Newcastle Herald exposed Church knowledge of notorious Hunter paedophile priests only after some key players were dead.
But
to claim, as he did in his extraordinary unpublished ‘‘Trial by Media’’
message to Catholics, that I wrote the articles only when Father Denis
McAlinden, Monsignor Patrick Cotter, Bishop Leo Clarke and others could
not defend themselves, was wrong.
It also completely ignored the real reason why those first 2007 articles finally snowballed into the Herald’s Shine the Light campaign for a royal commission last year.
Bishop
Malone accused me of ‘‘personal attacks’’ against clergymen, but too
many of those men died with their ‘‘good names’’ protected by the
Church, while the truth was known by their silenced victims.
It
was Cotter’s funeral on August 7, 2007, where he was lauded by Bishop
Malone as a ‘‘dearly loved uncle, grand uncle and fellow priest’’, but
where there was no mention that police wanted to charge Cotter in 1996
for failing to stop paedophile priest Vince Ryan, that led victims and
others to break that silence.
And it’s not as if the Herald kept
that a secret from the Catholic Church.
It’s all there, on the record
on September 22, 2007, in one of the articles that prompted Bishop
Malone’s ‘‘Trial by Media’’.
Also,
for the record, I deny being dishonest, irresponsible, rude or arrogant
in my reporting of the Church’s abysmal history on child sex abuse in
the Hunter Region and beyond it.
I reject, completely, Bishop
Malone’s allegation that police provided me with ‘‘intelligence’’.
It
was a retired police officer, among others, who provided information
about Cotter that the media – and the public – was entitled to have. By
the way, he was named.
Who knows why Bishop Malone’s ‘‘Trial by Media’’ was not published in the diocese’s Aurora magazine.
Possibly cooler heads, or legal advice, prevailed.