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Times Implies Catholics More Prone to Lie
The Archdiocese, in a statement and in The Tidings, (read it here) has already termed the Los Angeles Times' recent article about the so-called "Doctrine of Mental Reservation" as "insulting to all Catholics." But it's worth recounting the situation here since it provides one more entry in our dossier on The Times' bias.
The Times' article, which appeared March 26, 2007, quoted Irwin Zalkin, an attorney for abuse victims suing the Diocese of San Diego, as saying "you're never going to know the truth, one way or the other" when questioning a cleric under oath because the individual might invoke "a 700-year-old doctrine by which clerics may avoid telling the truth to protect the Catholic Church."
Zalkin went on to say, in the article, that Bishop Brom of San Diego discussed the issue during a deposition, using a hypothetical involving Nazis searching for a Jewish family, both to explain and justify lying in certain situations.
To add icing to the cake, The Times' article intoned that lawyer Zalkin's experience is "not unique." The usual suspects - plaintiffs' lawyers suing the Church - were rounded up to talk about how difficult it is to get Catholics to tell the truth in court proceedings about sex abuse.
There were some obvious and immediately apparent factual problems with the story.
The "Doctrine of Mental Reservation" has been debated for centuries by theologians and ethicists to reconcile the ethical and moral obligation to tell the truth with the ethical and moral obligation to protect others from harm. It has never been a Catholic doctrine. Catholics, like everyone else, are required to tell the truth under oath, as The Times' reporter could easily have verified had he bothered to do some reporting and consult the Catechism of the Catholic Church rather than simply buy into the assertion of plaintiffs' lawyer Zalkin.
Of course, nowhere in the article was there any example of a witness who had given false testimony either because of the so-called Doctrine or otherwise.
More importantly, Bishop Brom gave no such testimony. He was asked by Zalkin whether he ascribed to the Doctrine. His answer was "no." (The Times later ran an odd "correction" saying that the comments were made to Zalkin not during the deposition but when Bishop Brom "was not under oath," presumably during a break.
The Times failed to report the actual testimony in which the doctrine was disavowed. Moreover, the notion that Bishop Brom would have had some type of off-the-record philosophical conversation about this centuries-old doctrine with Irwin Zalkin was not investigated by the Times. Had The Times' done basic fact checking they would have learned that no such Zalkin-Brom conversation ever happened, except, apparently in the mind of Irwin Zalkin.
But the factual errors, as troubling as they are, aren't the most insidious aspect of the story. Instead, what deserves examination at the highest levels of The Times is how a story that implies, without any factual basis, that Catholics are somehow more prone to lie than others who are given the same oath came to see the light of day in the first place.
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