Crisis of Faith

Are you confused by the latest New York Times scandal—the one about the reporter, the White House, and the spy?

Did you spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to decode the 5,800-word report on the case that the paper published last Sunday, which felt less like a news story and more like a candidate for The Times' puzzle page? (Answers not on page B6.)

Don't despair. As with so many tricky modern problems—global warming, string theory, setting up a home wireless network—the problem is not your brain. The problem is "The Miller Case" itself, a tale so intricate and involuted, it appears to have been consciously designed to stump us. In fact, the only way to make sense of this scandal is to go outside it and find a good metaphor. I've got one, and it comes from The Times itself. On October 12, as a frustrated media establishment (plus a few scattered readers) was waiting for the paper to explain the role played by reporter Judy Miller in the case of outed spy Valerie Plame, The Times published a front-page, above-the-fold news scoop. It began:

"The confidential personnel files of 126 clergymen in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles accused of sexual misconduct with children provide a numbing chronicle of 75 years of the church's shame, revealing case after case in which the church was warned of abuse but failed to protect its parishioners."

The italics are mine. That phrase hit me like a nudge from Miller's notoriously "strong elbows," as I realized that The Times' scandal looks more and more like the one that's been tearing up the Catholic Church.

Think about it. A powerful institution of enormous prestige and global importance, one that has unusual sway over our collective life, turns out to have troublesome elements in its ranks, some of them downright corrupt. The story has been dribbling out for years in small isolated cases, but it blows open when a member of the priesthood is revealed to be a serial abuser of the truth. Worse yet, the crimes of young "Father Blair" were well known to his superiors, who had been warned repeatedly about his proclivities and did nothing, except cover for him.

When the truth comes out, those arrogant higher-ups continue to stonewall, apparently believing that their church's vaunted reputation and power will protect them. It doesn't. Cardinals Raines and Boyd both fall from their lofty perches, making headlines around the world.

You might think a scandal of such proportions would end right there, as the new leadership did everything it could to clean up the place, top to bottom. But powerful churches aren't like that. They're proud and ingrown and full of institutional neuroses. When the real Catholic Church first found out that its priests were sexually abusing children, did its leaders air all the facts and root out the problem? No, they delayed, double-talked, and protected their own.

Similarly, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, when The Times learned it had been publishing inaccuracies under the byline of Judith Miller, including some that helped justify a war—the journalistic equivalent of a mortal sin—one expected the paper to clean house, release all the remaining hidden files, and make a clean breast of it.

We now know that the Church of West 43rd Street didn't do that. The abuses continued, numerous warnings were ignored, and weird internal power games were placed above the interests of Times parishioners—that is, us readers. Now, a new wave of ugly facts, revelations analogous to the church's latest "personnel files," have come out, and the public—the minority that can still bring itself to care—is rightly horrified.

For a long time, the Miller case seemed potentially less serious than previous Times scandals. But it turns out that this troublesome priestess had a lot more power than young Blair, and she used it. She proudly called herself "Miss Run Amok," the files show; in at least one news story, she let a high administration official hide behind a misleading attribution. Despite all this, she didn't just have defenders at the top, she had fans—possibly even the paper's publisher, Pope Arthur II himself.

To read these new admissions, which came out in the form of that opaque 5,800-word story, it seems Miller had something close to free rein. Though barred from covering Iraq and "weapons issues," in fact "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."

Couldn't help herself, just like those serially abusive Catholic priests. Given the pattern of these affairs, odds are there are a lot more dark revelations to come. As one Times source noted in the story on the Los Angeles archdiocese:

"Unfortunately, these files do not contain the full story.... The full files would show how deep and pervasive this problem was, and how much the church put its own interests ahead of those of the [victims]. That is a broader and deeper story."

It sure is—in both cases. Maybe if adequate pressure is brought to bear, we'll hear a lot more from The Times about that broader, deeper story. But let's not hold our breath. The Catholic Church didn't fully admit its own complicity and errors until it was entangled in serious government investigations and lawsuits—when it really had no choice. Sadly enough, ditto for The Times.