Hmmmm. Why didn't the New York Times print this letter?

Mercatornet's Just B16 blog is a great resource for those who want to know the truth about all the latest allegations swirling around the Holy Father like so much volcanic ash.

Here's a letter Law professor John Cloverdale sent to the New York Times:

"Like many other people, I have felt in recent weeks that some news outlets have
unfairly targeted Pope Benedict XVI in connection with sexual abuse by priests.
In part this is a question of emphasis, with daily coverage of what may or
may not have been minor mistakes in judgment decades ago and almost no attention
to the major efforts Pope Benedict has made to remedy what is undeniably a
horrible situation.

With some frequency, however, I have observed what
strikes me as deliberate distortion of the facts in order to put Pope Benedict
in a bad light. I would like to call your attention to what seems to me a clear
example of this sort of partisan journalism: Laurie Goodstein and Michael Luo’s
article “Pope Put Off Move to Punish Abusive Priest” published on the front page
of the New York Times on April 10, 2010. The story is so wrong that it is hard
to believe it is not animated by the anti-Catholic animus that the New York
Times and other media outlets deny harboring.

Canonical procedure punishes priests who have violated Church law in serious ways by “suspending” them from exercising their ministry. This is sometimes referred to as “defrocking.” (According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary to “defrock” is to deprive of the right to exercise the functions of an office. )

A priest who has been suspended may request that he be released from his vows of celibacy and other obligations as a priest. If granted, this petition to be “laicized” would leave the former priest free to marry. Laicization (which is altogether different from defrocking and which may apply to a priest who has committed no crime but simply wishes to leave the priesthood) is not further punishment. It is something a
priest who has already been punished by being suspended might well desire, as do
some priests who have committed no crime and who have not been suspended.

.
The priest who is the subject of the article had already been punished by
being suspended long before his case reached Rome. He asked to be laicized.
Cardinal Ratzinger delayed his laicization not his “defrocking” as the article
incorrectly says. He had been defrocked years earlier when he was suspended from
the ministry. All of this is clear without reference to outside sources to
anyone who knows something about Church procedure and reads the article with
sufficient care. It is anything but clear, however, to a normal reader.

My complaint here is not that the article misuses the word “defrock”
but rather that by so doing it strongly suggests to readers that Cardinal
Ratzinger delayed the priest’s removal from the ministry. Delaying laicization
had nothing to do with allowing him to continue exercising the ministry, from
which he had already been suspended.

Not only does the article fail to make these distinctions, it positively misstate the facts. Its title is “Pope Put off Move to Punish Abusive Priest.” [italics added] It describes Cardinal Ratzinger’s decision as involving whether the abusive priest “should be forced from the priesthood” [italics added]. Even a moderately careful journalist would have to notice that all of this is incompatible with the fact (reported in the second paragraph of the article) that the priest himself had asked for what
Cardinal Ratziner delayed.

Had the facts been reported accurately, the article would have said that the priest was promptly punished by being removed from the ministry for his crimes, but that when he asked to be reduced to the lay state, which would have given him the right to marry within the Church, Cardinal Ratzinger delayed granting the petition. That, of course, would hardly have merited front page treatment, much less a headline accusing the Pope of “Putt[ing] off Move to Punish Abusive Priest.”

The second half of the article reports that the priest later worked as a volunteer in the youth ministry of his former parish. This is obviously regrettable and should not have happened, but he was not acting as a priest (youth ministers are laymen, not
priests).

A careful reader who was not misled by the inaccuracies in
the first part of the article would, of course, realize that his volunteering as
a youth minister had no factual or legal connection with Cardinal Ratzinger’s
delaying the grant of laicization.

There's more. Read it all.