Since the beginning of this week, I've been reading the blog of Fr Gordon MacRae, who was sentenced to 33.5 to 67 years in 1994 for the sexual abuse of a teenage boy (aged 15) who went to him for counselling. It's looking like the claims of abuse were false and were only made in order to gain a large settlement payout from the Church. However, Fr MacRae is still in prison while his lawyers fight for a new trial for him.
In the last decade of media coverage of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, scant attention has been paid to the probability of false claims against innocent priests. When one understands the role of the contingency fee bar in the mediated settlements of claims against Catholic dioceses, it becomes a virtual certainty that some priests have been falsely accused for money.
One such case was profiled in a riveting two-part series of articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz (”A Priest’s Story,” The Wall Street Journal, April 27/28, 2005). Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her compelling disclosures about false witness and witch hunt sexual abuse prosecutions in American courts of law. Her coverage of the travesty by which Father Gordon MacRae was convicted is a troubling account of how justice can be distorted by accusers and lawyers who have a financial stake in its outcome. It’s a story, as described by the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus in First Things magazine (June/July 2009), “of a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”
One glaring omission from the prosecutorial rhetoric in the Father MacRae case is the fact that he could have left prison over fourteen years ago had he actually been guilty and willing to say so. On multiple occasions before and during his 1994 trial, MacRae was offered pre-trial plea deals by the state’s prosecutor with the approval of his accusers. In exchange for a plea of guilty in lieu of a trial, MacRae could have served a prison sentence of only one to three years and could have left prison over fourteen years ago. Of course, the jury never knew of MacRae’s repeated refusals of such a deal.
Judge Arthur Brennan, however, likely did know of this when he sentenced the priest to sixty-seven years in prison, more than twenty times the maximum sentence that the state was prepared to impose if MacRae would plead guilty.
The National Center for Reason and Justice (www.ncrj.org) now endorses the appellate defense of Father Gordon MacRae, and sponsors a website at TheseStoneWalls. It contains a comprehensive case history for which this writer and others contributed substantial research. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that case of Father Gordon MacRae “must come to light and will be instrumental in a reform.”
It seems there are people who automatically assume that if an abuse accusation is made against a Catholic priest that it must be true, since all priests are most likely guilty anyway. WhaleOil certainly acts in that way (see Better than buggering little boys).
Related links: Truth in Justice: Was the wrong Catholic priest sent to prison? ~ TheseStoneWalls
Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest ~ The Media Report