http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/05/rolling-stone-alan-dershowitz-and-catholic-priests
By now, virtually everyone has heard of the Rolling Stone fiasco, with its explosive article, “A Rape on Campus,” having been unmasked as deeply flawed. Although the magazine featured a long story about campus sexual assault, the police found no evidence to substantiate the allegations of rape at the University of Virginia.
Perhaps fewer are familiar with the case of Alan Dershowitz, the well-known Harvard Law professor who tells his own frightening story of a false accusation. Dershowitz’s reputation for integrity, built over the course of a lifetime, was recently threatened by an uncorroborated allegation of sex with an underage woman. While that accusation has now been stricken from the record, Dershowitz notes that “you can’t unring a bell,” his sterling career and good name having been called into question.
Of course, there remains seared in American memory the tragedy of the Duke University lacrosse team, with three members of that squad having been accused of rape. Their story quickly became a national parable about race, class, and gender, with the athletes widely condemned in the court of public opinion prior to their exoneration. So hasty was their denunciation—on campus and off—that the attorney general of North Carolina subsequently condemned the “tragic rush” to accuse the students.
These high-profile episodes should make us think, once again, about Catholic priests who have been falsely accused of sexual abuse, and about the need for a just process in dealing with their cases.
One of the most significant problems facing priests today is that the standard for removing an accused priest from ministry is not “clear and convincing evidence,” or even a “preponderance of evidence,” but merely that an accusation is “credible”—the least reliable standard of assessment. David Pierre, in his eye-opening book,Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, has shown that a “credible” accusation might mean nothing more than, at a given time, the accuser and the priest lived in the same geographical area. Cardinal Avery Dulles pointed out that accusations can be deemed “credible” simply because they are not entirely groundless.