When the Washington Post Spiked My Sex Abuse Tip
Mark Judge
On August 17, Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein tweeted the following: “the 2018 Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis for some U.S. Catholics is the opening of civil war over homosexuality and Vatican II. The unanswered question is how many Catholics.”
In fact, the Catholic civil war over homosexuality has been going on since at least 2006. That’s when Boorstein herself ignored a tip I gave her about homosexuality and its connection to sexual abuse at a Catholic school I had attended from 1979-1983.
My Tip to the Washington Post
Boorstein at the time was covering the story of a priest at Georgetown Prep. Georgetown was an all-boys Jesuit high school in Maryland. The priest had been convicted of sexually abusing a male student. She ignored my tips, which was a doozy. They would have revealed the larger problem of the gay mafia that had taken over the Catholic Church in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like the bishops, Boorstein ignored the truth.
The 2006 story involved charges of sex abuse against Garrett Orr. Orr was a teacher of mine and at the time was a Jesuit. Orr would eventually be arrested and in 2011, he was sentenced to five years probation.
A Much Larger Story
When Fr. Orr was first accused of sexual abuse in 2003, Boorstein called me, a former Prep student, for comment. I told her there was a much larger story at Prep and in the larger Catholic Church. That story was the mass infiltration in the priesthood of gay men. It made an all-boys school like Prep an interesting and sometimes harrowing place to be.
I was especially appalled that one of my teachers had been Bernie Ward. Ward is a former socialist radio talk show host who is now serving a prison term for trafficking in child pornography. Ward had studied to be a priest. He then taught sex education at Georgetown Prep in the early 1980s, before decamping to San Francisco where he became a socialist version of Rush Limbaugh. As early as 1978, Ward had been accused of sexual misconduct around students. In 2007, he was convicted of distributing child pornography. He served a sentence of seven years.
My 2005 book God and Man at Georgetown Prep details how liberalism had corrupted some of the school’s faculty. A prime offender was Mr. Ward. His sex-ed class was heavy on Betty Friedan, Freud and orgasms, and light on Augustine, Aquinas, or John Paul II.
Boorstein said she would call me back.
“Listen,” she said a couple of days later. “I talked to Georgetown Prep. They say Bernie Ward never taught there. So that won’t be part of the story.”
I still remember standing there, dumbfounded. I had just tipped off a reporter for the Washington Post — the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post — that a former priest who had been indicted for child pornography had once taught sex education at the same school where another man had been caught making “inappropriate contact” with a student. Boorstein was taking the school’s word for it.
Finding out the truth was as simple as opening an old yearbook. Boorstein later confessed that she and her Post colleague felt I had “a gay problem.”
When Fr. Orr was first accused of sexual abuse in 2003, Boorstein called me, a former Prep student, for comment. I told her there was a much larger story at Prep and in the larger Catholic Church. That story was the mass infiltration in the priesthood of gay men. It made an all-boys school like Prep an interesting and sometimes harrowing place to be.
I was especially appalled that one of my teachers had been Bernie Ward. Ward is a former socialist radio talk show host who is now serving a prison term for trafficking in child pornography. Ward had studied to be a priest. He then taught sex education at Georgetown Prep in the early 1980s, before decamping to San Francisco where he became a socialist version of Rush Limbaugh. As early as 1978, Ward had been accused of sexual misconduct around students. In 2007, he was convicted of distributing child pornography. He served a sentence of seven years.
My 2005 book God and Man at Georgetown Prep details how liberalism had corrupted some of the school’s faculty. A prime offender was Mr. Ward. His sex-ed class was heavy on Betty Friedan, Freud and orgasms, and light on Augustine, Aquinas, or John Paul II.
Boorstein said she would call me back.
“Listen,” she said a couple of days later. “I talked to Georgetown Prep. They say Bernie Ward never taught there. So that won’t be part of the story.”
I still remember standing there, dumbfounded. I had just tipped off a reporter for the Washington Post — the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post — that a former priest who had been indicted for child pornography had once taught sex education at the same school where another man had been caught making “inappropriate contact” with a student. Boorstein was taking the school’s word for it.
Finding out the truth was as simple as opening an old yearbook. Boorstein later confessed that she and her Post colleague felt I had “a gay problem.”
Broken, but Not by the Mainstream Media
In the years since then, I have been waiting for the story about the sex abuse scandal to explode — and not just in the Catholic Church. I’m related to people who have lived and worked in Los Angeles. For years I have heard about the problem of sexual abuse in that town. In 2014, I wrote about “Hollywood’s Sex Abuse Cover-Up.” Yet I was unable to find anyone in the media — either mainstream or conservative — to offer me a contract to go West and dig deeper. The story, of course, was eventually broken by Ronan Farrow — tellingly, a reporter outside of the mainstream media.
Handling the Truth
In the 1992 film A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson plays a Marine officer who orders a “code red” to silence a disgruntled soldier under his command. Something similar has been happening in the media for the last several decades when it comes to homosexuality and sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
In one famous scene in the film, Nicholson cries that his interrogator, played by Tom Cruise, “can’t handle the truth!” But Cruise, in fact, could handle the truth — as can today’s honest Christian faithful. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Catholic Church was overrun with far too many gay men, many of whom were given positions where they were around too many boys and young men. This fact is even obscured in the now notorious Pennsylvania grand jury report on sex abuse and the priesthood. “Most of the victims were boys, but there were girls too,” the report reads.
I’ve reported on the gay Catholic mafia for over 10 years. I am sick of the continuing misdirection. It was mostly boys and young men, who suffered at the hands of homosexuals.
