Roman Catholic priest was arrested yesterday in Texas on charges that two years ago he raped a woman on a couch in a Brooklyn rectory, where she had gone for advice about annulling her marriage, the authorities said.
The thing about news context is that when a big story breaks, like the church pederasty scandal, it feeds many smaller stories that would have gone unnoticed. Once the big story is over, stories much larger than this one go back to being buried, or are ignored entirely.
That is why it will never be possible for journalism to evade the charge that it is simply a form of systematized gossip. Journalists stress the system, they fail to see how it is all in the service of the muse of gossip.
I have a friend who is working on reporting a much, much more odious story to investigators in Manhattan. A priest who abused small boys for years, bribing their AIDS-infected, crack-addicted mothers to pimp their children to him. A host of church authorities have protected him for more than a dozen years.
I doubt it will ever be reported by the Times - by the time the charges are filed, the gossips will be babbling about something else.
5:07:08 PM 
