Bishop Gaydos Responds to Post Dispatch

Will public debriding bring private healing of the wounds at St. Thomas Aquinas?
By JOHN R. GAYDOS

A full picture of life at the seminary would include good as well as bad.

It was another painful moment as the Post-Dispatch published a series on St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary and the sexual abuse scandal. It contained a lot of previously published facts with a few new details, but maybe it was necessary. You might be familiar with the term debriding - when the doctor takes a scalpel and cuts away all the dead tissue from a wound in order to prevent infection and promote growth. Perhaps, as a wounded church, this is our debriding. Perhaps we have to go through this agony in order to heal.

My quarrel is not with their words, but the way in which they were used to paint a picture of St. Thomas Aquinas as some private reserve of priests who preyed upon young men. In 40 years, more than 1,000 young men received a superb education at St. Thomas Aquinas. Some of the best pastors in our diocese today were once on the faculty there. There were no interviews with others who attended St. Thomas Aquinas or with priests who graduated and went on to a life of caring ministry or with anyone who might have had a rewarding experience there.

This is, no doubt, because the Post does not wish to present the truth as it is, but its own lurid stories in an attempt to attract readers. When one subscribes to the belief that truth is relative, truth becomes a victim, an aspect of life which hinders one's agenda.

The articles ignored the fact that the majority of our abuse allegations were reported after repeated invitations in our diocesan newspaper and in parish bulletins and that the diocese has cooperated with prosecutors.

The Post selects only those facts which support its agenda, its story angle...Anything to the contrary must, to its way of thinking, must be dismissed as irrelevant.

Bishop Gaydos' article is worth the read and can be found here. However, the Post Disgrace, so as not to be outdone or to have the last word, includes the following at the end of the article:

The Most Rev. John R. Gaydos is the bishop of the Diocese of Jefferson City. He declined to be interviewed by the Post-Dispatch for the series of articles on St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary.

Who, in his right mind, would want to be interviewed by a newspaper which seems to have such a difficult time presenting the whole truth?