The Public Eye Full of Grace

By MARGARET CARLSON

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin sits in his fourth-floor office at the Chicago archdiocese two days after a suit against him alleging sexual abuse has been withdrawn. He has got calls from the Pope and the First Lady on his red phone, the only dash of color in the severely plain room. He turns away from his marble conference table to point at the window he looked out on the day before the suit was filed last November. He remembers seeing a few reporters huddled below near the canopy of the Barclay hotel, peering up at his office. Every time he glanced down, there were more of them until, like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller, so many had gathered that he knew the situation had grown ominous.

He left his office and went home to change for a charity dinner. Reporters were waiting for him there too, and at that point he decided he had to take their questions. "I'm an open person, not defensive. I hadn't even seen this suit, but it was clear I couldn't wait. So I simply told them I had never abused anyone at any time at any place."

What happened next is a textbook illustration of how people can manipulate the media and why journalists must do their own homework before giving extended airtime to uncorroborated allegations. According to a source familiar with the case, the plaintiff's lawyer had rushed to file the suit in hopes of having it included in an imminent CNN special on priests and sex. Indeed, plaintiff Steven Cook, 35, had been made available for an exclusive CNN interview. Sure enough, when the suit was filed the next day, Nov. 12, CNN aired the interview with Cook, who said he had repressed the memory that the Cardinal had had sex with him when he was a teenage pre-seminarian in the 1970s. Bernardin was given time by CNN later in the day for his own press conference. But that fueled rather than cooled the story.

That Sunday, Nov. 14, CNN aired its hourlong special, which had been in the works for months. Cook's charges were added to the program and used to promote it. The show carried this introduction: "Charges that a prince of the church, a man eligible to become Pope, a Cardinal on the forefront of reforming how the church deals with clergy's sexual abuse, has himself fallen from grace."

CNN was not alone in giving Cook the oxygen of publicity. But when the only hook for a story is a lawsuit -- which takes only one person convincing one lawyer to go forward -- the media are under some obligation to check out the accusation. In this case, a modest amount of reporting would have shown the charges to be suspect. Repressed memory is controversial to begin with, and the hypnotist who jogged Cook's memory is in the graphic-arts business and is not a licensed psychologist. The evidence was flimsy. There was no telltale inscription in a book Bernardin was supposed to have given him, and Cook's photo of the two of them was a group graduation photo, one of thousands Bernardin was in.

Bernardin struggles to be spirit and not flesh as he reflects on the case, saying he passed as swiftly as possible from "Why me?" and anger to compassion. His worst moment ("embarrassing and humiliating," he says) may have been when he was asked on camera whether he was sexually active.

Now Bernardin's reputation as one of the most admired princes of the church is sullied. His obituary will contain the charge of sexual misconduct -- at least parenthetically. As penance for its fall from grace, CNN gave the Cardinal a quarter-hour on Friday night to try to allow him to recover what was taken from him. Is it enough? Is it too late?