Honoring Jason Berry

Last evening, the Trinity College Program on Public Values, which I direct, honored author and freelance journalist Jason Berry with our biennial Berkman Journalism Award. Berry is the reporter who, a quarter-century ago, broke the Catholic sexual abuse story that continues to roil the church today. He is a writer of many parts who retains […]

berry.jpgLast evening, the Trinity College Program on Public Values, which I direct, honored author and freelance journalist Jason Berry with our biennial Berkman Journalism Award. Berry is the reporter who, a quarter-century ago, broke the Catholic sexual abuse story that continues to roil the church today. He is a writer of many parts who retains his love of his faith even as he works, in the best muckraking tradition, to hold its faults up to the light. His forthcoming book, Render Unto Rome, explores the church’s finances, abroad and in the U.S. Our citation was drafted by my colleague Andrew Walsh, Trinity’s ace panegyrist:

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The Moses
Berkman Memorial Journalism Award is given biennially by the Trinity College
Program on Public Values in honor of Moses Berkman, class of 1920, an
outstanding journalist who served The Hartford Times as a political
correspondent, columnist, and editorial writer from the early 1920s until his
death in 1956. The award recognizes journalists whose work demonstrates the
qualities of integrity, insight, journalistic excellence, and serious moral
purpose that were the hallmark of Moses Berkman’s journalism.

In the
late 20th century, “investigative reporting” rose to a level of prominence
it hadn’t known since the days of the Muckrakers. Major American newspapers and
broadcast news operations competed to marshal teams of reporters, supported by
squadrons of lawyers and technical experts, to lay bare the hidden realities of
power and corruption. The big journalism of the day mobilized resources to
cover big stories, and, along the way, often brought down corrupt mayors,
governors, and even one president. Yet, the winner of the 2010 Berkman Award
earned his reputation as an investigative reporter of the first rank as a kind
of throwback–a freelance in the tradition of Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and
Ray Stannard Baker. Without the resources and institutional cover provided by
large journalistic institutions, Jason Berry does his work in a particularly
hard way, with persistence, stamina, and considerable frugality.

In our
judgment, the single biggest religion story in the history of the United States
(and perhaps in the history of the modern world) has been the clerical sexual
misconduct crises endured by the Catholic Church over the past three decades.
More than any other reporter, Berry laid the foundation for coverage of the scandal,
showing not merely patterns of sexual misconduct by priests, but the systematic
mishandling of the scandal by Catholic leaders. 
Already a veteran freelance reporter, in 1986 Berry broke the story now
regarded as starting point of the great misconduct scandal, the case of a
Louisiana priest name Gilbert Gauthe and the cover-up of his crimes in the
Diocese of Lafayette. Stories in a Louisiana weekly, the Times of Acadiana, led
to more comprehensive investigative stories in the National Catholic Reporter,
and eventually to the 1992 book Lead Us Not Into Temptation, which was proposed
to and rejected by 30 publishers before Doubleday agreed to publish it, and
which eventually served in many newsrooms as a kind of introductory handbook to
covering the Catholic Church.


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In 1994,
Berry began to report on allegations of sexual and financial misconduct by Father
Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of an increasingly influential Catholic religious
order founded in Mexico in the 1940s, the Legion of Christ. In 1996, Berry
began collaborating on the Maciel story with the late Gerald Renner of the Hartford
Courant. Under a joint byline, the two published a 7,000-word investigative
story in the Courant in 1997. In 2004, they followed up with the book Vows of
Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II. After a long period
of silence, in 2006 the Vatican ordered Maciel into “a retired life of prayer
and penance” and in 2009 it revealed that Maciel was a bigamist who might have
abused more than 100 seminarians, and, possibly, his own children.

Along the
way, Berry earned some praise, including two Catholic Press Awards, but was
relentless attacked by defenders of the church, many of whom have now recanted.
The New Oxford Review, which criticized Berry as a liberal Catholic, conceded
in its review of Vows of Silence that Berry and Renner were “seasoned and
conscientious” journalists. Father Owen Kearns, himself a Legionary of Christ
and editor of the Legion-owned National Catholic Register, wrote a column last
spring stating that he “regretted that in my defense of Father Maciel I took to
task Gerald Renner and Jason Berry, the writers who broke the story and their
editors at the Hartford Courant. They didn’t get everything about the Legion
right, but they were fundamentally correct about Father Maciel’s sexual abuse
and I ask forgiveness.”  Berry’s central
role in uncovering the Catholic scandals was recognized in 2009 by the Voice of
the Faithful, which awarded him its Saint Catherine of Siena Distinguished Lay
Person Award.


Berry
achieved these gradually accumulating results amid the endless scramble of a
freelancer’s life. He has published often in the National Catholic Reporter, New
Orleans magazine, and the Gambit, a New Orleans weekly, and in addition appears
in an astounding variety of venues, ranging from Reader’s Digest to the Nation.
Earlier in this decade, he consulted for ABC News and produced work for National
Public Radio. Along the way, Berry has also produced documentary films,
published a novel (improbably enough, about a corrupt governor of Louisiana),
and written at least one play produced in New Orleans, in addition to books
about the civil rights leader Charles Evers and the history of New Orleans jazz.

Deeply
rooted in the Crescent City, Berry has also written a flood of journalism on
Louisiana and New Orleans politics, on the civil rights movement, on jazz music,
and on Louisiana’s rich popular culture. His work as a culture critic has
received widespread recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on
jazz funerals in New Orleans. Since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he
has given careful attention to the revival of local musical and cultural life. Like
Moses Berkman, for whom this prize is named, Jason Berry built a career on
covering his home town. And in an age when big journalism seems to be a thing
of the past, his career gives us hope that investigative reporting–conducted with
care, fair-mindedness, and intellectual integrity– can survive in an age of
economic reverses for the mainstream news media.

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