Dear New York Times, Associated Press, The Times (London), Ruth Gledhill, Maureen Dowd, British Broadcasting Corporation, and all other disseminators of false news-stories designed to malign the Catholic Church,

In recent weeks there have been a large number of anti-Catholic stories that have been promulgated by you, to the intended detriment and dishonour of the true Church of Christ, that is, the Catholic Church. Nobody inside or outside the Church wishes to deny the reality or the gravity of the scandal of clerical sex abuse, or the ineradicable and heartbreaking harm that has been done. Indeed, the Church has learned her lessons from this and is now unquestionably the safest place to be in this regard, since putting in force the safeguards that she has put in place.
The insane frenzy of anti-Catholicism that you have fostered has mostly followed upon the publication of Pope Benedict's Pastoral Letter to the Irish Church. Very few of you seem to have read this letter, though I am aware of one direct quotation from it in the innumerable articles that I have read.
If you published the truth and omitted the lies, there would be no reason to object to you. What has been asserted of the long-dead Father Murphy, who died in 1998, is true. The assertion that the Pope was implicated in a cover-up is demonstrably false, and has been demonstrated to be false on several occasions in various articles, which, since you are so expert in research, I have no doubt that you will find for yourselves. What Father Cantalamessa quoted from a Jewish friend has been warped, and the Jewish friend has disappeared from the story, though he appears in the original text of the sermon. There was an article in today's Times that attributed the same thing to two different people. There have been other articles publishing demonstrable lies.
The journalism of these last days has been the worst that I have ever seen. If you are so little interested in the truth, and so much interested in persecuting it, I suggest you leave your profession.
I sincerely hope that you are prosecuted for libel, and compelled to make just restitution for the gross damage that you have caused.


Yours faithfully in the risen Christ,

David Mitchell