'Star' revisits AIDS in priesthood

Ten months after it touched off a firestorm of reaction with a series asserting that Catholic priests were dying of AIDS at a rate four times that of the general population, The Kansas City (Mo.) Star has taken a new look at the issue -- and concluded the rate is even higher.
"The latest examination reveals that there is no longer any question that hundreds of priests have died of AIDS and that many bishops were aware of their plights," Star reporter Judy L. Thomas wrote in the Nov. 5 followup to her "AIDS in the Priesthood" series published last January and February.
U.S. Catholic Church leaders and others excoriated the earlier series for its reporting methods. Most of the material came from the 100-plus interviews Thomas conducted with priests and others and from a statistical analysis from the Centers for Disease Control. Criticism of the series focused on a poll commissioned by the Star that asked priests about their personal experiences with AIDS and the HIV virus. Surveys were sent to 3,013 of the nation's 46,000 Roman Catholic clergy and drew 801 responses. The results were "manipulative" and statistically unsound, the U.S. Catholic Conference said then.
This time around, the newspaper examined death certificates in the 14 states that do not seal death records, and interviewed clergy, family members, and health-care workers to track priests who had died of AIDS in other states.
Those records reveal that more than 300 priests have died of AIDS-related causes since 1983. That indicates, the paper said, a rate that is more than twice the death rate among adult males in the 14 states -- and "more than six times that of the general population in those states."
Star Editor Mark Zieman said the paper's reporting was "right" the first time and that the followup was not a corrective to the initial series. "But that series was so controversial the first time, and the attacks were so vociferous from the church and elsewhere, that if people had any doubts, we wanted to show them what experts in the field had found, go with their lowest estimates, and back it up with death certificates," Zieman said.
To ensure the privacy of the AIDS victims, none were identified in the story without their families' permission.
To ensure that readers could have confidence in the findings, the paper showed its documentation to the deans of two major journalism schools, Dean Mills at the University of Missouri and James K. Gentry at the University of Kansas. "We had a problem: We don't like to use anonymous sources in stories, and in effect we had 300-plus anonymous sources," Zieman said. Involving the deans was the paper's solution, he said.
Reaction to the followup was low-key, eliciting perhaps 30 responses, Zieman said, compared with the earlier series, which triggered about 3,000. Zieman attributed the muted reaction to the "indisputable" documentation -- and the fact they appeared just as the presidential election overwhelmed every other story.
Still, the new stories angered the U.S. Catholic Conference. "The Kansas City Star, in an attempt to prove itself 'right' on the issue of HIV/AIDS and the priesthood, has systematically violated the privacy of deceased priests in 14 states. If any organization other than a journalistic one tried to do something like this, it would quickly hear from an outraged public," the conference said in a statement. It accused the Star of trying "to stir up the appearance of a crisis" by reporting the 300 deaths. "But there is no indication that they have, in the nation's nearly 200 individual dioceses, been so numerous as to constitute a crisis situation," the statement said.
The fact that only a small percentage of priests have died of AIDS does not make the story insignificant, Star Editor Zieman said: "Only a small percentage of people die in car wrecks, but everybody agrees that it's a significant story."

(Editor & Publisher Web Site: http://www.editorandpublisher.com)
(copyright: Editor & Publisher November 20, 2000)