Hidden Evil: The Anti-Catholic Agenda of Bishop Accountability

David F Pierre, Jr exposes anti-Catholic hostility and bias masked as support for victims. The goal of Bishop Accountability is to bankrupt and empty the Church.

October 1, 2025 by David F. Pierre, Jr., Editor of The Media Report

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Late last week Beyond These Stone Walls published at our Voices from Beyond feature an essay by Father Michael P. Orsi, former Research Director at Ave Maria University School of Law. The title of Father Orsi’s brief but brilliant essay, previously published in the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, is “Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound.”

It is a stunning review of one of the revelatory books by David F. Pierre, Jr. entitled, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories. Among its content is a bold chapter about the case against me.

Also at Voices from Beyond this week, we feature another very prominent figure in the American Catholic Church who published an equally stunning review of David F. Pierre, Jr.’s latest book, The Greatest Fraud Never Told. The reviewer is Father Peter M.J. Stravinskas, an accomplished theologian and Editor of The Catholic Response. His excellent review was previously published at The Catholic Thing : “At the Mercy of One False Brother.”

Mr. Pierre has graciously acceded to write about the online continuation of a fraud perpetrated against the Church by BishopAccountability.org.

Now here is David F. Pierre, Jr.

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The web site BishopAccountability.org likes to fashion itself as merely a “public library of information” that curates a vast “database of accused Roman Catholic priests” as it relates to sexual abuse. The site catalogs literally thousands of priests who have been only accused of sexual abuse whether they are alive or long-dead. For this, Bishop Accountability has naturally become a darling of the legacy media which continues to revel in keeping the embers of the “Catholic Church sex abuse story” alive while browbeating the Church for the sins of a small minority of priests from many decades ago.

But there is an evil that consumes the site. And this evil has absolutely nothing to do with the abuse of children.

For starters, there is little semblance of fairness or due process at Bishop Accountability. A visitor could easily conclude that the thousands of priests profiled on the site must be “guilty of something” for them to even be listed there. Indeed, that is really the whole purpose of the site: to suggest guilt by association. Only after a series of clicks can a visitor find the site’s “posting policy,” which could be paraphrased as such: “If a priest has been publicly accused of abuse at any time, we will plaster his name, photo, and history here for all of the world to see.”

Bishop Accountability’s False Promise

What about the priests who are clearly innocent, you ask? Well, by its very own admission, guilt or innocence plays no role whatsoever on whether or not a priest is profiled on its site. Here is one exception that Bishop Accountability has made: 

“If a survivor publicly withdraws an allegation, recants, or states that the alleged perpetrator has been misidentified, and if there are no other allegations of abuse against the accused cleric, that cleric is removed from the database.”

Interesting that Bishop Accountability still identifies a fraudster who has recanted his allegation as a “survivor.” This makes no sense at all, of course. Indeed, if there is any “survivor” in a false accusation, it would be the falsely accused priest himself who has “survived” the ordeal and had his life ruined. But Bishop Accountability does not see it that way. In short, Bishop Accountability will post the identity and photo of any priest accused of anything sex abuse related, no matter how old, wacky, or implausible the accusations are. 

Take the case of Diocese of Charleston Bishop Robert Guglielmone from a few years back. In 2019, a man openly admitted to a family member that he made up an abuse claim against Guglielmone in order to extract money from the Church. The man even blithely stated, “It’s worth a try.” The entire accusation was completely bogus and ridiculous, yet Bishop Guglielmone, who swiftly returned to ministry after the truth surfaced, is still listed on Bishop Accountability — along with his photo, of course — as if he were a convicted child molester.

And although Bishop Accountability claims that it will not post the profiles of priests whose accusers have recanted, this itself is not even true. Rev. John M. Costello, a Jesuit priest in the Diocese of Rochester, had his entire life upended in 2003 after a former student claimed that he had abused him some two decades earlier. However, after investigators began to scrutinize the chap’s claim, the accuser recanted and told investigators that “another priest,” not Costello, had abused him. But, defying its very own policy, Bishop Accountability continues to profile Costello on its site for the entire world to see.

Even the Dead Are Fair Game

There is also the legion of cases involving single accusations against long-dead priests. Some readers are old enough to remember a time when one would not dare say anything unproven about a dead person to abide by the truth that “dead people cannot defend themselves.” But when it comes to Catholic priests and Bishop Accountability, they proudly attack the dead and defenseless.

Just a couple of years ago, in 2023, a man contacted the Diocese of Albany to claim that Fr. J. Gregory Mulhall “physically assaulted” him as a “vulnerable adult" many decades earlier. What did Fr. Mulhall have to say about this? Well, not much, as he had died at age 90 over two decades earlier, in 2001. (Mulhall was ordained in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President.) Fr. Mulhall’s surviving friends and family members are naturally none too happy about him being publicly profiled as if he were a convicted child predator.

Another dead priest who would probably want to respond to an accusation against him if he were alive is Fr. Gregory Flohr, who died in 2004. Flohr did not have a single blemish against him in over four decades in ministry. It was not until many years after Flohr died that an anonymous male accuser saw the possibility of a large cash windfall and came forward to lodge a bizarre claim against Flohr that no reasonable person would ever believe. Yet Fr. Flohr is still included in Bishop Accountability’s “database” even though he is obviously unable to defend himself.

The Surprising Truth About Falsely Accused Priests

It is now an undeniable fact that false accusations against Catholic priests are rampant. In recent years as little as 6% of historical abuse claims against priests have even been deemed “substantiated” by the very lenient standards of diocesan review boards, with the majority of accusations deemed either “unsubstantiated” (indeed false), “unable to be proven,” or still under review. 

In 2021, in a church of 70 million people in the United States, 44 current minors came forward alleging that a current priest had recently abused them. However, only four of these 44 were ever found to even be “substantiated,” while the remaining 40 (or 91% (!)) were found to be completely bogus. 

Why is there a rampancy of false accusations? That answer is easy. Easy money. For the past two-and-a-half decades, the Church has been shoveling out cash to accusers and their tort lawyers like an ATM on tilt, and grifters have long taken notice. As Fr. Gordon MacRae himself chronicled two decades ago, an East-coast attorney confirmed as far back as 2001 that accusing a Catholic priest of sex abuse was a “current and popular scam” among criminals in prison looking for an easy cash payout. And, yes, this hustle still continues to this day.

Meanwhile, states like California and New York have made it easy for flimflammers to get in on the action by repeatedly enacting “window legislation” that temporarily suspends the statute of limitations and allows any fraudster or con artist to sue the Catholic Church for big bucks, no matter how long ago or crazy the abuse claim. Statutes of limitation, due process, and fairness have been discarded in order to line the pockets of tort lawyers and fleece the Catholic Church.

A couple of years ago, Thomas R. Hampson of Illinois, a 40-year veteran investigator with thousands of sex abuse investigations, wrote of what he witnessed in the Archdiocese of Chicago:

“There were priests who were falsely accused of abuse but the archdiocese settled anyway. I know they were false accusations because the stories were outrageous. No details. Implausible circumstances. And a reaction that wasn’t believable. Even in a civil trial these cases could not prove by a preponderance of the evidence that anything actually happened, much less that the accused was the one who did it. In most of those cases the priest was already dead.”

Hampson also added that in the current-day fever swamp in which people must “believe the accusers,” the principle of innocent until proven guilty has been abandoned such that the investigators are looking merely for confirmation of the accused’s guilt.

And what has been the end result of all this? The coffers of the Catholic Church have been drained by literally billions of dollars, robbing it of resources to build the faith and serve the poor.

The Sheer Evil of It All

Bishop Accountability claims that its site is dedicated to “the victims and their families and loved ones.” The reality could not be further from the truth.

There is a kind of underlying spiritual aura to Bishop Accountability that cannot be ignored. And that spirit is evil. Satan, along with his demon partners, hate the Catholic Church and everything it stands for, which is truth. Satan’s rage against Christ and the Catholic Church is eternal and continues today. Writer Thomas J. Nash has recently written about this reality:

“Satan and his demonic minions are irredeemably opposed to the truth. They hate the truth. More to the point, they hate him who is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life,’ our Lord Jesus Christ (John 14:6) … Consequently, Satan and his demonic minions really hate the sacrifice of the Mass and Eucharistic Adoration in general because they are daily reminders of Christ overcoming them and their infernal kingdom through the Cross.”

One of Satan’s great successes in recent years is perpetuating the lie that the priesthood of the Catholic Church is an irredeemable den of sexual immorality and corruption. Much of the recent breakdown in the fabric of Western civilization over the last 25 or 30 years can be directly tied to the nonstop media campaign against the Catholic Church tied to the sex abuse issue and the resulting silence of the hierarchy in opposing the many social initiatives that have brought so much harm to our societies. It has also torn God’s people away from the Eucharist, the Mass, and the Catholic Church itself.

In trampling on the rights of innocent priests, defaming the dead, and trafficking in innuendo, there is little doubt that Bishop Accountability has been a great asset to Satan in his battle against the Catholic Church.

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David F. Pierre, Jr. is the country’s leading observer of the media’s coverage of the Catholic Church abuse narrative and is the author of four acclaimed books, the most recent of which is The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church (Amazon.com). 

David is also the creator and author of TheMediaReport.com, an educational cooperative to chronicle and monitor the mainstream media’s coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse narrative. 

Please also check out TheMediaReport.com’s important posts on the case of Fr. MacRae: *EXCLUSIVE REPORT* Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest 

Journalism Outside the Box: Wall St. Journal Bravely Profiles Stunning Case of Wrongfully Convicted Priest Fr. Gordon MacRae

The Wall Street Journal Again Profiles Case of Fr Gordon MacRae

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

How SNAP Foisted McCarthyism Upon the Catholic Church

Generating fears, shameful to our ears, ruining careers; personal attacks, alternative facts, financial kickbacks: the rap of SNAP for a modern American witch hunt.

September 3, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

Ever so slowly awakening across America is a long-suppressed awareness of an ugly part of history that keeps repeating itself. There are prophets arising among us who are finding the courage to speak truth to power — in this case the power of mob justice. One of them is columnist Michelle Malkin whose article, “Fighting for the Falsely Accused” was sent to me some time ago.

Michelle Malkin tells the gruesomely familiar tale of former Fort Worth, Texas police officer, Brian Franklin. Convicted of the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in 1995, he spent the next twenty-one years in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. As Ms. Malkin describes, “There were no witnesses. There was no DNA.” There was just one person’s word against another’s, and the jury — after lots of media hype — was conditioned to bring no skepticism to the heavily coached testimony of a distraught teen.

The sole evidence was a medical report of a physical examination concluding that the girl had in fact been sexually assaulted. That, and a claim that the assault occurred in the backyard of her biological father who was a friend of the police officer-suspect, was enough to satisfy prosecutors and a jury.

It was a prosecutorial perfect storm, and the fact that there was no other evidence, no DNA to test, no witnesses to the peripheral circumstances of the crime, left the defendant-turned-prisoner with nothing to satisfy the court’s demand for proof of actual innocence. So with no one having to “prove” Brian Franklin’s actual guilt, his imprisonment went on and on, passing two decades in the long, slow parade of lost time that struck home hard for me. “It’s the easiest crime to be falsely accused of,” Mr. Franklin says today.

Before reading any further, try to place yourself in Brian Franklin’s shoes for a moment. It’s easy to feel immune from the gravity of such injustice because we have no frame of reference for it happening to ourselves — or to a brother, a father, a son, a close friend, a parish priest — until it does. How would you defend yourself against such a charge when no evidence at all is needed to convict you?

After 21 years in prison — what Michelle Malkin described as “a harrowing 7,700 days of a life sentence” — Mr. Franklin had to fight for freedom even after newly discovered evidence emerged showing that the girl’s stepfather was the actual assailant. In a new trial 21 years after the first, Mr. Franklin was acquitted. He then had to fight again, that time for a declaration of actual innocence from a Texas court that would make him eligible for reparations for the 21 years of life stolen from him.

Over time, laws have been passed that make such exonerations very difficult to obtain. Judges in my own appeals have declined to even review newly discovered evidence because of laws that don’t require them to. Under current New Hampshire law, a convicted defendant has one year from the date of conviction to find and bring forward new evidence that might challenge it, an impossible task from prison.

In a majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that “actual innocence is not, in itself, a constitutional claim,” that would support a federal habeas corpus  petition for a new trial. Rehnquist wrote for the majority court that innocent defendants in such cases can seek a political solution by asking for a pardon or sentence commutation from their governors. In the entire history of the State of New Hampshire, not a single such petition has ever been granted for a claimed sexual offense. As Brian Franklin said, “it’s the easiest crime to be falsely accused of,” and the most difficult from which to obtain justice once accused.

And as for reparations for the wrongly convicted, two decades ago, the New Hampshire Legislature, passed a law limiting reparations for wrongful imprisonment to a $20,000 cap regardless of how many years or decades a wrongfully convicted person spent in prison. It would cost more than that just to hire a lawyer to pursue such a claim for reparations.

The Catholic Rise of McCarthyism

In the case of Brian Franklin, he reports that he was sustained throughout those 21 lost years by the fact that, as Michelle Malkin wrote, “his family and church stood by him.” On the day this is posted, I awaken to my 11,286th harrowing day of a life sentence in prison for crimes that never took place at all. The things that sustained Brian Franklin have been largely absent from my experience and that of any other American Catholic priest so accused.

When a Catholic priest is accused, the first line of defense for a bishop and diocese is driven by lawyers and insurance companies and it has one goal: to get as much distance as possible from the accused. When I was accused, my bishop and diocese issued a press release that pronounced me guilty before jury selection in my trial. My diocese added to the published pre-trial statement that I also victimized the entire Catholic Church.

I don’t think anyone in the Diocese of Manchester would stand by that today, but they don’t stand against it either. I think that today they have a hard time explaining it so they just don’t even try, but I know exactly what happened, and it’s time to say it out in the open. In the current climate, few accused Catholic priests could have a fair trial in America. No convicted Catholic priest could be heard justly by an American appellate court or judge. No one in the Church or judicial system wants to admit this, but it is true, and we can learn why from a 1950s moral panic called “McCarthyism”.

Church officials, after getting their distance from the accused, leave it to the civil courts to sort out guilt or innocence. Maintaining a pretense about the integrity of the outcome, they remain blind or silent, or both, about the role played by money and the practice of mediated settlements in generating accusations. I described how this played out in my own diocese in my post, “David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

From 1990 to the present, activists from SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — carried out a highly effective campaign modeled after the community activism of Saul Alinsky and the tactics of ACORN, the radical Association for Community Organization for Reform Now. The activist campaign used public demonstrations and the news media to shame anyone who challenged or dissented in any way from the moral panic they promoted. The nature of the forces at work in this were described by The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger in “McCarthyism at Middlebury” (March 9, 2017):

“America’s campuses have been in the grip of a creeping McCarthyism for years. McCarthyism, the word, stands for the extreme repression of ideas and silencing of speech. In the 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy turned his name into a word of generalized disrepute by using the threat of communism, which was real, to ruin innocent individuals’ careers and reputations.”

Just substitute “campuses” with “Catholics,” “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy” with “SNAP’s David Clohessy,” and “the threat of communism” with “sexual abuse,” and the McCarthyist aura around the abuse narrative in the American Catholic church is clear.

That aura was created by SNAP, and maintained by its director, David Clohessy. Like Communism in the 1950s, sexual abuse is real, a fact harnessed by David Clohessy at SNAP and Terence McKiernan at Bishop Accountability to fuel the moral panic they created. It thus became a weapon for an open assault on the Catholic Church. In every media venue that would have them, SNAP stood ready to pounce on any bishop or Church official who called for even the most basic due process and civil liberties for Catholic priests so accused.

In “SNAP Implodes” in the March 2017 issue of the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, Bill Donohue described how SNAP manipulated the media with picket signs and feigned “Holy Childhood” photos, and harmed the Church through what he called “the conspiratorial savaging of innocent priests.” I am one of them, and I thank Bill Donohue for this truth, and for having the courage to write it when few others would. Now it’s on you, dear reader. Please share this post. Shout it from the rooftops in the public square of your social media.

SNAP obliterated the lives, reputations, and civil rights of hundreds of merely accused priests by publicly shaming them as “predators” and “pedophiles.” They knew well that these terms carried the same force of shock and moral panic as the political panic that ensued when a charge of “communist” or “communist sympathizer” was leveled in the 1950s. The manipulation of those terms, and of a news media hungry for scandal, characterized and empowered the shaming, blackballing, and ruined lives of the McCarthy Era, the widely accepted model for the modern American witch hunt.

For a stark example of the power of those words to shock even judges and deny priests the basic rights of American citizens, see our recent post, “Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae.”

Be Wary of Crusaders

In the later 1980s and 1990s, SNAP had the terminology right. The scandal in the priesthood was first and foremost a story of homosexual predation and blackmail. But to maintain the moral panic, the language had to change to suit political correctness. The terminology did not sit well with the gay rights movement, so SNAP had to change its tactics and its language. Even the bishops went along with the new script, and to this day many Catholic commentators still stick to the “pedophile priest” story. I wrote about this in a 2011 post, “Be Wary of Crusaders The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well.” One sentence has often been quoted from it:

“It is a testament to the power of reaction formation [a classic Freudian defense mechanism] that an entire institution would now prefer the term ‘pedophile scandal’ to ‘homosexual scandal’ even when the facts say otherwise.”

David Clohessy was masterful at abusing the term and using its force of shock to manipulate the news media. SNAP activists labeled as “pedophile enablers” any person of conscience who called for the application of less outrage and more due process when a priest was accused.

Like an accusation of witchcraft in 1692 Massachusetts, or of being a Communist in 1955 Washington, “The P-Word” — pedophile — was fired like a bullet from an automatic weapon by SNAP activists with rancor and an intent to demean and disarm any skeptic asking for due process. The extent to which this one word was misused and manipulated was a key factor behind what writer, Ryan A. MacDonald wrote was “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court,” another post that screams for justice and for both Church and State to take notice.

An example of the tactics of SNAP came from an activist writing under the name, “Neal Allen.” He seemed to stalk cyberspace for any positive comments or articles that called my own case into question, or presented a review of the facts. “Neal Allen” posted the same toxic comment everywhere, fired like a bullet calling me a “convicted pedophile,” and anyone writing in favor of my innocence a “pedophile enabler.”

Then it was discovered and exposed — by the heroic David F Pierre, of TheMediaReport.com — that “Neal Allen” does not even exist. It was a fake screen name used by a member of SNAP to give the impression that a mob was building to gang up on any dissenter from the attacks on me, on other priests, and the Church. Once “Neal Allen” was exposed as a fraud, he simply disappeared, but not before bullying lots of people into silent submission.

Now, from the recent lawsuits, resignations, and a kickback scandal within SNAP itself, it seems that none of this was ever about helping survivors or protecting children. It was just about money. In the name of nothing more redemptive than money, great, great harm has been brought upon the Church and priesthood.

The United States bishops going into their meeting in Dallas in 2002 were utterly terrified of Clohessy and SNAP, and the mesmerized news media that seemed to hang on their every word. When the USCCB invited David Clohessy and SNAP founder Barbara Blaine to address the 2002 U.S. Bishops Conference in Dallas in full view of the news media, the bishops had settled on a harsh reality that the best way to avoid being targeted by a witch hunt was to join it.

When it was over, and the “Zero Tolerance” language of the Dallas Charter was set in place, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote in his masterful analysis, “Scandal Time,” that the bishops scrambled to the newspapers “to check their score.” Fr. Neuhaus was one of the few Catholic voices to speak out in conscience against this assault on the American priesthood, and in this he gets the posthumous last word from his essay, “Scandal Time”:

“Zero tolerance. One strike and you’re out. Boot them out of ministry. Of course, the victim activists are not satisfied, and, sadly, may never be satisfied. The bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and unCatholic approach to sin and grace. They ended up adopting a policy that was sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost everything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

— Source: Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square

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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post for the cause of justice for accused priests and the wrongfully imprisoned. This story needs greater exposure to take it out of the shadows for, sadly, most of our news media has avoided this aspect.

Don’t stop here. There is more to learn on this from Beyond These Stone Walls:

David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae
A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court

From the Catholic League: Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”