“First, the media have no interest in discrediting mainline Protestant clerics, most of whom share elite secular opinion.”

For the past week or so, a story has been running in a number of niche news providers, such as Virtue Online, Episcopal News Service, Spero News and Ecumenical News International that you almost can’t find in U. S. papers.

The story concerns the resignation of a German Lutheran Female bishop, Maria Jepson. She was forced to resign in the middle of accusations that she was personally involved in a cover-up of a protestant priest who was accused of abusing more than 20 children in the 1980’s.

Jepson at first denied that she knew anything about these cases until early in 2010. But the German magazine Der Spiegel that she knew of them as early as 1999.

Not much of a story in our judgment at the Aquila Report, so we had not reprinted it. However, it has come to our attention that the REAL story is that no one in the main-line U. S. press is reporting the story.

Actually, the Associated Press News service broke the story internationally on July 16th. Since then very few large public media outlets have picked up the story, and most of those were not in the U. S. The BBC reported, as well as The Times of Malta, the Sydney (Australia) Morning News and a number of German newspapers. A Google search run late on July 26th came up with one U. S. newspaper – the Kansas City Star – showing a detailed story in their online edition.

The New York Times put it in the European edition, listing a one paragraph summary of the AP release. Washington Post did the same. But no background, no details, nothing significant. However, there is a lot of significance to the story.

Maria Jepsen was consecrated as a bishop in 1992 in the German Lutheran Church, and was only the fourth woman in the world to reach that office. In the U. S. a Methodist was first consecrated in 1982 but only served 4 years before retiring. An Episcopalian in the U. S., Barbara Harris, was consecrated in 1989 as the first female bishop in any Anglican-connected denomination in the world. The only other female bishop who preceded Jepsen was an Anglican in New Zealand later in 1989.

So why would the main-line media in the U.S. fail to run the story about Jepsen’s resignation? Of course one could only speculate, but Bill Donahoe of the Catholic League was willing to do that. Here’s an extract from a recent press release:

Why the blackout? First, the media have no interest in discrediting mainline Protestant clerics, most of whom share elite secular opinion on matters sexual: the mainline religions are champions of abortion rights and are not known to fight gay marriage. Second, the cultural elites like to blame men for sexual abuse; women, we are told, would never act the way male clerics do.

Just for the record, so far there has been no report of Jepsen being involved in the sexual abuse, but rather just being part of a long-lasting conspiracy among German church leaders to cover up the case.

But Donahoe’s comparison with main-line churches and main-line (usually called main-stream) media is an interesting one, and in many respects a correct one.

So – tell your friends that alternative media sources are growing by leaps and bounds and within the Bible-believing, confession, Reformed corner of the world, the Aquila Report will keep looking for those stories that are (and, in our judgment, should be of interest to our readers.

Don K. Clements a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is the Publisher of The Aquila Report