It's hard to know where to begin, but one thing's been at the back of my mind since I first saw it -- Virtue doesn't know what "deposition" means in this context. Virtue saw the word "deposition" someplace, pretty clearly in its legal sense. According to Wikipedia, "a deposition is the out-of-court oral testimony of a witness that is reduced to writing for later use in court or for discovery purposes." From the story and the links provided, it's pretty clear that a John Doe is suing various deep pockets over decades-old allegations against Bede Parry.
(I don't mean to minimize Parry's conduct as a Benedictine monk in the 1970s and 1980s or its impact on the victim. The legal process, however, is currently dealing with a particular allegation, and it's worth stressing, as Virtue does not, that the Catholic Church has been in the process of addressing Parry's and the many other abuses for decades as well.)
My point here is that it's plain from Virtue's headlines that he's not completely clear on the difference between a legal deposition and a deposition in The Episcopal Church, which is the ecclesiastical term for laicization or "defrocking" in that denomination, or if he does understand the difference, his writing is creating confusion about it. Looking closely at the version on Virtue Online, Roman Catholic Archbishop Jerome Hanus of Dubuque, Iowa, was scheduled to be deposed (i.e., interviewed out of court) in connection with a lawsuit over the Bede Parry case; Parry had been gradually eased out of Catholic pastoral roles between 1987 and 2000 after his continued abuse of minors became known.
Virtue's headline that reads in part, "Deposition of Former Pedophile Priest later admitted into The Episcopal Church" is factually incorrect and completely misleading. Archbishop Hanus is the one being deposed, in the legal sense of the word. Bede Parry, as far as we know, has not been "deposed" in the Episcopal sense, and has no disciplinary hearing scheduled that we know of. Virtue's own story indicates that Parry continues to be a priest in good standing in the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada. "Deposition" is not a term used in the Catholic Church; Parry has apparently been "laicized" there, but this story is not about that.
David Virtue represents himself as a "theologically trained journalist". But as we see here, at minimum he has real difficulty with ecclesiastical terminology: he's either revealing a basic confusion over the meaning of a word that I certainly learned in Episcopal confirmation class, or he's being deliberately confusing and misleading -- in other words, he's either a ditz or a knave. Neither is appropriate for someone claiming to be a "journalist".
