

Catholic leaders across the country immediately condemned Covington Catholic High School students accused of confronting and mocking a Native American elder, despite videos proving their innocence.



Bishops, priests, nuns, dioceses and even the students’ school condemned their actions as “bigoted” after a short clip of a confrontation between the students and Nathan Phillips circulated Friday on Twitter. Phillips, a Marine Corps veteran, claimed the students mocked him and other Native Americans with racist insults and pro-Trump chants.



Longer videos and testimony from witnesses, however, showed the students did not mock or jeer at Phillips or chant “build the wall,” but were in fact accosted by a black supremacist group called the Black Hebrew Israelites before Phillips and his Native American colleagues approached and confronted the students.



Several Catholic leaders chose to publicly shame the students, without reaching out to them for their version of events, and have yet to retract their statements of condemnation, or apologize as some members of the media have, despite evidence that the original narrative depicting the students as racist aggressors was false.



The students’ own diocese publicly condemned them, reportedly without reaching out to them for clarification about the situation.



“We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C. We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips,” the statement reads.



Catholic leaders’ willingness to condemn the students with little to no hesitation seems strange in light of Catholic officials’ reticence to publicly condemn or confront clerics accused and suspected of sexual abuse, like former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, or those accused of covering up allegations of abuse, like Cardinal Donald Wuerl, with as much immediacy.



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