Churches

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Notre Dame fire a year later: Foreign news outlets lead the way on coverage

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The world continues to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and the lives it has taken. That this global outbreak occurred during Lent put a renewed focus on where and how people practice their faith, especially in so many countries where houses of worship have been shuttered to weaken the spread of the virus.

It is in this context that the date April 15 takes on larger significance this year. It marks the one-year anniversary of an accidental fire that destroyed large sections of Notre Dame, the famed gothic cathedral that soars over the Parisian skyline. The French capitol hasn’t been the same since the blaze.

A year later, there remain so many unanswered questions about the cathedral’s future, how and when it will be rebuilt and what hurdles remain. The current pandemic has shifted attention and journalistic resources away from a story like the status and future of Notre Dame. Journalists are limited in their ability to travel to Paris, for example, to report on this story as France remains on lockdown — like most of the world.

A sweep of news sites shows that the cathedral did get some attention in the days before Easter — but only because a special liturgy was celebrated there on Good Friday. The cathedral’s most prized relic, the Crown of Thorns, even made a return after it had been rescued from the blaze.

Anniversary journalism is a big part of what editor’s remember when assigning stories every morning, when making pitches in editorial meetings or for stories to fill their Sunday editions.

Despite that, Notre Dame fire coverage has been sparse a year later, especially in the U.S.-based press. It is also a religion story and one that the mainstream press largely covered a year ago like it wasn’t. In general, the fire was covered like it had destroyed a museum rather than a house of worship. Anniversary coverage also remained focus on the building, but had no mention or quotes from religious leaders.

As mentioned, Easter did bring Notre Dame temporarily back into the news cycle. The New York Post, in its Easter Sunday editorial, held up the cathedral as a metaphor for our current troubled times:

As Notre Dame recovers from its ravages, so may we all rebound from the ravages of COVID-19.

Metaphors aside, there are lingering questions about what the future holds for this iconic structure.


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Clandestine masses and online funerals: Italy's newspapers covering virus through a religious lens

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Italian newspapers are known for their hyper-partisanship. The country has dozens of dailies and they have political allegiances that are tied to parties of either the left, right or center. It’s not unusual at all, of course, for newspapers in Europe to approach news and commentary from this partisan lens.

Hunger for information during the coronavirus pandemic — of which Italy has seen the world’s highest death toll when it surpassed 10,000 this past weekend — has led to some exceptional reporting. In the process, many Italian journalists have fallen ill from the virus while covering hard-hit areas like the northern Lombardy region.

While Italy’s newspapers have always covered news through a partisan lens, COVID-19 has led to lots of strong journalism as well as coverage of plenty of religious angles.

Newsrooms across Italy have closed — with editors working from home — while reporters in the field have reported on the national lockdown’s disruption of daily life and how the contagion has ravaged communities and families. I have been closely monitoring and reading several of Italy’s dailies even before the pandemic spread to the United States. How the deadly virus overwhelmed hospitals and led to the casualties of so many of its citizens (Italy has one of the world’s lowest birthrates and oldest populations) in such a short period of time is something truly grim and scary.

I examined several of Italy’s largest-circulation dailies — La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, La Stampa and Il Giornale — that span the political spectrum. La Repubblica (which leans left), Il Messaggero and La Stampa (which are both centrist) and Il Giornale (a right-wing outlet) all have one thing in common — all of them have included religion in their coverage. In fact, none of them have shied away from the subject in a country that is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

While some Italians have been resentful of the church’s power and authority in the past, the pandemic has led to a religious revival of sorts.


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About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague

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When President Donald Trump first talked about churches being “packed” on Easter Sunday, many listeners must have wondered if he meant July 12 instead of April 12.

A lot has changed since Trump’s pronouncement and, for the most part, churches are not packed except for notable exceptions, such as the arrest of a Florida megachurch pastor on Monday for holding services this past Sunday.

Some of you may have heard that the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne ignored the social-distancing warnings and preached to a packed church this past Sunday. TMZ and other outlets reported on that story.

This is the clear and present danger ... people continuing to congregate -- squeezing into close quarters like sardines -- and that's exactly what happened Sunday at a Florida Church.

The River Church in Tampa was packed to the gills with worshipers who clearly were looking for hope. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who presides over the megachurch and has been reportedly defiant over social distancing, has claimed he'll cure coronavirus just the way he did with Zika.

He has vowed he will never close his church ... despite every doctor and scientist saying social distancing is the only thing that will prevent the disease from spreading even more.

On Monday, Florida police arrested Howard-Browne and charged him with two misdemeanors. CNN’s Daniel Burke had the best lede about it all:

(CNN) Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne said he wouldn't close his doors of his Tampa, Florida, megachurch until the End Times begin. The police weren't willing to wait that long.

News of this was all over Facebook and Twitter by Monday night. For those of you who are afraid of the Constitutional implications of all this, don’t worry. The CNN story points out that the police have been trying to work with this pastor for days, but getting nowhere. Now, the Christian Post says that Howard-Browne (which I am shortening to RHB) made family groups stand six feet apart from each other, but as I watched the video (atop this page), it was hard to tell. Take a look.

But then again, I’ve a history with RHB. I interviewed him back in 1994 for this article when he first hit the American religious scene (he’s from South Africa), introducing the “holy laughter” phenomenon and calling himself “the Holy Ghost bartender.” I was not impressed.


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Helpless in Seattle: How journalists are/are not covering coronavirus, churches and conferences

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Here’s a dispatch from the center of the evolving pandemic — which where I live.

When the national epicenter for the coronavirus is 13 miles away from one’s home, life becomes a place somewhere between Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and Gabriel Garcia Márguez’s “Love in a Time of Cholera.”

If you live in major urban areas — think New York City and greater Washington, D.C. — you can expect to see these patterns sooner, rather than later. What’s in your newspapers this morning?

Back to Kirkland — the expensive suburb (described here by the Los Angeles Times for those of you who have never been). Kirkland is merely one of several cities on Seattle’s Eastside where this thing has hit. Kirkland used to be the place we’d go for some beach time on Lake Washington when I was in high school. It was unglamorous and kind of shabby until the tech boom hit, Microsoft moved into neighboring Redmond and Google began gobbling up reams of office space in Kirkland, sending rents soaring.

Living two suburbs away as I do, I can say that the pall over Kirkland is now upon us all. Visiting local stores is like entering the Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen the shelves at Trader Joe’s so empty. Target has zero, I repeat zero, cough drops. Lines are forming at the local Costco first thing in the morning so folks can get toilet paper. The King County bus system greets you with hygiene announcements when you board.

We will get to religious groups and coverage in a moment. Hang in there with me.

Traffic for the past few days has been delightfully free of gridlock but it feels, writes one Seattle Times columnist, like Seattle is being symbolically quarantined from the rest of America. Conventions, conferences and meetings are being cancelled left and right. The Seattle-based Alaska Airlines put lots of flights on sale, begging folks to fly or buy before the end of March. But interestingly, while one school district has totally shut down, the others are not.


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Mainstream press misses backstory of why Francis has (for now) vetoed married clergy

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Pope Francis — a week after the dust settled from his decision not to create an Amazonian rite that would have allowed married men to serve as priests and women as deacons — continues to garner news coverage as Catholic progressives and traditionalists debate what it all means.

The mainstream press, often too concerned with propping up Francis’ progressive bona fides, has largely not reported on why the pope decided to go the way he did. The factors that resulted in the pope’s decision came from a variety of camps inside the church. And what about this question: Did conservatives in the Vatican hierarchy, led by Cardinal Robert Sarah (helped by the recent intervention of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), raise enough concerns to tip the decision in their favor?

The Amazonian rite, however, was never only just about South America. The pope’s decision could have had global ramifications. The tug-of-war mostly involves German bishops pushing the pope to allow all clergy to marry (along with other changes in discipline and doctrine), while on the other is conservative prelates warning against doing away with the 1,000-year church tradition.

Once again, much of the backstory behind Francis’ decision can be learned from reading the religious press, both Catholics on the doctrinal left and right.

The mainstream press largely missed these angles, meaning readers had to delve really deep into internet news sources (with help from social media) to get analysis of how Francis reached his decision and whether the issue of married clergy/women deacons will rage on.

In the end, much to the chagrin of the mainstream press, Francis decided in favor of Catholic orthodoxy and tradition. What the mainstream press saw, but failed to report, was the Francis defies typical contemporary political categories.


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Election-year coverage should focus on Catholics as being ‘politically homeless'

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We’re a month into 2020 and, as expected, it is a year where the presidential election will dominate news coverage. In dominating the news, politics is also — like it or not — the prism in which journalists look at most other issues in society. That includes news about entertainment, economics, sports and, yes, religion.

A few things happened in January that have set the mood for the Iowa caucuses that took place Monday, the official start of the primary season. One of the biggest took place about 1,000 miles east of Des Moines, in Philadelphia, when Archbishop Charles Chaput was replaced by Nelson Perez.

The decision by Pope Francis, although ultimately not a surprising one, was largely portrayed in the mainstream press as the replacement of a conservative cleric with a largely progressive one. In other words, discussions of doctrine were framed and discussed in political terms.

This is how The New York Times framed the decision:

Archbishop Chaput, who was appointed to the position by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, has long been known as a theological and political conservative, often at odds with Francis’ mission to move beyond the culture wars dominated by sexual politics.

Francis recently acknowledged that a good deal of the opposition to his pontificate emanated from the United States, telling a reporter who handed him a book exploring the well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his agenda that it was “an honor that the Americans attack me.”

Archbishop Chaput’s departure was expected, as he had offered his resignation to Pope Francis when he turned 75 in September. Church law requires every bishop to tender his resignation at that age, but the pope can choose not to accept it, often allowing prelates to remain in office for several more years.

In this case, the pope did not wait long before saying yes.

A theological and political conservative. Really?

Theological absolutely if you mean Chaput upheld the teachings of the church. The accuracy of this political judgement is up for debate. Is a Catholic a political “conservative” if he backs Catholic doctrines on the death penalty, abortion, marriage, immigration and other hot-button issues?


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Plug-In: Journalist's faith -- Memoir tells how justice prevailed n Civil Rights Era murders

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“To the One who loves justice.”

That’s the simple dedication at the start of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell’s long-awaited memoir, “Race Against Time,” which hits bookstores Tuesday.

It reflects the deep Christian faith of the veteran Mississippi journalist, whose stories helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars.

“God loves justice,” Mitchell, 60, told me in a telephone interview.

Mitchell, a 1982 journalism graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Ark., worked for The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., for 33 years. He left in 2018 to found the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit watchdog news organization.

Although Mitchell’s book is written in first person, he stressed that it’s not about him. (Nonetheless, at least one reviewer suggests that readers might conclude, rightly, that he is a “hero.”)

“It’s really about these families, about the journey to justice and what all took place,” Mitchell said. “To me, the larger story is what’s important.”

What is that larger story?

Bestselling author John Grisham put it this way in endorsing the book, published by Simon & Schuster:


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Tips for mainstream journalists as they grapple with America's growing religious complexity

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Last month, the Pew Research Center issued an innovative analysis of 49,719  sermons delivered between last April 7 and June 1 in 6,431 U.S. congregations that were posted online. This report made a bit of news and is worth perusing if you missed it (click here).

 This Guy Memo recommends to fellow writers that a useful appendix to that document (click here for .pdf) deserves more than a glance. It details Pew’s standard system for “classifying congregations by religious tradition,” with 244 specific identities cited in interviewing, grouped into 19 categories.

Pew makes a major contribution to analysis of American religion with its frequent polling practice of pushing to get respondents'  specific identities and affiliations beyond the usually unhelpful “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” approach of old-fashioned polling.

What kind of Protestant?

For that matter, what kind of, say, Presbyterian (tmatt shows a blitz of options here)?

Are you an active or nominal churchgoer?

With the media frenzy over religion and politics, polls nowadays at least usually ask Protestants whether they self-identify as “evangelical” or not, whatever that word means.

When Pew asks poll respondents about the specific congregation they affiliate with, it then helpfully lumps the Protestants into the three main categories of “Evangelical,” “Mainline” and “Historically Black.” These three groups are distinct not only on religion but in social and political terms. Writers are likely to be less perplexed by Pew’s other categories of Catholic, Orthodox Christian, “other Christian,”  “Mormon” (there’s that controversial word again!), Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, “other faiths,” "miscellaneous" and “unclassifiable.”   

The following examples from Pew’s Protestant taxonomy will indicate some of the difficulties with America’s astonishing religious variety, particularly for those new to religion writing.


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Trinity Church Wall Street: Can reporters solve the case of the missing Episcopal rector?

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It was a strange way to announce one’s resignation, I must admit.

On Jan. 5, the rector of the richest Episcopal church in the country was standing before his congregation in downtown Manhattan giving some rather banal parish announcements. Then, he added, he knew that some folks had heard that he was leaving and yes, this would be his last Sunday there. Comparing himself and his wife to the Mary, Joseph and Jesus trio in terms of being on the move toward Egypt (and away from Herod, one supposes), he said they were going to take a sabbatical and that he wished the church well.

It was clear that many in the church had no idea what was going on, including the choir that was awkwardly standing by, waiting to sing an anthem during the offering. (You can see all this go down in this video. Start at the 50-minute mark).

Episcopal News Service ran a brief announcement the next day:

The Rev. William Lupfer resigned as rector of New York’s Trinity Church Wall Street on Jan. 3 after five years leading one of the most influential parishes in The Episcopal Church.

In a brief letter to Trinity’s staff, Lupfer, 59, did not offer a specific reason for leaving, but Trinity spokesperson Patti Walsh said in an email that Lupfer is “discerning a new call outside of Trinity.”

Founded in 1697, Trinity was Manhattan’s first Anglican church. As a result of a land grant from Queen Anne, it owns 14 acres in lower Manhattan and has become a major real estate developer. It had a $6 billion portfolio as of February 2019 and acquired Church Divinity School of the Pacific, an Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, California, in March 2019.

About that $6 billion portfolio, here’s a very informative New York Times piece that ran about a year ago. While it’s not quite as much as the $100 billion Mormon slush fund I wrote about last month, it’s a lot of cash.


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