Clergy

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NBC News toasts Pete Buttigieg in a hit piece aimed (#Surprise) at the Salvation Army

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Here we go again. No doubt about it, one of the key stories of the day offers a fiery mix of politics, money, sexuality, social justice and, yes, religion.

I’m talking about this NBCNews.com headline: “Pete Buttigieg criticized for volunteering with Salvation Army.”

Stay tuned for upcoming debates featuring Democrats seeking the White House. Will this issue have legs in the news? Maybe. Maybe not. I think it depends on whether candidates on the woke side of the party decide that it is good or bad for their prospects for an openly gay candidate to even hint at a willingness for dialogue and tolerance on religious-liberty issues.

Meanwhile, there is this journalism question: Does anyone at NBC News realize that the Salvation Army is a CHURCH as well as a major provider of help to the poor? Hold that thought. First, here is the overture:

Pete Buttigieg is drawing criticism after pictures of him volunteering for the Salvation Army, which has historically opposed gay rights, recently resurfaced on social media.

In the photos, Buttigieg is seen standing outside Peggs restaurant in South Bend, Indiana, where he is the mayor, for the Red Kettle Ring Off, an annual charity initiative during which public officials compete to raise money for the Salvation Army. While the photos were from 2017, Buttigieg, who has surged to the top of many polls of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, has been participating in the event since at least 2015, according to local news reports. He also held an event at the Salvation Army in South Bend last year. 

“I know the photos are two years old, but still, I can't help but wonder if Mayor Pete just looks at what LGBTQ activists have been working on for years and then chooses to spite it,” tweeted Zach Ford, press secretary of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy organization.


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Press doesn't get why a Catholic priest would withhold Communion from outspoken gay judge

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Debates about Catholic priests denying Holy Communion to U.S. pro-choice politicians or public officials have been around for more than a decade; indeed I covered that exact issue back in 2009. It was quite the raging issue in 2004 as well when the archbishop of St. Louis refused Communion to Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry.

The issue hasn’t faded at all; in fact this Washington Post piece, published a few months ago, notes that Democratic politicians are still being denied the sacrament if they have come out in favor of abortion.

Now there’s a priest in East Grand Rapids, Mich., who is doing something similar — not about abortion, but same-sex marriage. Here is how one TV station covered it. It happens to be the local NBC affiliate.

EAST GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Judge Sara Smolenski, chief judge of the Kent County District Court, has been denied Communion at the church where she has been a parishioner for more than six decades because she is married to a woman.

It is a move that for many was the final straw in a pattern of behavior that has them calling for the removal of a priest — a priest who came to St. Stephen Catholic Church about three years ago.

Right there you can see where this article is a set-up. The second paragraph could also read that: “It is a move that several in the parish applauded because they felt it was high time St. Stephen’s took a stand on crucial Catholic doctrines.”

Instead, you hear the dissidents’ point of view for the entire first half of the story.

In 1966, under the leadership of Rev. Msgr. Edward N. Alt, St. Stephen Catholic School became the first integrated Catholic school in Metro Grand Rapids and had a student body that was nearly 40 percent non-Catholic.

This tradition of inclusion and acceptance would be the essence of the school and the church for 50 years.

But now, some here say that is changing.


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Does the Vatican's quasi-official newspaper have a 'fake news' problem?

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The Vatican gets its fair share of coverage from news organizations around the world. Even those newspapers who don’t have a dedicated religion beat writer have Vatican coverage in its pages, either in the form of a foreign correspondent or via subscribing to wire services such as The Associated Press or Reuters.

It isn’t lost on Pope Francis that the news media ecosystem, saying this past May that journalists should use the power of the press to search for the truth and give voice to the voiceless.

Conservative news websites in the United States have increasingly set their sights on Francis in recent years. Catholic news sites that lean left doctrinally have also have a strong readership. Both need to be read by journalists who cover the Vatican and the pope. Another source they need to read is L’Osservatore Romano, a once great and influential newspaper that has over the years declined in both influence and stature.

For those who have never heard of it, L’Osservatore Romano is a daily newspaper printed in Italian with weekly editions in six languages, including English, and once a month in Polish.

The newspaper reports on the activities of the Holy See and owned by the Vatican — but is not considered an official publication. The Holy See’s official publication is the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which acts as a government gazette. The views expressed in L’Osservatore Romano are those of individual writers unless they appear under the byline “Nostre Informazioni” (Italian for “Our Information”) or “Santa Sede” (Holy See). In other words, one needs a media literacy course in order to fully understand what this newspaper is reporting.

The publication founded in 1861 — and available at newspaper stands across Rome, via subscription and online — continues to play a major role in interpreting the papacy and the role of the Vatican in the loves of Roman Catholics around the world. Problematic for the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper has been its editorial standards as of late.


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Des Moines Register offers master class on writing a slanted United Methodist-LGBTQ story

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I have never been a full-time police-and-cops reporter, but I have pulled an occasional shift on that difficult beat — which tends to involve lots of work with legal terms linked to crimes and trials.

At the same time, I have covered religion news in various capacities for 40-plus years and — this is a commentary on the divisive times in which we live — that kind of work also requires a working knowledge of legal lingo.

In the past, I have noticed that when someone is “charged” with breaking a law, that means there are debates about whether the person has committed the acts in question. In other words, officials have “charged” that a person did x, y or z, but there needs to be some kind of trial to determine if that charge is true.

With that in mind, please note the overture in this amazingly slanted Des Moines Register story — circulated via the USA Today Network — about another LGBTQ ordination conflict inside the bitterly divided United Methodist Church. Here’s the headline: “Iowa pastor facing church trial for being 'self-avowed practicing homosexual' takes leave of absence.”

An openly queer Iowa City pastor charged with "being a self-avowed practicing homosexual" in violation of United Methodist Church law will take an indefinite leave of absence, according to an agreement announced Wednesday.

A trial date had already been set when the Rev. Anna Blaedel requested a "just resolution," which focuses on "repairing any harm to people and communities," according to the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church. 

Blaedel, who identifies as queer and uses the pronouns they and them, expressed frustration and disappointment in a letter published in full by the Gazette. …

"Today we are naming together the truth that it is not currently possible for me to continue my ministry in the context of the Iowa Annual Conference, nor the UMC," wrote Blaedel, the former director of the Wesley Center at the University of Iowa. "That is not the truth I want to come to, but it has been, is being, revealed as true. ... I am no longer willing to subject my body and soul and life to this particular violence.

Now, let’s read this carefully.


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This week's podcast: Why it matters that Canadian Anglicans are having a near-death experience

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Years ago, while I was still an Episcopalian, I tried to get a circle of clergy and journalists to collaborate on what I thought would be a classic work of religion-marketplace humor.

The basic idea: The creation of the definitive collection of jokes about Episcopalians and their unique approach to Christian life and culture. As one priest put it, the Episcopal Church is “NPR at prayer.”

The book never happened, but I learned lots of jokes that I didn’t know in all of the basic categories, from “how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb” quips to jokes featuring “Episcopalians at the gates of heaven and/or hell.” But here was my favorite joke, as I heard it in 1993 (but with a few updates):

The year is 2030 … and two Anglo-Catholic priests in the back of National Cathedral are watching the Episcopal presiding bishop and her incense-bearing wife, an archdeacon, process down the aisle behind a statue of the Buddha, while the faithful sing a hymn to Mother Earth.

"You know," one traditionalist whispers, "ONE more thing and I'm out the door."

The whole point was that it’s hard for religious communions to die. In the end, there are always reasons for true insiders to hang on and hope the pendulum swings back their way.

But I remember that someone else had a joke — I don’t remember how it went — that centered on the idea that, after a few more decades of declining statistics, Anglican churches would be empty, except for elderly clergy at the altars whose salaries would be paid with endowment funds.

That joke cuts to the heart of the news story discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

As background, here is the top of the Religion News Service story I critiqued in an post with this headline: “Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why.”

(RNS) — A “wake-up call.”

That’s what Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, called a new report showing there may be no members left in the mainline Canadian denomination in 20 years.


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Should Roman Catholicism allow more married priests? Women at altars as deacons?

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Should Roman Catholicism allow more married priests? Women at altars as deacons?

THE QUESTIONS:

Reviving big Catholic issues: Should priests be married? Should women be deacons?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Those two epochal changes in Catholicism are posed to Pope Francis in the final report from an October synod for Catholic delegates representing South America’s Amazon region. Francis expects to issue his formal response in a pronouncement by the end of the year.

Catholics in that region can go for months, even years, without seeing a priest due to a severe shortage that is fostering evangelical Protestant inroads. Therefore the synod proposed that well-proven men (viri probati) be ordained as priests even if married, an experiment in bending the celibacy rule that liberals hope — and traditionalists fear — could spread elsewhere.

Partly for the same reason, the report also asked for renewed study of ordaining women as deacons, which Francis has already agreed to authorize, though delegates did not advocate this change. The synod also recommended a new recognized ministry of “woman community leader,” and urged more participation for women in church decision-making. (Only men were voting delegates at the synod, which women attended as consultants and observers.)

Female deacons would be revolutionary, and that change seems unlikely though not impossible. The celibacy that is mandatory for (most but not all) Catholic priests is considered a matter of discipline, not doctrine, and thus subject to change. Since celibacy has provoked so much discussion, and is the more likely to occur, The Guy treats that topic first.

The New Testament records that Peter, regarded by Catholicism as the first in the line of popes, was married. Jesus taught that some would choose to live as unmarried “eunuchs” for the sake of God’s kingdom (Matthew 19:12), and a biblical letter of Paul speaks of  a “special gift” to remain unwed (1 Corinthians 7:1-9). For both, this was singleness chosen voluntarily by certain Christians, not a requirement for all those in ministry.

In early Christianity, the choice of celibacy became more widespread as clergy sought to signify total dedication to church service.


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Podcast thinking: Fred Rogers, Tom Hanks, the Good Samaritan and the ties that bind

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Anyone who wanted to know why the Rev. Fred Rogers did what he did needed to pause and think about two of the central facts in his career.

First, there was the name of the show that made him a television legend: “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Then there was the rite that opened every episode — the transition into the trademark sweater and comfy shoes — and the song that went with it. The crucial line was the thesis statement at the end: “Please, won’t you be my neighbor?”

That was a strange question to ask children. Why not ask them to be friends? Isn’t “friend” a more common word among kids than “neighbor”? In this day and age, many adults are struggling to be “neighbors,” a term with all kinds of implications linked to helping people simply because they are nearby and need help.

But Rogers had very specific reasons for doing what he did. His goal was was to deal with the kinds of big questions that sent him to seminary in the first place, before he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, serving in a public ministry expressed in television broadcasting. He wanted to handle the kinds of subjects that trouble, and even frighten, children (and honest adults). We are talking about death, divorce, war, racism and, over and over, questions about why bad things happen to good people. The theological term is, of course, “theodicy.”

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, host Todd Wilken and I talked about the convictions that powered the work of Mister Rogers. Click here to tune that in.


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USA Today hunts for 'The Priest Next Door,' in sex abuse feature that breaks little new ground

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If you follow mainstream news coverage of clergy sexual abuse cases in the Catholic church, you know that there are two common errors that journalists keep making when dealing with this hellish subject.

First, there is the timeline issue. Many editors seem convinced that the public first learned about this crisis through the epic Boston Globe “Spotlight” series that ran in 2002.

This may have been when Hollywood grasped the size of this story, but religion beat reporters and many other journalists had been following the scandal since the Louisiana accusations against the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, which made national headlines in 1984. Jason Berry’s trailblazing book “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” was published in 1992. Reporters covering the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops chased this story all through the 1980s.

Does this error matter? I guess it only matters if editors care about accuracy and they truly want readers to understand how long these horrors have poisoned life for many Catholics. After all, the cover-ups are as important as the crimes.

Thus, it’s disappointing to dig into the new USA Today feature on this topic — “The Priest Next Door” — and hit the following summary material:

During its nine-month investigation, the USA TODAY Network tracked down last known addresses for nearly 700 former priests who have been publicly accused of sexual abuse. Then, 38 reporters knocked on more than 100 doors across the country, from Portland, Oregon, to Long Island, New York, with stops in Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Miami and more. They talked with accused priests, as well as neighbors, school officials, employers, church leaders and victims. They reviewed court records, social media accounts and church documents in piecing together a nationwide accounting of what happened after priests were accused of abuse, left their positions in the church and were essentially allowed to go free. 

Since the scandal first exploded into public view in Boston almost 20 years ago, the church has financially settled with thousands of victims, claimed bankruptcy at parishes across the country and watched disaffected congregants flee its pews. The church has promised change, with parishes posting guidelines aimed at protecting children and dioceses releasing names of credibly accused priests — many of whom were defrocked, or laicized, meaning they no longer work with the church.

The second problem that keeps showing up in stories of this kind? That would be covering sexual-abuse scandals among Catholics without mentioning that similar issues exist in other religious flocks — as well as in public schools, sports programs, nonprofit agencies (think Scouting) and other secular settings.


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It's time for journalists to ask: What has happened to the Vatican press office?

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Let’s start with a loaded question. But it’s a questions that journalists really need to ask, because of trends during recent events in Catholic life.

So here goes: Is the Vatican’s press office helping to push a progressive agenda that could forever change the Catholic church?

Here’s the background: The Pan-Amazonian Synod that ended over a week ago wasn’t without controversy, to say the least. The recommendations put forth regarding bestowing Holy Orders to women in the form of making them deacons is something Pope Francis has to make a decision on by the end of the year. Toss in the theological debate over the Pachamama statues present at the Vatican and at a nearby Rome church and there was no shortage of fodder for reporters and columnists.

That takes us to the Vatican’s press office, the people on the front lines of getting out the pope’s message to the world’s media.

Like the White House in the age of Trump, so too does the Holy See’s messaging need some further examination. Former White House Press Secretaries Sean Spicer, followed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, were all placed under the news media’s microscope for their statements and actions — and rightly so. The PR men and women behind Francis also deserve similar examination by the press.

Long gone are the days of Joaquin Navarro Valls. A “suave, silver-haired Spaniard,” as the Los Angeles Times described him in their 2017 obituary, Valls was both a close confidant of Pope John Paul II and served for more than two decades as chief Vatican spokesman. He defined what it was to be the pope’s press man. And he defended church teachings while doing it.

Navarro-Valls, a lay member of the conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei, had worked as a foreign correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC when the Polish pope offered him the job as director of the Vatican press office. He was the first journalist to hold the post. He was the right man at the right time for a globe-trotting pope at a time when mass media was growing.

Fast-forward to the present. The backlash to Francis by traditionalists is based on convictions that he has politicized the church, wanting to transform it into a social service agency.


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