Clergy

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Is it time to discuss this? New book surveys possible candidates for Chair of St. Peter

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he speculation over who will be the next pope is often a preoccupation of the Italian press and the subject never really fades away.

Newspapers up and down the peninsula love to handicap the race among the cardinals who are thought to be the most likely candidates to be elected pope. Indeed, the Italian term “papabile,” coined by Vatican watchers, has become mainstream over the last few decades.

Which man is “pope-able” (that is, able to become pope) is often debated in Rome and anywhere Roman Catholics gather.

Who will follow Pope Francis? The pontiff turns 84 in December, fueling speculation over who will be his replacement once he dies and the College of Cardinals meets to elect a new leader. Of course, there is now the possibility that he could retire — like Pope Benedict XVI.

A new book out, “The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates” (Sophia Institute Press) by the National Catholic Register's longtime Rome correspondent Edward Pentin (you can read his wonderful work here), delves into the lives and beliefs of the cardinals most likely to ascend to the Chair of St. Peter. Extremely well-researched (thanks to the help of international scholars), this book is a must-read for all Catholics and anyone who wants to take a peek into what the future and what personal experiences and philosophies these various men bring to the table.

In all, Pentin helped to pinpoint 19 men who could replace Francis once his pontificate is over. Becoming the spiritual leader of more than one billion Catholics worldwide and one of the most influential moral and religious figures in the world isn’t a matter to take lightly. What this book does well is offer up an in-depth look at these cardinals (their ecclesiastical life as priests and later bishops), many of whom remain unknown to most people — journalists included.


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QAnon in pews: Two online conversations with evangelicals concerned about the surge

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Way too many churches have never been all that effective, when it comes to helping the faithful deal with the challenges of daily life in the modern world — especially those linked to technology and mass media.

Back when I was teaching at Denver Seminary, in the early 1990s, we were struggling to help future pastors and church leaders cope with cable television all of those TV screens in the typical family home.

Frankly, many people couldn’t grasp how this was linked to pastoral ministry and preaching. I kept asking: How do your people spend their time? Spend their money? Make their decisions? These questions are at the heart of discipleship and they point to the powerful role that mass media play in modern life.

Now there is the Internet. Those TVs still exist, but they are surrounded by dozens of other screens that serve as doors into cyberspace.

It appears that we may have a topic that has some — repeat “some” — church leaders concerned about all of those screens. They are beginning to hear from pastors who are concerned, scared even, about the rising presence of QAnon dogma in their pews. Many saw the important essay in The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “The Prophecies of Q — American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”

In an “On Religion” column about QAnon, I stressed that church leaders need to wake up and realize the role that mainstream and alternative news sources are playing in dividing their people — period.

The bottom line: Many newsrooms are producing slanted, advocacy journalism that millions of consumers consider a kind of “fake news.” This is pushing readers away from mainstream news and deep into online niches packed with folks pushing QAnon and other conspiracy theories. Thus, I wrote:

The question, as pandemic-weary Americans stagger into the 2020 elections, is how many believers in this voting bloc have allowed their anger about "fake news" to push them toward fringe conspiracy theories about the future of their nation.

Some of these theories involve billionaire Bill Gates and global coronavirus vaccine projects, the Antichrist's plans for 5G towers, Democrats in pedophile rings or all those mysterious "QAnon" messages. "Q" is an anonymous scribe whose disciples think is a retired U.S. intelligence leader or maybe even President Donald Trump.

The bitter online arguments sound like this: Are these conspiracies mere "fake news" or is an increasingly politicized American press — especially on politics and religion — hiding dangerous truths behind its own brand of "fake news"?

"A reflexive disregard of what are legitimate news sources can feed a penchant for conspiracy theories," said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

A few lines later, Stetzer added:


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RNS finds trans clergy struggle for support, after leaving liberal seminaries (#WhyIsThat)

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Back in my Colorado days, I spent lots of time covering the Iliff School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary that was and is known as a hub for liberal Christian theology. A student — in the late 1980s — estimated that the student body was close to 50% gay and lesbian.

The problem, of course, was that there weren’t enough “urban” churches in Denver to handle all the students who needed to work part-time, serve in parish residency programs or be placed in their first pastoral positions (if they wanted to say in that regional conference). I once heard a feminist lesbian student, near tears, describing her attempts to preach to a small-town congregation out on the high plains of eastern Colorado. Some people even believed in hell.

What I realized was that this was not a story with two sides — liberal clergy vs. old-school locals. It was a story with, at least, three sides — liberal clergy, conservative laity and seminary/denominational officials caught in the middle. The liberal powers that be, you see, wanted to help the graduates, but they couldn’t afford to run off legions of ordinary church members. They had to be careful, for reasons linked to institutional survival.

I thought of those stand-offs while reading the recent Religion News Service feature — I am not sure that it is a “news” story — that ran with this headline: “As seminaries welcome openly transgender students, church lags behind.” Here is the overture:

When Austen Hartke arrived at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, he knew it was the only Lutheran seminary that didn't participate in his denomination's LGBTQ+ welcoming program. But as his awareness grew that he was transgender, so did his conviction that Luther was the right place for him.

Hartke, who had come out as bisexual years before applying to seminary, had specifically picked the school, he said in a recent interview, so he would learn to navigate his identity and ministry while being exposed to “the Midwestern attitudes I lived with every day.”

Still, said Hartke, who today runs the Transmission Ministry Collective, a community that supports transgender and other nonbinary Christians, “I didn’t come out as trans until I was holding my diploma, because I didn’t know what would happen.”


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Journalists should focus more coverage on Catholic police chaplains and less on 'cancel culture'

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I have covered my share of police funerals over the years. With some regularity over the course of two decades working in journalism, police officers have been shot and killed in the line of duty.

What follows — in print and on television — is a funeral, a mourning widow, crying family members and hundreds of officers gathered at a church. Even hardened reporters can tell you that covering these events can be heartbreaking.

There was no greater pain to hit New York City, and indeed the country, than the loses suffered with the 9/11 attacks. Of the 2,977 people killed in the attack that destroyed the World Trade Center, 412 were emergency workers who responded that day. They included:

* 343 firefighters (including a chaplain and two paramedics) of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY)

* 37 police officers of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department (PAPD)

* 23 police officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD)

* 8 emergency medical technicians and paramedics from private emergency medical services

* 1 patrolman from the New York Fire Patrol

That list keeps growing as more die each year from cancer and other health-related issues associated with the attacks.

While the death of these brave men and women is something Americans will never forget, one has to wonder about that legacy now that there is a movement to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder while in police custody in Minneapolis.

I was there on 9/11. As a reporter for the New York Post at the time, I was only blocks away when the second tower collapsed. I spent the next few months covering the tragedy and the many lives it impacted. One of the deaths I remember most was that of Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan friar who served as an FDNY chaplain. I had spoken with Judge just a few weeks prior to his death after he officiated the funeral Mass of Michael Gorumba, a rookie firefighter who died in August 2001. Gorumba suffered a heart attack shortly after battling a giant fire.

On 9/11, Judge was the first certified fatality.


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Journalism cancels its moral voice: What does this mean for Catholic news? For religion news?

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I have always been fascinated with the concept that journalism functions as a moral watchdog on our society. As someone who spent most of his career at two New York tabloids (15 years at the New York Post, two others at the rival Daily News), reportage and story selection revolved heavily around morality.

A lot of it mirrored traditional religious morality.

Editors and reporters never used that language to describe their work, of course.

They still reported both sides of the story and gave people who were the subject of said story the chance to rebuke accusations. Whether it was a news account about an unfaithful politician (former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and former Congressman Anthony Weiner spring to mind), a Wall Street executive who embezzled money or a regular guy who shot and killed a convenient store clerk over a few dollars, if you broke one of the Ten Commandments then you had a very good chance of being splashed all over page one.

ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sites, has a mission statement that sums up this philosophy very well:

To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.

Where does this morality come from? It is rooted primarily in Judeo-Christian values, something that helped form American society during what is now called The Great Awakening.

News coverage — be it about politics, culture or religion — is largely made up of crimes (in the legal sense) or lapses in judgement (in a moral one). But the news media has changed in the Internet age, primarily because of social media. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, to name just three, allows users — everyday people — to pump out content. That content can take many forms — from benign observations to what’s called hot takes — for all to read and see.

Truth, fact checking and context are not important. What matters are likes and followers. What we have now is something some have called “The Great Awokening” and it appears to have forever transformed our political discourse and the journalism that tries to report on it.

Mainstream news organizations, in their quest for clicks amid hope of figuring out a new business model, now mirror the content we all see on social media platforms.


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Podcast: Looking for progress after George Floyd killing? Look in pews, not political fights

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In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, news consumers have been reading all kinds of reaction quotes from all kinds of important people, including religious leaders, on the left and right sides of American public life.

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I tried to look past the recent headlines and focus on where coverage of this national tragedy could be going in the weeks ahead, especially in terms of religion-beat news.

With that in mind, let me start with the following question. Who said this, in reaction to the hellish video and subsequent revelations about Floyd’s death?

This makes me sick to my stomach. … To watch a police officer kill an unarmed black man — with no concern on his face, his hand in his pocket, indifferent to the bystanders begging for something to be done to help the man — is so disturbing. He and the other officers on the scene refused to listen and refused to respond. I hope they have deep regret and remorse for their actions. Police are not the judge and jury. These officers will have to stand before God and the authorities on this earth for what they have done.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson? The Rev. Martin Luther King III? That final line about divine judgment is strong enough for both of those preachers.

Actually, the answer is the Rev. Franklin Graham.

Yes, I also saw Graham’s statement bashing liberal clergy for their harsh reactions to President Donald Trump’s photo op with the Bible. But let’s try, try, try to stay focused on the racism discussions, for a moment. Graham’s Floyd statement could have been endorsed by others.

I asked Wilken some questions about America’s discussions of institutional racism and the potential for reform in police departments.

I asked if Wilken expected progress in talks between:

(1) Trump and Democrat Joe Biden? The answer is obviously “no,” said Wilken. I agreed.

(2) Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill? Wilken gave the same answer. Me too.

(3) African-American and white cops and the organizations in which they are involved?


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Home, home on the rage: And seldom was heard an unpredictable word in Trump Bible wars

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Let me just shout a quick “Amen!” in response to the sentiments offered on Twitter by my colleague Bobby Ross Jr.

Here’s the quote: “Too. Much. News.”

For the past three decades or so, Tuesday has been the work day when I try to hide away and write my “On Religion” column, which I ship to the Universal syndicate on Wednesday morning (this week: black preachers, Old Testament prophets and centuries of pain).

Nevertheless, during the past day or so I have been following the Trumpian Bible battles on Twitter. I saw, of course, quite a few people — including conservative Christians — addressing President Donald Trump’s Bible-aloft photo op. I wondered, frankly, whether we would hear from many of those people in the mainstream press coverage that would follow. Uh. That would be “no.”

So raise your hands if you were surprised that the Episcopal Church leadership in Washington, D.C., was outraged? Their comments were essential, of course, because the story unfolded in front of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House (site of a fire a day earlier). So you knew religious progressives would get lots of hot ink, as in the Washington Post piece that opened with the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington:

“I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop,” Budde said.

She excoriated the president for standing in front of the church — its windows boarded up with plywood — holding up a Bible, which Budde said “declares that God is love.”

“Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence,” Budde of the president. “We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us.”

Let’s keep reading. Raise your hand if you are surprised that predictable evangelicals said predictable things — which is also a valid part of the story:

Johnnie Moore, a spokesman for several of Trump’s evangelical religious advisers, tweeted favorably about the incident as well.

“I will never forget seeing @POTUS @realDonaldTrump slowly & in-total-command walk from the @WhiteHouse across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church defying those who aim to derail our national healing by spreading fear, hate & anarchy,” he wrote. “After just saying, ‘I will keep you safe.’ ”


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When covering riots and flames, it's wise to seek veteran voices from black churches

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It was impossible to continue business as usual in a seminary classroom in the spring of 1992, as flames and violence spread through parts of Los Angeles.

This was especially true while team-teaching a seminar blending studies of the Old Testament prophets with moral and spiritual signals drawn from contemporary news and entertainment media. In this particular seminar at Denver Seminary, half of the future pastors were black and half were white.

Old Testament prophets? Hear a few words from Jeremiah 22:

Hear the word of the Lord, O King of Judah sitting on the throne of David — you, and your servants, and your people who enter these gates. Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place. … (If) you will not heed these words, I swear by myself, says the Lord, that this house shall become a desolation.

Our leader, the late Haddon Robinson — one of the greatest homiletics professors ever — approved the following assignment, as we approached the first Sunday during the riots. We asked each white student to contact a black pastor, seeking insights into the sermon preached that Sunday. We asked black students to contact white pastors with the same goal.

I thought of that assignment while reading waves of news coverage of the protests and riots — note that the distinction — after the death of George Floyd, his neck under a white Minneapolis police officer’s knee. I also remembered that seminar in 2015, standing in my front yard watching smoke and flames in the night sky over Baltimore.

It’s impossible to do justice to the many religious themes and images in the events — peaceful and violent — linked to Floyd’s death, from the many protestors kneeling in prayer (sometimes with police) to rioters painting obscene curses on historic sanctuaries.

But we can see one constant that journalists should remember under these circumstances: The voices of the black church will be there — somewhere — and if you seek them out, you will find words, images and ideas that are crucial to those building coalitions seeking justice and change. And when it’s time to heal and clean up, look for religious folks of all kinds — black, white, whatever. They will be there, day after day.


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100 years of all kinds of Catholics -- good and bad -- going to confession in movies

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100 years of all kinds of Catholics -- good and bad -- going to confession in movies

Alfred Hitchcock knew a thing or two about complicated thrillers.

Having a murderer confess to a priest -- who couldn't betray this trust -- was already a familiar plot twist by 1953, when Hitchcock released "I Confess." Because of the seal of confession, this noble priest couldn't even clear his own name when police suspected that he was the killer.

Good prevails in the end. Shot by police, the killer makes an urgent final confession to the priest.

"It's natural for a Catholic filmmaker like Hitchcock to see the dramatic potential of confession, with its combination of mystery and holiness," said film critic Steven D. Greydanus, best known for his work for the National Catholic Register. "At the same time, Hitchcock thought 'I Confess' was a mistake, because he thought that his mostly Protestant audience in America just wouldn't get it."

The sacrament of confession is both sacred and secret -- facts known to Medieval playwrights as well as modern filmmakers. Thus, putting a confession rite on a movie screen is a "transgressive act" of the highest kind, said Greydanus, who serves as a permanent deacon in the Diocese of Newark, N.J. (Deacons do not hear confessions.)

"Voyeurism is an important theme in much of Hitchcock's work and he knew that using confession in this way was a kind of voyeurism. … He knew this was a kind of taboo."

Nevertheless, Hollywood scribes have frequently used confession and penance for everything from cheap laughs ("A League of Their Own"), to shattering guilt (Godfather III), to near-miraculous transformations ("The Mission"). In a recent 6,000-word essay -- "In Search of True Confession in the Movies" -- Greydanus covered a century of cinema, while admitting that he had to omit dozens of movies that included confession scenes.

The key is that filmmakers struggle to capture, in words and images, what is happening in a person's heart. The act of confession opens a window into the soul, since characters are forced to put their sins and struggles into words.

"Perhaps the very secrecy surrounding the sacrament of confession was part of what attracted filmmakers to depict it," wrote Greydanus. "Anyone can witness the Eucharistic liturgy, an ordination or a wedding. …

“But what transpires in confession can only be imagined -- which is the cinema's stock in trade. … Often enough, confession scenes have served in movies as a pretext to allow a character to articulate their spiritual or temporal struggles, whether or not any kind of sin is involved."


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