Marriage & Family

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Biden and the US bishops: Compromise crafted by 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick still in place

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Biden and the US bishops: Compromise crafted by 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick still in place

While doing groundwork for the pivotal South Carolina primary, Democrat Joe Biden went to a local church to do what he does on Sundays -- go to Mass.

What happened next made headlines, raising an issue that looms over the president-elect's personal and political lives. The priest at St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Florence declined to give Biden communion.

"Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that," said Father Rev. Robert E. Morey, in a press statement. "Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching. As a priest, it is my responsibility to minister to those souls entrusted to my care."

The priest, a former attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency, ended by saying: "I will keep Mr. Biden in my prayers."

Biden told MSNBC: "That's just my personal life and I am not going to get into that at all."

Nevertheless, Biden continued to make his faith -- he is a "devout" Catholic in news reports -- a key element of the campaign, as he has throughout his career. He also pledged to defend Roe v. Wade, to the point of codifying the decision into national law.

Catholic conservatives and liberals remain divided on how the church should respond, a tension demonstrated in a carefully worded statement by Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"The president-elect has given us reason to believe that his faith commitments will move him to support some good policies. This includes policies of immigration reform, refugees and the poor, and against racism, the death penalty and climate change," said Gomez, after the recent online USCCB meeting.

However, it is obvious that Biden's actions have clashed with "fundamental values that we hold dear as Catholics," the archbishop added. This includes supporting the federal funding of abortions, the return of the Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate and passage of the Equality Act, a sweeping LGBTQ rights bill that could lead to "unequal treatment of Catholic schools," said Gomez.

"We have long opposed these policies strongly. … When politicians who profess the Catholic faith support them, there are additional problems. Among other things, it creates confusion among the faithful about what the Church actually teaches on these questions."


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Thinking about Thanksgiving and beyond: Always coronavirus winter, but never Christmas?

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I am very sorry, but I need to talk about the Baby Boomers.

Trust me, I know that Americans are tired of hearing about the 73 million or so Baby Boomers. I know this is true because I am a Boomer and I’m tired of hearing about us. As a 66-year-old gravity challenged male with asthma, it seems like every time I turn on the television there is an advertisement about some medication that I may or may not need — soon.

Then there is the coronavirus pandemic and that pushy #BoomerRemover trend in social media. However, it’s certainly true that millions of Boomers fall into multiple COVID-19 risk categories.

This brings me to a sobering think piece that ran the other day in the New York Times by former ABC News religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer, whose byline will be familiar to many GetReligion readers.

On one level, this was a piece about Thanksgiving. But it also points forward into the entire holiday season, underlining many of the painful choices facing Baby Boomer grandparents, their children and, yes, their grandchildren. Here’s the double-decker headline:

‘Gram, Are You Sad?’ This Year, We’re Spending the Holidays Alone

None of our grandchildren will be at our table for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But the pandemic winter still leaves room for the imagination.

Yes, there are valid news stories hiding in this piece and some of them are linked both to religious rites and to family traditions that, for millions, are linked to religious seasons. For starters, what will happen to Midnight Mass? In my own tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, what happens to those glorious meals breaking the Nativity Fast?

Wehmeyer turned to the fiction of C.S. Lewis for a powerful image for what is ahead and what millions of people will be feeling in the weeks ahead. Emotions will really be running high during the Christian season of Christmas, which begins on Dec. 25th and runs for 12 days.


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The Atlantic offers faith-free take on this question: Should Down Syndrome kids be allowed to live?

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When is a religion story not a religion story?

When it covers a major moral question but does not make a connection with obvious religious themes and factual information. Here at GetReligion, we say that these stories are haunted by religion “ghosts. Basically, that’s an elephant in the living room that screams God involvement but the journalist has not been able to connect the dots, or appears to unwilling to do so.

The Atlantic just came out with a very thoughtful story on how Down Syndrome births are being eradicated in Denmark and why that should concern us all. And this feature story is overflowing with ghosts.

Every few weeks or so, Grete Fält-Hansen gets a call from a stranger asking a question for the first time: What is it like to raise a child with Down syndrome?

Sometimes the caller is a pregnant woman, deciding whether to have an abortion. Sometimes a husband and wife are on the line, the two of them in agonizing disagreement. Once, Fält-Hansen remembers, it was a couple who had waited for their prenatal screening to come back normal before announcing the pregnancy to friends and family. “We wanted to wait,” they’d told their loved ones, “because if it had Down syndrome, we would have had an abortion.”

Now, Denmark is known for its liberal abortion policies. In 2017, the Irish Times reported on how the Danish ambassador to Ireland had to state that no, it was not his government’s policy to eradicate all Down Syndrome births by 2030. Keep that in mind.

Back to The Atlantic story:

They called Fält-Hansen after their daughter was born — with slanted eyes, a flattened nose, and, most unmistakable, the extra copy of chromosome 21 that defines Down syndrome. They were afraid their friends and family would now think they didn’t love their daughter — so heavy are the moral judgments that accompany wanting or not wanting to bring a child with a disability into the world.

All of these people get in touch with Fält-Hansen, a 54-year-old schoolteacher, because she heads Landsforeningen Downs Syndrom, or the National Down Syndrome Association, in Denmark, and because she herself has an 18-year-old son, Karl Emil, with Down syndrome.


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One more time: Why can't Democrats count on Hispanics, etc., to vote the way they should?

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It’s one of the questions that I have heard the most from readers during the 17 years that GetReligion has been open for business: Why do you write so many posts — over and over — about the same errors and blind spots in mainstream news coverage of religion?”

Come to think of it, I have heard that question more than a few times from GetReligion writers.

Well, there are several reasons for this. We tend to write posts over and over when:

(1) The subject of these stories is really important in national or international news.

(2) The error, or the religion-news “ghost” we see, is really obvious and important.

(3) These errors are being made by journalists who are not religion-beat pros (think political-desk folks covering stories linked to religion). This points to the need for newsroom managers to hire more religion-news pros or to allow a religion-beat specialist to assist in reporting on topics of this kind.

So here we go again. The double-decker headline in The New York Times proclaimed:

Liberals Envisioned a Multiracial Coalition. Voters of Color Had Other Ideas.

Democrats may need to rethink their strategy as the class complexities and competing desires of Latino and Asian-American demographic groups become clear.

If you have followed GetReligion for the past four years, you know that we have noted — many times — the rising importance of Hispanic evangelicals, including what appeared to be a strategic role in the 2016 election in Florida. There’s more to this story than Cubans in Miami. Reporters need to visit megachurches in and around Orlando.

Also, if you have ever lived in Texas, you know that the political lives of third- and fourth-generation Hispanics is rather different than those of more recent arrivals. And, again, look for church ties.

Anyway, this latest Times story does deserve some praise for an accurate, and rare, use of “liberal” in a headline. Now the editors need to ponder this truth: Political labels are not enough. Here is an early summary of the facts in this totally faith-free feature, which focus on the failure of a pro-affirmative action push in California:


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Justice Alito warns: To spot religious-liberty trends in USA, listen to voices on campuses

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Justice Alito warns: To spot religious-liberty trends in USA, listen to voices on campuses

Almost a half century ago, comedian George Carlin recorded his controversial "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue.

That was then.

"Today, it would be easy to create a new list entitled, 'Things you can't say if you are a student or a professor at a college of university or an employee of many big corporations.' And there wouldn't be just seven items on that list -- 70 times seven would be closer to the mark," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, via Zoom, addressing the recent Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention.

Discussing religious beliefs, he argued, has become especially dangerous.

"You can't say that marriage is the union between one man and one woman," he noted. "Until very recently, that's what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it's considered bigotry."

Consider, for example, the case of Jack Denton, a Florida State University political science major whose long-range plans include law school.

In June, he participated in a Catholic Student Union online chat in which, after the death of George Floyd, someone promoted a fundraising project supporting BlackLivesMatter.com, the American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups. Denton criticized ACLU support for wider access to abortion and the BLM group's "What We Believe" website page that, at that time, pledged support for LGBTQ rights and efforts to disrupt "nuclear family" traditions.

"As a Catholic speaking to other Catholics," he said, "I felt compelled to point out the discrepancy between what these groups stand for and what the Catholic Church teaches. So, I did."

Denton didn't expect this private discussion to affect his work as president of the FSU Student Senate. However, an outraged student took screenshots of his texts and sent them to the Student Senate. That led to petitions claiming that he was unfit to serve, a painful six-hour special meeting and his forced exit.


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Thinking about divided America: Our complex land is getting more secular AND more religious

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In the overheated world of political fundraising and public-relations, America remains on the verge of theocracy, with women forced into red capes and white bonnets.

That’s the view of the political and cultural left, of course. On the right there are people who are absolutely sure that the drag-queen story hours held in some public libraries will soon be required in private religious schools. (Personally, I would like to see some of the folks on the right in those zip codes head to their public libraries and propose Narnia story hours or rosary-class meditation circles. If they are refused access, then it’s time to talk to authorities.)

The bottom line is that America is a very big, complex place and what flies in blue urban zones will not work in most of the heartland. While there is plenty of evidence that the nones-agnostics-atheists side of American life is growing (it is), there are also trends on the cultural and religious right that must be considered. As GetReligion has been arguing for years, the messy truth is that the mushy middle is what is vanishing.

This brings us to this weekend’s think piece at Religion & Politics, which ran with this headline: “Why the Partisan Divide? The U.S. Is Becoming More Secular — and More Religious.”

What does that mean? Well, for starters, consider trends among Hispanic Americans. You know that top Republicans and Democrats are thinking about that, right now.

In the end, there is plenty of evidence that the warring halves of American culture are real and they are not going away. What does religion have to do with that? Plenty. Click here for a recent GetReligion look at half of that: “'Blue Movie' time again: Massive New York Times op-ed says the 'pew gap' is real and growing.”

But back to this new essay by Spencer James, Hal Boyd, and Jason Carroll, who are faculty members in Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life. Here’s a key chunk of their thinking:

The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanship — it involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nation — nor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the country’s cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.


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Words matter: What kind of Catholic is Joe Biden? What kind of American is Rep. Cawthorn?

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Words matter: What kind of Catholic is Joe Biden? What kind of American is Rep. Cawthorn?

For serious journalists, words matter.

This is especially true when covering a subject as complex and nuanced as religion. So let’s ponder a religion-beat issue that, in political terms, is quite simple. However, in terms of history and doctrine, it’s rather complex.

Fill in the blank: “Joe Biden is a ______ Catholic.”

Now, if you follow the mainstream press, you know that for many the answer is “devout.” As in this CNN headline: “Trump claims Biden, a devout Catholic, wants to 'hurt God'.” And here is a typical news-story passage, care of CBSNews.com:

On Election Day, Mr. Biden, a devout Catholic, started out by attending Mass and visiting the graves of his son, Beau, and his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi, who were both killed in a car crash in 1972.

On Sunday, Mr. Biden did the same, attending Mass with his daughter Ashley and grandson Hunter at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, and then visiting his family members' graves.

Religion-beat veterans will notice that an important detail is missing from that passage — whether or not Biden received Holy Communion. The assumption, of course, is that he did (and that’s a safe assumption in East Coast establishment Catholicism).

It would appear that the key is that Biden says Catholicism has been a crucial force in his life and that Catholic social doctrine affects his political work. He carries a rosary. He goes the Mass — frequently. Other Catholics will note — a statement of fact — that some parts of Catholic social doctrine affect his political work and others clearly do not.

All of this came up for discussion as we recorded this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), which focused on a common theme from this blog’s 17-year history. Here it is: While many conservatives claim that the mainstream press is “anti-Christian,” or “anti-religion,” that simply isn’t true.

Take the New York Times, for example.


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New York Times went tone deaf when Matthew McConaughey started talking about God

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Let’s see. I feel an urgent need, right now, to write about news coverage that has nothing to do with Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick.

There is, you see, a side of my journalism personality linked to those long-ago days when I was an entertainment reporter-rock columnist. Also, when I taught at a seminary, I spent most of my time trying to get future pastors, religious educators and counselors to realize that, for ordinary Americans, “signals” sent via entertainment matter way more than those in news content. That’s tragic, but true.

So let’s flashback to that New York Times feature that ran not so long ago under this headline: “Matthew McConaughey Wrote the Book on Matthew McConaughey.” Let’s skip the second deck of that headline since it contained the obligatory reference to “all right, all right, all right (or in Texan, that would be '“alright” or some other spelling with an extra “w” or “h” in there somewhere).”

I was curious if this book — or perhaps I should say this Times feature about the book — would make any references to this complex superstar’s take on Christian faith. Maybe a reference to his infamous, by Hollywood standards, Oscar acceptance speech in 2014? You remember, when he said:

First off I want to thank God, because he's the one I look up to, he's graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human kind. He has shown me that it's a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late (British actor) Charlie Laughton, who said, 'When you got God, you got a friend and that friend is you.’ “

There was more, but we’ll leave it at that. It was kind of a short “Pilgrim’s Progress” with his trademark twang.

The Times feature does use the safe b-word — “beliefs” — but doesn’t seem very interested in the who, what, when, where, why and how. Thus, readers are told:

... McConaughey wants readers to look beyond the boldface name on its cover and focus on its fundamental message. No one can escape hardship, he said, but he can share the lessons “that helped me navigate the hard stuff — like I say, ‘get relative with the inevitable’ — sooner and in the best way possible for myself.”


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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks -- a modern voice in the news, defending ancient truths

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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks -- a modern voice in the news, defending ancient truths

A typical Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks speech would open with a self-deprecating jab at long-winded rabbis and then flow into a blend of Hebrew texts, science, law, literature, current events and the scriptures other faiths.

When the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom died on Nov. 7 at age 72, after battles with cancer that began in his 30s, the Prince of Wales said: "His immense learning spanned the secular and the sacred, and his prophetic voice spoke to our greatest challenges with unfailing insight and boundless compassion. His wise counsel was sought and appreciated by those of all faiths and none."

Most of all, Lord Sacks was known for using modern information and insights to defend ancient truths. One famous address, at a 2014 Vatican conference on marriage, began with fish mating in a Scottish lake 385 million years ago before charting humanity's rise from polygamy to monogamy, including some awkward biblical dramas.

Before this speech ended with a standing ovation, the rabbi explained that his goal was to defend the “most beautiful idea in the history of civilization," the concept of love as the origin of new life.

"What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history," he explained.

“Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires. … It made sense of the world and gave it a human face -- the face of love. For a whole variety of reasons, some to do with medical developments like birth control, in vitro fertilization and other genetic interventions, some to do with moral change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state … almost everything that marriage once brought together has now been split apart. Sex has been divorced from love, love from commitment, marriage from having children and having children from responsibility for their care."

Lord Sacks was part of the Modern Orthodox movement and wrote two dozen prayer books and works about science and spirituality, as well serving as a commentator on BBC Four's "Thought for the Day." He became chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in 1991, holding that post until 2013, Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 2005 and he entered the House of Lords in 2009.


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