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Speaking of people being praised: New York Times offered solid, old-school story about Barrett

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Guess what? Judge Amy Coney Barrett is being considered, once again, for an open chair at the Supreme Court, the only branch of the United States government that seems to matter in this tense and divided land.

The odds are good that you have read about this development in the national press or even in the few remaining pages of your local newspaper.

We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage. Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a “devout” Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett. I am following all of that in social media and elsewhere.

However, let me start these discussions with a post that might surprise many readers. I would like to praise the recent New York Times story that ran with this headline: “To Conservatives, Barrett Has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court.” Also, I think it was wise to have a religion-beat professional take part in reporting and writing this story.

I am sure that combatants on both sides of this debate will find some sections in this story rather troubling. But here is the key point I want to make: Unlike many Times stories in recent years, almost all of this material comes from qualified sources (left and right) whose names are attached to their opinions and the information they provided. There are attribution clauses all over the place, just like in Times of old.

Near the top there is this short summary:

“She is the perfect combination of brilliant jurist and a woman who brings the argument to the court that is potentially the contrary to the views of the sitting women justices,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, who has praised Mr. Trump’s entire shortlist.

The nomination of a judge whom Mr. Trump was quoted last year as “saving” to be Justice Ginsburg’s replacement would almost surely plunge the nation into a bitter and divisive debate over the future of abortion rights, made even more pointed because Judge Barrett would replace a justice who was an unequivocal supporter of those rights. That is a debate Mr. Trump has not shied away from as president, as his judicial appointments and efforts to court conservatives have repeatedly shown.

As you would expect, Barrett’s critics are given plenty of space to respond — which is totally appropriate. It is also good that these voices are clearly identified, along with information about their organizations.

In other words, the story contains evidence of debate on a serious topic in the news.


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Farewell to 'Diogenes,' a witty, conservative Jesuit with a very sharp pen

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Farewell to 'Diogenes,' a witty, conservative Jesuit with a very sharp pen

For millions of Americans, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is as familiar as the national anthem and much easier to sing.

Few would need help with: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on! Glory, glory, Hallelujah! … His truth is marching on!"

During 1990s fights over updated Catholic liturgies, a Semitic languages professor at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute wrote a Battle Hymn for modernists.

This "sanitized" text -- "chanted to no tune in particular" -- declared: "I see God's approach; it is good. God makes wine with God's feet. … Brightness flashes from the decision-making apparatus. God's worldview is currently earning widespread respect. Give honor repeatedly to the god of our tradition. We have owned our values."

Father Paul V. Mankowski put his own name on that First Things piece, since it didn't lance specific institutions or leaders. For decades, Catholics seeking his satirical work learned to look for "Diogenes" at CatholicCulture.org or "Father X" elsewhere.

Mankowski died on September 3 at age 66, felled by a ruptured brain aneurysm. Raised in a middle-class Rust Belt family, he worked in steel mills to pay tuition at the University of Chicago. His advanced degrees included a master's from Oxford and a Harvard University doctorate.

Many researchers, politicos and journalists (like me) knew him through telephone calls and emails, usually seeking documents and statements from nearby Catholic leaders. He was a rarity in the modern age -- a Jesuit conservative -- and his superiors eventually ordered him not to address church controversies. Much of his work was published anonymously or using pen names.

Princeton University's Robert P. George blitzed through years of emails, after hearing about Mankowski's sudden death.

"There are some doozies -- especially the spoofs, send ups and parodies," said George, on Facebook. "His wit was a massive quiver full of poison-dipped arrows, and he was a master archer.


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It's not too early to start gathering string on Catholic Cardinals on the rise

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It's not too early to start gathering string on Catholic Cardinals on the rise

The U.S. presidency is a geezer’s game this round.

If Donald Trump wins and completes a full term he'd be 78, while a President Joe Biden would be 82 -- thus the unusually intense buzz about Sen. Kamala Harris as president in waiting. Either man would be history’s oldest president.

On the religion beat, Pope Francis appears spry but he turns 84 in December and, inevitably, writers are already starting to muse about his successor. An election campaign for the leader of 1.3 billion Catholics is the religion writer’s equivalent of the Olympics, compounded by secrecy and subtlety. This should be an unusually hot race because Francis has roiled conservatives on both doctrinal and political matters.

Francis’s dozens of appointees to the College of Cardinals will exercise major voting power in the coming “conclave,” but that doesn’t mean his successor will be a clone. Cardinals chosen by the doctrinaire St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, after all, elected Francis. (As religion specialists will know, only cardinals under age 80 are electors and their total cannot exceed 120, with a two-thirds majority required to win.)

Further on the age factor. Some will say the rule of thumb has moved to older popes, as with the U.S. presidency, since both Francis and predecessor Benedict XVI were in their later 70s when chosen. However, back in 1958 the cardinals elevated a similarly aged Angelo Roncalli, the patriarch of Venice. Some figured he’d be a mere caretaker; in fact, he summoned the epochal Second Vatican Council.

One final age factor. It seems inconceivable that the cardinals would choose a youngster like Pope Pius IX, who was only 54 when elevated and had a turbulent 32-year reign.

By odd coincidence, two conservative Catholic publishers have simultaneously issued relevant pre-conclave books with the identical title, though the subtitles signal different purposes.


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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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What is a priest worth? Latest Ted McCarrick news says it depends on the lawsuit

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There’s a book out there asking: “What is a Girl Worth?” Written by former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, it asks who is going to tell little girls that the abuse done to them years ago was monstrously wrong and that it actually matters that their perpetrators are punished.

There also needs to be a book asking “what is a priest worth?”

For two years now, we’ve been looking at the news reporting about the sex scandal that surrounded the now-former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and how “everyone” knew he was dallying with seminarians and sharing beds with them at his New Jersey beach cottage back in the 1980s.

After the news about McCarrick broke on June 20, 2018, it took the MSM a month to get all the major details together — and still they missed a few. This New York Times piece says the sexual activity that McCarrick carried on with his protégé Robert Ciolek stayed above the waist. The paper hinted in the next paragraph that another seminarian or young priest involved with McCarrick had endured far worse sexual abuse, but unless you knew how to read between the lines, you missed it.

But the late Richard Sipe, a Benedictine priest-turned-psychotherapist, had posted on his web site 10 years beforehand accounts of very R-rated sexual activity McCarrick foisted on his underlings. Many journalists read it, but we didn’t know how to prove it. At the time, the church attitude I picked up was that nothing happened at that cottage and that the seminarians and young priests involved should get over it.

The thought that some could be scarred sexually for life never occurred to anyone. Who could they talk about this with? Who’d believe them? Because of what had been done to them, they were abandoned to mull over some very dirty thoughts while at the same time berating themselves for not fighting back.

Finally, last week, a bunch of media, including a consortium of New Jersey newspapers, reported a juicy lawsuit against McCarrick that threatens to expose some of the nastier details. Written by Newark Star-Ledger reporter Ted Sherman on the NJ.com site, the story was worth the wait.

He is known only as “Doe 14.”

Raised in a devout Catholic family, he attended St. Francis Xavier in Newark and Essex Catholic in East Orange in the Archdiocese of Newark, participating in church and youth activities.

And by the time he was a teenager, his lawyers say he was being groomed for a role in what they called a “sex ring” involving then-Bishop Theodore McCarrick, the 90-year-old now defrocked and disgraced former cardinal who was cast out of the ministry last year over decades-old sexual abuse allegations.


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John Paul II is already a saint -- is it time to add 'the great' to this pope's title?

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John Paul II is already a saint -- is it time to add 'the great' to this pope's title?

As he began his 1979 pilgrimage through Poland, Pope John Paul II preached a soaring sermon that was fiercely Catholic, yet full of affection for his homeland.

For Communist leaders, the fact that the former Archbishop of Cracow linked faith to national pride was pure heresy. The pope joyfully claimed divine authority to challenge atheism and the government's efforts to reshape Polish culture.

"Man cannot be fully understood without Christ," John Paul II told 290,000 at a Mass in Warsaw's Victory Square. "He cannot understand who he is, nor what his true dignity is, nor what his vocation is, nor what his final end is. … Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography."

That was bad enough. Then he added: "It is therefore impossible without Christ to understand the history of the Polish nation. … If we reject this key to understanding our nation, we lay ourselves open to a substantial misunderstanding. We no longer understand ourselves."

This was the stuff of sainthood, and John Paul II received that title soon after his 26-year pontificate ended. But the global impact of that 1979 sermon is a perfect example of why many Catholics believe it's time to attach another title to his name -- "the great."

"The informal title 'the great' is not one that is formally granted by the church," explained historian Matthew Bunson, author of "The Pope Encyclopedia: An A to Z of the Holy See."

"Every saint who is also a pope is not hailed as 'the great,' but the popes who have been called 'the great' are all saints. … When you hear that title, you are dealing with both the love of the faithful for this saint and the judgement of history."

In the case of John Paul II, mourners chanted "Santo subito!" (Saint now!) and waved posters with that slogan at his funeral. During a Mass only 13 hours after his death, Cardinal Angelo Sodano spoke of "John Paul, indeed, John Paul the Great."


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AP explains why it was wrong for local-level Catholic employees to get coronavirus relief money

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That Associated Press headline the other day certainly was a grabber: “Catholic Church lobbied for taxpayer funds, got $1.4B.” Let’s start with three statements about this in-depth report:

(1) The headline and the lede both assume there is such a thing as the “U.S. Roman Catholic Church” and that someone can write a check that will be cashed by that institution. This is like saying that there is an “American Public School System,” as opposed to complex networks of schools at the local, regional and state levels.

(2) There are national Catholic organizations that speak — and even lobby — for Catholic groups and causes, such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This doesn’t wipe out the reality of local parishes, ministries, schools, religious orders, regional dioceses, etc.

(3) It was completely valid to do an in-depth report on how Catholic nonprofit groups campaigned to receive coronavirus relief money for their employees — for precisely the same reasons journalists can, and should, investigate similar activities by other huge nonprofits and companies with complex national, regional and local structures. Maybe start with Planned Parenthood, just to provide some balance?

The key, once again, is a concept that came up the other day at the U.S. Supreme Court — “equal access.” Under these legal principles, part of the legacy of a liberal-conservative coalition in the Clinton-Gore years, government entities are supposed to treat religious organizations (think nonprofits) the same way they treat similar secular groups. They can work with all of them (sacred and secular alike) or they can turn all of them down.

They key is that they are treated the same. The bottom line: Religion is not a uniquely dangerous force in American life. This topic is discussed — sort of — way down in the AP feature.

But here is the overture of this follow-the-money investigative piece:

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

The church’s haul may have reached -- or even exceeded -- $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.

Note that nice neutral noun there in the second paragraph — “haul.”


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Does it matter if journalists have quit asking about the missing McCarrick report?

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It’s July of 2020.

Do you know where the McCarrick report is?

There are people who still care about the who, what, when, where, why and how of the scandal that brought down former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, at one time the most press-friendly and influential cardinal in the United States of America.

In a way, it’s even more important to know more about the rise of McCarrick in church circles in and around New York City and then learn the details of his networking years in Washington, D.C. Who were McCarrick’s disciples and to what degree did they protect him, during the years when rumors were thick on the ground about — to be specific — his unique personal style when dealing with seminarians.

It’s totally understandable that the McCarrick investigation has faded from view. The year 2020 has, after all, served up challenge after challenge for journalists and church leaders, alike. McCarrick was shipped off to western Kansas and, now, it appears that he has moved to a safe house of his own choosing.

The former cardinal is now an afterthought.

But not for everyone. The other day, J.D. Flynn of the Catholic News Agency produced a thoughtful essay on what this silence means and the long term effects it could have on Catholic laypeople and their trust of the church hierarchy. It’s worth reading — even as the year 2020 rages around us. Here is the overture:

On June 20, 2018, American Catholics woke up to discover that retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick stood accused of sexually abusing a teenager.

The cardinal said he was innocent. The New York archdiocese said it was a singular allegation. Dioceses in New Jersey said they had received isolated allegations of misconduct with adults.

Then the dam broke. It emerged that McCarrick had a pattern of sexual abuse and coercion, with minors and with young priests and seminarians. American Catholics learned about the cardinal’s beach house, his wandering hands, his preference for thin non-smoking seminarians. His coercive and manipulative letters became available to read, the testimony of his victims was crushing.

But the story didn’t stop at McCarrick.


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Pope Francis preaches about 'unbiased' journalism, affirming values few practice anymore

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Six months into 2020 and it has felt like we’ve experienced a decade’s worth of news.

While American society grapples with the coronavirus pandemic and racial unrest — in an election year no less — we are also witnessing the unraveling of old-school journalism before our very eyes.

As the news pages of The New York Times and Washington Post read increasingly like The Nation, religion coverage will certainly be affected. How so remains to be seen over the coming weeks and months. The news events of the last few months — and the Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco at the Times — continues to reverberate in American newsrooms.

Don’t believe it? Check out how some of the country’s biggest legacy newspapers covered President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech this past weekend. They have abandoned all pretense of fairness.

For the time being, journalists — and those who cover religion and faith in particular — are discussing and debating what is happening in our politics and society. The annual Catholic Media Conference, organized each year by the Catholic Press Association, went virtual this year (like so many meetings and conferences because of COVID-19). It is typically a place where journalists who work in Catholic media — covering a large spectrum of doctrinal beliefs and traditions — across North America.

This year’s conference was a chance for editors and writers from around the country to once again discuss the issues and challengers they face. The Zoom workshops and panel discussions that took place last week were very helpful. One of the biggest issues, as a result of the pandemic, is the long-term financial viability of diocesan newspapers.

However, the conference opened on June 30 with a video message from Pope Francis. The pontiff highlighted the difficult times everyone has been living through. Pope Francis, who has consistently drawn the ire of Catholic media on the doctrinal right, gave his view of what the religious press should look like in this country:

E pluribus unum – the ideal of unity amid diversity, reflected in the motto of the United States must also inspire the service you offer to the common good. How urgently is this needed today, in an age marked by conflicts and polarization from which the Catholic community itself is not immune. We need media capable of building bridges, defending life and breaking down the walls, visible and invisible, that prevent sincere dialogue and truthful communication between individuals and communities.

Francis, not shy about tackling what he considers fake news in the past, added that there is a need for journalists “who protect communication from all that would distort it or bend it to other purposes.”


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