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How can scribes capture Billy Graham's giant, complex life in newsprint? This will take time

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Back in the early 1980s, I sat in a meeting at The Charlotte Observer in which we discussed how the Rev. Billy Graham's hometown newspaper would handle his death. After all, he wasn't that far from the time when ordinary people start talking about retirement.

Graham, however, wasn't "ordinary people" especially in a town with a major road called the Billy Graham Parkway. The Observer team needed a plan. 

How do you sum up Graham's giant, complex, sprawling life in a few paragraphs? Try to imagine being the Associated Press pro who had to come up with the first bulletin that moved when the world's most famous evangelist died early Wednesday morning. Here is that story in its entirety:

The Rev. Billy Graham, who transformed American religious life through his preaching and activism, becoming a counselor to presidents and the most widely heard Christian evangelist in history, has died.
Spokesman Mark DeMoss says Graham, who long suffered from cancer, pneumonia and other ailments, died at his home in North Carolina on Wednesday morning. He was 99.
Graham reached more than 200 million through his appearances and millions more through his pioneering use of television and radio. Unlike many traditional evangelists, he abandoned narrow fundamentalism to engage broader society.

The priorities there seem solid, to me. The AP, of course, quickly released a full-length obituary.

As you would expect, there were stumbles in other newsrooms -- some of them almost Freudian. Consider the opening of the Graham obituary at The Daily Beast:

The Rev. Billy Graham, an evangelist preacher who changed American politics, has died at the age of 99. ...

Uh, no.

There were also some struggles to grasp the precise meanings of key religious words. For example, Graham was often called "America's pastor," but he spent very, very little time as a pastor, in terms of leading a congregation. There were some struggles, as always, with variations on words such as "evangelist," "evangelical" and "evangelizing." Was Graham a "fundamentalist"? The true fundamentalists would certainly say "no."


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MassLive.com offers a rare glimpse into the life of an African-American Catholic priest

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MassLive.com, which I praised in this space a couple months back for Ann-Gerard Flynn's thoughtful piece on locals' veneration of a touring relic of St. Anthony, has shown once again that it gets religion, this time with a sensitive and nuanced look at the vocational journey of an African-American Catholic priest.

Reading "African-American priest from Springfield finds his place in Catholicism, on campuses," I was surprised to discover that reporter Dan Warner does not normally cover the religion beat; his articles run the gamut of local topics. Judging by this engaging soft lede, he has a talent for storytelling:

WESTFIELD -- The Italian woman knelt in a front pew, twisting her neck to look at the man in the back of the Catholic church. She leaned to her husband.
"Guarda--look," she whispered in Italian. "Nero" (black).
He must be Baptist, she said. She went back to praying, nervously glancing over her shoulder.
The man in the back row finished praying and stood.
"Buon giorno," he said on his way out of the church.
He walked out the front door, along the side of the church and around back into the sacristy, put on his vestments and walked out to the altar to begin saying mass.
The man is the Rev. Warren Savage. And the moral of this true story, Savage said, is that we don't know people. Too often, people make assumptions based on appearance, and then miss a chance to learn and make a connection with someone else.
They never know what conversation they could have had. They never know that the African-American man in the back pew attended the Pontifical North American College in Rome and speaks Italian.

I like the delicacy with which Warner approaches Savage's experience as a member of a clerical culture in which he has relatively few African-American peers. Another reporter might taken advantage of the race angle to focus on occasions when Savage faced bigotry and prejudice. Warner doesn't shy away from discussion of the outsider aspects of Savage's experience, but he also avoids reducing the priest to a stereotype. Savage comes off as neither a plaster saint, nor a cassocked crusader. He is rather a very human priest, conscious of his own failings as he pursues holiness and serves his flock.

Particularly nice is this observation debunking a popular prejudice that has nothing to do with race:


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Bone again: MassLive could teach New York Times how to report on relics

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I wrote in this space on Tuesday that the New York Times' coverage of the Archbishop Sheen body battle was missing information on why relics are important to Catholics. By contrast, a recent article by Anne-Gerard Flynn at MassLive.com, although light on theology, captures the sense of the faithful who see in relics a living connection to saints.

Flynn seeks to capture the atmosphere of devotion among those venerating a relic of St. Anthony of Padua on loan to a local parish. She begins with an adept verbal snapshot of one woman paying her respects to the 13th-century Franciscan friar:

Springfield resident Brenda Madison was among the first area residents to venerate the relic of St. Anthony of Padua, and the physical experience of putting her lips to the glass reliquary containing the bone fragment of the saint, born in Portugual in 1195, left her in an emotional state.
"I teared up. I was just so happy. All of these years I have prayed to Anthony, and now I got that close to a part of the saint," said Madison, who attended a brief prayer service, Sept. 6, marking the reception of the relic into the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, at St. Michael's Cathedral.

Flynn's line about how "the physical experience of putting her lips to the glass reliquary ... left [Madison] in an emotional state" is subtle and powerful. Instead of asking an expert in Catholic theology about what it means to venerate a saint, she is trying to capture in words what such veneration means to the believer: physical contact with a person who, although dead to this present world, is alive in heaven.


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