Ross Douthat

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Thinking about a 'slow-motion' Catholic schism, with Ross Douthat and the X choirs

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Thinking about a 'slow-motion' Catholic schism, with Ross Douthat and the X choirs

My history with computers and journalism is long and complex.

Back in 1978, soon after the cooling of the Earth’s crust, I held a newsroom copy-desk job that required me to memorize (OK, I had a filing-card cheat sheet) the manual codes to control all of the fonts and text sizes for news stories, headlines, photo credits, cutlines, etc. I used to have nightmares in which I would mess one up.

A few years later, everyone had work stations tied to a newsroom mainframe. Then there were giant portable computers for the sports reporters and political-desk pros (the people who wrote copy that really mattered). Then there were tiny Radio Shack laptops.

I know, I know. Jurassic journalism territory.

But this brings me to what I think is a must-read online commentary about the Pope Francis decision to allow — some would now say require — priests to bless same-sex couples and/or their relationships. There have been many worth noting (see this essential Clemente Lisi post), but I think a tweetstorm from Ross Douthat looms over the debate, because he writes for The New York Times.

But how to embed all those tweets without making readers jump over hurdles of repeated material? I confess that I do not have the technical skill to do that. Thus, I did a cut-and-paste “think piece” — with Douthat’s leaping off post embedded at the very top.

It’s a quick read, but offers much to think about.


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Pope's same-sex blessings stunner inspires headlines and firestorms about those headlines

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Pope's same-sex blessings stunner inspires headlines and firestorms about those headlines

Catholics around the world — reacting to waves of media coverage — are still debating the decision by Pope Francis to allow priests to bless same-sex couples. 

Many rejoiced in seeing bold headlines about the decision, while others across the doctrinal spectrum argued it could sow confusion and exacerbate tensions further between progressives and conservatives within the church.  

The 5,000-word document — known as Fiducia supplicans and issued by the Vatican’s Doctrine of the Faith on Monday — elaborated on a letter the pontiff sent to cardinals that was published in October. In that letter, Pope Francis had said such blessings could be offered under some circumstances if they didn’t confuse the ritual with the sacrament of marriage.

This new declaration repeated those conditions, but also reaffirmed that marriage is a lifelong sacrament between a man and a woman. The Vatican said the blessing of these “irregular” situations — which also includes divorced Catholics — must be non-liturgical in nature and cannot be done at the same time as a civil union. 

As alway, intense mainstream-media coverage played a major role in the firestorm surrounding this Vatican document, with many journalists struggling to define the difference between “blessings” for same-sex couples and rites recognizing the validity of those unions.

The confusion shaped the debates. In the end, the document “will undoubtedly be considered yet another black mark on the memory of this pontificate, according to Steven O’Reilly, who runs a blog called Roma Locuta Est.

“Now, in an effort to defend this document, the Francisapologists or ‘popesplainers‘ will no doubt rely on the fact that the new Vatican document does say that the ‘form’ of the blessings for individuals in same sex relationships ‘should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the sacrament of marriage,’ ” he said. “So, the document in its first few sections appears to be consistent with past teaching.”


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Podcast: Is Cardinal Burke being 'political' by asking the pope questions about 'doctrine'?

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Podcast: Is Cardinal Burke being 'political' by asking the pope questions about 'doctrine'?

Let’s start with some basic facts about a hot, hot story on the religion-news beat — the escalating clashes between Pope Francis and doctrinal conservatives in his church.

We know that Pope Francis and the wider Synod on Synodality camp wants to bring a wave of “reform” to the Roman Catholic Church, with some openly stating that this includes the modernization of doctrines as well as the pastoral-care practices linked to traditional doctrines.

We know that Cardinal Raymond Burke and others — mostly leaders from the era of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI — insist that their primary goals are to defend the church’s doctrines, primarily on moral issues, as stated in the Catechism and centuries of church tradition.

Thus, journalists need to thinking about the meaning of several words that they are using, over and over, in coverage of this clash inside the Church of Rome. These three words were at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

What three words?

The first word is “reform.” In a previous post, I turned to online dictionaries and found this useful set of definitions for that loaded term:

Reform …. * make changes for improvement in order to remove abuse and injustices; "reform a political system" * bring, lead, or force to abandon a wrong or evil course of life, conduct, and adopt a right one; "The Church reformed me"; "reform your conduct" ... * a change for the better as a result of correcting abuses; "justice was for sale before the reform of the law courts" ... * improve by alteration or correction of errors or defects and put into a better condition; "reform the health system in this country" * a campaign aimed to correct abuses or malpractices. ...

What doctrines and pastoral traditions are we talking about?

The Associated Press report focusing on the pope’s latest actions against Cardinal Burke — the loss of his apartment in Rome and, most likely, his stipend — offers the following:

Burke, a 75-year-old canon lawyer whom Francis had fired as the Vatican’s high court justice in 2014, has become one of the most outspoken critics of the pope, his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and his reform project to make the church more responsive to the needs of ordinary faithful.

Twice, Burke has joined other conservative cardinals in issuing formal questions to the pontiff, known as “dubia,” asking him to clarify questions of doctrine that upset conservatives and traditionalists.


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New York Times offers flashback to sacraments offered by the priest of the Parrotheads

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New York Times offers flashback to sacraments offered by the priest of the Parrotheads

Although I have lived in West Palm Beach, and I once saw Jimmy Buffett riding his bike near the ocean on Palm Beach Island, I claim absolutely zero personal insights into the philosophy and lifestyle of Parrotheads.

However, I saw a tweet by Ross Douthat pointing readers to an excellent New York Times profile of Buffett linked to the 2018 success of the jukebox Broadway musical celebrating his life. The headline: “Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle.” In a way, this feature by Taffy Brodesser-Akner can be read — I think this is what Douthat had in mind — as a kind of meditation on the long, warm Buffett obituaries that are running wherever Baby Boomers get their news.

At first glance, there is next to zero religious content in this feature. Then I took off my journalism-commentary glasses and read this feature through the eyes of the Denver Seminary professor that I was, briefly, in the early 1990s. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

Now, read this large chunk of the Times feature and start looking for hints at the role that Buffett played in the lives of his, well, disciples.

One day he realized that even if you were the supply, you could also be the supply chain. “It’s up to you to figure out how to take advantage or to manage whatever you’re going to do,” he said. “Margaritaville” was a hit in 1977. But more important, on that day, Margaritaville® was born.

He established Mailboat Records, his record label, in 1999. He went from making $2.20 per album to making $6 an album, he told me. He built his own tour buses, because it costs five times more to rent equipment than to own it yourself. He then rented out that equipment to other acts. And he took charge of his merchandise. He didn’t do it because he was greedy. He did it because he could do it better than the people who were ripping him off with concert T-shirts that spelled his name as Buffet.

He sold his fans quality, spell-checked T-shirts. He played clubs all over the country, but it was the crowds in landlocked areas that seemed to love him most. In Pittsburgh, he and his Coral Reefer band mates noticed that fans had started wearing Hawaiian shirts, just like they did, to the shows. One night, in Cincinnati, his bass player Timothy B. Schmit (also of the Eagles) likened them to Deadheads, the way Grateful Dead fans would follow that band. And so they were christened Parrotheads, just as a joke, but then fans began to wear feathers and beak masks to shows. “In their minds they wanted to go to the ocean,” he said. He understood he was bringing the ocean to them. He was no longer just a singer. Now he was a guru.


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Plug-In: What do we know about the faith of the two latest GOP White House candidates?

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Plug-In: What do we know about the faith of the two latest GOP White House candidates?

A week has passed since influential pastor and author Tim Keller’s death. Look for some of the best tributes to him below.

Making news today: Texas’ GOP-controlled House could impeach scandal-ridden Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and kick the longtime Christian right culture warrior out of office, The Associated Press’ Jake Bleiberg and Jim Vertuno report.

Jumping into this week’s roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith, we start with two new entrants in the 2024 presidential race.

What To Know: The Big Story

Political opposites: “One has the most winning personality in politics,” the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan says of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

“The other doesn’t but has a story to tell about policy,” Noonan says of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Thusly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and speechwriter for former President Ronald Reagan characterizes the two aspirants who declared for the GOP nomination this past week.

Scott focuses on faith: “A cornerstone of Republican Tim Scott's political career has been an unyielding faith,” USA Today’s Phillip M. Bailey notes.

Monday’s campaign kickoff by Scott, one of the nation’s most prominent Black Republicans, emphasized his Christian faith and personal story, according to the Washington Post’s Marianne LeVine.

At Politico, Natalie Allison asks, “Can Tim Scott actually win with piles of money, lots of faith and a big bet on Iowa?”


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Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

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Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

Here’s a question for you: When it comes to defining the doctrines of blue-zip-America, which is more important — the news pages of The New York Times or the newspaper of record’s op-ed pages?

In the old days, I would have said the op-ed pages.

But that was back when most of the Times news desks were, to one degree or another, still part of (to one degree or another) the American Model of the Press (background in this .pdf file). That was certainly the case in the era of the late, great A.M. Rosenthal.

At this moment in time, there are signs of actual diversity — even tension — in the op-ed pages and maybe, just maybe, signs of a few glowing embers of editorial independence in the news papers.

But let’s still assume — as I argued in my Religion & Liberty essay, “The Evolving Religion of Journalism” — that the Times news operation is still operating as a niche-news, advocacy journalism publication anxious to please the new liberal, maybe illiberal, readers who pay cash for its content.

Let’s assume that the July, 2020, resignation letter posted by Bari “The Free Press” Weiss remains a must-read “think piece” for all news consumers. For those who need a refresh, as part of this “think piece” doubleheader, here are two key passages from that shot over the bow of the Gray Lady’s principalities and powers:

… [A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

Here is another essential passage from this “read it all” classic. This comes after Weiss — a gay, Jewish, old-school First Amendment liberal — describes the in-house digital bullying that made her hit the exit door:


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News hooks abound: How will religious faith shape the 'birth dearth,' and vice versa?

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News hooks abound: How will religious faith shape the 'birth dearth,' and vice versa?

Two January headlines a week apart signal that the past generation’s “population explosion” worries have reversed.

Observers fretted as China announced its population began to shrink last year as its birth rate reached a record low. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned parliament that a declining birth rate means the rapidly aging nation is “on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

Then last Saturday a New York Times op-ed asserted that unfair burdens on wives and mothers created a “birth strike” and “marriage strike” that are “killing South Korea.” The nation has posted the world’s lowest fertility rate the past three years and deaths now outnumber births.

Such realities provoked the ever-interesting Times columnist Ross Douthat to ask whether “the defining challenge of the 21st Century” will be climate change decried by so many analysts or, instead, the globe’s accumulating “birth dearth” a.k.a. “baby bust” or “population implosion.”

The second trend could well undercut societies’ “dynamism and innovation” and pit “a swollen retired population” against the “overburdened young,” he warned, while listing geopolitical factors in the coming “age of demographic decadence.”

Attention newsroom managers: This is an apt time for media to consider U.S.-focused big-think pieces on how religious communities are shaping population trends and, vice versa, how those trends affect religion.

Pro-procreation government programs appear to have limited impact in boosting birth rates, which instead reflect cultural values regarding marriage and children, and complex individual decision-making. . Articles might examine related abortion policy.

Traditionally, all religions cherish children and favor reproduction, notably in the case of the Catholic Church, as The Guy discussed here a year ago (though today there’s little difference in fertility between U.S. Catholics and Protestants). On the other side of that equation, there’s universal acknowledgment that married couples raising children have been a pivotal constituency drawn to religious involvement.


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Piecemeal coverage of Benedict XVI death reveals ultra-thin ranks of religion reporters

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Piecemeal coverage of Benedict XVI death reveals ultra-thin ranks of religion reporters

The death of a pope is like a World Series Day for religion reporters, who know that whatever they write will show up on the front page — alongside whatever Associated Press dispatches come from Rome.

This time around, papal coverage was strung together with a collection of work by beat specialists, columnists, general assignment reporters dragooned into doing pope coverage and retired folks brought in for a one-off and Catholic insiders. As the religion beat has been eviscerated at so many outlets, media managers aren’t sure where to turn when a major story like a papal death comes up,

So, when word came out last week that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was rapidly failing, newsrooms quickly called in whomever they knew could whip up a re-telling of this fascinating man’s life.

The timing flummoxed publications that had come out early with their list of notable 2022 deaths, only to have to add not only Benedict but broadcaster Barbara Walters and Brazilian soccer king Pelé, both of whom also died in the closing days of the year.

Naturally I jumped at the chance to do something for Newsweek (I’m their religion correspondent), so I began perusing what was already out there. I found a wave of hatred and ill will in the secular media for this traditional Catholic leader.

Topping the list was a tweet — since deleted — posted by Politico cybersecurity reporter calling Benedict a “Hitler Youth alumnus” and “homophobic pedophile protector,” both of which were below-the-belt blows in that all German boys in the early 1940s were dragooned into joining Hitler Youth.

As for the latter accusation, it was Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who saw how bishops were passing the buck on pedophile clergy in their dioceses — which is why he ordered all cases of credibly accused priests and deacons sent to his office at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith so he could defrock these people. That was in 2001.


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Podcast: About post-Roe politics and Biden's evolving doctrines on choosing to 'abort a child'

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Podcast: About post-Roe politics and Biden's evolving doctrines on choosing to 'abort a child'

Once upon a time, Sen. Joe Biden was almost a pro-life Catholic Democrat.

This may be the reason — as journalists frequently note — that he seems uncomfortable saying “abortion” in public remarks. Then again, he may also have private polling numbers on the muddled state of public opinion in which millions of Americans, including lots of Democrats, (a) oppose the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, yet (b) are also in favor of European-style restrictions on abortion that have been blocked by U.S. courts because of legal logic built on Roe.

As is so often the case, Americans want it both ways and it’s rare for the mainstream press to note the tensions in that stance, since that would require balanced coverage of debates about Roe.

Back to Biden and a must-read Washington Post political feature that served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). After spending much of his career somewhere in the middle on abortion, Biden now leads a Democratic Party that has veered so far to the cultural left that it champions third-trimester abortion (and even efforts to save the life of a baby born during a botched abortion).

That stance is hard to square with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as well as lots of opinion polls, especially in states that will — if what appears to be a 5-3-1 SCOTUS verdict against Roe survives a blitz of elite media scorn — face debates about centrist laws to restrict, but not ban, abortion on demand.

Here is the top of the Post report, and readers are urged to spot a major abortion-talk stumble from Biden:

Joe Biden became a senator in 1973, just 17 days before the Supreme Court decided the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade. Soon after, the young senator, a practicing Catholic, told an interviewer that he disagreed with the decision and that he had views on such matters that made him “about as liberal as your grandmother.”

“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far,” he concluded in 1974. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

Nearly a half-century later, with Biden evolving along with his party on the issue of abortion rights, he again declared the court was moving too far — this time, he argued, in the opposite direction.

“The idea that we’re going to make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child, based on a decision by the Supreme Court, I think, goes way overboard,” Biden said on Tuesday in reaction to a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion proposing to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Note that the Post editors, as opposed to some other elite media sources, used that quote in which Biden spoke words — “abort a child,” as opposed to a “fetus” — long banned in public-relations efforts for a pro-abortion-rights stance. I took that as a sign to keep reading.


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