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Same as it ever was: In religion news, sex wars about doctrine remain the story in 2024

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Same as it ever was: In religion news, sex wars about doctrine remain the story in 2024

Looking ahead at 2024, The Guy seems to recall hearing that there’s a U.S. presidential election going on.

If so, that will inspire ample chatter about the religion factor. There are important elections in other nations, including Taiwan last Saturday and probably Britain. Jews and their Christian allies will be closely monitoring the Israel-Hamas war.

All that said, it’s clear that debates about various angles of sexuality and gender will dominate the year’s religion news. Again.

Start with next October’s second and final session at the Vatican of Pope Francis’s Synod of Bishops concerning “Synodality,” a fuzzy buzzy word for enhancing members’ involvement in church life through a process behind closed doors.

Sidestepping synodality, Francis pre-empted his Synod with the December 18 go-ahead for Catholic priests to provide church blessings for same-sex couples plus those in as-yet-undefined “irregular” situations. Expect Catholics to agitate through the year against this historic innovation, especially in Africa (where bishops seem to believe that synodality may include listening to bishops in growing churches).

We can forget Synod action on female priests. But will there be concrete proposals to the Pope to enhance women’s church leadership otherwise, especially by ordaining them as deacons? If that includes altar duties, it will be a massive, historic change.

There’s a tiny possibility the Synod would issue a dramatic call to abolish the 885-year-old mandate that priests be celibate and unmarried (excluding Eastern Rite clergy and Protestants who convert). Or not. Did the influential adjunct secretary at the Vatican’s agency on doctrine, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, issue a Synod signal January 7?


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Perfect for Christmas headlines: Pope Francis OK's blessings for same-sex couples (sort of)

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Perfect for Christmas headlines: Pope Francis OK's blessings for same-sex couples (sort of)

When you thought all Pope Francis had in mind for this coming week was the traditional midnight Mass at the Vatican, the pontiff had something else up his sleeve.

One day after Francis turned 87, the Vatican dropped a bomb — a major victory for the progressive leaders of Europe’s shrinking Catholic churches who want to march forward with efforts to modernize Catholicism. How will bishops respond in the growing churches of Africa, Asia and the Global South?

As GetReligion has stressed, this story has been hiding in clear sight in Germany for more than a year — while receiving little or no coverage. Now, it is time for America’s most powerful newsrooms to ramp up their headlines.

Starting with the Washington Post’s 66-word lede:

ROME — The Vatican on Monday issued formal, definitive permission for Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples, as long as those benedictions are kept separate from marriage, a decree that amounts to an about-face after decades of discord between the LBGTQ+ community and the Catholic Church, which has long upheld that homosexuals are “disordered” and said any nod to their unions would be tantamount to blessing sin.

The guidance from the powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued after papal review and approval, largely reverses a 2021 ruling and expands on a far briefer statement of support for such blessings issued by Francis in September in response to questions raised by conservative clerics.

In other words, Pope Francis has been signaling for some time that some sort of approval for same-sex blessings was coming down the pike. No one expected him to choose the week before Christmas to do so.

One has to wonder why Francis didn’t give his bishops more of a heads up as to when this was going to happen. Here they’re coming into one of the busiest liturgical weeks of the year and the last thing they need is a major doctrinal switcheroo like this to land in their laps.

Couples in “irregular situations” as well as “couples of the same sex” may receive priestly blessings, the Vatican said, so that these “human relationships may mature and grow in fidelity to the Gospel.”

And what are these “irregular situations?” Divorce? Divorce and remarriage outside the laws of the church? Cohabitating couples? Big recipe for confusion here.


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Thinking about funding real online news: The following is not a promo for The Pillar

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Thinking about funding real online news: The following is not a promo for The Pillar

Let me stress something right up front.

The following is not a fundraising effort for The Pillar, the alternative Catholic news source that I think (and I believe Clemente Lisi is raising his hand as well) has become a must-read item in this age of crazy Catholic news events and trends. OK, news that is even crazier than NORMAL on that front.

We all struggle, in this age in which the Internet has debundled our news world and readers who really care about specific subjects — think Catholic news — have myriad options to choose from. The problem is figuring out which ones to support with, you know, money.

How many Substack options does one reader have the time to read? How many can said reader wave a credit card at, month after month?

Anyway, this week I received an email missive from The Pillar — “This is all a choice” — that was clearly a reminder to readers about the factors of time and money that I just mentioned.

But it was also a meditation by Ed Condon on one of the most painful realities in our splinted, niche-media world. Repeat after me: News is expensive. Opinion is cheap.

Thus, I want to point readers to sections of this letter that were valid “think piece” material for news-consumers who care about the digital religion beat. The “JD” is, of course, a reference to scribe J.D. Flynn.

Let’s start with a news event. Try to guess which one:

After the news first surfaced on an Italian site, a lot of people called, texted, and emailed us to ask what was going on, and if we were going to cover it. It took us a few hours to confirm things with our own sources, and the story made it into JD’s newsletter yesterday. 

But as more outlets were picking up the story, one American cleric told us that he simply couldn’t be sure it was true until he read it on The Pillar. 

That kind of feedback means a lot. It’s a confirmation of what we want The Pillar to be all about and how we want it to work. We don’t ever want to write something you could read somewhere else, or worse just repeat what someone else has said they heard. 

If you read it at The Pillar, it matters to us that you know it's true because you know we did the legwork to make sure of the facts — no matter if everyone else is already talking about some version of it, or no one else has got the story at all.


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Inside a tense huddle in Baltimore: U.S. Catholic bishops wrestle with Vatican criticism

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Inside a tense huddle in Baltimore: U.S. Catholic bishops wrestle with Vatican criticism

The U.S. Catholic bishops are gathered in Baltimore, once again, which means that reporters are listening to waves of friendly words in public, while trying to get bishops to be candid in the tiny windows of time when they are free to meet with outsiders.

The more tense the atmosphere, the smaller the windows of open discussion. Long ago, during meetings in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., several reporters (including moi) blocked the service door to the kitchen so that we could ask questions when bishops tried to slip out that back door.

The issue? Vatican efforts to discipline a bishop who was getting out of line on doctrinal issues. Back then, it was a progressive bishop who was in trouble with the pope.

Times change. Today, it’s doctrinal conservatives who are worried, since they are on the wrong side of trends in Rome. For more background, see my recent post: “Attention U.S. Catholic bishops: You are not allowed to say that this pope isn't Catholic.”

This early Associated Press report punches several crucial buttons:

BALTIMORE (AP) — Catholic leaders called for peace in a war-torn world and unity amid strife within their own clerical ranks on Tuesday, as U.S. bishops gathered in Baltimore for their annual fall meeting.

The meeting came soon after two actions by Pope Francis that illustrated the divisive challenges facing the Catholic Church – removing one of his harshest conservative critics from his role as bishop of Tyler, Texas, and releasing a document conveying a more welcoming stance to transgender people than the official positions of the U.S. bishops.

The key is that Catholics everywhere are supposed to be talking more openly, bowing to the spirit of “synodality.” That is, of course, a reference to the first major meeting of the Synod on Synodality, which featured strong efforts to prevent participants from speaking to journalists or releasing texts of speeches or remarks that were not cleared by synod leaders chosen by Pope Francis.

The AP report turned to American politics, of course, and offered this “tsk, tsk” analysis:

The bishops elected Toledo Bishop Daniel Thomas over a more prominent cultural warrior, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, as the new head of their committee on pro-life activities. The committee’s chair serves as the conference’s point-person in efforts against abortion, a top priority for the bishops.

Jamie Manson, head of Catholics for Choice, called it an ironic choice, given that Thomas serves in Ohio where Catholic groups “just spent more than $12 million fighting a losing battle against abortion access.” Ohio voters enshrined abortion rights by ballot amendment last week.


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Attention U.S. Catholic bishops: You are not allowed to say that this pope isn't Catholic

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Attention U.S. Catholic bishops: You are not allowed to say that this pope isn't Catholic

If you look up the cliche “Is the Pope Catholic?” online, you will find several ways of stating the obvious.

As for me, I like this offering from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus: This is a response “used to say that the answer to a question you have just been asked is obviously ’yes’.”

At this point, it is safe to say that Pope Francis wants the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (these men in particular) to know that the answer is “yes.” He also wants them to know that — when it comes to worship and doctrine — he believes that he, and he alone, gets to decide the meaning of the word “Catholic.”

Oh, and Pope Francis gets to decide the “Catholic” status of German bishops who are marching forward on blessing same-sex relationships. Ditto for progressive Bishop Robert W. McElroy of (tiny) San Diego, who is now a cardinal, and conservative Archbishop Jose Gomez of (massive) Los Angeles, who is not. Pope Francis gets to judge the “Catholic” status of President Joe Biden and Jesuit social-media maven Father James Martin (watch for new photo opportunities).

In other words, the Donald Trumpian “You’re fired!” message that Pope Francis sent to Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler isn’t about one loud Texan. What matters in Catholic life, right now, is who gets promoted (in various ways) and who gets punished. Actions matter more than mere words.

If religion-news consumers want to know what happened in the Strickland case, they can turn to the Vatican to know what progressive Catholics are saying and to the Catholic press to learn what conservative Catholics are saying (and what candid progressives are saying in response).

That’s true, but it appears seems a few reporters are learning how to handle both halves of that equation. I say that in praise of the solid Associated Press story — “Pope Francis removes a leading US conservative critic as bishop of Tyler, Texas“ — that is running in newspapers far and wide. Let’s walk through a some key passages:

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis on Saturday ordered the removal of the bishop of Tyler, Texas, a conservative prelate active on social media who has been a fierce critic of the pontiff and has come to symbolize the polarization within the U.S. Catholic hierarchy.

Bingo. The U.S. Catholic bishops — who gather today in Baltimore — go in the lede.


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Pope Francis enforces secrecy even while saying that he hopes for 'synodality'

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Pope Francis enforces secrecy even while saying that he hopes for 'synodality'

There’s no better indicator of how fraught things have become in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church than Pope Francis’s surprising, last-minute decision to clamp strict secrecy upon his all-important Synod of Bishops. This Vatican assembly, very likely the major event of his reign, is running through October 29 with a second, concluding session a year from now.

GetReligion editor Terry “tmatt” Mattingly surveyed the pope’s decision last week, but to repeat the basics: Regulations governing the synod, reinforced in Francis’s opening address, direct participants to reveal absolutely nothing about the discussions, including even what they themselves have to say, not just now but forever after (though the Vatican says violators are not under threat of excommunication).

Paradoxically, Francis’s purpose for this synod was to foster openness, flexibility and “synodality,” a vague buzzword for broader participation of all Catholics in their church’s life and governance! His Kremlin-esque blackout breaks from prior synod policy under five popes — including Francis himself.

We’ll see how things play out, but as of this writing the media have been offered only official briefings that are far more anodyne than usual.

The problem with secrecy rules is that they usually work imperfectly or not at all.

A gag order upon actual participants hands the power of information to outsiders’ interest groups, speculations, suspicions and gossip that inevitably influence news coverage and historical interpretation. For instance, note this paywalled New York Times account — “Vatican Conference Draws All Stripes to Rome, Welcome or Not” — of the “Catholic menagerie" assembled in Rome outside the secret Synod.


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How the Rupnik scandal and elite news coverage are shaping the legacy of Pope Francis

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How the Rupnik scandal and elite news coverage are shaping the legacy of Pope Francis

The more I read about Pope Francis and President Joe Biden, the more I realize that they are similar.

I mean, both are Catholic, and that’s where the similarities end, right?

That may be the case for most, but they are quite similar in how they are covered by the mainstream press.

Let me explain.

Without getting too much into the weeds here, Biden has been dogged by multiple scandals involving his troubled son Hunter. You wouldn’t know that, however, from much of the mainstream press coverage of this presidency. Journalists remain too concerned with former President Donald Trump — how could they not? — and the recently-averted government shutdown.

Conservative media have covered Hunter Biden’s alleged wrongdoings and shady business practices since the 2020 presidential election. That was when the public was were told by the mainstream press that Hunter’s woes were based on Russian misinformation. Here we are nearly three years later and, yes, it turns out that there is a there there.

This brings us to Pope Francis and scandals swirling around him.

Wait! What scandals, you ask? Hold that thought.

The mainstream press has been fond of this pope and media consumers can see that whenever he says something that matches progressive left-wing political ideology. When it comes to scandal, however, there’s little to no coverage. Case in point: The Rupnik case.

Like Hunter Biden’s laptop, you may not have heard of the Rupnik case. Most mainstream news organizations chose not to cover the latest developments to come out of Rome just last month.

Thus, here’s a recap: Marko Rupnik, a Jesuit priest, became the focus of an investigation late last year when multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him were reported in the Italian press. They mostly concerned sexual abuse of nuns who were part of Rupnik’s religious community and artistic studio in Rome.

When the extent of the allegations, over a period of many years, became evident, suspicions were raised that one of the most famous Jesuit priest in the world might have been given lenient treatment from the three most powerful Jesuits in the church.


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Podcast: Let's play, 'Name that pope!' The Pope Francis vs. St. Pope John Paul II edition

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Podcast: Let's play, 'Name that pope!' The Pope Francis vs. St. Pope John Paul II edition

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote my “On Religion” anniversary column (No. 26 at that time) about a game that Catholics seemed to be playing in cyberspace.

Some called this game, “Name that pope!” At this stage of Catholic life, early in the Pope Francis era, quite a few Catholics were frustrated with the many journalists who claimed there were striking differences — on social justice, poverty, the environment and peace — between the new pope and the previous two occupants of the Throne of St. Peter.

Pope Benedict XVI and St. Pope John Paul II were, you see, stern conservatives obsessed with clashes between centuries of Catholic moral theology and the Sexual Revolution. Pope Francis offered a kinder, more compassion vision focusing (all together now) on social justice, poverty, the environment and peace.

That old “Name that pope!” game played a pivotal role in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). We were talking about a new Associated Press story that ran with this headline: “Pope says some ‘backward’ conservatives in US Catholic Church have replaced faith with ideology.”

Hold that thought, as we return to the earlier edition of “Name that pope!” Let’s run through this unedited chunk of that column:

Start with this quotation: "The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion."

Name that pope: That's Pope Francis, believe it or not.

Round two: "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs."

Name that pope: That's Pope Benedict XVI.

Round three: "If we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, we make of our possessions a false god. How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can! ... Instead of bringing life, they bring death."


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A nuanced look at Portland Archbishop Sample? Journalists aren't coming up with it

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A nuanced look at Portland Archbishop Sample? Journalists aren't coming up with it

It must be a trend: Catholic bishops are laying down the law these days on the use of preferred pronouns, cross-dressing and other accoutrements of transgender individuals on their property – and they’re not getting a lot of love from the media over it.

The latest fight is within the Archdiocese of Portland (Ore.), but the dioceses of Des Moines, St. Paul and Minneapolis and Springfield, Ill. have taken similar stands. So I am curious a decision by the Catholic archbishop of Portland has created such a ruckus. Could it be because of the ultra gay-friendly ethos of the area? The Oregonian’s headline made it clear where it stood: “Portland-area Catholic schools are at a crossroads over transgender, nonbinary student rights.”

Hundreds of Portland area families whose children attend Catholic schools are protesting western Oregon Archbishop Alexander Sample’s guidance that schools under the church’s umbrella not recognize transgender and nonbinary students’ pronouns and identities.

Sample quietly released the 17-page document in January, when it was billed as a “teaching and formation resource” and not a mandate for the 41 archdiocesan schools, which stretch from Portland to Medford and include Central Catholic High School and 15 K-8 schools in Portland.

Nowhere in the rest of the piece is the statistic of “hundreds” of families supported although I read elsewhere that more than 1,000 people signed a petition opposing the archbishop.

The news of Catholic resistance to Sample was broken in the middle of Pride Month, a true insult in left-left Portland. (Note: I attended college there, had my first newspaper job in the Portland suburbs, have friends and family there, and I swoop through town at least once or twice a year, so I have more than a glancing knowledge of the place).


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