Clemente Lisi

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Pro-abortion rights activists hit Catholic churches, but you probably didn't read about it

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Pro-abortion rights activists hit Catholic churches, but you probably didn't read about it

If there was ever a doubt that Americans are living in two, separate news universes, then the past two weeks certainly crystallized that reality even more than the polarizing presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.

Americans who lean left politically, comfortable with reading just The New York Times or Washington Post, have been treated to apocalyptic news stories and opinion pieces — it is often hard to tell which is which — stemming from the leak of the draft decision that could overturn Roe v. Wade.

Did you know that gay marriage is now at risk? Did you know that this incarnation of the U.S. Supreme Court is illegitimate? For these elite news organizations and their readers, reversing the right to abortion is just the first attack by fascist Republicans — you wait and see.

On the right, conservatives who watch opinion shows on Fox News Channel or read Brietbart can’t get enough of how President Joe Biden has been an abject failure, particularly when it comes to inflation.

Have you seen how high gas prices are? Did you read about the baby formula shortage? To those news organizations, it’s all about fixing these problems by “owning the libs” by getting the GOP in control of the House and Senate in the November midterm elections.

I have friends on both sides of the political aisle and it’s shocking to me how much one side doesn’t know about what the other is reading and thinking. It often takes weeks for stories that one side repeatedly reported on to ever make it into the pages and onto screens of the other side.

It’s not a failure of our politics. Those have always been polarized. This is a failure of journalism.

Let me explain how these two news universes (while great for the bottom line of news organizations catering to their bases) led to a major news story being totally ignored by many mainstream news sites.

The protests — deemed an issue with “a lot of passion” by the White House — over abortion spilled over into houses of worship, especially Catholic churches. Is the First Amendment right to protest on private property more important than freedom of religion? Not according to the Constitution, and that’s what the news media should be concerned with reporting, not with managing narratives.

It’s therefore not a surprise that pro-abortion rights folks protesting outside churches — and in some cases disrupting Mass — received little to no coverage in most mainstream national news organizations.


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The pope, Cardinal Becciu and bad real estate deals: Concerning the Vatican 'Trial of the Century'

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The pope, Cardinal Becciu and bad real estate deals: Concerning the Vatican 'Trial of the Century'

The news media loves the term “Trial of the Century.”

This phrase gained widespread acceptance and use during the 1935 trial that stemmed from the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son three year earlier. That was in an era when newspapers and sensationalism went hand in hand.

The moniker came back in a more modern context when O.J. Simpson went on trial for double homicide in 1995 — a salute to the power of celebrity in American life, as well as debates about race. This era included both newspapers and TV (the trial was televised live), along with a nascent Internet that would eventually come to dominate the news landscape a few decades later.

Something akin to a Catholic “Trial of the Century” has gotten underway in Rome and there’s plenty of palace intrigue to go around. The trial involving corruption, bad real estate deals and financial wrongdoing has placed Pope Francis in the center of a controversy that for the first time doesn’t involve doctrine or theology.

Familiar journalism questions leap to mind: What did the pope know and when did he know it? What if a witness implicates Francis? Hold that thought.

Pope Francis may not be on trial, but he might as well be, as news coverage of this trial attempts to cut through all the noise and get readers what’s most important. Catholic media has done a very good job covering the trial, although I expect coverage to expand in the mainstream press should Francis become a central figure during testimony.

It’s moments such as this trial, delayed over the past year by preliminary hearings and COVID-19, that highlight the Vatican as both a religious institution as well as a political one, with all the headaches that come with managing a city state with immense wealth and properties. News coverage of this trial and its lead up has been interesting to dissect — depending on whether you read mainstream media or the Catholic press — and exactly what this latest scandal means for the church.


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Some 'Father Stu' coverage misses real-life redemptive message while shooting at actors

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Some 'Father Stu' coverage misses real-life redemptive message while shooting at actors

Easter weekend has become secular enough over the past few decades where many Americans use the holiday weekend to go to the movies.

It’s a trend that started with the summer blockbuster during the Fourth of July holiday and subsequently by Hollywood with premieres on Christmas Day. While COVID-19 put some of that on hold as audiences streamed movies at home, it seems to be making a comeback with the easing of the pandemic.

The gently gay-friendly Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore won the box office this past weekend, while the religiously-inspired film Father Stu finished a respectable fifth. It wasn’t a bad finish for a film that doesn’t feature a Marvel superhero and may find an audience in Western-rite Christians who were otherwise at church and with family this past Sunday.

Of course, this is a film that features a superhero of a different kind.

Father Stu is the true story of Stuart Long, an amateur boxer who eventually moves to Los Angeles in order to pursue an acting career and along that journey he becomes a Catholic priest. That’s the simplest way to put it without giving away too much of the plot for those who are planning to see it in the coming days.

The two-hour film, featuring Mark Wahlberg as the main character, gets a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45% based on 75 reviews by critics, but a 95% from verified users from the general audience. It shouldn’t surprise me that there is a divergence between media-market critics and the audience when it comes to movies that glorify faith. I found the story compelling, despite the vulgar language, but it is worth seeing.

I get that reviewers are entitled to their opinions. After all, that’s the job of a critic. But the coverage around the film, however, has been framed in a certain way, offering up lopsided and negative takes among many mainstream news sites.

This isn’t a traditional news-coverage question, but it’s appropriate to ask: What’s going on here?


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Bishops meet in secret about 'culture war' stuff: What does this mean for Catholics?

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Bishops meet in secret about 'culture war' stuff: What does this mean for Catholics?

While Pope Francis was presiding over a ceremony at the Vatican to consecrate Ukraine and Russia on March 25, a group of high-ranking American bishops met in Chicago.

That could be a news story.

The gathering at Loyola University — entitled “Pope Francis, Vatican II and the Way Forward” — was co-sponsored by Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture. Its aim was, according to what news coverage there was, to create a dialogue between theologians and bishops.

“We want to show that opposition to Pope Francis — not universally, but to a large extent — is opposition to Vatican II,” said Father Mark Massa, a priest and historian of the American Catholic Church, to describe the goal of the meeting. “Francis is trying to cash the check that Vatican II wrote — synodality was the big thing.”

Synodality is an invitation to build deeper communion within the body of Christ, according to the Vatican, and part of a process the pope has embarked on this year to create dialogue between Catholic believers and clergy. Or a certain type of clergy.

In other words, moving forward into the spirit of Vatican II. That is a big news story.

The two-day meeting, by invitation only, didn’t appear to fit the description of synodality. Rather, as Massa said, it was meant to see “how we can move the American church away from these culture wars divided between conservatives and liberals … to a united position where it’s possible to be on a spectrum of positions and still be considered a good Catholic and not be called names by people who disagree with you.”

Critics in the conservative Catholic press read that statement to mean how the 70 prelates in attendance — with help from progressives within the American church in the form of academics, journalists and theologians — could bolster this pope’s agenda. Those on the Catholic left in the National Catholic Reporter billed it as a way bishops “can better support the agenda of Pope Francis.”

I reported at the end of 2021 that this year would “be the one where the battle between this pontiff and doctrinal traditionalists intensifies even further.” The culture war that is dominating our politics at the moment has spilled over into our religious institutions and the Catholic church’s hierarchy.


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Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

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Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

I was never nuts for Disney. I’ve never been to one of their a theme park, either as a child or now as a parent of two children, and never indulged in their movies much over my lifetime. I’ll freely admit that puts me in the minority, both in the United States and around the world, when it comes to Disney consumption.

I was, however, once a Disney employee. No, I didn’t work in one of their stores. Instead, I was employed at ABC News in New York, where I worked for their digital unit running the website and other internet assets such as social media. It was a great place to work — although not “The Happiest Place On Earth” as the official tagline for Disneyland states. It was, after all, a newsroom — but one of the perks was free tickets each year to their amusement parks.

I say all this in the context of the ongoing feud regarding the Florida “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which is now law after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it. This is the much-discussed bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

The law continues to get media coverage for two reasons. First, because of Disney’s involvement and second due to the larger notion that DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, is — everyone chant the media mantra — “engaging in a culture war.” This remains a political story, a business story and a pop culture story.

Is this also an important religion story? It certainly is (tmatt takes on this very topic in GetReligion’s most recent podcast).

My most recent GetReligion post focused on the news media’s largely ignoring the Republican DeSantis’ Catholic faith in regard to the widespread news coverage around the bill, which opponents effectively labeled “Don’t Say Gay” even though the bill never used those words.

At the same time, the news coverage for conservative press around the legislation has centered much more on Disney’s late-in-the-game activism in opposing it. The coverage among mainstream and progressive news sites continues to center on that activist “Don’t Say Gay” mantra.


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As Florida's DeSantis wages culture war, his Catholic faith isn't news -- unless it's used to attack him

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As Florida's DeSantis wages culture war, his Catholic faith isn't news -- unless it's used to attack him

The two things that lots of people don’t want to read about these days is the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump, part of a larger trend regarding news fatigue in this country. Unfortunately, this post will mention both and only because it is about Ron DeSantis.

The Florida governor has been in the news the past few years because of his connection to the former president and a virus that paralyzed the planet for two years. A hero to the right and bogeyman to the left, DeSantis has received plenty of mainstream news coverage — much of it one-sided — because of his use of so-called culture war issues to push legislation.

DeSantis, who is running for re-election and among the favorites to run for the White House in 2024, has been a lightning rod for Democrats and a focus of criticism from the mainstream press for the last two years. His actions regarding COVID-19 were at odds with how blue states handled the virus, often catapulting him to national attention.

While the coverage has predictably focused on politics, the religion-news hooks in these stories have largely been ignored — unless they were highlighted to be used against him. The bottom line: DeSantis is not the kind of Catholic who draws cheers from journalists who admire progressive Catholics.

Those angles were once again set aside by the press coverage of the recent debate about the state’s sex-education bill.

As political conservatives and liberals battled it out over the merits of this bill, the press ignored DeSantis’ Catholic faith throughout the past few weeks of coverage.

The legislation — which the press insisted on calling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — was, as the Associated Press recently noted, the following:

Since its inception, the measure has drawn intense opposition from LGBTQ advocates, students, national Democrats, the White House and the entertainment industry, amid increased attention on Florida as Republicans push culture war legislation and DeSantis ascends in the GOP as a potential 2024 presidential candidate.

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph, but mostly for what’s not mentioned.


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Vatican 'Synod on Synodality': Why the press has largely ignored this big Catholic story

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Vatican 'Synod on Synodality': Why the press has largely ignored this big Catholic story

We interrupt your reading about the war in Ukraine with a very important post about the global Catholic Synod on Synodality.

Synod on synodality? Say that three times fast. For some Catholics it’s kind of a Zen thing.

The Synod of Synodality is a two-year process that Pope Francis began last October. Officially known as “Synod 2021-2023: For a Synodal Church,” it is a process that allows bishops to consult with Catholics — from parishioners all the way up to priests — in a spirit of collaboration and openness. This includes official dialogue with some activists who actively dissent from church teachings.

Why should anyone care? Is this a news story that editors will care about?

A phrase like Synod on Synodality certainly won’t ever make it into a punchy headline, not even at The New York Post.

The secular press isn’t all that interested in doctrinal issues that don’t appeal to a larger audience or lack a political connection. It’s the reason why the pope going after the Latin Mass got little mainstream news attention while bishops batting President Joe Biden about receiving Holy Communion got tons of coverage. Then again, the synod will almost certainly contain strong LGBTQ news hooks.

It was in March 2020, on the eve of the pandemic, that Pope Francis announced the synod. It was quickly forgotten as the world battled the outbreak of COVID-19. The Vatican even set up a Twitter account for the synod.

Last October, when the pope launched the start of this process, the Catholic press did a very good job explaining what the Synod of Synodality is. For example, Catholic News Agency explained this global synod and its purpose this way:

The pope acknowledged that learning to listen was “a slow and perhaps tiring exercise” for bishops, priests, religious, and laity.


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Pronoun wars? The 'usual suspects' quoted by the press skewed Baptism-gate coverage

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Pronoun wars? The 'usual suspects' quoted by the press skewed Baptism-gate coverage

What is the role of journalism? Above all, it is to inform and educate. We know that reliable information is needed for any society to properly work. At the very least, readers deserve accurate information.

What happens when this isn’t the case? That’s the dilemma that befell many news organizations in recent days when a big Catholic news story came across their newsroom desks.

Yes, I’m referring to the botched baptism story out of Arizona last week that made so many headlines. And that’s hard to do considering the ongoing pandemic, the Beijing Olympics and Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Yes, baptism-gate has been all the rage. News coverage of it, however, not so good. More on that later.

To summarize: a priest named Andres Arango, following a church investigation, determined that he’d incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms over more than 20 years. It meant that those who had been baptized in Phoenix, and at his previous parishes in Brazil and San Diego, needed to be baptized again.

What did he do wrong? Arango, who has since resigned after making the mistake, used the wrong pronoun. Instead of saying, “I baptize you in the name of” he used “we.” After diocesan officials found out, they said people who Arango baptized aren’t officially Catholic. That means they weren’t eligible for other sacraments like Holy Communion.

This is where the news coverage got interesting. Once again, on an issue of great importance to Catholic readers and church leaders, secular news outlets assumed the views of one side were normative — even accurate — at the expense of church doctrine. Here at GetReligion, we have a name for that approach (click here for information).

Everyone from The New York Times and USA Today to NPR and local news outlets covered the story. What we learned from the coverage was telling. It was also largely one-sided and inaccurate.


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Pope Benedict's blunder and ensuing media coverage have put his legacy on the line

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Pope Benedict's blunder and ensuing media coverage have put his legacy on the line

It has been 20 years since The Boston Globe broke open the decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, dragging into the light a hellish story that had lingered on the edge of elite media coverage since the 1980s (see this GetReligion post: “That gap between 1985 and 2002”).

Two decades later, this is a story that continues in the form of questions about who in the Catholic hierarchy knew what and when in a variety of dioceses around the world.

The issue wasn’t limited to Boston. Predator priests were everywhere — a scandal that may have been unearthed in the United States, but one that continues to plague other parts of the world.

The focus the past few weeks has been on Germany and the involvement of Benedict XVI in the handling of some abuse cases, decades before he became a key church official in Rome and, eventually, pope. This was also long before the church — in part due to his leadership — adopted stricter policies on how to handle cases of clergy sexual abuse.

This is a complex subject for journalists to cover, in part when events in the past are viewed through the lens of present church policies and standards. How is the press doing?

Here’s a timeline of these fast-moving developments. This latest chapter in the decades-long clergy sex abuse saga began on Jan. 20 when a law firm released a report, commissioned by the German church, to look into how cases of sexual abuse were handled in Munich between 1945 and 2019. Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, headed that archdiocese from 1977 to 1982, when he was named to head the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The report’s authors found that Ratzinger failed to stop the abuse in four cases. The report also faulted his predecessors and, this is crucial, his successors for their own misconduct in allowing clergy accused of sex abuse to stay in ministry.

The 2,000-page report also criticized Cardinal Reinhard Marx, currently the archbishop of Munich and Freising, for his role in two cases dating back to 2008. Marx offered his resignation to Pope Francis last year, saying he was willing to take responsibility for his part in the sexual abuse crisis. Francis did not accept the resignation, which says something about what this pontiff thinks of the German prelate.


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