Euthanasia

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Polexit? Looking for news about tensions between EU and Poland's Catholic culture

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There is a circle of GetReligion readers who have, from time to time, been known to lose it at the sight of a URL pointing toward material from LifeNews.com, an advocacy journalism site that focuses, as the name implies, on issues linked to abortion, euthanasia, etc.

As I just stated, LifeNews.com is an advocacy site that, basically, covers one side of hot-button stories on these topics. If you are looking for fair coverage of liberal views on this topic, this is not the site for you.

However, if you are looking for clues and information about stories that are not receiving coverage in the mainstream press, this is a place to find tips about documents, events and sources that could lead to balanced mainstream coverage. In other words, LifeNews.com has the same approach to journalism as, let's say, Rolling Stone or, on moral and religious issues, the Kellerism-era New York Times. You go there to read about one side of an argument.

Some culturally liberal readers believe, in a strange echo of conservatives who write off the Times, that this means that all events or information reported at LifeNews.com should be ignored. I don't believe that about the Times and I don't believe that about the much smaller and less important LifeNews.com. I take what I see in advocacy publications with a grain of salt and look for links to valid information about views on the right and left.

That brings me, in this post-Brexit world, to this new LifeNews.com report, which ran with the headline, "Poland Defends Its Pro-Life Laws, Blasts EU Leaders Telling It to Legalize Abortion."

(CFAM) -- The Polish government snapped back at European bureaucrats in a scathing response to a report published last week by the Council of Europe that criticized Poland’s restrictive abortion law and its treatment of women.


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Washington Post offers one-sided (positive) look at conservatives who oppose death penalty

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As a life-long opponent of the death penalty, I have attended my share of prayer gatherings and rallies on this issue and other issues linked to it. That final clause -- "and other issues linked to it" -- is crucial.

What I have learned is that, in contemporary American life, there are basically two groups of people who are opposed to the death penalty.

The first group is made up of political progressives who oppose the death penalty and that's that. The second group (which would include me) consists of pro-life religious believers -- left and right -- who oppose the death penalty as well as legalized abortion, euthanasia and other life issues. The goal in this camp is to consistently apply a standard that all life is sacred, from conception to natural death.

In my experience, it's relatively rare to see mainstream press coverage of this second group, especially coverage that discusses the role that faith and doctrine plays in this stance. So I did a double-take the other day when I saw that Washington Post headline that proclaimed, "Meet the red-state conservatives fighting to abolish the death penalty."

Yes, this piece by New York magazine writer Marin Cogan is labeled "opinion." However, it's about as newsy as 80 percent of what runs as hard news in major newspapers today.

Let me confess that this is, in effect, a "Kellerism" piece that just happens to support a cause that floats my own boat. If you are looking for fair, accurate arguments in favor of the death penalty then this is not the piece for you. However, I wanted GetReligion readers to know about it because it does a pretty good job of handling faith-based material, while dealing with a group of believers that rarely gets much news coverage. So why an "opinion" piece?

Here is the overture:


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And there is one more thing: Did press hear what Pope Francis said about abortion?

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So Pope Francis had something to say about the theological views of one Donald Trump. You probably heard about that.

During the same in-flight presser while returning to Rome from Mexico (full transcript here), he also addressed a question about contraceptives and the Zika virus. You probably read about that, too. Maybe.

But what did he have to say about abortion, which remains a hot-button subject? Before we get to a very interesting Religion News Service commentary on that, let's flash back for a moment.

As anyone who reads elite newspapers knows, early in the Pope Francis era the mainstream press reported, over and over, that he had ordered Catholic conservatives to stand down when it came to fighting about abortion, marriage and other "culture wars" topics.

Remember that exclusive America interview? Of course you do. It is still be quoted whenever these topics come up in church discussions. Next to the out-of-context "Who am I to judge?" soundbite (that wasn't a soundbite), we are talking about some of the most popular Pope Francis language -- ever. Here's how I summed that up in a column at the time:

... The pope unleashed a media tsunami with a long, candid interview published exclusively in America and other Jesuit magazines around the world. While the pope talked about confession, sin and mercy, one quote leapt into news reports and headlines more than any other.
"We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible," he told the interviewer, a fellow Jesuit. "The teaching of the church ... is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time."

The strange thing is what happened next, right in the middle of that media storm. The pope addressed -- drawing next to zero coverage -- a gathering of Catholic gynecologists. And what did he have to say?


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It's impossible to praise or attack Justice Scalia without covering his Catholic faith

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This is an ironic day in American political life, a day in which lots of labels are being tossed around by journalists -- in some cases, once again, with little thought given to whether those labels are still relevant or accurate.

That thunderclap you just heard was, of course, the news that Justice Antonin Scalia had died. The timing is stunning, to say the least, with a White House race unfolding and a U.S. Supreme court schedule packed with major cases linked to the First Amendment and church-state issues.

There is too much coverage, already, to try to take a look at it all. But let me make a few suggestions for some guidelines for readers as they dig into the coverage.

Look for coverage that quotes Scalia's friends as well as his enemies. You will know that you're in good company, in terms of journalism, when you hit features that note that some of his fiercest opponents, when it came time to argue law, were also among his closest friends. 

Scalia was a conservative in several senses of that word, especially when it came to law and to faith. Yet, like the word "liberal," that is a word that is often of little use when discussing matters of law and now politics. Right now, an old-school First Amendment liberal, or literalist, increasingly looks like a cultural conservative.

So look for stories that refuse to pin simplistic labels on Scalia.

Then, alas, there is this early NPR piece, as a negative example. Yes, it involves use of the f-word that journalists love to use in ways that directly contradict the Associated Press Stylebook.

Also note that the written work of this justice -- famous and infamous for his use of wit and sarcasm -- is reduced to one of those shallow verbs that journalists use when, basically, they want to call someone simplistic or even dumb:


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Child euthanasia: CNN is still leaving God and faith questions on cutting room floor

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“Heaven over hospital” is the tearjerker story lots of folks have been talking about this week, with good cause.

Set in Oregon, a state with liberal euthanasia laws, the major players aren’t consenting adults dying of some awful disease and who want to put a quicker end to their misery.

No, this time the major player is a 5-year-old. 

The story is in two parts. Here is how the second part debuts:

(CNN) Five-year-old Julianna Snow has never been healthy enough to attend Sunday school at the City Bible Church in Portland, Oregon, where her family belongs, so most of what she knows about heaven, she knows from her parents.
They tell her that heaven is where she'll be able to run and play and eat, none of which she can do now. Heaven is where she'll meet her great-grandmother, who shared Julianna's love of shiny, sparkly, mismatched clothes.
God will be in heaven, too, they tell her, and he will love her even more than they do.
But Michelle Moon and Steve Snow explain that they won't be in heaven when Julianna arrives there, and neither will her big brother, Alex. She'll go to heaven before them because she has a severe case of an incurable neurodegenerative illness called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.
Her coughing and breathing muscles are so weak that the next time she catches even a cold, the infection could settle in her lungs, where it could cause a deadly pneumonia. Her doctors believe that if they can save her under those circumstances -- and that's a big if -- she will likely end up sedated on a respirator with very little quality of life.

And here comes the issue that lifts this tragic story into the news:


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Spot a religion ghost? Paul Ryan is a busy father who wants to help raise his kids

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Here is an important "political" question for you (I say that in snark mode): When dealing with Catholics in the Republican Party, is their faith only worth mentioning when it is part of (a) references to their strange, culturally speaking, beliefs on issues of moral theology or (b) when they clash with good, progressive Catholics who are on the other side of the political aisle?

I certainly agree that it is fair game to ask GOP Catholics questions about how their faith influences their views on, let's say, the death penalty, immigration and health care. I say that because I think it's important -- for the same doctrinal reasons (see the Pope Francis address to the U.S. Congress) -- to keep asking Catholics in the Democratic Party obvious questions such as abortion, euthanasia and religious liberty. Oh, and the death penalty, as well.

It's a worldview thing, you see. Catholicism is a massive force in the lives of people who actually try to live it out and that would certainly be true when you are talking about the life of a political leader.

This would be true to ask faith questions if one was writing about a relatively young Catholic father who is trying to make a career choice that would almost certainly pull him away from his family more than the political post that he already holds.

Let's say, for example, that this young father is trying to decide whether to become Speaker of the House.

Now, run an online search for the terms "Paul Ryan" and "Catholic" and you will get all kinds of things.


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Gov. Jerry Brown's Catholicity vs. euthanasia decision gets above-the-fold ink

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Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old Californian who moved to Oregon last year so she could end her life instead of facing the last stages of brain cancer, got her political revenge this week.

That's the reality in the news coverage. That’s because -- unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere -- California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill making assisted suicide legal. Which opened the gates to this controversial personal or family choice to some 38 million people overnight.

And the Los Angeles Times reporter who covered it did a great job of making the religion angle front and center. That is, the Catholic governor of the country’s most populous state did something totally against his religion, but readers got to learn about how that decision played out. Start reading here:

Caught between conflicting moral arguments, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, signed a measure Monday allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.
Brown appeared to struggle in deciding whether to approve the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church.
“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown wrote in a signing message. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”

After explaining some provisions of the End of Life Option Act and placing a quote by its opponents quite high in the story, the reporter swung back to Brown, who said he had weighed the religious arguments.


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Thus saith The New York Times: Compassion is the opposite of Catholic doctrine

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In the end, the Jesuit pope added to the debates, but did not openly address the key doctrines linked to marriage and sexuality that are causing so much tension in his flock, as in so many others.

Don't take my word on this. We have The New York Times saying on the record that the pope kept speaking in a pastoral tone, asking his shepherds to be more loving and compassionate as they strive to welcome wayward Catholics back into the sacramental fold. But did he actual show his hand in terms of the cards he may or not play on the truly explosive doctrinal issues, such as changing the contents of the Catholic Catechism on divorce and gay sex?

In a remarkably blunt sermon from the Times -- which ran above the fold on Sunday's A1, with no hint of an "analysis" label -- this was the ultimate word:

Those who know Francis said they did not expect his other remarks this weekend to give fodder to conservatives or, for that matter, directly address the issues in the church that liberal Catholics have championed.

So no words of support for the doctrinal right, but also no words of explicit support for those who want to change church teachings.

But wait, what was the headline on that story? 

A Pastoral Pope, Slipping Conservatives’ Grasp

And the crucial Times proclamation -- note the word "seemed" -- to support that? 


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Label this! Pope tells Congress everything starts with defense of human life -- period

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There's no question that, for those reading the Pope Francis address to Congress through the lens of politics, the most newsworthy passages were his explicit references to immigration and climate change. Why? These words pointed to wedge issues between Democrats and Republicans that will almost certainly play a major role in the 2016 elections.

Also, there were powerful passages about the death penalty and the blood money earned through the international arms trade.

It was a remarkable scene, all the way around. What are the other nominations for a list of the deepest and most philosophical speeches ever delivered to Congress?

However, if you look at the pope's remarks through the lens of doctrine -- as Francis urged reporters to do days earlier -- then the crucial passage, the thesis statement, was this one:

We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome. Let us remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt 7:12).

This Rule points us in a clear direction. Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us. The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.

This conviction has led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty. I am convinced that this way is the best, since every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity ...


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