During the 1981-82, I spent most of my time at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign — taking graduate seminars, teaching reporting labs, writing my weekly column on rock music for the local daily and burying myself in graduate-project research.
The topic of that thesis — a condensed version ended up on the cover of The Quill — was the beleaguered status of religion writing in most American newsrooms. Over and over again, I heard editors give two reasons (in one form of another) for why they avoided covering religion: (1) Religion news was boring and (2) religion news was too controversial.
That’s the ticket. There were just too many boring and controversial religion stories out there.
Then a story broke in The Chicago Sun-Times that had everyone talking. It certainly was controversial, but no one thought that it was boring. The opening was a blockbuster, focusing on the most powerful leader in America’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese:
A federal grand jury in Chicago is investigating whether Cardinal John P. Cody illegally diverted as much as $1 million in tax-exempt church funds to enrich a lifelong friend from St. Louis.” It went on to report: “The grand jury has issued a subpoena for Cody’s personal banking records as well as one seeking financial documents of the Archdiocese of Chicago dating back to the mid-1960’s.
Church officials were not amused. A member of Cody’s legal team said that the “Cardinal is answerable to Rome and to God, not to the Sun-Times.”
The religion writer on that investigative team was Roy Larson, a former Methodist minister who became a newspaper reporter.
On one level, he fit a religion-beat stereotype that was common when I first started considering this line of work: That of the tired liberal Protestant minister who retired from his pulpit to run a newspaper religion-news section. In the case of Larson, the problem with this stereotype is that his skills as a mainstream hard-news journalist were real and immediately obvious.
Larson died this past week at age 90, after a career that included several extra chapters — including years editing a social-justice publication and leading the Garrett-Medill Center for Religion and the News Media, backed by the Northwestern University J-school and the nearby seminary.
The obituary for Larson at the Sun-Times quoted another Chicago-based authority on religion and the news:
Author Martin E. Marty, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of religious history, said Mr. Larson’s work continues to influence journalists. “He and numerous colleagues covered religion so consistently and forthrightly that I’d have to call them representatives of, yes, ‘good old days,’ ” Marty said. “And his career, record and achievement inspire models and hope for ‘good new days.’ ”
Here’s another crucial section or two of that piece:
After graduating from Augustana College, Mr. Larson studied at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. His son said he was a minister at churches including Taylor Ridge United Methodist Church, Mayfair United Methodist Church in Chicago, Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Covenant United Methodist Church in Evanston and First United Methodist Church of Elmhurst.
Mr. Larson was outspoken in opposing the Vietnam war and supporting civil rights and racial equality, which led to pushback at some churches. … He was an early ally of the LGBTQ community, said Albert Williams, a critic, associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and former editor of GayLife newspaper. “He offered counsel on how to generate support in religious establishments for civil rights, for gay rights.”
How did Larson blend the two sides of his career?
“He was disillusioned by organized religion,” his son said. “But he occasionally continued to attend church.”
(Those seeking additional insights into Larson’s career and life should read the Religion News Service tribute written by Bob Smietana, one of Larson’s many disciples.)
No matter what, Larson’s name will always be connected to the lengthy battle between the Sun-Times and Cardinal Cody, who stonewalled the reporters during round after round of ink-based conflicts.
What a time that was. I remember dashing off campus, day after day, to check a nearby news stand to see if that day’s Sun-Times included updates on the scandal.
In some ways, the results of the investigation were mixed — since law officials kept a safe distance (amid reports that at least one Sun-Times journalist was harassed). Nevertheless, these stories did manage to “follow the money” and the results were stunning.
Writing for NiemanReports in 2003, Larson offered this summary:
These accounts, illustrated with photographs, reported that Cody provided the money for a luxury vacation home for his friend, Helen Dolan Wilson, in Boca Raton, Florida and that in earlier years he had helped Wilson get a job in the administrative offices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis where Cody was the chancellor. For the next several days the Sun-Times produced new revelations. The paper reported that Cody had put Wilson on the payroll of the Archdiocese of Chicago while she was living in an expensive apartment on the city’s lakefront; that Cody had steered insurance contracts to his friend’s son, David Dolan Wilson, and that Wilson was the beneficiary of a $100,000 insurance policy on Cody’s life.
The newspaper went to great lengths to keep the focus of the stories on the issue of money, specifically charges that the cardinal illegally used tax-exempt church funds to enrich his friend. Without implying there was an intimate relationship between the archbishop and Wilson, a divorced mother of two, the reporters still felt it was necessary to explain to readers the nature of the ties that bound the two. The task was made difficult by the fact that Helen Wilson was described in different ways by different people. As a result of news reports in St. Louis and Chicago, some people, including priests, were led to believe she was Cody’s cousin; others thought she was his niece. Cody himself called her his cousin although, genealogically, she was not. At times, in published reports she was described as a widow when, in fact, she was divorced and her former husband was still alive.
Journalists today may not understand how hard it was, in those days, to take on one of the most powerful princes of the Catholic world, as well as a man who was a cornerstone in the — uh — unique fortress that was the Chicago establishment.
Most of all, it was not normal for a newspaper — drawing on the skills of a religion-beat professional — to document events in the shadows of a cardinal’s life. This was not boring religion news, in because it involved big money and wink-wink scandal.
Back to Larson’s summary article:
One of the city’s most powerful political leaders, then and now, Alderman Edward M. Burke, said a few days after the story broke: “It would seem to me that one could conclude that the only difference between what the Sun-Times did to Cardinal Cody in this instance and what the Ku Klux Klan did to the Catholic Church in the early 1900’s is that the Sun-Times leaders did not wear hoods and white flowing capes. It is vicious; it is unwarranted; it is clearly … the greatest example of yellow journalism that I’ve seen in a Chicago newspaper in decades.”
It was a sign of things to come. Larson was one of the reporters who was there on the religion-beat, doing groundbreaking work as some newsrooms realized that there was more to religion-news work than covering church picnics and denominational conventions.
As the Orthodox say: May his memory be eternal.