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.

Back in my graduate-school days, I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after spending a few years working at the local daily, The News-Gazette. I read the Chicago dailes, of course, during some glorious years of newspaper warfare in that great and wild city. Thus, I remember ripping my way way through the headlines and thousands of words of copy kicked off by the famous Chicago Sun-Times blockbusters about the life and times of one Cardinal John Patrick Cody. Here’s a slice of a Nieman Reports flashback:

On Thursday, September 10, 1981, the Chicago Sun-Times splashed across its front page a three-tiered headline that jolted the city: “Federal grand jury probes Cardinal Cody use of church funds.” A subhead read: “Investigation centers on gifts to a friend.” The first in an extended, multifaceted series of investigative stories did not appear until a team of three Sun-Times reporters had completed an 18-month search for sources, documents and other substantiating evidence. And this investigation took place at a time when reporters still shared information with federal authorities, including the Internal Revenue Service. …

Fully aware that they were dealing with an explosive issue in a metropolitan area where the Catholic Church was a powerful institution with members at the top levels of the city’s political, judicial, business and labor establishment, the tabloid’s publisher and editors were not in a rush to get into print. When the reporting team was first assembled, Publisher James Hoge told the investigative unit: “We’re going to have to do as careful and as in-depth reporting as anyone’s ever done, because this is dynamite.”