From Reuters: Another by-the-book Womenpriests story

April 30, 2013 By 19 Comments
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At this point, it seems that mainstream journalists have decided that the Womenpriests movement deserves a slow-rolling wave of coverage in which (a) it will clear that the women are operating outside the official borders of the Roman Catholic Church, but (b) the viewpoints of movement leaders will be quoted as gospel truth when it comes time to discuss why the nasty male church leaders believe what they believe.

For most reporters, appears that this is now a story in which only one side needs to be approached for in-depth quotes.

Yes, there is also a possibility that Catholic officials have decided to refuse all interview requests. However, I am convinced that if this was the case, journalists would be telling us that (with the standard, “A spokesperson for Archbishop Nasty Male declined comment when asked about the courageous work of the brave women who are willing to listen to the voice of Christ Sophia”).

The other day, I took a look some of the pre-event coverage of the ordination of Rosemarie Smead in Louisville, Ky. Now, Reuters has produced a story on the ordination rite itself that is a five-star classic of the genre.

Let’s walk through the top of this story:

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (Reuters) – In an emotional ceremony filled with tears and applause, a 70-year-old Kentucky woman was ordained a priest on Saturday as part of a dissident group operating outside of official Roman Catholic Church authority.

Where did this rite take place? In a liberal Protestant Church. Readers have to dig pretty deep into the story to find that out.

Rosemarie Smead is one of about 150 women around the world who have decided not to wait for the Roman Catholic Church to lift its ban on women priests, but to be ordained and start their own congregations.

Another interesting feature of this report: The Reuters team somehow managed to avoid using the actual name of the movement behind the event — Womenpriests. The implication is that these are dissident Catholic churches, not fledgling parishes in a separate movement. This is implied, of course, in the lede with the “operating outside of official Roman Catholic Church authority” language. But why not use the actual name of this schismatic movement?

Later on, readers are told:

The ordination of women as priests, along with the issues of married priests and birth control, represents one of the big divides between U.S. Catholics and the Vatican hierarchy. Seventy percent of U.S. Catholics believe that women should be allowed to be priests, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this year.

And who are these “American Catholics”? Might they be Catholics on the fringe of the church? The key number, of course, would be the number of PRACTICING American Catholics who are in favor of changing church doctrines on the priesthood. They are out there, but much smaller in number.

Now it is time, as usual, to quote several pieces of paper representing the views of the church establishment:

The former pope, Benedict XVI, reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings. Male priests have been stripped of their holy orders for participating in ordination ceremonies for women.

In a statement last week, Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz called the planned ceremony by the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests a “simulated ordination” in opposition to Catholic teaching.

“The simulation of a sacrament carries very serious penal sanctions in Church law, and Catholics should not support or participate in Saturday’s event,” Kurtz said.

And what about this church traditions involved in this issue? What does church history say?

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Mainline, People, Religion, Social Issues, Worship Tagged With: 19 Comments

Secular-sacred union between Washington state hospitals

April 29, 2013 By 10 Comments

Suffice it to say that your GetReligionistas frequently receive emails that sound something like this:

In the Sunday, April 28, 2013 Seattle Times there is an interesting story on the potential impact of Catholic hospitals taking over public hospitals. … Overall the article is interesting and informative; however, as a former reporter I found it perplexing how the author … slips into what is essentially an advocacy role in the story.

Paragraph four reads: “But over the years, these citizens have paid hard-earned tax money to keep United General Hospital open, and they don’t want religious doctrine espoused by someone else — surely not someone in Rome or even Seattle — to govern their reproductive and end-of-life choices.”

That strikes me as editorializing. …

Actually, this is a close call for me. The key is an editing rule that I try to teach my journalism students every semester.

Consider this journalism question: Must reporters include an attribution phrase with each and every sentence, or even paragraph, that they write? This is an especially tricky issue when reporters offer paraphrased quotes built on multiple interviews, as opposed to direct quotes from one specific individual or document.

I teach students this rule: Never let readers go more than one paragraph without knowing the source of the information. Stated another way: It’s OK to have a paragraph without an attribution clause if its information is clearly connected to information in a previous paragraph that is clearly attributed to a source or a group of sources.

In this case, the story opened by discussing debates in a Washington town called Sedro-Woolley about changes linked to the merger of their small, struggling secular hospital with a multistate Catholic health-care system. In that context, readers are told:

Critics say they’re not anti-Catholic or anti-religion. And they don’t underestimate the hardship and hard work of the dedicated nuns who brought health care to remote logging and mining towns in Washington before it was even a state.

But over the years, these citizens have paid hard-earned tax money to keep United General Hospital open, and they don’t want religious doctrine espoused by someone else — surely not someone in Rome or even Seattle — to govern their reproductive and end-of-life choices.

“When a hierarchy of a religious entity is in charge of the ethics of a hospital, then they are in control — not the members of a community,” says Mary Kay Barbieri, 69, co-chairwoman of People for Healthcare Freedom, which is fighting the proposal.

Well now. For me, what we have here is a questionable attempt to chop one strong summary paragraph — note the connecting “but” in the third sentence — into two punchy paragraphs, perhaps to quicken the pace for readers.

However, in doing this, editors created a strongly opinionated second paragraph that is not clearly linked to that earlier attribution phrase, “Critics say they are not …”

Would our GetReligion reader have reacted negatively if the editors had been more old school and added a few more words to the offending neo-opinion paragraph? What if the story had said: “But over the years, these critics have paid hard-earned tax money to keep United General Hospital open, and they insist that they don’t want religious doctrine espoused by someone else — surely not someone in Rome or even Seattle — to govern their reproductive and end-of-life choices.”

Better? What does the story lose through that tiny addition?

It’s likely that our reader would not have had a negative reaction to that, or if the two paragraphs had been combined with that crucial “but” clause in the middle.

Picky? You bet. But this is an important and loaded topic. There are, to state the obvious, crucial church-state issues involved and the setting is oh, so provocative. As the story later notes:

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Filed Under: Business & Economy, Catholicism, Journalism, Social Issues Tagged With: , , , , 10 Comments

Baltimore Sun drops ball in profile of a preacher’s son

April 27, 2013 By 2 Comments
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Here we go again.

The following has become a GetReligion mantra, when it comes to mainstream media coverage of sports and religion. If journalists are going to play the God card, especially in the ledes of major stories, it really helps if they are willing to devote some part of these stories to detailing the role that faith plays in the lives of the athletes who are being profiled.

In this case, we are talking about a piece of scripture that is at the heart of a story about a player who was just selected by the Baltimore Ravens at the end of the first round of the National Football League draft. To top that off, this same piece of scripture played a highly symbolic role in the lives of several Christians on the Ravens team (think Ray Lewis, especially) during last year’s run to the Super Bowl and the NFL title.

The Baltimore Sun team gets the scripture into the lede and initially does a good job of framing its importance. This is long, but the following will show some of the context for the verse’s appearance in this young man’s life:

Long before Isaiah 54:17 became a rallying cry during the Ravens’ Super Bowl run and a fixture in Ray Lewis’ speeches, an angry and withdrawn young boy heard the words and decided to put them over his bedroom door.

“No weapon formed against me shall prosper.”

Yet to celebrate his 10th birthday and already burdened by a lifetime’s worth of tragedy, Matt Elam felt that the whole world was against him when he displayed the verse to give him a daily reminder of what mattered.

His half brother had been shot and killed four years before he was even born. His parents divorced when he was 5. Already acquainted with death and departure, Elam then had to deal with the murder of his older sister, Christina, who was at a local park when shots rang out.

Elam, just 8 years old, got the news from his neighbor and sprinted to the park to see his 12-year-old sister one final time.

“We were really close and when I lost her, I felt like everybody was against me,” Elam said Friday.

Read that carefully. We are not talking about a college player putting that scripture over the door of his bedroom. It appears — the sentence structure is quite bizarre — that we are talking about a 10-year-old boy, already burdened with tragedy and pain, putting those words over the doorway into his private sanctuary in the rough streets of the neighborhoods north of downtown West Palm Beach, Fla.

That’s really quite amazing, if one stops and thinks about it. It would appear that religious faith — the kind that teaches fairly obscure scriptures to young boys — must have played a major role in his upbringing. You think?

Yet what is going on with all of these violent events that have touched his life? Might there be some connection between the faith and the pain, some link between scripture and the realities of Elam’s tragic young life?

So how far into this story will readers have to go to find out the answer to that unasked question? Good question.

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Filed Under: Marriage & family, People, Race, Religion, Sports Tagged With: , , , , , 2 Comments

That all-but-missing detail about Jeb Bush’s life

April 26, 2013 By 12 Comments
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Catholics here in America have a very intense and interesting relationship with the mainstream press.

First of all, there are just so many of them and so many different kinds — with active and inactive, believing and non-believing being the simple points of reference.

Second, their sheer numbers make it impossible to ignore Catholics when it comes to the raw, swing-vote data so often used when talking (journalists may want to cross themselves here) POLITICS.

Third, there are so many Catholic politicians out there that issues of doctrine (does this or that vice president openly attack the teachings of the church) often become entangled with the practice of the faith, especially the Sacraments. Honestly, it often seems that many journalists truly believe that there is a Constitutional right to receive Holy Communion that cannot be denied by weird bishops and priests who think they have something to do with hearing confessions and protecting the Sacraments of the church.

You add all of that up and it’s pretty clear that it is pretty important to take a look at the faith content and status of any Catholic who may or may not be seeking the presidency.

This is especially true if the candidate speaks Spanish.

Yes, this is true even if the candidate’s last name is B-U-S-H. In fact, that fact may make the candidate’s Catholicism even more interesting.

If that is the case, then what is going on in the following Style piece from The Washington Post? I’m talking about the one with the headline, “Hispanic consciousness lends weight to Jeb Bush as GOP eyes 2016 presidential race.”

Marriage and family are at the heart of the story, of course, but so are issues of Latino culture, broadly defined. Here’s the opening:

MIAMI – She was almost like a member of the family. An employee, but almost one of them. For three years, Maria Magdalena Romero had tended to the suburban Miami home of Jeb and Columba Bush, had helped to raise their three children, had twined into the fabric of their lives.

Then, with lurching swiftness, she was yanked away. On a mild winter morning in 1991, two immigration agents appeared at the door of the family home looking for the woman Bush’s younger son and namesake, then just 10 years old, remembers as “a super nice lady.” They carried deportation orders.

It didn’t matter that Bush’s father was president of the United States at the time or that a Secret Service agent had answered the door. Romero, who was in the country illegally but had a work permit, wasn’t getting a reprieve.

“It was a difficult time for all of us, but most of all for Maria,” Jeb Bush said in an e-mail about that day. His son, Jeb Jr., hadn’t even realized she’d been deported. “I thought she just left,” Jeb Jr. said in a recent interview.

That long-ago deportation is one among many inflection points for the elder Bush in what has been a lifetime of intimate proximity to America’s Hispanic community, to its searing pain and its buoyant joy, to its mores and its politics. While Republicans cast about for leaders who can connect with Spanish-speaking voters, this tall Texas native with the Mexican American wife has remarkably come to represent a kind of Hispanic consciousness for the party.

I would not argue with any of that material, in terms of its placement in the story. The Post team had to deal, immediately, with Jeb Bush’s broader contacts with the complex, multifaceted Latino world that is Florida and, especially, South Florida (I say that as someone who was living in West Palm Beach during four years of his time as governor). The man speaks Spanish for a reason — in fact, for multiple reasons.

So how important is this Bush’s faith, especially in an era in which (a) moral/religious concerns continue to frame key political debates about religious liberty and (b) the rising Latino population all but requires additional attention to Catholic institutions?

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Filed Under: Catholicism, People, Politics, Race, World Religions Tagged With: , , , , , , , 12 Comments

Yes, we know two Orthodox bishops are missing in Syria

April 25, 2013 By 13 Comments
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Editor’s note: This happens now and then, every two or three years. Two GetReligion writers jumped on the same news subject and then proceeded to write and post at precisely the same time. What are the odds? In this case, we will simply let the two posts stand as written.

Yes, your GetReligionistas — the Orthodox guy in particular — have received more than a few emails seeking our take on the media coverage of the kidnapping of two Orthodox bishops in Syria.

I have seen quite a bit of coverage. You can read European sources. You can follow the story at in Arab media, including Aljazeera.com. You can read about the kidnappings in Catholic Media. You can read about these events at Fox News and other conservative media.

At this point, you cannot read about the kidnappings in reports by the mainstream American press.

Why is that? I don’t know, although it does appear that many mainstream editors seem to think that the persecution of Christians in troubled parts of the world is “conservative news.”

There have been reports that Orthodox Bishop Paul Yazigi — the brother of Antiochian Orthodox Patriarch John X Yazigi of Damascus — and Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim of the Syriac Orthodox Church were kidnapped by terrorists in the village of Kfar Dael while they were on a relief humanitarian mission linked to relief efforts. Media reports indicate they were taken while on the road between Aleppo and the Bab al Hawa crossing with Turkey. The deacon driving their car was shot dead.

While there have been reports that the men were freed, this new report from Aljazeera states otherwise:

Two kidnapped Syrian bishops are still being held, sources have said, denying earlier reports that they had been released, and prompting calls by the international Christian community for their freedom.

Sources told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the two leading Christian figures remained captured a day after Pope Francis called for their release.

Early on Tuesday, reports quoting Greek Orthodox Bishop Tony Yazigi said that Bishop Boulos Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church and Bishop John Ibrahim of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, had been kidnapped while carrying out humanitarian work in the northern province of Aleppo. Later on the same day, reports said they had been released, quoting a Christian association.

A priest at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East in Damascus, who declined to be named, told Al Jazeera that the bishops have not been released.

“We haven’t heard anything from them. We do not know who kidnapped them,” the preist said.

And later in the story, readers are told:

“A rebel commander in Idlib told me he was sure they were not released,” Al Jazeera’s Basma Al Atassi, reporting from the Turkish border city of Antakya, said. “He said he believed they were kidnapped by an Aleppo-based battalion.”

As a member of an Antiochian Orthodox parish — Holy Cross Orthodox Church, just south of Baltimore — we prayed for the kidnapped bishops last night during the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts (we are still in Great Lent, on the ancient Julian Calendar). Pascha (Easter) is May 5th. The leaders of these two ancient churches in the East have released a joint statement about the kidnappings, which remains posted online. Here is a key part of that document:

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Filed Under: Islam, Journalism, Middle East, Orthodoxy, World, World Religions Tagged With: , , 13 Comments

Journalism and the first few minutes after childbirth

April 24, 2013 By 24 Comments

There is nothing new about journalists arguing about the loaded language that surrounds our public debates about abortion.

For starters, there is the whole “pro-choice” vs. “anti-abortion” thing and all of the years in which editors in so many mainstream newsrooms granted one side of the debate it’s positive, vague, self-chosen label while slapping a label on the other side that was, for many, too negative and too narrow. Most of all, only one side of the debate had to wrestle with the ugly word “abortion.” Who can oppose “choice,” the ultimate buzz word of the American Way of Life?

I have also heard my share of newsroom debates about the word “fetus.” For example, in a news story about a pregnant woman, some journalists argued that it was best to avoid direct quotes in which the mother referred to her “baby” if, in the next paragraph, the reporter would be using the newsroom-approved term “fetus.” Didn’t that clash look awkward? Perhaps it would be best to paraphrase the mother to remove that tricky language?

Obviously, in the eyes of some journalists, it was always better to paraphrase all of the quotes from those religious nuts who kept inserting the words “unborn child” or “unborn children” into their soundbites.

Everyone knows that an “unborn child” is actually a “fetus.” After all, the dictionary says:

fe·tus … pl. fe·tus·es

… 2. In humans, the unborn young from the end of the eighth week after conception to the moment of birth, as distinguished from the earlier embryo.

However, if this is the case, what in the world is going on in the top paragraphs of the following story in USA Today?

PHILADELPHIA – One clinic worker testified that she saw aborted fetuses moving, breathing and, once, “screeching.” Another described a 2-foot-long fetus that “didn’t have eyes or a mouth, but it was like … making this noise. … It sounded like a little alien.”

A third witness recalled how, as ordered, she used surgical scissors to snip the spine of an aborted fetus she’d found in a toilet, its arm still moving. “I did it once, and I didn’t do it again,” she said. “… It gave me the creeps.”

The creeps are an occupational hazard for jurors in the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, accused of running a clinic where seven babies were allegedly killed after botched abortions and an adult patient was given a fatal overdose of Demerol.

Now, isn’t the whole point of this aspect of the Gosnell trial — as opposed to many other hellish issues being raised in that courtroom — is that associates of the abortionist have testified that, when performing late-term abortions with viable fetuses, it was his practice to administer drugs that induced labor, to deliver the children and then, after the births, to use the “snip” technique to kill them?

So the whole point is that the viable child was outside the mother’s body — past the moment of birth. Has anyone disputed that this happened in some cases, in a number of cases that needs to be determined?

If that is the case, why are some journalists using “fetus” language to describe the newborns that are being “snipped”?

Perhaps this new and, for me, bizarre journalistic debate has something to do with this other passage drawn from that USA Today piece:

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Filed Under: Journalism, Marriage & family, People, Politics, Science Tagged With: , , , , , 24 Comments

Behold: A pretty fair tribute to George Beverly Shea

April 23, 2013 By 5 Comments
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Longtime GetReligion readers may recall that I grew up in Texas in the 1960s and early ’70s, the son of a Southern Baptist pastor. Suffice it to say that I have been to my share of Billy Graham meetings, back then and as a reporter on the religion beat in Denver and elsewhere.

So I heard George Beverly Shea sing on multiple occasions.

The purpose of this post is quite simple, but I will admit that it is a bit strange. I would like to thank the editors of The Washington Post for running a non-snarky obituary for Shea, who died April 16 at the age of 104. I don’t think I have ever heard a single person say a bad word about Shea, which would have raised the degree of difficulty in writing an obit with some teeth in it.

It is estimated that Shea sang — in person — for an estimated audience of 220 million in a career that spanned seven decades. Toss in television and shelves of albums and he would have to rank near the top, in terms of impact, in the world of gospel music.

Shea was never the main attraction and he knew it, a fact noted in the Post report. Here’s my favorite chunk of the story:

When Graham devoted himself to his evangelistic “crusades” in 1947, he invited Mr. Shea to join him. From then on, wherever Graham preached, Mr. Shea sang. He was known for his clean diction, perfect pitch and a robust bass-baritone voice that was as sturdy and as flashy as a tree trunk.

Mr. Shea had a repertoire of hundreds of hymns — some of which he composed — but was identified with a few familiar favorites, including “The Old Rugged Cross,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and, especially, “How Great Thou Art.” He began singing “How Great Thou Art,” a Swedish hymn written in the 1880s, in the mid-1950s. When Graham preached to more than 2 million people during a prolonged crusade in New York City in 1957, Mr. Shea sang his signature number on more than 100 consecutive nights.

Two alterations he made in the lyrics of “How Great Thou Art” became so well known that the original words were almost forgotten. Mr. Shea changed “consider all the works thy hands have made” to “all the worlds thy hands have made” and “I hear the mighty thunder” to “I hear the rolling thunder.”

“I got a bang when I used to hear Elvis Presley sing my two words,” Mr. Shea told the Kansas City Star in 2004.

The connections with the Graham family were strong at every possible level.

How strong?

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Music, People, Radio & TV, Worship Tagged With: , , 5 Comments

Womenpriests again: The people vs. paper scenario

April 22, 2013 By 32 Comments
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Anyone who has ever worked on the religion beat knows the drill.

You are writing a story about a controversial topic, a topic that people in the establishment of a religious body are not anxious to talk about. The rebels, on the left or the right, are anxious to tell their story.They will talk your ear off, as long as you don’t ask them any challenging questions.

Meanwhile, the establishment leaders — on the left or the right — just want the subject to go away. Rather than granting an interview or two, they hand out a printed press release making the usual old arguments against the rebels.

In other words, you end up with a story in which real people get to debate a piece of paper. It is rarely a fair fight.

I think this is what happened in the following Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal story about another ordination in the Womenpriests Movement, but I am not sure about that.

(By the way, the movement’s website spells their name “Womenpriests,” as opposed to “Women Priests” or “WomenPriests.” I keep seeing variations, but, in the future, “Womenpriests” it will be here at GetReligion — unless they change it again.)

The top of this story hits all the familiar points, in a people vs. paper scenario. But here is my question: Did the real Catholic officials refuse to tell their side of the story or did the newspaper’s leaders make a decision to turn this into a people vs. paper scenario? In other words, did the Courier-Journal team refuse to talk to the Catholics, or did the Catholics refuse to talk to the Courier-Journal? More on that later.

But here is the usual personal-voice opening for a Womenpriests story:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Rosemarie Smead sees herself as preparing all her life for the step she’s about to take.

She was brought up a devout Catholic. She lived for a short time as a cloistered nun. She has theology and counseling degrees. She marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala. — then worked with troubled children there for years. She forged a career as an Indiana University Southeast professor, training school counselors.

Now the petite 70-year-old from Bedford, Ky., is preparing for what she freely admits is a flagrant defiance of Roman Catholic law — specifically Canon 1024, which restricts the priesthood to baptized men. …

Smead is scheduled to be ordained by the dissident Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests. The service will take place in a Protestant sanctuary.

It will be the first such ordination in Louisville by the decade-old Women Priests group, which has been holding such services around the world.

“It’s illegal, but it’s valid,” said Smead. “In order to challenge this law, we have to break it.”

The story includes other information. Active Catholics support church teachings on this subject, while inactive Catholics want to see women ordained. And the pieces of paper from the local archbishop say what they say. No humans are interviewed on the side of the church.

It is also interesting to note — once again — that the story does not question in any way the apostolic succession of the women bishops, nor does it talk about the role of Old Catholic splinter groups in the history of the Womenpriests ordinations.

Instead, readers are simply told:

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Mainline, People, Religion, World, Worship Tagged With: , , , , 32 Comments