Rome and the death penalty, again

October 22, 2005 By

execution tableSome of you will recall that we recently had a lively thread here at GetReligion on “cafeteria Catholicism” and Rome’s teachings on the death penalty.

The key point: Many journalists have asked why the Vatican keeps flirting with Eucharistic discipline for Catholic politicians who have openly rejected the church’s teachings on abortion, but has not threatened to take action against those who favor — to one degree or another — the death penalty.

The question looming behind the headlines is this: Why is Rome leaning toward the GOP, by ranking abortion above the death penalty?

Now, please understand that one of my goals as a journalist is to find liberal religious voices who make liberals sweat and conservatives who do the same for those in their own camp. I am prejudiced in favor of candor, as well.

In that spirit, let me point readers toward a column by a conservative Catholic leader, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, titled “What does the Church teach on the death penalty?”

I realize that this archbishop’s pro-Vatican stance will turn some readers off.

But Chaput has been saluted in some camps on the Catholic left because he has openly supported the stance taken by the late Pope John Paul II (as opposed to the stance that many insist the pope took on this issue). Thus, reporters have often quoted this statement from another Chaput column in the Denver Catholic Register last March.

… (The) deeper problem — the death penalty itself — remains with us. Here’s a simple fact: If the defendant in a murder trial is financially well off and white, he has a much lower chance of receiving the death penalty than if he’s poor or a person of color. In some states, the inability to hire a private attorney can amount to a death sentence. …

Experience shows that, quite apart from the serious flaws built into the death penalty in too many states, capital punishment simply doesn’t work as a deterrent. Nor does it heal or redress any wounds, because only forgiveness can do that. It does succeed though in answering violence with violence — a violence wrapped in the piety of state approval, which implicates all of us as citizens in the taking of more lives.

Having read that column, those who favor and oppose the death penalty are ready to read what Chaput has to say in his current column. Neither side will cheer. Hopefully, those on both sides will read carefully. By the way, it does not appear that this Chaput column has drawn any coverage in the Colorado media. It should.13 1 Electric chair

People really need to read the whole thing, whether they agree with Chaput (and Rome) or not. Nevertheless, here is a key passage:

Catholic teaching on euthanasia, the death penalty, war, genocide and abortion are rooted in the same concern for the sanctity of the human person. But these different issues do not all have the same gravity or moral content. They are not equivalent.

War can sometimes be legitimate as a form of self-defense. The same can apply, in extraordinary circumstances, to the death penalty. But euthanasia is always an inexcusable attack on the weak. Genocide is always the premeditated murder of entire groups of people. And abortion is always a deliberate assault on a defenseless and innocent unborn child. It can never be justified. It is always — and intrinsically — gravely wrong.

What Catholic teaching on the death penalty does involve is this: a call to set aside unnecessary violence, including violence by the state, in the name of human dignity and building a culture of life.

Yes, there are no quote marks around the phrase “culture of life.”

Yes, the archbishop ends by calling for the United States to end the death penalty.

But reporters must read the Catholic documents on these various issues — especially the teachings on abortion and public life — before we head into the next round of news coverage of Catholics, Communion and the ballot box. The goal is to cover the debates — inside the church and outside — as accurately as possible.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Politics

Idol word haunts copy desk

October 21, 2005 By

olnmI am still catching up after the Tennessee tour, so here is another quick post saved from earlier in the week.

I need to offer a mega-hat tip to Amy Wellborn on this next one, pointing to the blog of her husband, Michael Dubruiel. It seems that someone at the Herald News copy desk in suburban Chicago messed up — big time.

If you click here, you will see the story and a repaired headline that says:

A visit from Our Lady

* Virgin Mary: Local parish is host to 33-foot statue for 2 weeks

The story is a pretty plain description of strange goings-on among the exotic local Catholic natives. Nothing really spectacular.

Our Lady of the New Millennium, a 33-foot, 8,400-pound statue of the Virgin Mary[,] began a two-week stay at St. Mary Immaculate parish. … The statue, commissioned in 1984 by Carl Demma, who has since passed away, is meant to be a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The statue was completed in 1999 and by Oct. 2003 had visited over 170 parishes.

There’s one strange phrase there: “is meant to be.” But what caught the eye of Welborn and Dubruiel was the original headline for this story, which now exists only in Catholic bloggerland. Hang on, because it was a doozy.

A visit from Our Lady

Statue of Virgin Mary: Local parish is host to 33-foot idol for 2 weeks

Dubruiel thought this failed the “objective reporting” test, for reasons that are rather obvious. But just in case readers missed it, he added:

Notice how the statue is referred to as an “idol”. If you have a second you might want to drop the suburban Chicago news an email that’ll point out that Catholics do not worship statues or idols but God alone!

Actually I am sure — as a former headline writer — that the red telephone at the copy desk rang a few times and the headline was changed rather quickly.

GetReligion readers will notice that Dubruiel assumed this was a case of media bias. In this case, I believe someone simply messed up.

That said, I can find no indication that the newspaper humbled itself and published a correction. The editors simply replaced the headline. However, that word “idol” was a real slap in the face for the traditional Catholics who would been drawn to this story. A correction would have been nice. Did I miss one somewhere?

P.S. Welborn’s blog is a great place to keep up on an interesting Holy Grail trial involving everyone’s favorite gnostic Catholic theologian — Dan “DaVinci Code” Brown. Click here for more details.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Humor

McPrayer Closets in your McMansions?

October 20, 2005 By

eyesore 200101 01What a week. I am finally back at work and I feel the need to unload some short items from the past week on the road. So — warning — here come some short, punchy (I hope) posts while I try to dig out my desk and travel bag. Prepare to scan and click.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I seriously considered not posting an update on my original “Mansions on a Hill” post. The follow-up post — a sort of “Would Tony Campolo own a McMansion?” debate — is still drawing a few new comments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I post the following link to a Wall Street Journal feature by Troy McMullen that, in effect, suggests more McProtestant people are building McPrayer Closets in their McMansions.

Actually, that isn’t really fair. There isn’t much evidence that this prayer-closet phenomenon has a class angle.

As religious themes grow more important in American culture — in an April Gallup poll of 1,003 adults over 18 years old, 42 percent of respondents described themselves as evangelical Christians — a handful of interior designers have begun to market themselves as experts in merging home decor with religion. Their influences run the spectrum: subtle touches, such as using colors taken from a client’s favorite Bible passages, and more overt ones, like the installation of altars and large cast iron crosses in some homes. …

These designers say they’re simply filling a niche — helping Christians and others guided by religion who want to tap into their faith without turning their homes into chapels. Still, there’s another reason interior decorators are striving to set themselves apart: The field has never been more crowded. The American Society of Interior Designers, a trade group, says its membership hit a record high of 35,000 this year.

Perhaps the story behind this story is that evangelicals are beginning to feel the need to do something that the ancient churches have done for centuries and centuries — urging members to bring sacramental objects into their homes. In my Eastern Orthodox neck of the church woods, we call these blessed zones “icon corners.” I have heard that Roman Catholics do this from time to time, as well.

Meanwhile, try to find a photograph online of a Protestant “prayer closet.” Let me know what you find. OK?

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Evangelicals, Uncategorized

True or untrue!?!

October 11, 2005 By

newsboyGreetings from London, GetReligion readers! My five days in the British capitol find me on the edge of my seat, per the huge news I keep reading in the easy-to-read-in-the-tube tabloids! So much seems to be happening! The families of delinquent children receiving £5,000 for misbehaving! Fathers receiving 6 months paternity leave! And the BBC asking for more British taxpayer money!

OK, so it’s not that exciting over here, but it’s certainly a change of pace from the staid Washington papers. I have noticed, in my completely unscientific poll of the London papers, an absence of religion coverage, but that’s not saying that there isn’t any.

Speaking of which, let’s move onto more important things that don’t include the newspaper headlines I’ve been reading.

One of our readers, Francis, found this article in the Times of London “interesting.” On a first read, I also found it interesting and also completely frustrating because it reads as a hit piece by an authority who knows little about religion. The headline, “Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible,” is enough to give anyone who knows anything about the Catholic Church heartburn. After that, the piece is all downhill:

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.

I’m sure the Catholic bishops of England, Scotland and Wales were thinking of the rise of the evil religious right when they “warned” their parishioners that Catholics do not swear to the absolute truth of the Bible. And since when was a group of bishops from Great Britain “the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church”?

Sullivan weighs in, and is predictably caught up in the misleading nature of the article:

Of course. Anyone who believes that the world was literally created in six days a few thousand years ago is not expressing his or her “religious beliefs”. Believing something that is demonstrably and empirically untrue is not religion. It is simply superstition or lunacy. It has nothing to do with faith in things we cannot know. The notion that it should actually be taught in public schools as science is beneath even debating.

I am not a Catholic, but I do know a thing or two about the Catholic Church, and one is that official Church doctrine has long rejected its traditional position regarding the absolute accuracy of the Holy Scriptures from a modern historical and scientific perspective. Then why is this paragraph in the article, referring to this somehow groundbreaking document?

The document shows how far the Catholic Church has come since the 17th century, when Galileo was condemned as a heretic for flouting a near-universal belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible by advocating the Copernican view of the solar system.

Right. From condemning Galileo to “some parts of the Bible are not actually true.”

And while this is possibly an editing oversight, the end of the article contains a list of passages from the Old and New Testaments citing, as fact, those that are true and those that are untrue, but it fails to cite a source.

Jimmy Akin has a much thorough breakdown of the articles failures than I could ever provide (and delivers quite a smackdown, by the way), so I encourage you to read more here if you’re interested. Here’s a snippet:

Ooooooh! That’s completely different, then! It ain’t “the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church” but just the bishops of England, Wales, and Scotland that issued the document!

Gledhill must have been raised in a non-Euclidian universe where the fallacy of composition works, so that you can identify the part with the whole without fear of inaccuracy.

Things — including news reporting — must be so much simpler in Gledhill’s universe of origin, what without having to worry about that pesky part/whole distinction.

Over there the Vatican has probably not bothered calling any ecumenical councils gathering all of the world’s bishops to speak for the Church. They’ve just let the bishops of Great Britain issue all of the Church’s official statements. Maybe the pope is even based in non-Euclidian England!

So why is this, along with the many other 32-point type headlined stories that I’ve read in the last few days, news to anyone? I guess you have to do something to sell newspapers these days, along with free DVD offers blasted across the upper folds. With these trends making their way across the Pond, I worry about the future of American journalism, though I wouldn’t mind a tabloid size Post or Times for my morning yogurt and eggs, minus the big headlines of course.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Journalism, Religion, World

Gay priest purge? Next trial balloon

October 7, 2005 By

crystal colors balloonsLike I said, we are still in the trial balloons stage on the whole issue of the rumored Vatican statement that was supposed to “purge” the priesthood of gay men. This is why I believe that it is much more important, at this point, to talk about the sure thing, which is “Instrumentum Laboris” [PDF] and the wave of examiners who will be visiting Catholic seminaries across the United States in the near future looking for doctrinal train wrecks.

This is why, in my Scripps Howard column this week, I focused on the fact that a renewed emphasis on mandatory celibacy runs throughout the questions in the 12-page Vatican document that will guide these confidential seminary investigations.

While the document — as posted on the World Wide Web — contains one or two clear references to homosexuality, there are a dozen or more direct or indirect references to mandatory celibacy and its role in the training, or “formation,” of priests.

To cite only one sequence, investigators will ask: “How does the formation integrate harmoniously the spiritual dimension with the human one, above all in the area of celibate chastity? How are the seminarians formed to celibate chastity in the areas of friendships, human relationships, human freedom and the formation of the moral conscience? In the judgment of the Visitors, does the seminary provide adequate formation that will enable the seminarians to live celibate chastity? (This question must be answered.)”

Why talk so much about celibacy? That’s simple. If you cannot (a) afford, for statistical reasons, to seriously cut the number of gay priests serving at altars and you (b) also know that it is next to impossible to strictly define what it means for someone to be gay, once actively gay, possibly gay, militantly gay or even formerly tempted to be gay, then you (c) focus harder on getting all of your priests (you too, straight guys in overwhelmingly female parishes) to do a better job of keeping their vows.

And, besides, as the always candid progressive Father Donald Cozzens wrote in the New York Daily News:

Finally, there is a dimension of hypocrisy. If and when the Vatican instruction is released and enforced, in many cases the seminary official, religious superior or diocesan bishop who informs a gay candidate for seminary admission that he is not acceptable will be gay himself.

Thus, I am not surprised to see that the omnipresent Rome insider John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter is now saying that the still forthcoming document on homosexuals in seminaries “will not demand an absolute ban” and will simply ask seminary leaders to make decisions on a case by case basis and be extra careful.

Allen reports that gays would be kept out of seminaries:

* If candidates have not demonstrated a capacity to live celibate lives for at least three years;

* If they are part of a “gay culture,” for example, attending gay pride rallies (a point, the official said, which applies both to professors at seminaries as well as students);

* If their homosexual orientation is sufficiently “strong, permanent and univocal” as to make an all-male environment a risk.

There’s more to the Allen report, of course, and now the Associated Press has a report out on the same topic (and with very similar sourcing). So there is another ripple of news on this hot story, but I would urge readers to, once again, treat all of this as yet another trial balloon. And what is the larger story? Perhaps this is more wood under the fire that could lead to conservative Catholics — not liberals, conservatives — starting to talk about Anglican Rites and larger Eastern Rites and other forms of Catholicism that would allow men to marry and then be ordained.

P.S. Check out this Religion News Service report by Godbeat veteran David Briggs on how the theological left views the current tensions about Catholic seminaries, gay priests, etc. Are the sources quoted arguing, essentially, that Catholicism in the American context is now another liberal oldine body?

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Filed Under: Academia, Catholicism, Social Issues

Celibacy talks on the Roman table

October 6, 2005 By

capt pl10210061028 vatican bishop meeting pl102Here is a level-headed news tip from Andrew Sullivan and, surprise, surprise, it’s about the Roman Catholic Church.

Based on conversartions I’ve had in the past month or so with some Catholic leaders and writers (no names, please), I think he is on to something. I can hint at what I am thinking by saying that I am still trying to follow up on this column. Anyway, here is the Sullivan item:

Thursday, October 06, 2005

IN ROME: There’s a new news black-out on the latest synod in Rome. Some may well interpret this as yet another sign of Benedict’s authoritarian nature. They may be right. But the scope of the subjects discussed — “a purported shortage of priests, proposals to let priests marry, and whether communion should be offered to certain divorced Catholics and denied to politicians who support abortion rights” — strikes me as something that John Paul II would never have even allowed to be on the table. Some sources tell me that Benedict has not shut the door completely to a married priesthood. Personally, I think it is critical to the survival of the Western church at least. It already exists if the priest is a convert from Anglicanism, and if I were a newpaper editor, I would assign a reporter to write a feature on today’s married Catholic priests. Most people don’t even realize they exist. Who knows what might happen? But if the option for clerical marriage emerges under Benedict, you read it here first. I for one would not be surprised.

Sullivan is spinning off of a punchy, newsy Washington Post report from Rome by Daniel Williams. All kinds of issues are being discussed and the issue of Communion rights for pro-abortion-rights politicians is not even the hottest item on the menu.

By the way, I would add that, in the first paragraph quoted below, Williams should have mentioned that the Eastern Rite churches have married priests, as do all the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. This is the more ancient tradition for the priesthood — married priests, celibate monks as bishops.

Like Sullivan said, something is going on when a reporter can write the following:

A representative from an Eastern Rite church, one of the bodies in the traditionally Orthodox Christian region of the world that recognize Vatican authority, suggested that Catholic rules requiring celibacy among priests had no theological grounds.

Bishop Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines said the synod had to squarely confront a priest shortage so as to provide congregations with proper services.

The National Council of Priests of Australia, which claims to represent half the country’s clergy, offered a letter to the synod saying the priesthood could attract more recruits if the church allowed priests to marry and opened a debate on letting women be ordained.

Venice Archbishop Angelo Scola, who functions as a kind of master of ceremonies at the synod, noted that some delegates had “put forward the request to ordain married faithful of proven faith and virtue,” a special category made up of older, married and religiously grounded Catholic men known as viri probati.

As you would expect, the usual suspects (the photo is from Amy Welborn’s site) have all kinds of news and commentary about the synod. Kudos to the Post for running a major report on the debates there, in the midst of a big news day back in the U.S.

Speaking of which: What is The New York Times doing using an Associated Press report for its coverage of this story? Did I miss a staff byline somewhere in the past 24 hours or so?

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Social Issues

Toward a culture of quotes

October 5, 2005 By

Keeler2Like the Rt. Rev. Doug LeBlanc, I am not fond of the whole “scare quotes” school of writing about religion and social issues.

But this morning, the Baltimore Sun ran a story that I thought delivered a textbook example of how to properly use quotation marks when using that politically explosive term that we have been debating a bit — “culture of life.”

The context is a Matthew Hay Brown feature marking the anniversary celebration of Cardinal William H. Keeler of Baltimore being ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. We are interested in this paragraph early on:

Today, as he celebrates the 50th anniversary of his priesthood — the actual date was in July — the cardinal is a leading spokesman for the church in the vital areas of relations with other faiths, discussion with other Christian denominations, and support for what his friend Pope John Paul II called “the culture of life.”

Later on, the story offers more insights into the term, thus fleshing out the definition. What I like is that this first reference uses “culture of life” as a real quotation, not a political term. It is directly linked to its source — John Paul II.

This is called “attribution.” It is a journalism virtue. Just do it.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Journalism

Offensive religious advertising

October 4, 2005 By

PlayStationAdReligious depictions in advertisements are nothing new. Nor are offensive advertisements. Put the two together and you have an issue for us to talk about.

Reuters has the story that must have been all over the Italian papers of a Sony ad for the PlayStation gaming system depicting a smiling young man wearing a crown of thorns twisted into the PlayStation’s geometric logo.

The international news service’s story on C-Net’s News.com lamely quotes an editor of a Catholic weekly in an attempt to sum up the controversy:

“This time they’ve gone too far,” said Antonio Sciortino, editor of Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family), a mass-circulation Catholic weekly.

“If this had concerned Islam there would have been a really strong reaction,” Sciortino was quoted as saying in the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Say what? You want to explain that quote for us, Reuters? That quote, I believe, is an attempt to portray the controversy, but the article fails to explain exactly why the advertisements were offensive. Reuters does offer this background:

In the Bible, Jesus was forced to wear a crown of thorns by mocking Roman guards before he was crucified. In the advertisement, a young man smiles cheekily, wearing a crown whose thorns are twisted into the geometric shapes that are PlayStation’s logo.

Apparently this is not the first time someone has upset European Catholics in advertisements. An IKEA ad attempted to play off the decline of church attendance among Catholic Italians by stating that the furniture chain was open on Sundays and two ads portrayed a modified da Vinci’s Last Supper, one with a female Jesus and “glamorous disciples” and the other showing the followers of Jesus as gamblers and Judas holding his 30 pieces of silver.

I am not one to be offended easily, but I found the ads lacking in good taste. That said, I believe people should find better things to get upset over. Are the faithful in Europe making a mountain out of a molehill? Or are these adverts, as they say across the pond, something Christians — and those of other faiths — should really be concerned about? You can bet your money, as Sciortino said above, that certain radical Muslim groups would have had a few things to say about it.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Pop Culture, Religion, World