Selective Stories

The headline of The New York Times story is apparently misleading: Collecting Catholics’ Everyday Stories as an Antidote to Scandals in the News. The writer Paul Elie has joined with StoryCorps, who produce the stories of average Americans heard on NPR on Fridays, to find similar stories of Catholics. The collaboration is called the American Pilgrimage Project.

He started thinking about this ten or so years ago as he was writing his The Life You Save May Be Your Own (which I commend) as the news stories on sex abuse kept coming out.

“I felt a pain about my tradition,” Mr. Elie said when I met him for an interview in Brooklyn last month. “Something was broken here, and there must be something in the way we tell our stories that could help to make it better. I’m in the story business. So how could I help to heal it, somehow?”

Judging from the three stories the Times mentions, “antidote” seems the wrong word. None say “Here’s the story of a life being Catholic made better.” Rather the opposite. I don’t want cheerful propaganda but some stories that explain why so many millions of Americans are happy Catholics.

Those who read Elie’s hit piece on Benedict in The Atlantic will not be quick to assume that this project will include many stories challenging the standard secular narrative.

Thanks for the link to Unequally Yoked, whose thoughts on “trigger warnings” I commend.