Beautiful tribute to Catholic sisters in Civil War nursing

July 4, 2013 By mollie

On this Independence Day, let’s look at a great story that appeared on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette really pulled out the stops for coverage of this Civil War anniversary and Sunday’s paper had a special section that covered various angles. I’m no Civil War buff but my visit to Gettysburg a few years ago was fascinating and informative.

In any case, Ann Rodgers had a piece in that special section on an under-covered religion angle. It’s fantastic:

The Daughters of Charity at their provincial house in Emmitsburg, Md., could hear the cannons of Pickett’s Charge 10 miles off. They helped their chaplain pack a wagon with medical supplies and, when the cannons were silenced, a dozen sisters rode with him to tend to the wounded.

“They had already been on battlefields in the North and the South,” said Lisa Shower, who gives Civil War tours at the National Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. In 1863, nuns were the nation’s only trained nurses.

A dozen orders sent sisters to battlefields and military hospitals. Rodgers lays out the general nursing situation (such as that most nurses were men because it was considered disreputable for women to be exposed to nakedness and filth) and ads:

But among the most effective were 571 Catholic sisters, who were often appointed to oversee military hospitals. The Sisters of Mercy of Pittsburgh were twice personally requested by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to run military hospitals in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh.

Because many religious orders were founded to care for the sick, the sisters had accumulated centuries of experience. By 1860, they ran 28 American hospitals. They were the only trained nurses in the nation.

“The sisters didn’t have what we would consider today to be professional training, but the documents of every community had … a section on care of the sick,” said Sister Mary Denis Maher, archivist of the Sisters of Charity in Cleveland and author of “To Bind Up the Wounds” about sisters in the Civil War.

While no one yet understood infection, their time-honored practices stressed cleanliness and good food, she said.

Dix, who was anti-Catholic, didn’t recruit sisters, but generals and Cabinet members begged for their services. After the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Union Gen. George McClellan asked the Daughters of Charity for every available sister.

Then we get to the specifics of how they helped out at Gettysburg, overrun by 21,000 wounded men, by dressing wounds:

The sisters dressed wounds, fed patients, helped soldiers write letters home and tended to the spiritual needs of soldiers. They often baptized dying men.

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Revelations, Books of Psalms and other scriptures

April 29, 2013 By mollie

Last week we noticed some embarrassing corrections related to how newspapers described the Epistle to the Ephesians. In the comments, Godbeat veteran Ann Rodgers wrote:

My paper today carried a Washington Post story about the memorial service for explosion victims in West, Texas, that said President Obama alluded to the “Books of Psalms.”

Could that be true? The Books of Psalms? Is Biblical illiteracy this bad? Literary knowledge at an all time low? Let’s check out the passage:

It was the second time in as many weeks that Obama had to console a grieving community after a tragedy, following a trip to Boston last week. Before he spoke, videorecorded eulogies quoted the tearful grandparents, parents, wives, relatives and friends of the fallen. At Baylor, the wails of crying babies and young children echoed through the Ferrell Center.

“I cannot match the power of the voices you just heard on that video,” Obama said. Alluding to the Books of Psalms, he said: “You have been tested, West. You have been tried. You have gone through fire. But you are and will always be surrounded by the abundance of love.”

Yikes. Or is it that bad? As commenter Brett responded:

Ann — What’s in our Bibles as the Psalms has been considered to be made up of five “books” or sections, each ending with a doxology or a benediction. The sections are Pss. 1-41; Pss. 42-72; Pss. 73-89; Pss. 90-106 and Pss. 107-150. Some Bibles will have headings like “Book 1” or “Book 4” to mark the groupings.

That being said, the division is not common knowledge and although it’s possible President Obama meant his construction in that way, I’d imagine it’s just one of those slips of the tongue that happen sometimes.

I didn’t watch President Obama’s comments, but I didn’t take it that it was his reference to the “Books” of Psalms but, rather, the Washington Post‘s. The commenter later noted:

Whoops, just reread Ann’s comment and realized she may have been talking about what the WaPo writer said and not the President. If it was the writer, then I’m agreeing with her that it’s the kind of omission from ignorance that also brings us “the Book of Revelations.”

Nothing makes me want to scream quite like people making the Revelation of St. John into “Revelations.” Anyway, for future reference, here’s the passage from which President Obama was riffing:

Oh, bless our God, you peoples!
And make the voice of His praise to be heard,
Who keeps our soul among the living,
And does not allow our feet to be moved.
For You, O God, have tested us;
You have refined us as silver is refined.
You brought us into the net;
You laid affliction on our backs.
You have caused men to ride over our heads;
We went through fire and through water;
But You brought us out to rich fulfillment.

The more you know, as they say.

Psalms image via Shutterstock.

Was Pope Francis ‘anointed’ today? (UPDATED)

March 19, 2013 By mollie

The New York Times has run, at last count, 10 pieces in the past six days bringing up the allegations that the new Pope assisted the old Argentine junta in the “Dirty War” period. Which is quite a lot for a story based on hearsay and supposition as opposed to evidence, no?

You can read George Conger’s post about other media outlets pushing the story.

Pope Francis was installed earlier today during a mass that received quite a bit of media interest.

One reader noted something about a CNN story on the matter. Here’s the relevant portion:

The Vatican geared up for the inauguration of the pope on Tuesday, a ceremony ushering in a new era for the Roman Catholic Church.

Anticipation mounted among the faithful across the globe awaiting a joyous and solemn chapter of Christian history. St. Peter’s Square will bustle with tourists, locals and pilgrims during the official Mass to install Francis as the bishop of Rome.

The choice of day to anoint him as the holy father of the Roman Catholic Church carries a rich symbolism: It is the day that Catholics celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph to honor Jesus’ father on Earth, the carpenter Joseph. It also happens to be Father’s Day in Italy.

So is it right to say that today he was “anointed” as the holy father of the Roman Catholic Church? Anointed has a few definitions. Let’s look at the Merriam-Webster offerings:

1: to smear or rub with oil or an oily substance
2:
a :to apply oil to as a sacred rite especially for consecration
b : to choose by or as if by divine election; also : to designate as if by a ritual anointment

From the reader:

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What should be tweeted via @ThroneOfPeter?

November 12, 2012 By tmatt

Let’s drop the media criticism for a moment and have a bit of fun (about a topic that is actually pretty serious).

What was your first reaction if and when you saw this short news story? I’ll link to The Los Angeles Times take on it:

Digital white smoke signals may soon be rising on Twitter. The Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI will begin tweeting from a personal Twitter account, possibly before year’s end.

This clearly won’t rival Pope Benedict XVI’s first appearance on the St. Peter’s balcony –- or even his first appearance on Twitter. But it should give him a far more apostolic follower count than his Vatican account (some 28,000 faithful).

The 85-year-old Benedict first tweeted from that Vatican account last year. That’s when the Vatican launched a news portal. No one was really a fan of the handle @Pope2YouVatican. No word yet on the new handle. …

The Vatican says the Twitter account will belong to Benedict (though it’s likely he will write 140-character messages in longhand and let someone else do the actual tweeting).

That’s most of it, aside from the obligatory joke about the possibility that the pope will give up tweeting for Lent. Actually, this whole “give one thing up for Lent” story is rooted in myth, not Catholic (or Anglican or Lutheran or Orthodox) tradition, but that news hook lives on and on.

Anyway, if @Pope2YouVatican didn’t work, what do the headline writers in our cyber-midst think would be a better handle for Benedict XVI? What do you think the pope should try to accomplish with his Twitter account?

The latter question, truth be told, is connected to an interesting event that took place yesterday in Baltimore — when a pack of bloggers met with a smaller pack of bishops to talk about a new research report (click here for the document) on the state of Catholicism in social media. After spending several days deep down South (speaking at the Meek School of Journalism at the University of Mississippi), I rushed back to take part as the only non-Catholic on the main panel.

As you would hope, and expect, Ann Rodgers of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went the extra mile and covered the event. Another Godbeat veteran, Cathy Grossman of USA Today, was also there and I hope we see a report from her soon.

Meanwhile, you can also dig into a few of the remarks via, naturally, the event Twitter feed: #bpsblog

Here is the top of the Rodgers story:

BALTIMORE — The majority of Catholics use social media, but only the most ardent visit Catholic sites, which typically do a poor job of attracting fallen-away Catholics and those searching for a faith connection.

The statistics came from a study released just before the annual Baltimore meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. About 25 bishops arrived early to learn from bloggers and other social media experts how to have a more effective online presence.

The gathering, sponsored by the bishops’ communications office, was modeled on a similar session held last year at the Vatican.

“Catholic media, at this point, is very effectively preaching to the choir … and to the very small percentage that agree with you on almost everything,” said panelist Terry Mattingly, religion columnist for the Scripps-Howard news service and co-founder of GetReligion.org, which analyzes religion coverage in secular media.

But if a bishop is trying to engage in evangelization without a sophisticated social media outreach, he said, “you have a promising future in ministry to the Amish.”

The study from the bishops’ research agency, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, showed that 62 percent of Catholic adults, including 37 percent of those 70 and older, have a profile on Facebook. Two-thirds of Catholic adults, including 84 percent of those 30 and younger, visit YouTube. Yet just 5 percent of Catholic adults with Internet access follow blogs related to the Catholic faith, though that number rises to 13 percent who attend Mass weekly. Despite a vigorous Vatican website and countless official and unofficial Catholic sites, 53 percent of more than 1,000 self-identified Catholics surveyed weren’t aware of a significant Catholic presence on the Internet.

Believe it or not, the subjects that interest Catholic readers the most — according to Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate — are church history and the lives of the saints.

Yes, much of the information was THAT inside baseball. Thus, I asked if bishops were willing and able to supply digital offerings linked to film, dating, family life, humor, liturgical music, books and other normal, everyday topics. Would anyone else be willing to join Cardinal Timothy Dolan in reaching out to the Comedy Central world?

The most stunning moment in the afternoon, for me, was supplied, naturally enough, by the unofficial czar of the Catholic blogosphere.

Several bloggers specifically mentioned problems with racist posts from professing Catholics. Rocco Palmo, whose “Whispers In the Loggia” blog on church leadership is nearing 25 million site visits, pointed out that 60 percent of Catholics under 30 in the United States are Hispanic, but the Catholic blogosphere doesn’t reflect that.

When he writes an annual post in Spanish for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, “I never get more angry, vitriolic hate mail,” he said.

He advised bishops to directly address bigotry online.

“We have a major problem when people in our church think they can get away with that and be in communion with the Catholic Church,” he said.

The bishops, in chorus, expressed several common concerns. Many were concerned that life in cyberspace would be too hectic, too shallow and too divisive. How could they keep up? Would any opinions they expressed be blown up into controversies?

Listen to these voices:

“I’m afraid of making a fool of myself,” said Archbishop Roger Schwietz of Anchorage, Alaska. “This is personality driven. What I’m used to is to focus on the message and stay out of the way.”

Bishop John Gaydos of Jefferson City, Mo., compared the digital age to the era that saw the birth of Christianity. “It spread like wildfire. You had the system of Roman roads … and the spiritual hunger of people who would go after any new mysticism,” he said.

Panelist Mary DeTurris Poust, who has spent a 30-year career in Catholic media, said Google searches for “Catholic” and related words are declining while searches for “spiritual” and its variants are rising.

“That should send up a warning flare,” said Ms. Poust, who blogs at “Not Strictly Spiritual.” “It reflects a virtual version of what we are seeing in [bricks-and-mortar] searches. People are searching, but they are not searching for us. … How do we reach Catholic adults who are disconnected from the church but are desperately seeking a spiritual connection?”

By all means, read all of the Rodgers story. Then you can turn to this Catholic News Service report. If you would, please point us toward other online reports about this gathering and this subject.

In the end, I concluded that the issue is not whether bishops should blog or tweet. That’s a question for each shepherd to make on his own. If you can preach, you can blog.

The key for me is whether the bishops can find talented Catholics — with or without collars — who are talented enough to write quality, provocative material that can attract and hold the overloaded eyes of modern Catholics, sort-of Catholics, young Catholics, ex-Catholics and, yes, unbelievers. Do these bishops have talented people on their staffs? If so, all they have to do is support them and work with them. Just do it.

The Economist chides Catholic Church on its finances

August 21, 2012 By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

When a story uses extra adjectives or adverbs to pretty up a story, you know something might be fishy. If the information, data and narrative can’t speak for themselves, it’s worth reexamining the piece more closely.

I had that fishy feeling when I read The Economist‘s lengthy piece on the Catholic Church’s finances amidst the abuse scandals. On first read, you could spot strange word choices, ones an editor would often delete. Right up top, the writers make judgments before you can even read and decide for yourself. See the words I bolded for examples:

[T]he finances of the Catholic church in America are an unholy mess. The sins involved in its book-keeping are not as vivid or grotesque as those on display in the various sexual-abuse cases that have cost the American church more than $3 billion so far; but the financial mismanagement and questionable business practices would have seen widespread resignations at the top of any other public institution.

The piece hammers away before you can begin to understand how The Economist comes to its conclusions.

The picture that emerges is not flattering. The church’s finances look poorly co-ordinated considering (or perhaps because of) their complexity. The management of money is often sloppy. And some parts of the church have indulged in ungainly financial contortions in some cases—it is alleged—both to divert funds away from uses intended by donors and to frustrate creditors with legitimate claims, including its own nuns and priests. The dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy may not be typical of the church as a whole. But given the overall lack of openness there is no way of knowing to what extent they are outliers.

Can we safely say it’s time to strike “legitimate” from our vocabularies? Really, it’s unclear what the reporter expects of the Catholic Church’s financial openness before you can get into how it’s “sloppy.”

The church is also increasingly keen to defend its access to public health-care subsidies while claiming a right not to provide certain medical services to which it objects, such as contraception. This increased reliance on taxpayers has not been matched by increased openness and accountability.

When you finally get down into the numbers, you can see for yourself how the finances play out. The piece offers some interesting details and you can get a grasp of where the resources go, but the snark runs throughout the piece into the graphics (“Many mansions”) and images chosen for the piece (Timothy Dolan is Manhattan’s largest landowner?).

Before you assume looking at the Catholic Church’s finances is like looking at just any old spreadsheet data, you have to take other factors into account. While I got hung up on the piece’s writing, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s Ann Rodgers posted the following comment on her Facebook page (reposted with her permission):

While much of this is very interesting, I think the author mixes apples and oranges. Catholic hospitals are rarely under diocesan control for anything other than doctrinal purposes. To talk about hospital access to municipal bonds in the same paragraph as discussions of diocesan financial woes due to abuse suits shows a poor understanding of church structure.

Ding, ding, ding! If you read her reporting, Rodgers “follows the money” as much as another scrutinizing reporter, but she also knows how to follow it with an understanding of how the Catholic Church works.

To flesh out Rodgers’s initial reaction, we have a post from Nineteen Sixty-four, a research blog for Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a non-profit research center that conducts social scientific studies about the Catholic Church.

Recently I was contacted several times by a reporter at The Economist for some data. I’ve always felt that this is one of the last few intelligent magazines on the racks. But I also recall being concerned after speaking to this reporter and thinking, “he doesn’t quite get the Church.” He seemed stunned to find out that the Catholic Church in the United States doesn’t have a neat and tidy set of financials done annually. He felt the Church should be doing what any multinational corporation would do. I kept telling him the Church is not Walmart.

Mark Gray emphasizes that he does not think The Economist is anti-Christian, but instead he carefully goes through and shows how the reporter assumes too much, misunderstanding the Catholic Church structure along the way. Read it all. Right now.

The Economist report could be pretty interesting if it weren’t couched in such a snooty assumptions and wording. Even if you don’t study the Catholic Church like Gray does, you can still sniff out a poorly reported story. Why can’t the numbers, used and compared appropriately, speak for themselves?

Reprimand image via Shutterstock.

New York Times solves the problem of Sharia

February 1, 2013 By geoconger

This report on Thursday’s Cairo conference from the New York Times breaks the streak of great stories it has filed from Egypt over the past few months. Long on speculation and short on facts, “Rivals Across Egypt’s Political Spectrum Hold Rare Meeting, Urging Dialogue” on page A10 of the 1 Feb 2013 issue rambles on about what the Times thinks might happen rather than report what has happened. And, (I know you will be surprised to hear this) the article omits the role religion and religious groups play in the news.

The background to this story is the clash between the Muslim Brotherhood aligned government of President Mohamed Mursi with moderate Muslims and secularist parties to the left, a split with salafist (even more hardline Islamist) parties to the right, coupled with the persecution of religious minorities — primarily Christians, but also Baha’is, Shia, and Ahmadiya Muslims.

The Times has done a great job in reporting on the unraveling of Egypt, but this article does not live up to the standard the Gray Lady has set in its reporting so far.

The article opens with:

With Egypt’s political elites warring and street violence taking on a life of its own, young revolutionaries on Thursday tried to step into the country’s leadership vacuum, organizing a rare meeting of political forces that, in Egypt’s polarized state, was a victory in itself. The meeting, which included representatives of secular leftist and liberal groups as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, failed to resolve some of the most divisive issues facing the country, including whether Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, would agree to form a national unity government or amend the country’s newly approved constitution, as some opposition leaders have demanded.

The lede is framed in terms of a heroic attempt by “young revolutionaries” to bring the “warring” factions to the conference table, that must (alas) be deemed a noble failure as it did not achieve the immediate aims of “some opposition leaders” in forcing the president to change his government or revoke the new constitution. This political failure is coupled with a likely short term failure in halting the escalating violence in the streets.

Nor was there any assurance that the meeting’s principal call — to end the violence that has led to more than 50 deaths over the last week — would be heeded on the streets. Clashes during protests have become the latest polarizing issue in Egypt’s turbulent transition, with Mr. Morsi and members of his Muslim Brotherhood movement largely blaming shadowy instigators for the violence. Others, though, have faulted the country’s poorly trained security forces for a persistently heavy-handed response to protests.

The article then identifies the “organizers” of the meeting as:

a leader of the April 6th youth movement, three Brotherhood defectors and Wael Ghonim, a former Google executive who played a prominent role in the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak. Group members said they met several days ago, “to look into ways of leading Egypt out of the crisis and to warn against the threats of being dragged into a cycle of violence.”

And it notes that leaders of the secularist National Salvation Front were present at the meeting along with senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders. A comment is offered by the leader of the National Salvation Front, Mohamed ElBaradei expressing boilerplate optimism, before the story moves back into a discussion of the parlous political state of the country.

At this point we get some hint that something else may be going on:

In another display of high-level concern, the talks on Thursday were held under the chairmanship of the country’s leading Muslim scholar, Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb of Al Azhar mosque and university. After the meeting, he said that a national dialogue, “in which all the components of the Egyptian society participate without any exclusion” was “the only means to resolve any problems or disagreements.” He urged the participants to “commit to a peaceful competition for power” and to prohibit “all types of violence and coercion to achieve goals, demands and policies.”

And the story closes out with comments from a professor from Georgetown University who warns the situation is spiraling out of control. The problem with this story is that it downplays the role of Al-Azhar at the expense of the “young revolutionaries”, neglects to give details of the 10 point communique endorsed by the government and opposition, and omits the place of religious leaders in the negotiations.

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