And now, a word from Richard N. Ostling, one of the most celebrated religion-beat writers of the late 20th century.
Let us attend.
When the former Time and Associated Press veteran talks about gaffes on the religion beat, he often begins with a simple, yet common, example. Here is a brief discussion of that issue, taken from a Scripps Howard News Service column that I wrote (drawn from my chapter in the book “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion):
… Mistakes are mistakes and it isn’t good for readers to keep seeing stories that, week after week, cause them to mutter, “Wait a minute. That’s just wrong.” Here’s a prime example, a mistake Ostling keeps seeing in reports about the declining number of ordinations to the Catholic priesthood. This mistake often shows up in news coverage of mandatory celibacy for priests or the scandals caused by clergy sexual abuse.
Journalists often report that Rome does not ordain married men.
“Now it would be accurate,” said Ostling, “to say that the overwhelming majority of men ordained as Catholic priests are not married. It would even be accurate to say that ‘almost all’ priests are not married. But what about Eastern Rite Catholicism, where you have married priests? Then there are the married men who have been ordained in the Anglican Rite, who used to be Episcopal priests. You have a few Lutherans, too.”
Now, this is probably not a “media bias” issue. When talking about this kind of error, we are probably not dealing with a question of “objectivity,” “fairness” or “balance.”
We are talking about a simple question of accuracy. Mistakes are bad. Correct?
So what does this particular error look like when you encounter it in its natural habitat? Consider the opening of the following Christian Science Monitor report on, yes, the clergy-abuse crisis and, yes, the claims that the dominant tradition of a celibate priesthood in the Catholic West might be part of the problem.
Vatican No. 2 Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone made headlines … when he appeared to ease the church’s absolute position on celibacy, telling Spanish radio the centuries-old rule is not an “untouchable” one. The prelate’s comment was part of a Vatican affirmation of celibacy and a strong view that there is “no direct link between celibacy and the deviant behavior of certain priests,” as Cardinal Bertone put it.
But even opening the door slightly on such a deeply cherished practice is a concession to persistent questions tied to revelations of child sexual abuse in the United States, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Kenya, and Austria that has put the church in crisis, analysts say. From the start of the Catholic priest child abuse scandal, Vatican officials have pointedly sought to play down the role that mandatory celibacy may or may not play in the abuse and cover up surfacing this spring.
OK, let’s set aside that strange “Vatican No. 2 Cardinal” reference, which is most strange. Is there a scorecard somewhere containing these rankings?
This passage contains yet another reference to the Catholic church having an “absolute position on celibacy,” which is simply not accurate. Even the reference to “mandatory celibacy” needs to be linked — a tiny link is all that we need — to this tradition’s dominant, but not exclusive, role in the Catholic West.
As Ostling said, celibacy is clearly normative. But it is not an “absolute” doctrine in the churches that are in union with the Church of Rome. Period. That is an inaccurate statement. That’s bad and, in a few passages, the ripples from that error touch other parts of this story.
Come on, people. Read some church history. Get it right.
Photo: A married Catholic priest, a former Anglican, and his family.
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Comments (18) |
May 1, 2010, at 12:24 am
Part of the problem is the moniker Roman Catholic being equated with only Latin or Western Rite Catholics.
Eastern Catholics are also in communion with the Bishop of Rome.
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May 1, 2010, at 2:02 am
Add ignorance to lack of time to learn and lack of desire to learn and voila - we have this result in too many cases.
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May 1, 2010, at 3:14 am
Mistakes are bad but unintentionally one of the mistaken sentence is probably right when take at face value.
That’s probably true but how many man does Rome actually ordain?
Last time I checked, priests are ordained by their local bishops - sure, there are some ordinations in the diocesis of Rome too but you get my point.
File that next to “Vatican No. 2”.
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May 1, 2010, at 4:55 am
I think this is a great example of why the fact that there are married Catholic Priests matters. It helps clear up misunderstandings about Catholic teaching that many writers have. (I don’t think it needs to be mentioned every time celibacy is mentioned, since it is pretty rare in the Latin Rite: in my time of parish hopping I’ve only encountered one married priest, and he’s the one in the picture you tagged.
I have no idea what the actual number is, though.) As things stand now, you just know that if Rome did make celibacy optional in the West, the press would be suddenly flooded with stories about how Rome changed a core dogma and has in effect surrendered belief in Papal Infallibility.
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May 1, 2010, at 6:52 am
MichaelV:
Please explain to readers that this has NOTHING to do with papal infallibility. It also isn’t the result of dogma or even, correct me if I am wrong, DOCTRINE in the strict definition of that word.
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May 1, 2010, at 7:36 am
Exactly - and thanks for making that clear if I left it ambiguous! Celibacy is a discipline practiced in the west, maybe for good reasons, but nobody claims it’s something that God requires of the Church.
It’s frustratingly common to see the issue of clerical celibacy lumped in with things that are matters of doctrine. And there are those who misunderstand papal infallibility to apply to apply to every word he speaks about any topic whatsoever; as though Catholics believe the pope could walk into 7/11 and select a winning lottery ticket whenever he wanted.
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May 1, 2010, at 12:04 pm
The story I’m waiting to read is what happens when married priests have problems: an affair, a divorce, kids in trouble, and so on.
Since we now know that Catholic priests are not more likely to offend sexually than other men (Newsweek), to relate the matter to celibacy (even as tendentiously as the CSM did) is simply wrong - incorrect.
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May 1, 2010, at 1:36 pm
I think that “Vatican No. 2 Cardinal” label attempts to refer to Cardinal Bertone as the #2 guy at the Vatican, after the Pope, not the second-ranked cardinal. (Maybe a comma or two is missing?) Bertone is Cardinal Secretary of State and Camerlengo after all. And since Rocco over at “Whispers in the Loggia” regularly refers to the Cardinal as the “Vice-Pope,” who can argue with that?
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May 1, 2010, at 2:13 pm
How about paying attention to the huge numbers of ordained clergy in the Latin Church who are married and who are being given more and more responsibility and who, more and more, are being used full-time including in higher level Church positions. ( One typical example: In our archdiocese the Church’s cemeteries had always been under the supervision of a priest. But a while back a deacon was put in charge).
One gets rather tired of constantly seeing in the media that the Latin Catholic Church only has only a celibate clergy and that it is normative for ALL Latin clergy—except convert priests.
I was ordained to the Catholic clergy as a deacon by Cardinal Medeiros in 1980 and have a wife, 4 children, 7 grandchildren (and more on the way). In fact, my wife was nearing the end of a pregnancy the day I was ordained (We joked about the cathedral ceiling collapsing on us).
In a recent history book of the early Church I read (about the 4th and 5th Century Church) deacons and priests were virtually co-equal (with different functions but deacons appeared as important as priests in Church councils) under the supervision of a bishop. In fact, many deacons jumped from being deacons to being elected pope. One of the most famous was Pope St. Gregory the Great.
It could be that the Holy Spirit is leading the Church into another such era so, hopefully, at some point Big Media will catch on.
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May 1, 2010, at 9:08 pm
@tmatt:
Yes, the issue of celibacy has always been described to me as a matter of discipline, not doctrine (let alone dogma).
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May 2, 2010, at 3:47 am
But Tmatt, you should not fall into the exactly mirroring mistake by saying “Celibacy is a discipline practiced in the west”, when it is only predominantly practiced in the west but also (to a much lower extent) in eastern churches.
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May 2, 2010, at 3:49 am
I meant, Michael V.
You should not fall into the exactly mirroring mistake by saying “Celibacy is a discipline practiced in the west”, when it is only predominantly practiced in the west but also (to a much lower extent) in eastern churches.
Disregard or delete my earlier posting.
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May 2, 2010, at 3:51 am
Will B,
Cardinal Bertone might be no. 2 in the vatican city state but he is certainly not something like “vice-pope” - people use that term are very seriously wrong and need to be argued with. There is no such thing as a vice-pope and Cardinal Bertone is pretty much down in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (which is not the same as the Roman Church), let alone the Vatican City State.
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May 2, 2010, at 9:00 am
Eastern rite Catholics number about 2% world wide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Catholic_Churches#cite_note-25) and Anglicans are much smaller (10,000 in the US), Lutherans in communion smaller still, compared to over 1 billion in the Latin rite. The insignificance of the exception to the celibacy rule is of journalistic importance here.
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May 2, 2010, at 10:14 am
Jay - the significance lies in the difference between discipline and doctrine, not the numbers.
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May 2, 2010, at 3:23 pm
No, numbers are important too.
I agree with Jay that the vast majority do have celibacy but the important thing is: if NOT ALL have it, no matter how minute the numbers are, NOT ALL have it.
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May 2, 2010, at 9:09 pm
JAY:
No, you are wrong. Totally. There is no journalistic argument in favor of inaccuracy.
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May 21, 2010, at 10:13 pm
Deacon John’s comments were much enlightening.
I have to admit I have little sense of the role and function of Deacons in the Catholic Church. I am pretty sure I remember reading that one of the Vatican II reforms was allowing married Deacons.
Two questions, are deacons paid, and what duties can they perform that lay people can not?
I guess this points out a larger problem, in the non-Catholic world it is assumed Catholic clergy=priests.
The extreme of this was when comments about one of the married Gentlemen-in-waiting to the Pope being involved in a male-prostitution ring turned into attacks by commentors about this being a negative result of celibacy. I guess expecting people to read an article is a bit much, but the pathological hatred of celibacy is widepsread.
I guess this leads to two other inquiries. First would be why there is such a pathological hatred of celibacy. Second, why are acknolegments of married Catholic clergy so rare. Thirdly, why the cases of abuse by Catholic deacons get virtually no press, which may well also explain why abuse by clergy in other traditions gets less attention.
However ascribing all this to anti-Catholism is a bit simplistic. In my view when SNAP opens its mouth in commenting on abuse issues in other Churches it normally does so in ways that just make it look stupid. It has to be a Church that really views clergy as distinct and special for SNAPs blatherings to almost make sense. In a Church where virtually all adult males hold the priesthood, in one where there are “music ministers” and “children’s ministers”, or in one that fully believes there is a “priesthood of all believers” the SNAP doctrine of authority being used to repress is senseless. Yet applying it to Catholicism alone, is a case of punishing a psecific religious practice.
This is another gripe I have with media treatment of this matter. As is so often the case when the call is “save the children”, people do not seem to worry that in saving the children they may be accused themselves. It happened during the recovered memory syndrome and day care accusation frenzy of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there have almost certainly been more false claims of clergy abuse than we know of. This is especially likely since some of the accused died before 1970, which means that the accuser is almost the only person left who knew the accused.
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