One of the major religion events of this past weekend, obviously, was the Vatican rite at which Pope Benedict XVI created 22 new cardinals, including two from the United States.
In terms of standard-issue news on the big-city religion beat, having your city’s archbishop join the college of cardinals is a mucho big deal. At the very least, it’s the kind of thing that requires the writing of a full-career feature story about the man, with a heavy emphasis on the work that he did to earn this nod from the Vatican.
The other day, I noted that then Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York City held his own when The New York Times served up its pre-red-hat feature. That fine story offered a combination of attributed material from a number of different sources — including radio broadcasts, public sermons and interviews.
The other U.S. archbishop-turned-cardinal was Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien of Baltimore, who currently is in a transition between his work in the nation’s oldest Catholic archdiocese and a global-level slot in the Vatican hierarchy. This means, of course, a major story in The Baltimore Sun. The result was utterly and totally predictable, other than one or two glaring oddities. Here is the top of the feature:
Even as he prepared in Rome for the weekend ceremony that will elevate him to cardinal, Baltimore Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien vigorously lobbied for political issues important to the Roman Catholic Church — a hallmark of his five-year stint here.
The vocal 72-year-old O’Brien — who has been the spiritual leader of Catholics in Baltimore and nine surrounding counties — has sparred with the likes of President Barack Obama and top Maryland lawmakers. He didn’t always succeed, but he pressed on, as he has on a number of highly charged issues.
Last month, O’Brien decried a proposed federal regulation from the Obama administration that would have required Catholic hospitals and universities, among other institutions, to provide employee health insurance that covered contraception.
In recent days, the O’Brien went head-to-head with Gov. Martin O’Malley, a fellow Catholic, over the elected leader’s support for legalizing same-sex marriage. O’Brien called several state lawmakers from Rome, urging them to oppose the measure, in the hours before a crucial Friday night vote moved the measure closer to becoming law. And in one of his most criticized moves locally, O’Brien made the budget-minded decision to close 13 Catholic schools in the spring of 2010, frustrating students and parents.
Now, here is your assignment: Name a major American city in which each of these points — to one degree or another — would not apply to the work of a Pope Benedict XVI-era prelate.
As this standard-duty article rolls on, it becomes pretty clear that the Sun team faced a major problem. The bottom line: A key voice is missing from this feature. Whose?
Pope Benedict XVI could name his successor in Baltimore as early as March, O’Brien said last month. He has been traveling between Rome and Baltimore, working two jobs since August, and did not respond to interview requests for this article.
Ouch. Frankly, that is amazing. I may be wrong, but this gap has to say something about the archbishop’s attitude toward the Sun, a newspaper that never uses a fly swatter when a baseball bat will do when it comes time to cooperate with and-or to promote the views of local Catholic dissidents. O’Brien is no arch conservative, but to this newspaper he is, clearly, a fundamentalist.
Still, O’Brien preaches sermons all the time that could have been quoted in this story. He writes, too. While he declined to be interviewed, it would have been easy to find ways to feature his voice as a balancing element in this all politics, all the time report. It’s even possible that there are religious, faith-based themes in his work that could have been included. Then again, apparently not.
The Sun team did manage to reach out to a global-level expert — who promptly pointed them in the right direction (should the editors be interested in knowing more about why Rome honored this man). They turned to Rocco Palmo of Whispers Inside The Loggia. And what did he have to say?
Palmo, who has sources in the Holy See and broke the news of O’Brien’s new appointment, said the O’Brien’s strong leadership style likely contributed to his elevation and transfer to Rome, where he is expected to take on additional assignments for the pope.
“O’Brien’s always been given sensitive assignments by the Vatican,” Palmo said, pointing to O’Brien’s role as the head of an in-depth study into all U.S. seminaries, to root out the potential origins of child abuse by Catholic clergy.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if O’Brien were called in as a troubleshooter for the Vatican, in addition to his day job,” Palmo said.
Ah, the study of the seminaries. That would be a key starting point, since it is hard to have Catholic churches without priests.
It is at this point that the Sun, once again, looks away from a major story that has been sitting in its own backyard for several decades. You see, Baltimore happens to be the home of one of North America’s most famous, or infamous, seminaries and one of the first things that O’Brien — the former leader of America’s Catholic military archdiocese — did when he came to town was attempt to change the culture a bit at St. Mary’s Seminary. All you have to do to learn more about that situation is type “Baltimore,” “seminary” and “Pink Palace” into a search engine.
Palmo did his best to underline the obvious, but it was not enough.
Basically, this Sun news feature centered on the elements of O’Brien’s tenure in Baltimore that the newspaper had, in the past, deigned to cover. One can ask (I just did) whether the actual O’Brien was missing from that earlier coverage, just as he was — by his own choice — missing from this pre-red-hat feature.
PHOTO: Cardinal Edwin O’Brien (left) and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, rocking the red.
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Comments (16) |
February 20, 2012, at 3:32 pm
“Vatican rite” ? You mean the rite followed during the public consistory for the creation of new cardinals. There are no “Vatican” rites.
“Vatican hierarchy” ? You mean the order of seniority within the Roman Curia. “Hierarchy” in the Catholic Church refers to the three orders of deacon-priest-bishop.
MSM are by-and-large guilty of using “Vatican” as a cover-all when writing of the internal structure of the Catholic Church. Don’t let GR drift in that direction, tmatt.
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February 20, 2012, at 3:58 pm
The rite held at the Vatican.
Journalists tend to use fewer words than normal people.
OK, “global-level slot at the Vatican.”
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February 20, 2012, at 4:41 pm
C’mon tmatt. First of all, try to be a bit more candid and gracious about accepting criticism. Don’t be a grouch here, please.
And good journalism is not about sacrificing accuracy for speed.
The rite held at the Vatican? That’s way too vague. It was held in St Peter’s Basilica. But you knew that, didn’t you?
And the offices of the various components of the Roman Curia are not confined to the Vatican City.
And then there is what you wrote in para 2:-
Cardinals are personally appointed by the Pope. So what’s this “Vatican” business again?
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February 20, 2012, at 5:26 pm
I wonder why the scandal Dolan presided over in Milwaukee isn’t mentioned at all? Talk about a ghost!
Hot debate. What do you think?
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February 20, 2012, at 5:31 pm
What’s so stunning?
Covering religion shouldn’t need some alternate pair of tinted glasses.
The Sun’s story is pretty straight forward journalism - accurate without distortion. Just because it doesn’t emphasize that the new cardinal has been lobbying on behalf of a foreign, theocratic country, like much of the anti-Catholic agenda wants addressed, doesn’t mean there is anything stunning in its omission. There is not a standard that journalism about covering religion that requires any contortions or a different st of facts, but that seems like that’s what some are asking for.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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February 20, 2012, at 5:50 pm
“Earn” a “nod from the Vatican”? A hat for the archbishop of a major metropolis is quasi-automatic, and would require an excuse for not doing it. When Montini, as Archbishop of Milan, was NOT made a cardinal, it was considered a snub.
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February 20, 2012, at 6:29 pm
Actually every American bishop heading a diocese has condemned the president’s HHS regulations, so Cardinal O’Brienis not outstanding in that regard.
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February 20, 2012, at 6:31 pm
That anti-gay site linked to in this post is kind of… anti-Christian. It certainly lacks a certain measure of credibility, and not because it wasn’t picked up by the MSM. It defies the Catholic Catechism, it’s not sourced, and it just reflects a nasty mindset. What is it doing here?
Oh, wait. I know.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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February 20, 2012, at 8:18 pm
I looked for “the anti-gay site linked”. The links are to the Sun, Google, GetReligion itself, and Whispers from the Loggia, so I must assume the last is the “anti-gay site”. Are you telling us that this blog is solely “anti-gay”? Is every identifiably Catholic blog ipso facto “an anti-gay site”?
To paraphrase someone or other, why don’t you just admite you are biased?
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February 20, 2012, at 8:29 pm
Or are you trying to be funny by telling us that Google is “anti-gay” when it returns results you dislike?
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February 20, 2012, at 10:54 pm
“All you have to do to learn more about that situation is type “Baltimore,” “seminary” and “Pink Palace”into a search engine.”
I followed the above suggestion and got links to some very old stories, generally pre-2000 or, if newer, referring in the body of the article to old stories and Michael Rose’s book “Good-bye Good Men” which was published in 2002.
What is the evidence that St. Mary’s of Baltimore still deserves that reputation? My presumption is that due to the recent scandals the situation has been substantially cleaned up. Do you know anything to the contrary?
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February 21, 2012, at 12:02 am
Some folks here are missing tmatt’s point. Roger, the Sun completely missed talking with or quoting anything from Cardinal O’Brien, hence the title of the post, “Stunning gap in Sun story on new cardinal”. That’s rather a major faux pas.
Lee Gilbert, tmatt was making the point that the former “Pink Palace” has been changed under Cardinal O’Brien, which is something the Sun could have covered but did not, for some (un)known reason.
And William, there was no need to mention anything about “the scandal Dolan presided over in Milwaukee,” for two reasons: 1) The Sun’s story was about O’Brien, not Dolan; and 2) there was no scandal over which Dolan presided in Milwaukee. That scandal belonged to his predecessor there, Rembert Weakland. Dolan’s job was to begin house cleaning, which he did.
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February 21, 2012, at 9:21 am
A network evening news show was on in my livingroom Sunday with the sound turned off, when we noticed a story on the new cardinals. I do’nt know which network. Anyway, we turned the sound on just in time to hear the reporter say that the Church is “mired in scandal and considered by many to be behind the times,” but the new cardinals represent hope for the future. Gee, they whipped that one out of the bottom drawer.
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February 22, 2012, at 10:03 am
Will: The cardinal’s hat to O’Brien was not a given. There has been strong speculation that it would move to a southern see, given the decline in Catholic population in the northeast and the growth in the south. St. Louis was long a cardinalatial see, but no more. There is also talk that Detroit or Philadelphia may cease to be so.
I agree that this story is terribly trite and lacks history. One of the most important things to say about O’Brien is that he’s a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of guy. He was thought of as a true military hawk because of his background, yet took the lead in renewing the bishops’ call for nuclear disarmament. In that sense, it makes him an heir to Cardinal Bernardin.
He was also far ahead of the curve in taking action regarding one of the worst of the global sex abuse scandals. Back when the Legionaries of Christ were still very much in the good graces of powerful people in Rome, he spoke out very publicly against a number of their practices. It was a move that took courage at the time.
I don’t see any of that here.
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February 22, 2012, at 6:15 pm
RE: Responses to #’s 1, 2 and 3. Actually, one of the first rules of good journalism is to use the fewest words possible to make a point. Liberties may be taken as long as the truth is not altered. The only exception seems to be the term “partial-birth abortion”. For some reason the liberal media makes allowances to replace the three word term with seven (7) words — “a certain type of late term abortion”. Maybe the fewer words were a little too graphic. “Rite” renders easily to “ceremony” especially for the understanding of non-Catholics. Responses #1 and #3 are really trite.
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February 23, 2012, at 1:27 am
Trite, JMJ2in1? Maybe you meant my point (it’s one point, about careless use of the term “Vatican”) is picky? “Trite” means it’s old hat (in other words, something everyone knows already).
tmatt himself said this in response to a comment on one of his posts (about Newt Gingrich):-
I happen to take that seriously.
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