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Anyone who follows the Catholic blogosphere knows that there was a major explosion last week sparked by some controversial — to say the least — remarks by Father Benedict Groeschel, a figure who has been much revered among conservative Catholics as an author, spiritual director, television personality and pastoral counseling professor at St. Josephâs Seminary in Yonkers.
First things first: The Indianapolis Star team deserves quite a bit of credit for the quick news feature it produced the other day about the death of Andrew Moore, a Thomas Aquinas College student who was killed while walking from coast to coast during a prayer marathon in opposition to abortion.
So what’s up with the Associated Press, all of a sudden? It used to be rare to read an AP report that totally needed an “analysis” label, but now it seems that these stories pop up all of the time.
Time for a brief trip into tmatt’s massive folder of GetReligion guilt, that niche in which I stash mainstream news stories — good and bad — that catch my attention but then get trampled in the rush to react to bigger stories. This time around, I think that this particular story deserves late attention, not because it is of massive importance, but because it represents another example of the struggle at The Baltimore Sun to recognize that the Roman Catholic Church is a big, complicated institution and that it is often important to talk to a variety of Catholics to find out what is going on.
As regular GetReligion readers will know, I have — for quite some time now — curious about what the word “Islamist” means when it is used in mainstream news coverage of the Islam, either in lands that are majority Muslim or those that are not. In other words, does “Islamist” mean one thing in Cairo and another thing in Detroit?
You may need to sit down. It’s time for GetReligion to offer a positive (for the most part) take on a New York Times report about Catholicism and, in particular, the troubled Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Up front, I sort of feel the need to apologize for posting on what is essentially the same topic that the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway covered earlier today.
Truth be told, for several days now I have been trying to find ways to avoid writing about the whole nun-wars story.
From time to time, your GetReligionistas have joined with the general public in moaning about the degree to which mainstream journalists are obsessed with matters of political “process” and that whole “inside baseball” school of news coverage in which reporters pounce on tiny changes in process or personnel as alleged evidence of earthquakes in national or world affairs.
