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The calendar page at the website of the church formerly known as Mount Calvary Episcopal in Baltimore contains a number of items that should be of interest to reporters covering stories about believers who are now making their way into the Vatican’s newly created “personal ordinariate” for “Anglicans entering full communion with the Catholic Church.”
Flash back a few years and you may remember all of those big headlines about the controversial decision by Pope Benedict XVI to park Vatican tanks on the lawn of Canterbury Cathedral and, thus, begin an ecclesiastical invasion of England. Click here for a refresher course.
Another day, another mainstream news report on the Womenpriests movement that seems to have been written with the assumptions that (a) people are Roman Catholics if they say they are Roman Catholics (as opposed to being believers who are in sacramental Communion with the Church of Rome) and (b) that the Church or Rome is, or should be, operating on organizational principles that are much looser than, say, the Church of England.
If generic New York Times readers know anything at all about Anglican bishops in Africa, surely they know that most of them are quite conservative on matters of faith and practice. For example, they are opposed to homosexual activity of any kind — a position that is very common on a continent in which their growing churches often directly clash with conservative Islam.
It’s so easy to make mistakes on the religion beat, especially when covering someone as complicated as President Barack Obama.
Which is amazing if you stop and think about all of the important religious events and trends that made it into the headlines this week.
When I first read this profile of James McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey, I thought it was a pretty puffy piece. McGreevey, you’ll recall, resigned after a former aide accused him of sexual harassment. In one of the most exciting press conferences I can recall, McGreevey announced his resignation by saying “My truth is that I am a gay American.” Reporters live for this kind of stuff. I love a good sex scandal and I remember sitting in my newsroom with my mouth ajar, thinking “this will never be topped.” And then just five years later we had that press conference with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
Hang on, because this is going to be a strange post. It’s possible that this only makes sense to me, at the moment.
I grew up in the Central Valley of California, a few miles outside of a town of a thousand people. We lived across the street from the local church, though, and many of my childhood memories involve the church’s bell tower. For one thing, it rang shortly before services began each Sunday morning. That’s when the locals would know to head on over — on foot. And whenever a parishioner died, we’d toll the bell once for each year of their life. When we’d be out playing in the fields, we’d stop and count each clang.
