Catholicism

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Pope and imam dial back talks about Christian concerns, with assist from some journalists

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The leader of a billion-plus Catholics met with a leader of a billion-plus Muslims, and media gave it appropriately thorough coverage.

Except for one matter: persecution of Christians in Muslim lands.

Pope Francis himself was oddly timid on the point. But that doesn't mean mainstream media had to downplay it also -- especially when they cover plenty of such incidents.

Typical was the Associated Press report:

Pope Francis on Monday embraced the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the prestigious Sunni Muslim center of learning, reopening an important channel for Catholic-Muslim dialogue after a five-year lull and at a time of increased Islamic extremist attacks on Christians.
As Sheik Ahmed el-Tayyib arrived for his audience in the Apostolic Palace, Francis said that the fact that they were meeting at all was significant.
"The meeting is the message," Francis told the imam.

Following this press release-style lede, though, AP says the two leaders discussed "the plight of Christians 'in the context of conflicts and tensions in the Mideast and their protection,' the statement said." It adds that Al-Azhar broke off talks alks with the Vatican a decade ago, after Pope Benedict XVI quoted a Byzantine emperor saying that some Muhammad's teachings were "evil and inhuman."

The article also retells some bloody specifics:

Benedict had demanded greater protection for Christians in Egypt after a New Year's bombing on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria killed 21 people. Since then, Islamic attacks on Christians in the region have only increased, but the Vatican and Al-Azhar nevertheless sought to rekindle ties, with a Vatican delegation visiting Cairo in February and extending the invitation for el-Tayyib to visit.

But if any Mideastern Christian leaders had opinions on the meeting -- and it's hard to imagine they wouldn't -- AP wasn't interested.


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The Washington Post puts generic faith at the heart of a family's fight to save a child

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First things first: I have nothing but praise for the dramatic and very human story that unfolds in the recent Washington Post feature that ran under the headline, " ‘God is telling me not to let go’: A mother fights to keep her 2-year-old on life support."

This story focuses on agonizing choices and, in this age of soaring health-care costs, that means dealing with the viewpoints of medical-industry professionals as well as traumatized family members. Readers need to understand both points of view to grasp some of the core issues in this piece.

Also, the story doesn't hide the fact that religious faith is, for the parents of little Israel Stinson, at the heart of their fight to keep him alive. There is quite a bit of religious language in this piece, as there must be.

So what is missing? Well, if this family's faith is at the heart of their story, might readers want to know something about the details of that faith? Maybe even the name of this faith? Are they Baptists, Catholics, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses or what? Hold that thought.

Here is the overture for the story:

Two-year-old Israel Stinson was being treated for an asthma attack in an emergency room in Northern California last month when he started to shiver, his lips turning purple and his eyes rolling back in his head.
Over the next day, court records claim, Israel had a hard time breathing, went into cardiac arrest and seemingly slipped into a coma. Soon, his doctors declared him brain-dead and decided that he should be disconnected from the machine that kept his heart beating.
But his parents protested: Discontinuing medical treatment, they argued, would violate their son's right to a life -- and their hope that he might eventually have one.


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Theodicy in the White House race? Believers facing a choice that is more than political

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Theodicy in the White House race? Believers facing a choice that is more than political

The first time someone sent me the link to this obituary from The Richmond Times-Dispatch, I was sure that it had to be a fraud, perhaps something produced by those talented tricksters at The Onion.

Ah, but the URL did, indeed, take readers to the proper news website in Richmond.

Now, when you think something is a fraud one of the first things you do is head over to Snopes.com to see if that crew had rendered a verdict. Indeed, the Snopes team is flying a "True" flag. This citizen wanted to send a message to the world.

Thus, I mentioned this instantly viral obituary during this week's "Crossroads" podcast discussing the whole "lesser of two evils" conflict that many cultural and religious conservatives are experiencing during this election year. Click here to tune that in and we'll come back to my Universal "On Religion" column on that topic.

But here is the top of the obituary in question. When host Todd Wilken and I were discussing this on the air, I just couldn't get my self to use the woman's name. Why? Well, because the first couple of people I discussed this with -- face to face -- kind of turned pale and asked if suicide was involved. The answer is "no."

NOLAND, Mary Anne Alfriend. Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68.


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M.Z. asks: Why do some journalists avoid using the name of the 'Little Sisters of the Poor'?

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It happens. Every now and then, during my daily tsunami of reading mainstream news reports about religion, I look right at something and fail to see it.

Consider, for example, that rather important religion-news ghost in that New York Times story the other day about a certain non-decision decision by the U.S. Supreme Court about the Health and Human Services mandates linked to the Affordable Care Act. The headline on the story was this rather ho-hum statement: "Justices, Seeking Compromise, Return Contraception Case to Lower Courts."

Now, the Supreme Court is in Washington, so I focused most of my post on the Washington Post coverage of this religious-liberty case, which involves quite a few Christian ministries and schools (see this Bobby Ross, Jr., post for more). However, for a variety of reasons, public discussions of the case have boiled down to the Barack Obama administration vs. the Little Sisters of the Poor. In part, as illustrated in the photo at the top of the post, we can thank Pope Francis for that.

My post the other day focused on the fact that many journalists -- headline writers in particular -- seemed frustrated that this case keeps going on and on and on, with one complicated and nuanced development after another. As I put it, the desire of many editors is clear:

The goal is to write that final headline that Will. Make. This. Stuff. Go. Away.

Toward the end of the piece I turned, briefly, to the coverage in The New York Times. To make a long story short, I saw a few interesting details and missed The Big Idea in that report. You see, the college of journalism cardinals at the Times, and in some other newsrooms, found a way to write about this case without mentioning some rather important words, as in, "Little Sisters of the Poor."

Luckily for me, there are now -- more than 12 years into the life of this blog -- lots of people who know how to spot a GetReligion angle in the news. That includes, of course, one M.Z. "GetReligion emerita" Hemingway of The Federalist.


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#NEVERTRUMP religion hook 2.0: Washington Post ignores this 'holy ghost' once again

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Every now and the your GetReligionistas have online conversations about how to handle certain puzzling situations that keep coming up in our work.

Here is a thorny one: What should we do when (1) a newsroom produces a news story that misses a significant religion angle (that's called a "ghost" or even a "holy ghost" in GetReligion lingo), (2) GetReligion publishes a post on this topic and then (3) that newsroom or another, within a day or two, manages to crank out another story that misses the exact same religion-news ghost?

So do we write another post on the exact same angle? Do we, in effect, run the previous post all over again and say, "Hello!" Do we ignore the second case study even though it demonstrates, once again, the importance of this specific religion ghost? Do we write a second post that clearly mentions, and even quotes, the first post and updates the subject?

I have always voted for that final option, especially when we are dealing with a major news topic covered by an elite newsroom.

This brings me back to The Washington Post and its coverage of the rebel alliance of conservatives linked to the #NEVERTRUMP movement that continues to try to create another White House ticket to offer voters an alternative to Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton. That's the whole "lesser of two evils" puzzle.

Yes, I wrote about this topic roughly 48 hours ago. We will come back to that.

However, the Post team has produced another political-beat feature on this topic and, once again, it appears that the editors are unaware that evangelical Protestant and conservative Catholic voters play a major role in GOP politics and some coalitions.


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The Little Sisters of the Poor are happy; headline writers (Cue: audible sigh) are not

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If there is anything in the world that, in my experience, mainstream news editors hate it's when stories that they are not all that interested in go on and on and on and on without a clear resolution. Like it or not, many of these stories have to do with religion.

If there is anything in the world that, in my experience, mainstream news editors hate it's when stories that they are not all that interested in go on and on and on and on without a clear resolution. Like it or not, many of these stories have to do with religion.

Right now, in newsrooms across this complex land of ours, there are editors saying: "What? The United Methodists STILL haven't made up their *%^#*)@ minds on ordaining gay people?" (Cue: audible sigh.) 

I used to call the news desk from national church conventions -- left and right -- in the 1980s and editors would say, "Look, I don't have time for all those details. Just tell me who won."

The goal is to write that final headline that Will. Make. This. Stuff. Go. Away.

This brings me, of course, to the Little Sisters of the Poor and the ongoing efforts by the White House to draw a bright line -- in this case a line made of condoms and birth-control pills -- between freedom of worship (think religious sanctuaries) and the free exercise of religion beliefs (think doctrinally defined charities, parachurch groups and schools). 

You can just sense the frustration at The Washington Post as the U.S. Supreme Court pointedly refused to issue a ruling for or against the religious ministries and schools that have been fighting, fighting and fighting against the Health and Human Services mandates requiring them to cooperate in slipping contraceptives and other Sexual Revolution services into their health insurance plans. 

You want excitement in a headline? Well, this isn't it: "Supreme Court sends Obamacare contraception case back to lower courts."


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Hey Washington Post czars: Evangelicals and Catholics are irrelevant in #NeverTrump camp?

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It you have followed Republican politics over the past quarter century or so, you know that GOP White House wins have often been linked to what researchers have called the "pew gap," especially when there are high election-day vote totals among white evangelicals and devout Catholics.

That "pew gap" phenomenon can be stated as follows: The more non-African-Americans voters attend worship services, the more likely they are to vote for culturally conservative candidates -- almost always Republicans.

As I have stated before, it's hard to find a better illustration of this principle than the overture of the 2003 Atlantic Monthly essay called "Blue Movie." This piece focused on a campaign by Bill, not Hillary Rodham, Clinton, but it remains relevant. This passage is long, but remains essential -- especially in light of the very strange Washington Post piece about the remnants of the #NeverTrump movement that is the subject of this post. The Atlantic stated:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.
Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) 


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Deaconesses or female deacons? Journalists do you know the history of these terms?

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Once again, it is time to play that popular news-media game, "What did Pope Francis say and what might it mean?" The goal is to fit a bite or two of church history into the rapid-fire and breathless responses of journalists in some elite newsrooms, where a papal call for clarification on female deacons is being hailed as a possible door to the ordination of women as priests. 

Let's start with some basics: The word used in Romans 16:1 to describe the woman named Phoebe is diakonos -- which some have translated as "servant," while others use "deacon. In the New International Version, that would be:

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae.

In the classic King James Version, that reads: 

I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea.

Scan through this Bible Hub search and you'll see a variety of translations that go each way. But we can start our discussion with an acknowledgement that the early church did include some kind of role for women known as "deaconesses." 

Now, we also need to recognize that in the modern world, a rapidly rising number of Catholic parishes and ministries are featuring the ministry of men ordained as "permanent deacons," as opposed to deacons who will soon transition into the priesthood. This is a very newsworthy trend.

So, when you clicked on your news source of choice (or perhaps even opened a newspaper) today, did the story you read contain some material resembling the following from the report in Crux?

Currently, canon 1024 of the Code of Canon Law says that only a baptized male can receive the sacrament of ordination, so the law does not presently permit female deacons. The question, however, especially in light of the Biblical evidence for women being referred to as “deaconesses” in early Christianity, is whether that law could be changed.


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Strange 'story' for strange times: Fox 29 in Philly decides to follow a priest around ...

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It's time to look at a very, very strange "news" story. If it's a "news" story, which is the whole point.

In a way, it's fitting to start my day with a strange story in light of all the strangeness that your GetReligionistas went through yesterday, when we were caught up in what appears to have been a crashed server at one of the nation's major internet-services companies. These things happen. But, to paraphrase Steph Curry, we are back.

If you have lived in a major metropolitan area, one in which the competition between local TV-news operations is rather intense, then you know that some very strange "news" stories can end up on the air (and even in special promotions).

Well, is it "sweeps month" in Philadelphia at the moment? Here is why I ask:

CAMDEN, N.J. -- The Diocese of Camden has opened an investigation of one its priests after FOX 29 Investigates raised questions about his actions.
The probe has been under way for nearly three weeks. How did this story get started? Investigative Reporter Jeff Cole explains that a parishioner of his former church urged us to take a look at where Father Joel Arciga-Camarillo spends his time away from the church. Here's what we saw.

The soap-opera-esque commentary continues:

It's just past 2 p.m. on Wednesday, April 13, and we're keeping an eye on a light-green, four-door Volkswagen tucked behind this multistory, bright-yellow home in Camden.
We sit and watch for about an hour and see a man in a T-shirt and ball cap emerge from the back of a van with a female driver and small children, some in Catholic school uniforms. They go in the home.


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