Catholicism

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Mainstream press misses backstory of why Francis has (for now) vetoed married clergy

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Pope Francis — a week after the dust settled from his decision not to create an Amazonian rite that would have allowed married men to serve as priests and women as deacons — continues to garner news coverage as Catholic progressives and traditionalists debate what it all means.

The mainstream press, often too concerned with propping up Francis’ progressive bona fides, has largely not reported on why the pope decided to go the way he did. The factors that resulted in the pope’s decision came from a variety of camps inside the church. And what about this question: Did conservatives in the Vatican hierarchy, led by Cardinal Robert Sarah (helped by the recent intervention of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), raise enough concerns to tip the decision in their favor?

The Amazonian rite, however, was never only just about South America. The pope’s decision could have had global ramifications. The tug-of-war mostly involves German bishops pushing the pope to allow all clergy to marry (along with other changes in discipline and doctrine), while on the other is conservative prelates warning against doing away with the 1,000-year church tradition.

Once again, much of the backstory behind Francis’ decision can be learned from reading the religious press, both Catholics on the doctrinal left and right.

The mainstream press largely missed these angles, meaning readers had to delve really deep into internet news sources (with help from social media) to get analysis of how Francis reached his decision and whether the issue of married clergy/women deacons will rage on.

In the end, much to the chagrin of the mainstream press, Francis decided in favor of Catholic orthodoxy and tradition. What the mainstream press saw, but failed to report, was the Francis defies typical contemporary political categories.


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Concerning married Catholic priests: Do reporters know they are common in parts of the world?

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For years — unto ages of ages, amen — I have hit the same roadblock when reading mainstream news stories about the Catholic church and mandatory celibacy for priests. You know: We’re talking about statements that the Catholic church does not allow the ordination of married men to the priesthood.

It’s a classic, “Close, but no cigar” situation. The problem is that it is mostly true, but the statement simply is not accurate. Thus, news organizations should not publish or broadcast this kind of statement.

It is accurate to say that MOST Catholic priests are not married. It’s even better to say that MOST priests in Catholicism’s LATIN Rite are required to be celibate. You see, even in the Latin Rite there are some former Episcopal priests and a few Lutheran pastors who were allowed to make the transition to the Catholic priesthood — after they were married.

However, in terms of statistics, the main thing that reporters need to know is that married priests are the norm in the Eastern Rite bodies that are in communion with the Vatican. These churches exist in North America, but they are at the heart of Catholic life in the Middle East. Many readers, and apparently quite a few editors, get confused and assume that these churches are part of ancient Eastern Orthodox Christianity (where married priests are the norm, as well).

Every now and then, a news hook comes along that encourages journalists to remember that there are lots and lots married priests in the Christian East. That leads to helpful stories such as this think piece in The Washington Post: “Pope Francis won’t allow married priests in the Amazon. But in this part of the world, married priests are the norm.” Here is the rather standard-form overture:

ROME — After one-and-a-half years of feeling their bond deepen, after coffee meetups and French study sessions, Oleh Kindiy leaned in close to his girlfriend in a mostly quiet chapel and offered her a ring. She said yes. But asking for marriage was just his first question.


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Is Europe 'Christian'? That depends on how, and when, someone asks that question

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Is Europe 'Christian'? That depends on how, and when, someone asks that question

THE QUESTION:

Is Europe Christian?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The intriguing question above is the title of a brief new book (from Oxford University Press) by prominent French social analyst Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and critic of political Islam.

To Roy, the correct answer is that it all depends on what you mean by “Christian.”

The Religion Guy agrees. If the answer is no, that’s an epochal change. The continent has served as the faith’s heartland through much of history, symbolized by Catholicism’s headquarters in Rome and the World Council of Churches offices in Geneva, though thriving churches in the Global South are now taking the numerical lead.

Across the continent, the Christian heritage involves some cultural and moral influences, nostalgia, folkways, and a residuum of respect. But actual belief, practice, and church participation are weakening steadily. Is Shrove Tuesday February 25 merely about pancake recipes, or Christmas a season of street markets and consumer excess? Pope Benedict XVI and allies could not even win acknowledgment of the continent’s past Christian roots in the European Union’s constitution of 2004.

The Pew Research Center tells us Europe is the only sector of the world where the population labeled Christian in whatever way is shrinking by demography as deaths steadily outnumber births, resulting in a net loss of 5.6 million in just the years 2010 to 2015.

Before turning to Roy’s argument, let’s scan relevant data from Pew’s 2018 report on telephone interviews with 24,599 randomly selected adults conducted in 12 languages in 15 nations of Western Europe (post-Soviet Eastern Europe was not surveyed).

It’s striking that only 27 percent of West Europeans “believe in God as described in the Bible” any longer.


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From Ryan Burge and Co. -- Has that rising 'religiously unaffiliated' tide started to slow?

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Here is a headline that I was not expecting from Ryan Burge and his colleagues at the Religion in Public weblog: “The Decline of Religion May Be Slowing.”

Argue with this crew all that you want. But what we have here is another snapshot of poll numbers that demonstrates why Religion in Public is a website that religion-beat professionals and their editors really need to have bookmarked. When in doubt, just follow GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge on Twitter.

In this case, Yonat Shimron of Religion News Service spotted this story pronto. We will come back to that report in a minute. But first, here is the top of the crucial Religion in Public post, written by Paul A. Djupe and Burge:

In a companion piece published … on Religion in Public, Melissa Deckman of Washington College finds that the probability of being a religious none in Gen Z (born after 1995) is the same as for Millenials (born between 1981-1994). This bombshell finding sent us running for other datasets. Like all good scientists, we trust, but verify. …

It is conventional wisdom at this point that the incidence of religious nones is on a steady rise after 1994. Driven by a mix of politics, scandal, and weak parental religious socialization, non-affiliates have risen from about 5 percent to 30 percent. That trend appears to be accelerating by generation, so the rate of being a religious none is much greater among Millennials than it is among Greatest, Silent, and Baby Boomer generations as the figure below shows using the General Social Survey time series. Those older generations are still experiencing some secularization (the rates are rising across time), but not nearly as rapidly as the young. From this evidence, we expected that the rate of being a none among Gen Z might be even higher, leading to a bump above Millennials. The initial, small sample estimate from the General Social Survey, however, suggests that Gen Z is not outpacing Millenials and may have even fallen behind.

The assumption for some media-beat pros, including me, has been that the percentage of actively involved religious believers would remain fairly steady — somewhere around the 20-22% numbers that appear in Gallup Organization work for several decades.

However, it seemed like the “nones” were going to keep growing by feeding on the vast, mushy, sort-of-religious middle of the American marketplace.


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Pope Francis attempts to mend some doctrinal divisions by rejecting Amazonian Rite

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How progressive is Pope Francis? Not as much as many may think.

In a surprise move, Francis rejected a proposal that had called for married men in remote areas of the Amazon to marry, a decision widely seen as a victory for conservative Catholics who feared such an exception would eventually lift the celibacy requirement of priests around the world.

The pope, the first ever from Latin America, also rejected a proposal that would have allowed women to serve as deacons, an even more momentous change within the church’s traditionally male hierarchy. Press reports consistently failed to note that female deacons in altar ministry would have had a bigger impact on Catholic doctrine than ordaining married men.

The pope’s rejection of an Amazonian rite came three months after bishops at the controversial Pan-Amazonian Synod had made several recommendations to the pontiff. The big change would have included allowing community elders to perform Mass and other duties of ordained celibate Catholic clergy in order to deal with the shortage of Roman Catholic priests in South America.

In Francis, progressives have (or thought they had) their man — someone who says he’s unafraid to tinker with church tradition. This passage, high in the New York Times coverage, sums up their disappointment in this decision:

The pope’s supporters had hoped for revolutionary change. The decision, coming seven years into his papacy, raised the question of whether Francis’ promotion of discussing once-taboo issues is resulting in a pontificate that is largely talk. His closest advisers have already acknowledged that the pope’s impact has waned on the global stage, especially on core issues like immigration and the environment. …

The pope’s refusal to allow married priests was likely to delight conservatives, many of whom have come to see Francis and his emphasis on a more pastoral and inclusive church as a grave threat to the rules, orthodoxy and traditions of the faith.

The papacy of Francis has frequently drawn the ire of conservative Catholics, many of them living in the United States and parts of Europe — so they were anxiously awaiting this statement from Rome. After all, the Pan-Amazonian synod, a three-week meeting at the Vatican, was fraught with controversy.


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Podcast: Do Catholic dissenters have a constitutional right to Holy Communion?

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They are among the most famous words in journalism, combining to form a phrase that — back in the old wire-service days — defined the craft of hard-news reporting and writing.

All together now: These words are “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why” and “how.”

That’s the old approach to writing a good hard-news lede (especially on deadline). This formula can be a big clunky, at times, but it does force reporters to think through their material and identify the most important elements of a story.

So, with that in mind, try to identify the various pieces of the W5H puzzle when reading the Providence Journal lede that dominated our discussions during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The key in this case is to focus on the “why” factor.

The Rev. Richard Bucci, pastor of the West Warwick church where a lawmaker’s sister has said she was sexually molested repeatedly as a child by a now-dead priest, marked the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision by issuing a flier listing the names of every Rhode Island legislator who voted last year to enshrine the right to an abortion in state law.

So why did this Catholic pastor send out this flier? That’s pretty obvious: He did so in response to a piece of abortion-rights legislation in Rhode Island.

Now, why did the individual legislator mentioned in this train wreck of a lede believe that Father Bucci had taken this action?

It would appear that Rep. Carol McEntee thought this action also had something to do with the Catholic church — or this particular parish — hiding clergy who abuse children. Later, readers also learn that Bucci and McEntee had previously clashed over her right to give a eulogy in the middle of a Catholic funeral.

But what is the main story here? Is this a story about the new abortion law and Bucci’s list of legislators or is it a story about Rep. McEntee and this priest? Does the story offer evidence that proves that McEntee is onto something, with this claim that there are two “why” factors at play in this case? (Hold that thought.)


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There's a whiff of a tiff when the pros try to pick the past decade's top religion stories

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What were the past decade’s top religion stories?

In the current Christian Century magazine, Baylor historian Philip Jenkins lists his top 10 in American Christianity and — journalists take note -- correctly asserts that all will “continue to play out” in coming years.  

His list: The growth of unaffiliated “nones,” the papacy of Francis, redefinition of marriage, Charleston murders and America’s “whiteness” problem, religion and climate change, Donald Trump and the evangelicals, gender and identity, #MeToo combined with women’s leadership, seminaries in crisis and impact of religious faith (or lack thereof) on low fertility rates.

Such exercises are open to debate, and there’s mild disagreement on the decade’s top events as drawn from Religion News Service coverage by Senior Editor Paul O’Donnell. Unlike Jenkins, this list scans the interfaith and global scenes.

The RNS picks:  “Islamophobia” in America (with a nod to President Trump), the resurgent clergy sex abuse crisis, #ChurchToo scandals, those rising “nones,” mass shootings at houses of worship, gay ordination and marriage, evangelicals in power (Trump again) as “post-evangelicals” emerge, anti-Semitic attacks and religious freedom issues.

You can see that the same events can be divvied up in various ways, and that there’s considerable overlap but also intriguing differences.

Jenkins  looks for broad “developments” and focuses on the climate and transgender debates, racial tensions, shrinking seminaries and low birth rates (see the Guy Memo on that last phenomenon).

By listing religious freedom, RNS correctly highlights a major news topic that Jenkins missed. RNS includes the U.S. legal contests over the contraception mandate in Obamacare and the baker who wouldn’t design a unique wedding cake for a gay couple. Those placid debates are combined a bit awkwardly with overseas attacks against Muslims in China, India and Myanmar, and against Christians in Nigeria. OK, what about Christians elsewhere?


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Journalism train wreck: Catholic scholar pours acid on news story about abortion and politics

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In the summer of 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote a confidential letter addressing one of the most controversial doctrinal issues involving Catholic faith and public life.

We are talking, of course, about whether it is wise for Catholic clergy to deny Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who consistently and openly reject centuries of church teachings on abortion, marriage and other hot-button doctrinal issues.

On one side of this fight are Catholics who say priests should take this stance in an attempt to encourage politicians to confess their sins and receive forgiveness. The goal is to save souls.

On the other side are Catholic progressives (for the most part) who say priests almost always use this tactic to punish Democrats who clash with the church on abortion, while declining to punish Republicans (for the most part) who clash with the church on issues such as the death penalty, immigration, etc., etc.

This is the tip of a giant iceberg, of course, and the cardinal who would then become Pope Benedict XVI has made other statements on this issue. It didn’t help that, at a key moment, then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick blurred (that’s putting things mildly) some of the details of Ratzinger’s 2004 letter.

Why bring this up? All of this is crucial background material for a spectacular online clash between a famous Catholic scholar and editors at The Providence Journal about a truly bizarre story (“Priest: No Communion for R.I. lawmakers who supported abortion law”).

Where to begin? First, let’s flash back to a 2007 National Catholic Reporter story about that Ratzinger letter — “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion.”

“There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia,” Ratzinger wrote.


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Election-year coverage should focus on Catholics as being ‘politically homeless'

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We’re a month into 2020 and, as expected, it is a year where the presidential election will dominate news coverage. In dominating the news, politics is also — like it or not — the prism in which journalists look at most other issues in society. That includes news about entertainment, economics, sports and, yes, religion.

A few things happened in January that have set the mood for the Iowa caucuses that took place Monday, the official start of the primary season. One of the biggest took place about 1,000 miles east of Des Moines, in Philadelphia, when Archbishop Charles Chaput was replaced by Nelson Perez.

The decision by Pope Francis, although ultimately not a surprising one, was largely portrayed in the mainstream press as the replacement of a conservative cleric with a largely progressive one. In other words, discussions of doctrine were framed and discussed in political terms.

This is how The New York Times framed the decision:

Archbishop Chaput, who was appointed to the position by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, has long been known as a theological and political conservative, often at odds with Francis’ mission to move beyond the culture wars dominated by sexual politics.

Francis recently acknowledged that a good deal of the opposition to his pontificate emanated from the United States, telling a reporter who handed him a book exploring the well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his agenda that it was “an honor that the Americans attack me.”

Archbishop Chaput’s departure was expected, as he had offered his resignation to Pope Francis when he turned 75 in September. Church law requires every bishop to tender his resignation at that age, but the pope can choose not to accept it, often allowing prelates to remain in office for several more years.

In this case, the pope did not wait long before saying yes.

A theological and political conservative. Really?

Theological absolutely if you mean Chaput upheld the teachings of the church. The accuracy of this political judgement is up for debate. Is a Catholic a political “conservative” if he backs Catholic doctrines on the death penalty, abortion, marriage, immigration and other hot-button issues?


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