Clemente Lisi

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Why did viral papal slap garner Francis largely favorable news media coverage?

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Starting the new year with an apology is never good.

That’s how Pope Francis kicked off 2020 just a week ago following an incident in St. Peter’s Square the night before. The incident in question was the pope being grabbed by a woman. The pope, in turn, slapped the woman’s arm and the whole thing went viral. That was followed by memes and lots of news coverage on a day usually dedicated to replaying ball drops and advice on hangover cures.  

The media’s reaction to the slap, from social media to major news organizations, again showed the divide that continues to exist among Catholics around the world. Those who like Francis saw a man being grabbed and reacting like anyone would. His detractors saw a man with little patience for parishioners.

The media coverage was all over the place on this one, starting out extremely negative and changing to a largely positive one overnight after Francis apologized for his angry reaction. The Holy See’s own news operation, Vatican News, described the incident this way:

“His salvation is not magical, but it is a ‘patient’ salvation, that is, it involves the patience of love, which takes on wickedness and removes its power. The patience of love: love makes us patient,” said the Pope. “We often lose patience. So do I. And I apologize for yesterday's bad example…”

The apology Pope Francis offered was in connection with a moment from his visit to the Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square on Tuesday evening.

As he greeted the faithful, a woman tugged his arm, causing a shooting pain to which the Pope reacted with an impatient gesture to free himself from her grip.

That Vatican News attributed the pope’s reaction to “a shooting pain” has no attribution. The Vatican press office never gave an official reason and also failed to comment on the possibility of that poor security contributed to the problem, as AFP pointed out. In his public apology on New Year’s Day, the pope also failed to give a reason for his reaction. Instead, Francis went off-script and delivered what sounded like a heartfelt apology. At the same time, no media outlet that I saw knew the woman’s identity or interviewed her.

Most of the divide over the viral moment played itself out on Twitter. #DUH


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Start of a new year: Stories and trends to watch for on the Catholic beat in 2020

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There are no shortage of religion stories, but you already knew that. You wouldn’t be here — and we wouldn’t be doing this — if you also didn’t think so.

This time of year brings with it pieces looking back on the biggest stories of the year. It’s also a time to look ahead. The coming year will certainly be a busy one once again for journalists who cover Catholicism, Pope Francis and the church’s hierarchy.

The pontiff already made his claim for newsmaker of 2019 (and 2020) after a bizarre incident on New Year’s Eve that included slapping the hand of a woman who grabbed him in St. Peter’s Square in the same evening where he denounced domestic violence against women. The video went viral to start 2020 as the pope apologized for the incident on New Year’s Day.

With that, here are six of the biggest storylines and trends journalists need to watch for in 2020: 

The 2020 presidential election: Yes, there will be another presidential election this November. That means politics will dominate the news cycle and our everyday conversations. Yes, even more than it already has the past few years. Trump and the digital age has wrought news overload — even with coverage of religion news. Look for reporters to cover religion a lot, if the news is linked to the president and his Democratic challengers.

How Catholics vote will be a big storyline throughout the primaries and in the general election.


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What U.S. presidential candidates will be doing to court religious voters in 2020

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President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponents are courting voters with less than a year before the 2020 election, and many of them are chasing support from a variety of religious voters — in pews on the right and the left.

For example, all eyes are on Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his attempts to build trust with African-American churchgoers — a crucial part of the Democratic Party base in the Sunbelt and elsewhere. We will return to that subject.

But first, the Trump campaign announced recently that the president's re-election efforts would include launching three coalitions: “Evangelicals for Trump,” “Catholics for Trump” and “Jewish Voices for Trump.”

Despite being impeached by the House, the Trump campaign’s focus on these three religious groups aims to expand the president’s support, especially in battleground states where the former real-estate mogul won in 2016.

An analysis of the 2018 midterm elections conducted by Pew Research Center found continuity in the voting patterns of key religious groups. For example, white evangelicals voted for Republican candidates at about the same rate they did in 2014, while religiously unaffiliated voters and Jews again largely backed Democrats.

There’s plenty that Trump and the crowded field of Democrats challenging him have done over the past few months, and are continuing to do as we head into 2020, to court religious voters. Expect that to intensify with the start of the primaries next years and in the months before November’s general election.

Below is a look at Trump’ efforts, along with those of the seven Democrats who qualified for the next debate on Thursday night in Los Angeles.  


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Attention reporters: New poll examines trends among 'Catholic voters' heading into '20 elections

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With less than a year before the 2020 presidential election, a new poll of U.S. Catholics found that they largely favor a host of Democratic challengers to President Donald Trump.

But the survey also found that 58% of devout Catholics, those who say they accept all church teaching, were “sure to vote” for Trump next year — compared to 34% of all Catholics and 32% of respondents overall who were asked the same question.

The survey — conducted in cooperation between the Eternal World Television Network and RealClear Opinion Research — offers updated insights into the minds of American Catholics ahead of the upcoming Democratic primaries and the November general election. 

“With few exceptions, for generations, tracking the preferences of the Catholic vote has proven to be a shortcut to predicting the winner of the popular vote — and I expect 2020 to be no different,” said John Della Volpe, director of the poll. “Like the rest of America, the 22% of the electorate comprising the Catholic vote is nuanced and diverse. And like America, the diverse viewpoints based on generation, race, and ethnicity are significant and prove that no longer are Catholic voters a monolith.”

There’ s also the notion of who exactly are these Catholic voters who support Trump? Here at GetReligion, tmatt has argued — quoting a veteran priest in Washington, D.C. — that there are actually four types of Catholic voters in America: Ex-Catholics, Cultural Catholics, Sunday-morning Catholics and “sweats the details and goes to Confession” Catholics. The poll doesn’t dig into any of these factors.

Since the days of John F. Kennedy, Democrats who are also Catholic have tried to reconcile the church’s teachings with their party’s politics.


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Big story: How to properly cover laws regarding sex abuse and Catholic church bankruptcy

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It’s been 17 years since The Boston Globe published its groundbreaking series on clergy sex abuse.

Some two decades later, a political shift in state legislative bodies and fallout from the #MeToo movement have all collided to bring what many warn is a financial reckoning that could cripple the Catholic church in America.

It was more than a year ago — on November 28 to be exact — that I warned in a GetReligion post about how the church would be hit with a blizzard of lawsuits in 2019 and what a massive story it would be.

Here’s an excerpt from that post:

As the scandals — that mostly took place in past — continue to trickle out in the form of grand jury reports and other investigations, look for lawmakers to try and remedy the situation for victims through legislation on the state level.

With very blue New York State voting to put Democrats in control of both the state Assembly and Senate (the GOP had maintained a slight majority), look for lawmakers to pass (and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Catholic, to sign) the Child Victims Act. The Empire State isn’t alone. Other legislatures in Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey and New Mexico are considering similar measures.

The New York legislation would allow victims of abuse suffered under the age of 18 to seek justice years later as adults. Removing the statute of limitations on cases involving private institutions, like the Boy Scouts and Jewish yeshivas, is at the heart of the battle.

New York did indeed pass the law — and may other states followed in its footsteps. In all, 15 states and the District of Columbia have changed their statute of limitations over the past two years in order to allow for lawsuits regarding rape and sexual assault allegations dating back many decades to be brought to court. In many cases, the offender is long dead.


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'The Two Popes' movie gets rave reviews and a good amount of fact checking, too

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The Christmas season is a time for both religious introspection and, of course, consumerism.

It’s also the time families go to the movies, which is why lots of them are released at this time of year.

Among the smorgasbord of films to open in the days before Thanksgiving was “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” the Fred Rogers bio-pic featuring Tom Hanks. That film is of particular interest because of its religion connections. See this recent tmatt post: “Podcast thinking: Fred Rogers, Tom Hanks, the Good Samaritan and the ties that bind.”

The only movie to open last week on the day before Thanksgiving was “The Two Popes.” I gave the flick a bad review over at Religion Unplugged, arguing that it needed a reality check. However, there are issues here that journalists will want to think about, as well. Here’s the key paragraph:

Where does the movie go wrong? Benedict did summon Bergoglio to Rome after the Argentine cardinal had resigned, as is custom when someone in that position turns 75. No one knew at the time how the cardinals would vote, except maybe former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Therefore, the movie imagines what a dialogue between Benedict and Francis would be like. In taking us behind the secrecy of the Vatican, Meirelles creates a work of fiction.

“Change is compromise,” Benedict tells Bergoglio. 

“Nothing is static in nature,” Bergoglio replies.

Benedict, in response, argues: “God is unchanging!” 

The invented dialogue, like in the example above, aims at trying to convey the doctrinal divide that exists between these two men.


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Why God continues to have a place at Thanksgiving tables and in Thanksgiving stories

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As millions of Americans sit down today to a turkey dinner with all their favorite side dishes, many will pause to say a prayer or otherwise give thanks.

That’s part of the story, after all. The one central theme to the holiday that endures to this day is the idea of giving God thanks. It’s the reason why the Pilgrims held a feast in the first place a year after making landfall in what is now Plymouth, Mass.

Even as a growing number of young people identify with no religion, Americans are still largely thankful to God. While the day is marked with football games and parades, it’s also true that Thanksgiving, one of the least commercial holiday’s celebrated in America, has a religious origin that has been debated ever since the Pilgrims marked the original Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 following their first harvest.

Two years away from the 400th anniversary of the holiday and days away from another Thanksgiving, historians and scholars continue to debate what the feast continues to mean for Americans. The holiday, while rooted in religious tradition, remains one of the things that ties modern secular society to this country’s colonial past. More than a Protestant holiday despite its roots, the day is celebrated by all denominations and viewed as uniquely American.

The day we now call Thanksgiving was observed by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in October 1621. The feast lasted three days and, according to attendee Edward Winslow, was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims, like the colonists that followed them, celebrated a thanksgiving several times a year when the harvest was plentiful. It was highlighted by attending church services and thanking God before a large meal. Throughout the American Revolution, a day was set aside for giving thanks. Connecticut, for example, was the first to do so. The biggest change by the 17th century was that politicians were the ones calling for a Thanksgiving rather than church authorities.


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Does the Vatican's quasi-official newspaper have a 'fake news' problem?

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The Vatican gets its fair share of coverage from news organizations around the world. Even those newspapers who don’t have a dedicated religion beat writer have Vatican coverage in its pages, either in the form of a foreign correspondent or via subscribing to wire services such as The Associated Press or Reuters.

It isn’t lost on Pope Francis that the news media ecosystem, saying this past May that journalists should use the power of the press to search for the truth and give voice to the voiceless.

Conservative news websites in the United States have increasingly set their sights on Francis in recent years. Catholic news sites that lean left doctrinally have also have a strong readership. Both need to be read by journalists who cover the Vatican and the pope. Another source they need to read is L’Osservatore Romano, a once great and influential newspaper that has over the years declined in both influence and stature.

For those who have never heard of it, L’Osservatore Romano is a daily newspaper printed in Italian with weekly editions in six languages, including English, and once a month in Polish.

The newspaper reports on the activities of the Holy See and owned by the Vatican — but is not considered an official publication. The Holy See’s official publication is the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which acts as a government gazette. The views expressed in L’Osservatore Romano are those of individual writers unless they appear under the byline “Nostre Informazioni” (Italian for “Our Information”) or “Santa Sede” (Holy See). In other words, one needs a media literacy course in order to fully understand what this newspaper is reporting.

The publication founded in 1861 — and available at newspaper stands across Rome, via subscription and online — continues to play a major role in interpreting the papacy and the role of the Vatican in the loves of Roman Catholics around the world. Problematic for the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper has been its editorial standards as of late.


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Note to sports writers: America magazine's Notre Dame football feature required reading this fall

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College football is celebrating its 150th season this fall. As a result, there have been many retrospectives looking back at some of NCAA’s best teams and players. You can’t look back at the last century and a half without mentioning Notre Dame.

That takes me to a recent issue of America, a weekly Jesuit magazine, and the great job they did at looking back at Notre Dame football in the context of what the success of a Catholic school meant in a primarily Protestant America. Under the headline, A Fighting Spirit: The place of Notre Dame football in American Catholicism, the result is a wonderful reflection of how important religion, football and immigration are to the American experiment. It also manages to be nostalgic and at the same time wrap in the current realities of the clerical sex-abuse crisis and other issues plaguing the church.  

The piece starts off with how the Notre Dame mystique got its start in the 1940s and what that meant to Catholics around the country. This is how writer Rachel Lu, a contributing writer for America, summed up that feeling: 

U.S. Catholics embraced the Fighting Irish with enthusiasm. When the leaves started turning each September, people who had never set foot in the state of Indiana would be decked out like frat boys, raising the gold and blue for Our Lady’s loyal sons. In parochial schools across the nation, nuns led Catholic schoolchildren in prayers for Irish victory. Notre Dame was the first school in the U.S. to have a nationwide following of “subway alums,” devoted fans for whom a radio dial represented their only connection to the university. It was said in those days that every priest in the U.S. was a de facto recruiter for Notre Dame.

In the minds of their fans, Notre Dame’s stars were much more than football players. They were warriors, fighting for the honor of Catholics across the nation.

Despite living a more secular world, Notre Dame’s Catholic roots and traditions are very much a story. I made a similar point about a year ago when Notre Dame was vying for a national title. A year later, Notre Dame isn’t anywhere close to a national championship — No. 1-ranked LSU is the favorite for now — but that doesn’t mean sports writers can’t be reminded how important religion is to the school and football in general.


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