I am not a very good prognosticator. Yet this is the time of year that forces many journalists to do just that.

What will 2021 bring? That’s the big question following a 2020 that will forever remain a year where the world was held hostage by a pandemic. It was also a year where we had a combative presidential election and a reawakened social justice movement that brought our divided politics out into our streets. Could any of us have accurately predicted what 2020 would have been like? I don’t think so.

That hasn’t stopped many from trying to predict what next year will be like. The vaccine could bring with it prosperity and freedom again, but a new strain of the virus has forced much of Europe into lockdown once again. A lot of what 2021 will look like — in terms of religion and faith — will depend on the virus and how politicians choose to handle it.

It’s true that the pandemic exposed all kinds of issues in our society. The journalism that is tasked with objectively reporting these issues so that citizens can make informed decisions failed us miserably, a trend that was years in the making, but peaked in 2020 with the presidential election. My post from this past June highlighted this extremely difficult realization for me after more than 20 years in the business. Here’s the main thrust of that post:

News coverage — be it about politics, culture or religion — is largely made up of crimes (in the legal sense) or lapses in judgement (in a moral one). But the news media has changed in the Internet age, primarily because of social media. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, to name just three, allows users — everyday people — to pump out content. That content can take many forms — from benign observations to what’s called hot takes — for all to read and see.

Truth, fact checking and context are not important. What matters are likes and followers. What we have now is something some have called “The Great Awokening” and it appears to have forever transformed our political discourse and the journalism that tries to report on it.

Mainstream news organizations, in their quest for clicks amid hope of figuring out a new business model, now mirror the content we all see on social media platforms. Newsrooms loaded with a younger generation who grew up in this environment have imposed their own woke politics as their morality thermometer.

The news media both underplayed COVID-19 and then hyped it, only to pause their concern in the wake of the George Floyd protests. For a list of 2020 media misses, check out this roundup.

That’s in the past now, but we will indeed be talking about 2020 for years and decades to come. Instead of trying to predict the future, the aim of this post is to advise mainstream journalists on what the major Catholic news storylines will be over the next 12 months — in the United States and the world.