Richard Ostling

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Catholic news budget: (1) Again, Pius and the Jews (2) Despite Francis' dodge,  celibacy debate persists

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The good news: After years of agitation among prelates, historians and Jewish leaders, on March 2 the Vatican will fully open its covert archives that cover Pope Pius XII’s performance during the Nazi era.

The bad news for journalists: It will take months, even years, for expert researchers to draw coherent conclusions from the estimated 16 million pages of documents. Neverthelessl, retrospectives on the Pius debate since the 1960s will be timely just now, drawing upon the massive material in newsroom morgues and online.

The issues surrounding this pontiff — a long-pending and controversial candidate for sainthood — are huge for Jewish relations. Beginning in 1920, Pius was the Vatican’s envoy to Germany, and during his years as secretary of state its top strategist on Nazism. Then his 1939 election as pope coincided with war and the Holocaust.

The big historic question: Did he say and do enough as Hitler’s regime oppressed Jews and eventually slaughtered them by the millions?

The Vatican completed a partial release of historical texts on Pius in 1981 but the new, complete batch is expected to be more enlightening. The Holy See is offering assurances that scholars are welcome to apply for access to the collection regardless of religious views or ideologies. What historians are in line, and what journalists will be on the list?

Sources to note from Nicole Winfield’s Associated Press scene-setter include Brown University historian David Kertzer and Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s international interreligious director (based in Jerusalem but reachable via AJC publicist Kenneth Bandler, bandlerk@ajc.org or 212-891-6771).

Now, here is a second subject for this week’s Memo package.

The news media are pondering Pope Francis’ February decision to dodge proposals from South America that the church experiment with ordaining married men as priests in places with severe need.


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LDS church leaders enact a major breakthrough on secrecy next Wednesday

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Mitt Romney’s explanation that he voted to expel President Donald Trump as a duty to God, followed by the president’s religious scorn, renews interest in the senator’s well-known devotion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Journalists also need to know that the nation’s fourth-largest religious body will also be in the news on February 19 for a very different reason. For the first time it will grant members (and thus the media and the public) full access to its governing rulebook.

This is a major breakthrough. The General Handbook prescribes the exercise of powers, procedures, and policies that define the church. The quasi-official Encyclopedia of Mormonism says it is “pre-eminent among Church publications” as “an authoritative guide.” But the contents were long kept secret except for those appointed to church offices.

Religion News Service’s “Flunking Sainthood” columnist Jana Riess, author of the 2019 book The Next Mormons (Oxford), noted that since only males hold office, as a woman she’s been denied access to policies “that potentially affect my life” and open access “helps to empower the general membership” of both genders.

We’re dealing here with the most secretive of America’s major religions.

Its strictly-held financial information is the stuff of legend. The texts of the sacred rituals in temples are kept confidential, and non-members and church members who lack their bishop’s approval cannot attend. (There’s special angst when non-LDS family members cannot witness temple weddings.)

Likewise, the Handbook was carefully distributed with numbered copies that were to be destroyed when no longer in use.


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This is not a trick question: Can students pray in U.S. public schools?

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This is not a trick question: Can students pray in U.S. public schools?

THE QUESTION:

Can students pray in U.S. public schools?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The Trump Administration’s education and justice departments, after work with government attorneys, issued policy guidance to public schools January 16 on this emotional-laden and oft-misunderstood issue. The answer is well settled in American law and agreed upon by a very wide range of religious and public education organizations.

The answer is: Yes, depending.

Yes, if a student initiates prayer and does not disrupt classes. Students also enjoy other religious rights on an equal basis with non-religious activities, as surveyed below. 

But the answer is no if public school systems, administrators or teachers authorize prayers in an official capacity. Federal court edicts say that violates the Constitution’s ban on government “establishment of religion.” (Private schools, of course, can do whatever they want about religion.)

The Trump announcement (nicely timed to boost religious enthusiasm in the 2020 campaign) merely repeats the well-settled consensus. However, the federal government might now enforce more strictly local schools’ required written certification that they keep hands off students’ voluntary religious activities, and it might investigate complaints of violations more vigorously.

Our story starts with Engel v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling that saw an obvious “establishment” violation in public school recitations of a bland interfaith prayer of 22 words that was authorized by the New York State Regents.


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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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Mainstream journalists should pay attention if American Judaism gets into serious trouble  

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How many articles have we read about the inexorable demographic slide of U.S. “mainline” Protestantism, difficulties lately hitting “evangelicals,” declining Mass attendance for Catholics and the growth of religiously unaffiliated people (“Nones”) who forsake all religious ties that bind?

There’s been far less media attention to the state of Judaism, the nation’s second-largest religion though Islam is moving up. It faces far worse prospects, according to premier chronicler Jack Wertheimer, a historian and former provost at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).

Reporters — if American Judaism is in serious trouble, that’s a big story by any definition.

This dire, developing story is a good example of the way scholarship that deserves media coverage can be mostly hidden for an extended period yet remain pertinent and newsworthy. Wertheimer’s “The New American Judaism” (Princeton), published two years ago, only caught The Guy’s eye when boss tmatt noted a review in the current edition of the Orthodox Union magazine Jewish Action. (The Guy has not yet read the book but that lengthy review provides ample substance and quotes.)

Wertheimer sees a “recession” — if not a great depression.

More than 2 million people of Jewish parentage “no longer identify as Jews.” Many others do not see themselves as part of the Jewish religion and define themselves only in cultural or ethnic terms. Rising intermarriage means fewer Jews tomorrow. Birth rates among the non-Orthodox are so low one wonders “who will populate Jewish religious institutions in the future.”

If the religion atrophies,  can non-religious communal life thrive?


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Big news decades in the making: Why are United Methodists finally going to divorce?

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THE QUESTION:

Why is the large United Methodist Church preparing to split in May?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

One of 2020’s major news events occurs May 5-15 when delegates in Minneapolis decide whether and how to break up the large United Methodist Church (UMC). The simple answer to why is that long-running conservative-vs.-liberal differences proved irreconcilable when it comes to sexual morality in general, and homosexuality in particular.  But there’s much more to be said.

The stakes are high, since the UMC is America’s second-largest Protestant denomination and biggest of the so-called “mainline” groups, which are long-established, predominantly white, active in ecumenical organizations, and allow more flexibility on belief than conservative “evangelicals.” The UMC has dealt with the gay issue for 48 years, during which membership slid from 10.3 million to 7 million. Continual and enervating haggles doubtless contributed to membership shrinkage in all of “mainline” Protestantism, even as U.S. culture and politics shifted toward gay toleration following the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

The UMC’s debate began soon after it was founded in a 1968 merger between the Methodist Church and the smaller Evangelical United Brethren Church. An official commission was appointed to collate the uniting groups’ teachings on a range of topics and report to the new denomination’s first General Conference in 1972. (The Guy covered this Atlanta event for Time magazine).

The commission proposed approval of the statement that “homosexuals no less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth, who need the ministry and guidance of the church in their struggles for human fulfillment, as well as the spiritual and emotional care of a fellowship which enables reconciling relationships with God, with others, and with self. Further, we insist that all persons are entitled to have their human and civil rights ensured.”

Conservatives did not dispute those concepts but were wary, and seemed befuddled during floor debate. Then Texas lawyer Donald Hand jotted down wording, ran it past a state Supreme Court justice, and offered this amendment: “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian doctrine.” The spur-of-the-moment insert passed, and remains on the books to this day.


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Tips for mainstream journalists as they grapple with America's growing religious complexity

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Last month, the Pew Research Center issued an innovative analysis of 49,719  sermons delivered between last April 7 and June 1 in 6,431 U.S. congregations that were posted online. This report made a bit of news and is worth perusing if you missed it (click here).

 This Guy Memo recommends to fellow writers that a useful appendix to that document (click here for .pdf) deserves more than a glance. It details Pew’s standard system for “classifying congregations by religious tradition,” with 244 specific identities cited in interviewing, grouped into 19 categories.

Pew makes a major contribution to analysis of American religion with its frequent polling practice of pushing to get respondents'  specific identities and affiliations beyond the usually unhelpful “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” approach of old-fashioned polling.

What kind of Protestant?

For that matter, what kind of, say, Presbyterian (tmatt shows a blitz of options here)?

Are you an active or nominal churchgoer?

With the media frenzy over religion and politics, polls nowadays at least usually ask Protestants whether they self-identify as “evangelical” or not, whatever that word means.

When Pew asks poll respondents about the specific congregation they affiliate with, it then helpfully lumps the Protestants into the three main categories of “Evangelical,” “Mainline” and “Historically Black.” These three groups are distinct not only on religion but in social and political terms. Writers are likely to be less perplexed by Pew’s other categories of Catholic, Orthodox Christian, “other Christian,”  “Mormon” (there’s that controversial word again!), Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, “other faiths,” "miscellaneous" and “unclassifiable.”   

The following examples from Pew’s Protestant taxonomy will indicate some of the difficulties with America’s astonishing religious variety, particularly for those new to religion writing.


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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

THE QUESTION:

What is Judaism?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

How are we to comprehend the series of attacks on American Jews during the holiday season? Why were there 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. during 2018, by Anti-Defamation League count, which was double the 2017 total and the third-worst year on record?

Whatever the explanation, the three-word question above was the headline and subject of an online article just before the recent repellent events. Author Dennis Prager is a religiously and politically conservative Jew whose talk show airs on many “Christian-formatted” stations in the Salem Radio Network.

Prager said he raised this very fundamental question because “fewer and fewer Jews know anything about Judaism,” and many non-Jews “erroneously identify Judaism with what most Jews believe,” namely some vague secularized outlook.

This is no easy question because Jewish identity has a dual nature, religious and ethnic. Many Americans who consider themselves Jewish may be religiously Buddhist, or atheistic, or could care less about any religion and see their identity only as a cultural heritage. Also, unlike Christianity, Judaism is not a religion with defined creeds and confessions.

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 told us Judaism is quite simply “the religion of the Jewish people,” which doesn’t get us very far.


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