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Do not let the small mistakes in this article about the ordination of six former Anglican clergy as Catholic priests for the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter distract you — this article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram entitled “6 former Episcopal clergymen are ordained in Catholic Church” is one of the few I have seen that “gets religion” and understands the big picture being covered in this story.
Time for a brief trip into tmatt’s massive folder of GetReligion guilt, that niche in which I stash mainstream news stories — good and bad — that catch my attention but then get trampled in the rush to react to bigger stories. This time around, I think that this particular story deserves late attention, not because it is of massive importance, but because it represents another example of the struggle at The Baltimore Sun to recognize that the Roman Catholic Church is a big, complicated institution and that it is often important to talk to a variety of Catholics to find out what is going on.
You may need to sit down. It’s time for GetReligion to offer a positive (for the most part) take on a New York Times report about Catholicism and, in particular, the troubled Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Sometimes, your GetReligionistas come across mainstream religion-news stories that leave us saying, “That was kind of good, but that left me wanting more.” As if that mixed message wasn’t confusing enough, the truth is that some of these stories may leave one of us “wanting more,” in a good sense, or “wanting more” in a bad sense. Some cause us to feel both ways at the same time.
I have been on the road for a week or more and, when I returned home, there was a huge stack of Baltimore Sun newspapers for me to triage. One of the first GetReligion-esque stories that I ran into concerned a local news event that the Sun has been ignoring for months (see previous GetReligion coverage here).
You know, I love a good news report involving the details of liturgical events and the Agence France Presse recently served up, well, a really BIG liturgical story.
A few years ago, I read a fascinating story in the New York Times about Buddhist teachers Michael Roach and Christie McNally. A decade earlier, they’d taken vows never to separate, night or day. And yet, the article explained, they were celibate. It was one of those interesting, if a tad fluffy, stories written under the heading “Living Together.” The headline was “Making Their Own Limits in a Spiritual Partnership:”
Although I lived in the mountains of Tennessee for six years, I am not an expert on the small — but well documented — bands of Christians who choose to handle snakes as part of their worship services. Yes, there was this mainstream Greek newspaper that decided that I was an expert on this subject (one of the most bizarre episodes in my career), but that was the kind of mistake that happens when one writes a singe column that somehow shows up high in a Google search.
