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Boy, when I wrote a piece for The American Spectator suggesting that the next pope not allow most priests to marry, I had no idea that we’d have a new pope so quickly, or that he would be so very likely to resist most calls to reform. The piece may be the fastest-rotting piece of punditry I have ever produced, though that didn’t stop readers from giving it to me good in Reader Mail.
At a dinner last night with some journalists and scholars (not in Rome), I wisecracked that we all needed to head down to Jesuit headquarters to watch the conclave on live video.
It’s time for a last glance at some memorable pre-conclave stories as we watch the press try to handle the hours (or perhaps days) of waiting before the white smoke starts another blitz.
This week, The Washington Times ran a three-part series (links here, here, and here) by religion reporter Julia Duin. The umbrella title for the series was “Faithless: God under fire in the public square,” and the 7,200-word package serves as an interesting look into the world of the Christian and secular activists who are fighting over how much religion should be allowed to shape public policy and public life.
Maybe it’s just the mass-media professor in me who is used to chanting “technology shapes content.” But, you know, I sort of see a link between the following two stories in those radically different Washington, D.C., daily newspapers.
CBSNews.com commentator Dick Meyer thinks he has a new, fresh insight into the pope, politics, faith and cutlure in his “The Devoutness Divide.” And that would be true, if he were writing pre-1991, pre-James Davison Hunter, pre-”Culture Wars” (as Hunter actually defined that term).
Later this month, the Newport Beach Film Festival will include a documentary on Lonnie Frisbee, a charismatic figure who helped shape the early Jesus Movement.
You can agree or disagree, but conservative religion columnist Michael “Marriage Savers” McManus — a mainstream Protestant — has an interesting point to make about the papal conclave. He asks this question: In the age of imploding ordination statistics, would a Third World pope — especially one from Africa — be more likely to allow priests to get married than a pope from Europe or elsewhere in the First World?
