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As GetReligion readers keep reminding us in the comments pages, it is getting harder and harder to know how to do news critiques of essays, commentaries, editorials and the occasional news reports that appear in the once towering weekly news magazines — by which I mean Time and nonNewsweek.
For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, it’s difficult to read the stories attempting to link Pope Benedict XVI to abuse of children. For our purposes here at GetReligion, I hope that it’s possible to simultaneously condemn the abuse of children that has taken place, to criticize the Vatican’s handling of the problem over the years, and to hope that the media work to cover this story more responsibly than we’ve been seeing.
At least 10 years ago, a conservative Catholic friend of mine told me something that totally changed how I viewed this whole era of clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
Bishop Jose H. Gomez, ordained by Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organization favored by the Vatican, was named to lead a predominantly Hispanic archdiocese. The pope chose Gomez to succeed a retiring 25-year archbishop seen in many ways as a legend among progressives — but also a prelate who faced scrutiny over his handling of clergy sexual abuse cases and questions over what some critics labeled his shaky moral theology.
So after a two-year uptick in 2006 and 2007, the teen birth rate fell in 2008. You might recall that when the teen birth rate went up, many mainstream stories attempted to link the increase to abstinence education.
Ann Rodgers has earned such a reputation for her thorough reporting that a reader e-mailed us recently describing her as “Pittsburgh’s queen of religion reporting.” What an appropriate title for a journalist who regularly covers local news that deserves national attention and national news from a local perspective.
If you read a daily newspaper somewhere in the United States, other than New York City, and you care deeply about the latest wave of clergy sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church, then you may have spotted the following Associated Press report about the case of Father Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul of India.
Yesterday I looked at a couple of stories covering President Barack Obama’s visit to a Southeast Washington church for Easter services. Reader Peggy noted in the comments:
My family returned to Baltimore last night after celebrating a joyful Pascha (that’s Easter in the ancient churches of the East) at a church in Salem, Mass., with family and soon-to-be family.
