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Why did viral papal slap garner Francis largely favorable news media coverage?

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Starting the new year with an apology is never good.

That’s how Pope Francis kicked off 2020 just a week ago following an incident in St. Peter’s Square the night before. The incident in question was the pope being grabbed by a woman. The pope, in turn, slapped the woman’s arm and the whole thing went viral. That was followed by memes and lots of news coverage on a day usually dedicated to replaying ball drops and advice on hangover cures.  

The media’s reaction to the slap, from social media to major news organizations, again showed the divide that continues to exist among Catholics around the world. Those who like Francis saw a man being grabbed and reacting like anyone would. His detractors saw a man with little patience for parishioners.

The media coverage was all over the place on this one, starting out extremely negative and changing to a largely positive one overnight after Francis apologized for his angry reaction. The Holy See’s own news operation, Vatican News, described the incident this way:

“His salvation is not magical, but it is a ‘patient’ salvation, that is, it involves the patience of love, which takes on wickedness and removes its power. The patience of love: love makes us patient,” said the Pope. “We often lose patience. So do I. And I apologize for yesterday's bad example…”

The apology Pope Francis offered was in connection with a moment from his visit to the Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square on Tuesday evening.

As he greeted the faithful, a woman tugged his arm, causing a shooting pain to which the Pope reacted with an impatient gesture to free himself from her grip.

That Vatican News attributed the pope’s reaction to “a shooting pain” has no attribution. The Vatican press office never gave an official reason and also failed to comment on the possibility of that poor security contributed to the problem, as AFP pointed out. In his public apology on New Year’s Day, the pope also failed to give a reason for his reaction. Instead, Francis went off-script and delivered what sounded like a heartfelt apology. At the same time, no media outlet that I saw knew the woman’s identity or interviewed her.

Most of the divide over the viral moment played itself out on Twitter. #DUH


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'Uncle Ted' McCarrick is on the move again: Is this a major Catholic news story or not?

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So, let’s say that there is a major piece of news that breaks concerning the life and times of the man previously known as Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick.

This is something that happens quite frequently, even though the disgraced former cardinal moved into the wide open spaces of West Kansas, living as a guest in a Capuchin friary.

Ah, but is he still there?

That leads us to this simple, but important, headline at the Catholic News Agency: “Theodore McCarrick has moved from Kansas friary.” As I write this, I am not seeing follow-up coverage of this development at any mainstream media websites. Here’s some of the key CNA material:

A spokesman for the Capuchin Franciscan Province of St. Conrad told CNA Jan. 7 that McCarrick left St. Fidelis Friary in Victoria, Kansas, just days ago. He has moved to a residential community of priests who have been removed from ministry, senior Church officials told CNA.

The former cardinal made the decision to leave the Kansas friary himself over the Christmas period, sources say, adding that his continued presence in the friary had become a strain on the Franciscan community that was hosting him.

The story notes that McCarrick’s new home remains unknown or a secret and that he is paying his own rent. So why move now?

Sources familiar with McCarrick’s situation told CNA that both the Kansas friary and McCarrick had been concerned that a forthcoming report on the former cardinal’s career, due to be released by the Vatican in the near future, would bring disruptive media attention to the friary.

McCarrick apparently hopes the new “secluded” location will limit media attempts to contact him in the event of renewed interest in his case, a Church official told CNA.

So here is the question that some Catholics — repeat “some,” mainly on the left — would raise: Can this report be trusted since this story was broken by an “alternative” Catholic news source, a theologically conservative news operation linked to EWTN and the legacy of Mother Angelica?


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Nonprofit groups destined to command big chunk of journalism? What about religion news?

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As the 2020s dawn, the Internet-ravaged newspaper business is paying close attention to The Salt Lake Tribune, long known for independent-minded reporting that includes stellar religion coverage by Peggy Fletcher Stack and colleagues. The  148-year old Trib is conducting an experiment as the first important U.S. daily to turn non-profit. 

A related phenomenon is wealthy investors who needn’t fret about profits purchasing, e.g., the Boston Globe, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine and The Atlantic. (The latter made good use of a $490,000 Henry Luce Foundation grant for religion coverage.) 

Are charities and nonprofit groups destined to command a major chunk of American news reporting, including religion coverage? 

 On the religion beat, we see The Associated Press’s deal to distribute copy from two non-profits, Religion News Service (which has emphasized opinion pieces in recent times) and TheConversation.com (which re-frames scholars’ thinking for general audiences).  This innovation is funded by $4.9 million from the Lilly Endowment. (Disclosure: The Guy was an AP religion writer 1998-2006). 

An example of this newborn joint operation is “Reparations and Religion: 50 Years after ‘Black Manifesto’,” a solid  RNS article The AP transmitted December 30 that was widely picked up online by other media.

Notably, the article has a double byline. Matthew Cressler, no journalist  but a religion-and-race scholar at the College of  Charleston, is named first out of alphabetical order, indicating priority over co-author Adelle Banks, a well-respected RNS reporter.


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Bible trivia time for hard-working religion scribes: What is a cubit? A shekel? An ephah?

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Bible trivia time for hard-working religion scribes: What is a cubit? A shekel? An ephah?

THE QUESTION:

Bible trivia: How long is a cubit? What does a shekel weigh? How much does an ephah contain?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

Readers of the Bible, particularly those wedded to the revered King James Version from four centuries ago, will keep running across esoteric words for weights and measures in ancient times. Many editions today help out by providing modern equivalents in the text or footnotes.

But don’t take those equivalents too literally. Specialist Marvin Powell’s advice is that “measures have always posed a special problem for translators.” He said it’s “almost impossible” to fix equivalents with much precision so we’re talking about rules of thumb — literally the thumb in one example below.

Ancient usage was approximate to begin with, and meanings varied by districts and eras. There appear to be differences before and after Israel’s exile in Babylon that began in 526 B.C., and between the Old and New Testament cultures. Powell figured that any proposed equivalents have a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent if not more.

This gets us into the development of metrology, the science of measurement. The Guy here relies especially on two historians of the ancient world, Powell of Northern Illinois University, writing in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, and D.J. Wiseman of the University of London, in the New Bible Dictionary.

Consider the Old Testament prophet Amos, who denounced corner-cutters who “trample on the needy” by dishonestly selling wheat so as to “make the ephah small and the shekel great” (8:5). That indicates measurements were inherently a bit flexible as tradesmen bargained over weights and prices in their ancient marketplaces.

The most frequent such term in the Bible is the famous “cubit,” which measured length.


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About Todd Bentley and 2020 prophecies: How are reporters supposed to cover this stuff?

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If you had been at a women’s tea at my church last weekend, you would have seen several women pull out lists — from the internet and other sources — of prophetic pronouncements for the coming decade. There were oohs and aahs of appreciation as these women read out loud upbeat forecasts for the future.

Go to almost any charismatic Christian website or ministry these days and you’ll see lists of things that one is supposed to think or pray about for the next decade or what God supposedly will be carrying out. There’s even prophetic conferences in the early part of this year whereby you can go and find out what’s up in heavenly realms and meet individuals who cast themselves as modern-day “prophets” and “apostles.”

Interestingly, none of these charismatics prophesied the killing of Iran’s top general, Qassen Soleimani, last Friday. What’s also not mentioned on any of these sites is the coming environmental catastrophe that secular prophets are saying is up for the coming decade. I’m reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, which claims that global warming is so far advanced, large portions of the Earth will be too hot to live in sooner rather than later. As we gaze at news broadcasts of eastern Australia burning up, Wallace-Wells sounds more accurate than these other folks.

Not everyone is in lockstep. Charisma magazine just came out with a blistering editorial slamming false prophets. I find this sort of inside-baseball debate fascinating, since it often points to topics that are in the news or lurking in the background. Here’ a key quote from that.

“… the prophetic nonsense must stop. Not once have I read or heard about any prophecy for 2020 that includes judgment, correction, rebuke or warning. To stuff our spiritual faces with nothing but happy prophetic thoughts is utter foolishness at best. At worst, it will seal the fate of our nation as one that started out godly and ended suddenly under God's wrath.

After mentioning some of the ills and sins committed by the American public,

To publish word after word about how blessing and promotion is our portion in 2020 will do little to nothing to prepare the people for what is to come… Where are the prophets who are warning the church that God himself will come against it? Where are those who are shaking people out of their mediocrity and casual connection to God, awakening them from a lethal slumber?

Bob Smietana of Religion News Service just wrote a very interesting piece about a disgraced prophet that dates back to events that happened almost 12 years ago. His name is Todd Bentley and he made tons of headlines for his starring role in a revival that played out in Lakeland, Fla., back in 2008.


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After decades of fighting, United Methodists avoid a visit from ghost of the Episcopal future?

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It’s the Methodist question I have heard the most from GetReligion readers (and even locals here in East Tennessee) over the weekend.

I will paraphrase: If the conservatives have been winning the big votes at United Methodist conferences for the past couple of decades, then why are news reports saying that the traditionalists have agreed to “leave the United Methodist Church”?

This is the response that popped into my head a few hours ago after round of news reports, Twitter and online buzz: Basically, I think conservative Methodists have been visited by the Ghost of the Episcopal Future.

Methodist traditionalists are not interested in 50 years of hand-to-hand legal conflict with the entrenched United Methodist principalities and powers. Hold that thought. Meanwhile, I will admit that it’s hard to see the logic of this statement in any one news report. Let’s start with some math from the Associated Press:

Members of the 13-million-person denomination have been at odds for years over the issue, with members in the United States leading the call for full inclusion for LGBTQ people. 

The rift widened last year when delegates meeting in St. Louis voted 438-384 for a proposal called the Traditional Plan, which affirmed bans on LGBTQ-inclusive practices. A majority of U.S.-based delegates opposed that plan but were outvoted by U.S. conservatives teamed with delegates from Methodist strongholds in Africa and the Philippines.

By the way: The numbers in that first paragraph are accurate, as opposed to the following circulated by Reuters: “The United Methodist Church lists more than 13 million members in the United States and 80 million worldwide.” That’s way off, but quite a few online and broadcast outlets picked up that error and ran with it.

Accurate math really is important here. So are the doctrines that are at stake, which are much broader than battles over marriage and sexuality (see my two “On Religion” columns about these trends here, and then here).

The key is two realities that are in constant tension.


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Plug-In: Why Texas minister talked to Bobby Ross -- only -- about deadly church shooting

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A few minutes after noon Sunday, my iPhone started pinging with messages from friends — alerting me to a shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ in this Fort Worth suburb.

“One of my friends’ parents goes there,” my sister, Christy Fichter, texted. “Said her dad was carrying … not sure if that means he shot the shooter or not. A little too close to home for sure.”

As it turned out, her Facebook friend Jaynette Barnes’ father — Jack Wilson — was the heroic church security team leader who stopped the bloodshed.

The former reserve sheriff’s deputy gunned down Keith Thomas Kinnunen, 43, after he fatally wounded two beloved Christians: Richard White, 67, and Anton “Tony” Wallace, 64. The shooting lasted just six seconds but felt like so much longer to those who endured it.

As I searched online for any reliable details, I came across a link to the church’s YouTube livestream of its Sunday morning assembly. I fast-forwarded through the video until I came to the part that will be seared in my brain forever. 

I heard the shots. And the screams. 

I saw the bodies fall. 

And I burst into tears.

However, I quickly composed myself because I am a journalist.


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Thinking along with Emma Green: Sen. Josh Hawley dares to tilt at many GOP windmills

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It’s the question that many politicos have been asking: What happens to the Republican Party after the Citizen Donald Trump era?

Here’s another question that is linked to that: What happens to cultural and religious conservatives — those that backed Trump and those that opposed him (openly or privately) — after this fever dance of an administration is over?

That was the topic looming in the background of a recent Emma Green think piece (yes, another one) at The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “Josh Hawley’s Mission to Remake the GOP.”

In most press coverage, the Missouri freshman is painted as a rather standard-issue conservative in the U.S. Senate. After all, those conservatives are all alike — even if libertarian folks often clash with religious conservatives in ways that don’t get much ink.

However, journalists who parse the texts produced by Hawley will notice strange subplots, like the fact that he is known for, as Green puts it, “casually citing the philosopher Edmund Burke and the Christian monk Pelagius in a single stretch.” But here is the paragraph where things get serious:

His speeches around town, including one he delivered … while accepting an award at the annual gala of the American Principles Project Foundation, a socially conservative public-policy organization, are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy: He rails against income inequality, condemns the policy deference afforded to corporations, and speaks warmly about the civic value of labor unions. He often talks about the “great American middle” being crushed by the decline of local communities, the winner-take-all concentration of wealth, and the inaccessibility of higher education. And he said that the modern Republican Party’s split over competing impulses toward free-market economics and social conservatism has led some conservatives to ignore the effects of their policies on the middle and working class. “It’s time to do away with that,” he told me.

You need another clash?


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There he goes again: New York Times Editor Dean Baquet on journalists getting religion

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There he goes again: New York Times Editor Dean Baquet on journalists getting religion

There he goes again.

Yes, the GetReligionistas noticed the online hubbub caused by that Chuck Todd remark the other day on Meet the Press, when he read part of a letter to the editor sent to The Lexington Herald-Leader that took a shot at, well, a certain type of Bible reader that went to the polls in 2016.

The problem, you see, is not a matter of politics — strictly speaking.

The problem is with that these knuckle-draggers have the wrong religious views, when it comes to the Bible. Here’s the key language, as it ran in Newsweek:

"[Why] do good people support Trump? It's because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales," the letter read. "This set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good. ... The more fairy tales and lies he tells the better they feel. …

“Show me a person who believes in Noah's ark and I will show you a Trump voter."

Well now, that was certainly a quote worth discussing in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

I argued that this Meet the Press exchange was, in a way, a modern version of the classic shot at Richard Nixon voters that was reported in the classic Joe McGinnis book, “The Selling of the President.” Old folks like me will remember that quote, which said Nixon was “the president of every place in this country which does not have a bookstore.”

In other words, there are smart people and dumb people and people whose biblical views do not match those of NBC News are in the second camp.

As I have been saying for years, religious conservatives are wrong if they think that many elite journalists are anti-religion. That’s a simplistic thing to say. Many journalists believe that there are good religious people and bad religious people and that one of the duties of the press is to advocate for the views of the good religious people. Journalists get to tell us which doctrines are true and which ones are false.


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