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What journalists need to look for during Benedict-Francis feud over priestly celibacy

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The movie The Two Popes is a largely fictional account of the doctrinal differences between the retired Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

In real life, those differences were brought to the surface this week when retired Benedict issued a strongly-worded defense for priestly celibacy — countering his successor Pope Francis, who has publicly affirmed this tradition of the Roman rite, but who is also considering allowing older married men to be ordained in the Amazon to deal with a shortage in that part of the world.

The pope emeritus made the surprise comments in a book, excerpts of which were printed in the French newspaper Le Figro, co-authored with Cardinal Robert Sarah (click here for the cardinal’s defense of listing the retired pope as an author of materials in the book).

What journalists covering this ongoing story need to focus on is explaining what it means for a pope to be infallible on matters of doctrine, as talk of schism intensifies. Also, what role does an emeritus pope play? What does clergy celibacy mean doctrinally for Catholicism? All of these factors will have a bearing on what Pope Francis ultimately decides to do regarding doing away with celibacy among men serving congregations in the Amazon region.

Both Benedict and Sarah are doctrinally conservative, while Francis is widely seen — especially in media reports — as a progressive who wants to change many church teachings to deal with changes in the modern world.


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That story that stayed 'til Christmas: Pachamama debates lingered at the Vatican

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The scene during the Vatican's Christmas concert was simple and even childlike, as a young woman from Latin America instructed participants -- including smiling cardinals -- to fold their arms over their chests.

But this was a religious ritual, not a 1990s Macarena flashback.

"You will feel a strong vibration," she said, according to translations of the online video. "That is the heart -- your heart, but also the heart of Mother Earth. And on the other side, where you feel the silence, there is the spirit -- the spirit that allows you to understand the message of the Mother.

"For us indigenous peoples … Mother Earth, Hitchauaya, is everything. It is that Mother who provides food. She is the one who gives us the sacred water. She is the one who gives us medicinal plants and power and reminds us of our origin, the origin of our creation."

The name "Hitchauaya" was new, but battles over "Pachamama" rites had already emerged as one of the strangest Vatican news stories of late 2019. For weeks, progressives and conservatives argued about the relevancy of the first of the Ten Commandments: "You shall have no other gods before me."

Three events in Rome fueled the Earth Mother wars. For some Catholics, they became linked, theologically, to an early 2019 meeting in Abu Dhabi when Pope Francis signed an interfaith document that included this: "The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom."

First, early in the fall Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region, there were rites that included wooden statues of a pregnant Amazonian woman. Some journalists reported that they represented "Our Lady of the Amazon" or were symbols of new life. Outraged Catholics then stole the statues and tossed them in the Tiber River.

Speaking as "bishop of this diocese," Pope Francis apologized and sought "forgiveness from those who have been offended by this gesture." He said the images were displayed "without idolatrous intentions."


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Shane Claiborne finally gets his day in the media sun in the Washington Post Magazine

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Although evangelicals have been the flavor of the month for some time in the mainstream media, it’s rare that you see a thoughtful profile on one of them. Conservative evangelicals are distasteful to much of the media on the Eastern seaboard, so the search has been on to find someone who is more palatable to mainstream media tastes.

And thus Shane Claiborne, one of the more interesting Gen X thinkers out there, was a perfect choice for a recent Washington Post Magazine piece.

He’s spent more than two decades living in inner-city Philly; he got some serious cred traveling to Iraq during the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and doing time in Calcutta helping Mother Teresa. He has hung out with the unglamorous poor and stayed on message for a long time.

On a gloomy Tuesday morning in April, the Christian activist Shane Claiborne was in the studio of WCPN, Cleveland’s NPR affiliate, waiting to go on air. The overhead lights glinted off his thick-rimmed glasses. The 43-year-old had spent the past five weeks on a national tour, living on a retrofitted school bus, speaking at community centers and churches every night, trying to accelerate regional movements against gun violence. His collaborator, Mike Martin, a Mennonite blacksmith from Colorado, was sitting to his left…

The story then refers to the verse from Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Claiborne and Martin had been enacting the verse on tour. They were promoting a book they had written — “Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence” — and at every stop, they were using Martin’s forge to convert a rifle into a garden tool. The point was to give communities a chance to grieve, but also to convince them that change was possible. It all reflected the broader project that has made up Claiborne’s career: promoting what might be called an alternative version of evangelical Christianity, one more concerned with social justice than with personal salvation. Or, as he would put it to me later, a bit wryly: “Getting Christians to connect their faith to issues that I think matter to God and are affecting our neighbors.”…


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Any darkness to report? The cathedral dean (and bishop) who led St. John the Divine to relevancy

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Obituaries are an interesting and unique form of journalism.

On one level, these news features — especially long takes on the lives of the famous — are tributes to people who shaped our culture. There are cases, of course, in which people become famous for negative, as well as positive, reasons. It would be strange to see an obit of former President Bill Clinton that avoided the flaws, and possible crimes, that led to his impeachment.

There are also people whose lives become intertwined with controversial people. It’s hard to imagine, at some point in the future, an obituary for Bob Weinstein that didn’t mention the #MeToo excesses of his brother Harvey Weinstein during their years working side by side. Consider this passage from a New York Times story last fall:

Time’s Up, a Hollywood-based advocacy group begun in the wake of the Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo effort, quickly issued a statement after learning of Bob Weinstein’s new production company.

“There could have been no Harvey Weinstein without the complicity of Bob Weinstein, who for years put profits ahead of people’s lives as Harvey terrorized women throughout the industry,” the statement read.

This brings me to the recent Times feature obit that ran with this dramatic double-decker headline:

James Parks Morton, Dean Who Brought a Cathedral to Life, Dies at 89

Leading the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine for 25 years, he sought to make it central to urban life.

Morton was a liberal Protestant hero who led an Episcopal sanctuary that served as a Maypole around which activists of many kinds danced. However, his career was closely connected with an even more famous liberal Christian hero — Bishop Paul Moore — who was hiding secrets. Hold that thought.

Let’s start with the glowing Times overture.


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Plug-In: 7 tips for covering horrific events in houses of worship (and treating victims right)

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I love journalism. I love my fellow journalists.

But as I pointed out in last week’s column on the media barrage faced by minister Britt Farmer after a deadly shooting at his Texas church, I believe we can do better — much better — in how we treat victims.

To help in that regard, I asked four highly respected news professionals — three of them Pulitzer Prize recipients — for advice. Everyone I’m quoting has extensive experience in this area and in making our profession proud.

Based on what they told me, here are seven tips for covering horrific events at houses of worship:

1. How you approach a victim is everything.

“Many mistakes are usually made in the initial approach when journalists are trying to get that quote or sound bite,” said Joe Hight, a Pulitzer-winning editor who is the Edith Kinney Gaylord Endowed Chair of Journalism Ethics at the University of Central Oklahoma. 

“It just doesn’t work like you’re at a public news conference or interviewing a public figure,” added Hight, who hired me at The Oklahoman in 1993 and oversaw our coverage of victims after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. “You are intruding upon private individuals in their most vulnerable moments. In these tragic situations, you have to ask the victims or family members for permission. You need to say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and mean it sincerely. You need to put yourself in the victim’s position of grief and despair after such a tragic situation.

“You need to determine whether the individual is even capable of talking to you at this point or whether you need to step away and approach later. How would you feel if you were asked that question? You don’t want to cause further harm or take advantage of someone in grief just for a quote or sound bite. How you approach will often determine what kind of interview you will get. Do it poorly, and you will possibly cause more damage.”

2. Think long and hard about your call to a victim (and if you really need to make it).

Sensitivity is so crucial.


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Something completely different from Ryan Burge: Atheists love cats, while believers love dogs?

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Tired of all those statistics about white evangelicals and Citizen Donald Trump?

Tired of charts about soaring “nones” and imploding Mainline Protestants?

This time around, political scientist and progressive Baptist pastor Ryan Burge has served up something different. I mean, who doesn’t want to read a Religion News Service essay with this headline: “Atheists prefer cats, Christians love dogs, study shows.” Click here for a .pdf of the original academic paper.

Let me interject, as a personal confession, that my wife and I have had our share of cats and dogs, even in the same household. However, as an adult, I developed a strong allergy to cats — except for a beloved black cat. Go figure.

But back to this week’s dose of Burge material, in the text of the RNS piece:

Dogs are the most popular household pet. In fact, there’s no religious traditi­on in which fewer than half of adherents own a dog. 

However, there are some interesting differences among faith groups. Evangelicals and Catholics are more likely to have dogs than are mainline Christians. Mainliners are more likely than evangelicals and black Protestants to own cats. Jews prefer dogs to cats. Jewish families are also more likely than other traditions to own a small mammal or a bird.

Those who claim no religious identity are most likely to have a cat.


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Playoffs weekend NFL think piece: Ray Lewis, Eddie George and the faith ties that bind

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Over the years, there have been two or three sports fans who have worked at GetReligion.

I have even seen evidence that several dozen (cough, cough) GetReligion readers are interested in sports. Maybe there’s something about people who care about religion and journalism that blocks an all-American interest in sports? Beats me.

Anyway, from time to time some of us (looking at you, Bobby Ross, Jr.) have soldiered on, producing posts about mainstream coverage of sports stories that skips over (that’s putting it mildly) relevant religious content in the lives of star players and sometimes entire teams. I could write a whole book on ESPN and Baltimore Sun stories about the Baltimore Ravens that contain massive God-shaped holes, in terms of important facts about the lives of players, coaches and staff members.

Now it is time for round two of the National Football League playoffs and this round of games includes a renewal of one of the fiercest rivalries in the league, dating back to when the Ravens and the Tennessee Titans were in the same division. Yes, this means that one of my two NFL teams will knock the other one out of the Super Bowl race tonight.

With that in mind, let me recommend a story at The Athletic website (which is really worth its modest price) with this headline: “ ‘We gotta tell this story’: Eddie George, Ray Lewis and a friendship fueled by rivalry, marred by tragedy, saved by love.”

That last word — “love” — is linked to faith-based ties that bind.

We are, of course, talking about iconic players here. It also helps to know that quite a bit of this long story focuses on ties between George, Lewis and the late, murdered quarterback Steve McNair, who played for both franchises. Here is the overture, set in the present:


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Trigger warning! New Crossroads podcast contains dis-United Methodist time travel

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I don’t need to write a new GetReligion post about this week’s “Crossroads,” do I?

After all, this podcast conversation with host Todd Wilken (click here to listen) focuses on why United Methodists on the doctrinal left and right, as well as establishment players in the middle, are now bracing for divorce. In one form or another, I’ve been writing this post since the early 1980s.

What we need is a time machine (I’m a fan of Doctor Who No. 4) so that I could let readers bounce around in United Methodist history and see why all those new headlines about a proposed plan to break-up this complicated church need to be linked to trends and events in the past.

So here we go. Stop No. 1 in this time-travel adventure is Denver, in the year 1980 (care of a GetReligion post with this headline: “United Methodism doctrine? Think location, location, location”).

… It was in 1980 — note that this was one-third of a century ago — that Bishop Melvin Wheatley, Jr., of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church announced … he was openly rejecting his church's teaching that homosexual acts were "incompatible with Christian teaching."

Two years later, this United Methodist bishop appointed an openly gay pastor to an urban church in Denver. When challenged, Wheatley declared: "Homosexuality is a mysterious gift of God's grace. I clearly do not believe homosexuality is a sin."

This date is crucial, because it underlines the fact that the United Methodist Church’s doctrine that homosexual acts are “incompatible with Christian teaching” has been on the books for decades.

That’s why the following passage — from the New York Times a few days ago — is so misleading. The wording here gives the average reader the impression that this doctrine is something that conservatives pulled out of their hats in 2019. This Times report stated that a global split has been:


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About that semi-apology by Chick-fil-A czar: Is this a mainstream news story or not?

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As we approached New Year’s Day, and this new era in GetReligion.org work, religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling started floating some trial balloons in our team’s behind-the-scenes email chatter.

For example, he suggested that we needed to run short, punchy commentary items every now and then when there was an interesting religion-beat story breaking or there was a potential story lurking somewhere in the digital weeds.

Long ago, GetReligion even had a “Got News?” logo for that kind of thing, atop posts that pointed to interesting, potentially newsworthy items in denominational wire services or other alternative sources of religion-beat information.

So what would this look like? Maybe something like this. Have you seen any mainstream news coverage of the leader of Chick-fil-A writing a letter admitting that his company messed up the whole ties-that-bind situation with Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

This story is all over the place in conservative Christian media, but, so far, I’m not seeing anything in the mainstream press. Here is the headline at DISRN: “Chick-fil-A CEO laments “inadvertently discrediting outstanding organizations" in giving strategy switch.”

So is this a story or not? It’s obvious that the original funding shift was a story, because it caused a firestorm in elite media (must-read Bobby Ross post here). Now there is this, care of DISRN:

In an open letter to the American Family Association (AFA), Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy expressed that the company "inadvertently discredited several outstanding organizations" when the fast food giant announced it would be restructuring its philanthropic strategy by halting donations to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last year.

AFA President Tim Wildmon had written Cathy asking if Chick-fil-A would publicly state that both ministries are not hate groups because of their beliefs concerning sexuality, marriage, and family.

Cathy responded:


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