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Progressive Catholic cardinal of Washington, D.C., pours praise on America's embattled press

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Progressive Catholic cardinal of Washington, D.C., pours praise on America's embattled press

With a controversial Catholic in the White House, there was no way for Cardinal Wilton Gregory to face a pack of Beltway journalists without fielding political questions.

Job 1 was addressing President Joe Biden's statement: "I respect them -- those who believe life begins at the moment of conception and all -- I respect that. Don't agree, but I respect that."

The leader of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has made it clear that Biden can receive Holy Communion. However, Gregory also noted: "The Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that life -- human life -- begins at conception. So, the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching."

That was the big headline after this event, but this wasn't the topic Gregory came to the National Press club to discuss. In his recent address, he poured praise on America's mainstream press, especially journalists who -- during this "anxious time" -- have openly pushed for change on issues linked to racism and social justice.

"You are the ones we rely on to keep us informed, updated and connected as a global community of various faith traditions," said Gregory, America's first Black cardinal. "Like all industries, journalism has certainly changed over the years. Technology has expanded your reach and abilities to share our life stories, our dreams and our hopes.

"You are the professionals with just the right words, who immerse yourselves in a community, a situation or even a crisis -- to bring us the facts, the people and the takeaways that can help us work toward living in true peace and equality for all, without the threat of violence or harm."

According to a sobering blast of data from Gallup, the cardinal's critique of the national press would ring true for Democrats and political progressives -- but not for Republicans and cultural conservatives. Catholics can be found in both of those camps, of course.

In their Sept. 1-17 poll, Gallup researchers asked: "In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio -- when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?"


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Using the journalism TARDIS: Why was Cardinal McCarrick such a crucial news source?

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When a big news story gets rolling -- like the fall of Cardinal Theodore "Uncle Ted" McCarrick -- the digital waves keep crashing in day after, even if there are no new developments in the mainstream press.

Here at GetReligion, it's hard to know what is worth an update or a critique. We will err on the side of keeping readers connected to some of the discussions that are taking place in serious blogging and social media.

Some of the most important issues in this case are linked to journalism questions in the past. If you have followed the must-read posts of GetReligionista Julia Duin (start here and here) and others (Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher, for example), then you know that news organizations had pieces of this puzzle years ago, but could not land the on-the-record interviews needed to satisfy lawyers and editors. One of the big questions: What happened to the New York Times Sunday Magazine story in 2012 that almost made it to print?

There are many "what ifs" to consider. Old-timers like me -- people who covered events in which Cardinal McCarrick was a player and watched journalists encircle him -- may also want to pause and consider why this man was such a prominent news source, in front of cameras and behind the scenes.

The bottom line: The Catholic hierarchy chose to put him in Washington, D.C.

So with that reality in mind, let's do something that your GetReligionistas hardly ever do (with good cause), which is jump in a journalism TARDIS (a Doctor Who reference, of course) and travel back in time. In this case, it's quite educational to pause and examine a glowing 2004 Washingtonian profile of Cardinal McCarrick. Here is the epic double-decker headline: 

The Man In The Red Hat

With a Controversial Catholic in the Presidential Race, the Cardinal Is Seen by Many as the Vatican's Man in Washington -- and He May Play a Big Role in the Selection of the Next Pope

Here is the overture. Pay close attention to the information about this cardinal's clout with journalists:


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Location, location, location: Where a Supreme Court nominee kneels matters in DC life

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Greetings from Prague, in the Czech Republic. It's kind of interesting to visit a part of the world where the World Cup matters more than the latest tweets of Donald Trump. Needless to say, people do have strong opinions about what Trump is up to, in terms of England, Russia and beyond.

That open U.S. Supreme Court seat? Not so much. The assumption is that Trump has nominated a Trump candidate to please Trump people.

That's bad, of course. It also misses some of the most interesting angles in the Brett Kavanaugh story -- some of which are linked to religion and culture. So once you get past this man's love of charging baseball tickets on his credit card, and his ability to serve mac and cheese to the homeless, what kinds of picture is emerging for Americans who read major newspapers?

I was really intrigued, the other day, by the Washington Post story that ran with this headline: "The elite world of Brett Kavanaugh."

"Elite" is an interesting world in this case. This really is one of the cases in which, in D.C. Beltway culture, the word "elite" actually means rich, powerful and liberal.

On one level, this is a real estate story -- it's all about location, location, location. Before we get the Kavanaugh's church, let's look at the opening anecdote about his local bar.

The Chevy Chase Lounge is a neighborhood joint where bartender Tim Higgins is accustomed to bantering with long-standing patrons, including a middle-aged guy named Brett who likes to pop in for a Budweiser and a burger after coaching his daughters’ basketball games.

As he watched the news recently, Higgins learned something else about Brett Kavanaugh: He was among the judges whom President Trump was considering to nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Most people in Washington tell you what they do,” Higgins said from behind the bar Tuesday, the day after Trump nominated Kavanaugh. “I never knew Brett was a lawyer. I expect we’ll be seeing him in here a lot less.”

Note: Not only did Kavanaugh not talk politics with his bar crowd, he wasn't even talking about what he does for a living -- on the second most powerful court in America. Maybe that's because he is a mainstream Republican living in one of greater DC's most prominent nests of liberal Democrats?

Location, location, location. How about education and church?


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One year later: BuzzFeed feature gets the 'miracle' details in GOP baseball shooting

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Did you notice that Rep. Steve Scalise returned, to the best of his abilities, to the annual Congressional Baseball game the other night?

It has been a year since that stunning mass shooting, when an angry liberal Democrat came close, close, close to gunning down most of the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives. Here is a link to a nice NPR update on how Scalise is doing, using the 1-year anniversary as a news hook,

Sure enough, the word "miracle" is a key part of the story.

The anniversary reminded me of a magazine-length piece at BuzzFeed that has been buried deep in my GetReligion folder of guilt for several weeks. This happens, sometimes, with long, long stories. They are hard to critique in a short post and, well, they rarely draw responses from GetReligion readers. We are all rather busy, aren't we?

Anyway, the BuzzFeed story focused on two primary angles of the near massacre -- one political (and rooted in journalism) and the other is religious. This is the rare case in which the religion angle was handled better than the political one. The massive headline on this piece proclaimed:

THE 9 MINUTES THAT ALMOST CHANGED AMERICA

How The Congressional Baseball Shooting Didn't Become The Deadliest Political Assassination In American History

The political angle?

Why wasn't this bizarre and troubling event a bigger deal -- a bigger news story -- than it was? Why did the story slide on A1 so quickly? This story almost, almost, almost was one of the biggest events in the history of American politics. BuzzFeed noted:

What is certain is the disquieting way June 14 slipped beneath the news so quickly. The shooting felt much further away by July, August, September than mere months. If people joke about how the weeks feel like years in the current era, there’s an unsettling truth behind the joke -- the way anything can lose scale and proportion. Two dozen members of Congress were nearly killed one morning last year, and the country didn’t change very much at all.

Was the problem blunt politics, including bias in newsrooms?


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Sally Quinn and her ghosts: A memoir about magic, sex, spirituality and the religion beat

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Now this is what the DC chattering classes desperately needed right now -- something to talk about other than President Donald Trump and his wife's controversial choices in footwear.

If you have followed post-1960s life in Washington, D.C., you will not be surprised that the person in the center of this hurricane of whispers is none other than journalist and social maven Sally Quinn. Yes, we're talking about the much-talked-about lover and much-younger wife of the great Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Once the most feared "New Journalism" scribe covering DC social life, Quinn later used her personal charisma and clout to create the "On Faith" blog at the Post -- opening a window into the religious beliefs of her corner of the DC establishment. Hint: Mysterious progressive faith is good, traditional forms of religion are bad, bad, bad. Meanwhile, the former atheist became -- in her public persona -- a rather visible Episcopalian.

Now she is tweaking that image with a spiritual memoir entitled "Finding Magic" in which, in the words of a must-read Washingtonian profile, the "gatekeeper of Washington society turned religion columnist and about-to-turn evangelist for mysticism, magic, and the divine."

Journalists reading this profile will marvel at the personal details. However, it's also important to keep remembering that Quinn -- during some crucial years -- served as a major influence on religion-beat debates. My take on her approach: Why focus on hard news when everyone knows that religion is really about emotions, feelings and personal experiences?

OK, back to the Washingtonian article itself, which details the degree to which Quinn has decided to let her "spiritual freak flag fly." The summary statement is:

It’s a spiritual memoir, called Finding Magic, that charts her path from “angry atheist” to -- well, Quinn’s spiritual classification is a bit hard to define, even for her. A sort of Eat Pray Love for the This Town set, the memoir offers an intimate, at times painful look inside her exceedingly public life. There’s less glamour and cutthroat ambition, more vulnerability and personal anguish. She outs herself as a believer in the occult and as an erstwhile practitioner of voodoo, and she packs the book with moments that have made anxious friends wonder: Are you sure you want to share that?

Really? #Really.


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DC church reaching millennials with evangelical, but strangely noncontroversial take on life

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Trust me. As a guy in his early ‘60s, after studying trends in American religion for more than four decades, I have seen plenty of news stories explaining how this church or that parachurch has found the magic formula for reaching people who are young and/or sick of organized religion.

These news stories come along every decade or so and are usually rooted in concerns stirred by research into the minds, hearts and lives of another a new generation. This was true with Baby Boomers, Generation X and now the millennials.

I’m not being cynical. We are talking about serious issues for clergy of all kinds, as they try to discern how changing times affect young people heading into the big spiritual gateways of life — marriage, career, children, mid-life angst, retirement and, well, you know.

Right now, the journalism ground is still shaking about you know what -- that headline-grabbing (still) 2012 Pew Forum study about the sharp rise in the number of people, especially the young, who openly describe themselves as unaffiliated, when it comes to institutional religion. Yes, lots of single young adults are sliding into the “Nones” zone.

This brings me to a long “Acts of Faith” feature, written by a freelance writer, that ran the other day at The Washington Post with a headline that, trust me (again), I felt like I had read (with a different noun at the end) several times in my professional life: “A new crop of D.C. churches has discovered the secret to appealing to millennials.” 

Here is the overture, complete with a 36-year-old pastor who — in the post-Associated Press Stylebook world in which we live — doesn’t have “The Rev.” in front of his name.

Aaron Graham is talking to Washingtonians about power.


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Christmas carol wars on the DC Metro -- not

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Anyone who spends much time on subways and other forms of mass transit knows that a whole lot of religious stuff goes on while people are moving from home to work. I’m not just talking about the people with their sports pages and copies of 50 shades of hades or whatever.


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