Catholic News

David Gibson says all I wanted to say this week. He is better informed than I could ever be because he’s a journalist and I’m a blogger. Nevertheless, I will forge ahead. I still have questions after his excellent article and everything else I have read on the US Bishops’ closing of the Catholic News Service (CNS).

I know how important CNS is to the local Catholic news effort because I read www.CatholicPhilly.com every week, and there I find many CNS articles, especially for Vatican and national news, as Gibson argues and NCR reports. The Catholic Standard and Times is no longer published by Philadelphia, a Metropolitan Archdiocese. Therefore, it should be a major player in US Catholicism, as it was under former Archbishop Charles Chaput, not that that was an especially good thing. But indulge me in a Philly moment. I have two larger points.

The two Philly reporters online do a good job covering local events, and some articles relate to broader Catholic issues, like the Synod. They are less critical than I, but that is to be expected. The CNS reporters are careful, too.  This week on the Philly site, Gina Christian writes about Ukraine, so it’s a local story with larger implications. The Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy in the US is located here, and its leaders plead for the rest of us not to get used to war in their country. (Parenthetically, I’ll link to David Bromwich in The Nation against World War III, reminding us of JFK and the Cuban missile crisis.)

In a decent bit of editing, the other “content producer” who is also “director,” Matthew Gambino, puts the first commentary this week also about Ukraine. It’s by George Weigel and I learned something interesting. Weigel writes about anti-Communist and spiritual “reformist” Father Alexander Men, “who had warned of a ‘new Russian fascism’ days before his assassination,” and concludes, “I like to think that Father Men and those he inspired might have ignited a rebirth of Russian culture capable of resisting Putinism’s allure.” Weigel convinces me that Men would have been a better leader of Russian Orthodoxy than those patriarchs I wrote about in February. That’s my first larger point.

Weigel’s article is from The Catholic Difference, the opinion resource on Catholic World Report (CWR), published by Ignatius Press. It’s very conservative but at least it’s not a part of the EWTN Fox-like media empire, as reported by Gibson – remember him? That’s the second larger point; as Gibson says, dioceses around the US do not spend a lot on the news, especially news that we’ve come to understand as “investigative reporting.” I get notifications when some websites do something on women, for example, but often they are republishing something else, without even making comments, as bloggers like me do.

What else did I learn from a real reporter like Gibson? He goes to income tax returns! “Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sits on EWTN’s board. That’s like the head of CNN serving as an adviser to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and then working to shutter his own network in favor of Fox News. Most people would have questions. Real journalists would get answers.”

I’m not sure what that last comment means. Is someone – Gibson – going to ask Gomez who made the decision? And why? Those are my big questions.

I don’t remember anyone covering this at the USCCB business meeting last November. Journalistically, I go to the USCCB strategic plan and read all of it. I find that “This strategic framework was written by more than 300 bishops, 1,800 collaborators, and more than three dozen committees, subcommittees, ad hoc committees, secretariats, and offices of the Conference. The work reveals the Holy Spirit animating more than 230 objectives and nearly 900 activities—all for the purpose of building the Kingdom of God.” LOTS of those activities are reaching out to laity, clergy, youth, the world – but no mention of cutting out the CNS, which one might suppose would be essential to achieving the 230 objectives. Almost none of which are measurable, by the way, but I digress into my life on boards and in management.  

I go to the 2020 USCCB audit report. Most interesting is the Operating expense line for “Communications, policy, and advocacy activities”: $15,485,813. How much of that do you think was for CNS, and how much for lobbying? No need to comment.

I also pick up that revenue from sale of publications was $5,630,193 and royalty income was $2,363,920. Gibson notes that “USCCB Publishing, which holds the rights to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the U.S. Adult Catechism and many other books, will cease its publishing operations at the end of 2022.” Will that be privatized? Nobody has mentioned where these books will go, but I am sure they will not go away.

Enough of a foray into journalism for me. I do not want you to leave wondering why this is an important issue for anyone interested in church reform, even for such an out-there idea like the ordination of people of all genders to the priesthood. Gibson calls for an integrity that is not exclusive to journalism, but must characterize it:

“The quality of Catholic journalism is not determined by the quality of a journalist’s Catholicism. Journalism is part of media, but not all media is journalism. Journalism is a craft and a trade, and it establishes its credibility by doing its job well, which by definition is to seek the truth.”

“Catholic journalism is not piety or apologetics. As Martin Luther put it, “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.” Or, if you prefer your wisdom from more reliably Catholic sources, consider Jacques Maritain’s advice in his well-known essay on Christian art: “If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to ‘make Christian.’ “

“…As Mike Lewis of the Catholic commentary site, Where Peter Is, noted, the Second Vatican Council’s decree on the media, Inter Mirifica (“Among the Wonders”) speaks about the faithful’s “right to information” reported in a “true and complete” and professional manner. The Council Fathers said that it is a “duty” of the Catholic Church “to instruct men [rb:sic] in [the] proper use” of the media.” 

If you think this blog is over, as I did, you are mistaken, because I had to link to Where Peter Is, which I have very rarely used. But like this blog, it is “a Catholic media outlet, Where Peter Is does not primarily do journalism…But as a site that regularly provides analysis and commentary on news and events in the Church, we rely on good, professional, and ethical journalism every day. And the quality and standards of the work done by CNS are top-notch.” Lewis follows this with his own harrowing employment story, if you have not yet focused on the labor implications of this decision.

We can be reassured that the CNS office in Rome is going to be maintained for now, and that we do have another real journalistic source for news in NCR. But I cannot do better to communicate my real feelings about this than to slightly rearrange Gibson’s opening salvo:

The May 4 announcement is perverse proof of what a bone-headed decision the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops made in opting to gut CNS. [It] eliminates a rare source of credibility for the hierarchy, a critical tool for reliably informing American Catholics about the church beyond their own diocese, and a counterwitness to the proliferation of ideologically driven Catholic media platforms that are driving the church apart, and regular Catholics around the bend — often right out of Catholicism.

Don’t go away. Stay with us, whatever your Catholicism is. Know that we will always tell our truth.