The pope, the media and balance on pro-life ministries

It was the telephone call heard around the world, because the pope made the call. On the other end of the line was a single woman in central Italy, who mailed Pope Francis a confused, anguished letter after learning she was pregnant by a man who turned out to be married. The man demanded that she have an abortion and she refused.

Then a strange telephone number appeared on her caller ID screen. It was the pope, who called to say that she made the right decision because the "child was a gift from God" and that he wanted to help.

Pope Francis, she told The Catholic Herald, assured her that "as Christians we should never be afraid. He told me I had been very brave and strong for my unborn child. I told him that I wanted to baptize the baby when it was born, but I was afraid, as I was divorced and a single mother. ... He said he would be my spiritual father and he would baptize my baby."

If the baby is a boy, she plans to name him Francis.

A few news organizations, but not many, covered this media-friendly parable.

But two weeks later, the pope unleashed a media tsunami with a long, candid interview published exclusively in America and other Jesuit magazines around the world. While the pope talked about confession, sin and mercy, one quote leapt into news reports and headlines more than any other.

"We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible," he told the interviewer, a fellow Jesuit. "The teaching of the church ... is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time."

Stressing the need for improved pastoral responses on hot-button issues – such as abortion and homosexuality – Pope Francis said the church "cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. .... We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel."

The pope, of course, stressed the need for balance between pronouncements and pastoral care, not the end of the church's public advocacy on its moral doctrines. He said that Catholic leaders cannot insist "only" on issues linked to sexual ethics, which is not the same as saying they should be silent on them.

The church, he said, must be a "field hospital" for the wounded and its most important message is "the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all."

The world of Catholic bloggers, insiders and experts exploded, both on the doctrinal left and the right. Some traditional Catholics expressed sadness and concern, focusing on secular media editing of the pope's remarks, more than on the content of the actual interview.

While the media storm raged, Pope Francis did an interesting thing – especially in light of his alleged call for the church to tone down its teachings on abortion and other hot-button issues. He addressed, with little media fanfare, a gathering of Catholic gynecologists, urging them to remember that a doctor's "ultimate objective" must always be the protection of life.

"The culture of waste, which now enslaves the hearts and minds of many, has a very high cost: it requires the elimination of human beings, especially if they are physically or socially weaker," he said, according to a English translation offered by The National Catholic Register.

"Our response to this mentality is a categorical and unhesitant 'yes' to life. ... Things have a price and are sold, but people have a dignity, worth more than things and they don't have a price. Many times we find ourselves in situations where we see that which costs less is life. Because of this, attention to human life in its totality has become a real priority of the Magisterium of the Church in recent years, particularly to the most defenseless, that is, the disabled, the sick, the unborn child, the child, the elderly who are life's most defenseless."

In the end, stressed the pope, the church must continue to proclaim that, "Each child who is unborn, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ, bears the face of the Lord, who, even before he was born, and then as soon as he was born, experienced the rejection of the world."

Rather faith-free WPost story about ministry to the hungry

As happens about this time every summer, tmatt headed to the Southern Highlands to take a week off. Thus, there was no new Scripps Howard column. There was, however, this post from GetReligion.org that I think will interest the readers of my weekly column. Enjoy. For the past two decades, I have spent quite a bit of time driving the back roads of the Southern Highlands, which is one of the many names that locals use to describe the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina.

One of my very favorite East Tennessee roads runs from the back of Johnson City — where my family lived during our Milligan College years — down the Nolichucky River into the back side of Greeneville. The mountains there are high, lonesome and as beautiful as any in the region. They are almost completely free of development, especially when it comes to tourists.

But as any local knows, there are mountain people up in there and their lives are very hard. The word “Appalachian” has many meanings and extreme poverty is part of the picture.

The Washington Post ran a fine, but haunted, news feature the other day about a rolling food-bank project to fight hunger among the shattered families along those mountain roads above the Nolichucky. Please read it all, because it’s well worth the time.

If you look carefully at the photo that ran with the piece, you learn that this particular anti-hunger project has a name, a name that is not mentioned in the article for some reason. However, readers do find out quite a bit about the bus driver and the people he feeds.

The driver’s name was Rick Bible, and his 66-mile route through the hills of Greene County marked the government’s latest attempt to solve a rise in childhood hunger that had been worsening for seven consecutive years.

Congress had tried to address it mostly by spending a record $15 billion each year to feed 21 million low-income children in their schools, but that left out the summer, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to spend $400 million more on that. Governors came together to form a task force. Michelle Obama suggested items for a menu. Food banks opened thousands of summer cafes, and still only about 15 percent of eligible children received regular summer meals.

So, earlier this year, a food bank in Tennessee came up with a plan to reverse the model. Instead of relying on children to find their own transportation to summer meal sites, it would bring food to children. The food bank bought four used school buses for $4,000 each and designed routes that snake through some of the most destitute land in the country, where poverty rates have almost doubled since 2009 and two-thirds of children qualify for free meals.

Good stuff.

However, as a former resident of the region, my religion-ghost alarm went off immediately when I saw — in that photo, not in the story text — that the name of the food bank was Second Harvest. As it turns out, this charity is linked to Greeneville Community Ministries.

The obvious question: Is this a purely government project or, as one would expect deep in the Bible Belt hills, is this worthwhile and remarkable effort just as much a ministry among the volunteers and donors as it is a tax-funded project? It could, of course, be both. If so, that’s a very interesting angle to include in the story.

As it is, the story is poignant, moving and essential reading — yet strangely faith-free if you know anything about that part of Tennessee. Why write the story without including the religion angle?

For the full text, click here.

The life and Times of John McCandlish Phillips

The word on the Brooklyn streets in 1959 was that a crazy preacher from Pennsylvania was helping addicts find the power to kick heroin and gang members to trade their weapons for Bibles. Reporter John McCandlish Phillips heard the talk in local churches and took the tip to his metro editors at The New York Times. This was more than a religion story, he argued. This was something truly new in urban ministry in a rough corner of the city.

The editors just didn't get it.

"The New York Times could not see ... validity of this approach to any issue as serious as addiction. Editors said, 'You can't put a few religious ideas up against something as real as addiction and expect any results,' " said Phillips, in a 2000 interview in Riverside Park.

The young preacher was David Wilkerson, whose story would eventually be told in the bestseller "The Cross and the Switchblade." Phillips kept bringing this editors detailed reports about Teen Challenge's work, which would eventually expand worldwide.

Again, Phillips stressed this was not a story full of mumbo-jumbo. As a veteran reporter, he knew he needed a foundation of hard facts about subjects –- drug addiction and gang warfare – that were clearly newsworthy. After a decade, his editors surrendered and let him write the story.

"The results were there," he said. "Lives were being changed. ... It was news. We miss too many stories like that and that's a shame."

Phillips died on April 9 at the age of 85. His brilliant two-decade Times career ended when he left the newsroom in 1973, at the peak of his journalistic powers, to become a Pentecostal preacher on Manhattan's upper West Side. His flock was small, but included some Christians in major newsrooms who considered him a discreet and invaluable mentor.

No one questioned the man's journalism skills. In a 1997 profile in The New Yorker – "The Man Who Disappeared" – writer Gay Talese was quoted calling him the "Ted Williams of the young reporters," even on a legendary staff that included David Halberstam, Richard Reeves and J. Anthony Lukas.

"There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips," said Talese. "Phillips is not interested in winning a Pulitzer Prize. He is not interested in demeaning people. …He wants to redeem people. Talk about marching to a different drummer. Phillips is not even in the same jungle."

On the management side, the Times obituary noted that former managing editor Arthur Gelb once called Phillips "the most original stylist I'd ever edited."

The reporter's death also fired online discussions of a controversial issue in mainstream journalism: Whether many newsrooms are hostile environments for religious believers. A provocative piece at The Week ran under a headline stating, "Why newspapers need to hire more Christians: For starters, it would help rebut conservative concerns about media bias."

Decades before today's "culture wars," Phillips noted that he was the one born-again, evangelical Protestant in a Times newsroom in which – literally – there were more bookies than people with Bibles on their desks. With a tired cackle, he told me, "God must love journalists, because everyone knows He loves sinners."

Yes, it would help if there were more religious believers at The Times, he said, but only if they had the skills to work there. He couldn't understand why so many young believers simply assume they could never work in real newsrooms, thus increasing the cultural and intellectual diversity in modern journalism.

"We live in a world that is, in fact, rife with evils, is rife with excessive ambition, is rife with a willingness, by far too many people, to cut any corner or to practice any deception in order to advance their purposes. They will hide, if they can, their practices from the public eye," he said.

"Journalism at its best pursues the facts about certain situations in which evildoers are at work and assembles those facts and judges them fairly. It's not a crusade, so much as it's a responsible gathering of a body of evidence that, when it's finally presented, is so persuasive that evil must skulk, retreat or be subjected to strong public remedy."

Phillips looked out across the Hudson River, into a setting sun.

"Why," he said, "wouldn't Christian believers want to be part of that?"

Old religion-beat questions linger, even after 25 years

Every year or so, editors are asked to sit patiently while market researchers dissect thick reports about what consumers say they want to see in their newspapers.

That was already true back when Harry Moskos was editor of The Knoxville News Sentinel. But he immediately noticed something strange, when handed the executive summary of one late-1980s survey.

Two words near the top of the subjects valued by readers caught his attention – "religion" and "family." Yet the professionals interpreting the data offered zero suggestions for improving coverage of those subjects.

"I remember saying, 'Look at that.' ... Those words just jumped out at me, primarily because I knew people in Knoxville tend to see those subjects as connected," said Moskos, 76, in a telephone interview. He recently ended his 60-year journalism career, with most of that work in Albuquerque, N.M., and Knoxville, Tenn.

Of course, he admitted, the fact he noticed the words "religion" and "family" also "says something about the life I've lived and how I was raised" in a devout Greek Orthodox family. "I just knew we had to do something ... to respond to that interest among our readers," he said.

Thus, Moskos asked his team to create a section on faith and family life. As part of that effort, he asked – at a meeting of Scripps Howard editors – if the newspaper chain could start a national religion-news column.

That's how – 25 years ago this week – I began writing this "On Religion" column for the Scripps Howard News Service. At that time, I was the religion reporter for one of the chain's major newspapers and then I continued this work while teaching, first in a seminary, then in two liberal arts colleges and, now, as director of the Washington Journalism Center.

Through it all, I have been amazed that many people still think religion is a boring, unimportant subject that can be relegated to the periphery of news coverage. The late Associated Press religion writer George Cornell once noted that – year after year – at least half of the items in that wire service's global list of the top news events have obvious ties to religion.

And what about that journalistic mantra, "Follow the money"? When hundreds of thousands of sports fans – spending millions of dollars – head to stadiums or face their televisions, news organizations respond, big time. What happens when millions of religious believers – spending billions -- do the same? Not so much.

"Usually, where people put their time and money, that's where their interests are," Cornell told me in 1982. "Newspapers' attention and space are supposed to be geared to people's interests. Right?"

The other big mystery, for me, is why professionals who lead newsrooms rarely seek out experienced, even trained, religion reporters. Discussions of this topic often reference a religion-beat opening Washington Post editors posted in 1994, noting that their "ideal candidate" was "not necessarily religious nor an expert in religion."

Please note the word "ideal." Try to imagine editors saying their "ideal" candidate to cover the U.S. Supreme Court would be someone who is not an expert in the law. How about similar notices for reporters covering politics, education, sports, science and film?

"The religion beat is too complicated today for this kind of approach to be taken seriously," said Russell Chandler, who covered religion for years at The Los Angeles Times. I interviewed him for "Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion," from Oxford Press.

"If you don't have experience you have to pay your dues and get some. Then you have to keep learning so that you get the facts right today and tomorrow and the day after that," he said. "I have never really understood what this argument is about. It's like saying that we want to sign up some people for our basketball team and we don't really care whether or not they can play basketball."

This logic also rings true for Moskos, who noted that he once interviewed five skilled sportswriters when seeking someone to cover University of Tennessee football – a quasi-religious subject for locals. Why not take that approach to religion news?

"If you send somebody out to cover the Oak Ridge National Laboratory," he concluded, "you'd better find yourself a journalist who knows something about science. ... If people are going to get the job done covering religion then they need to find some journalists who know a thing or two about religion."

'Tis this pope's gift to be simple

The rise of Pope Francis has certainly raised new questions for Vatican watchers, such as: How significant is it that he has not been wearing cufflinks? In the past, this kind of detail "would be seen as frivolous," noted Rocco Palmo of Philadelphia, whose "Whispers In The Loggia" site is must reading for Catholic insiders. Now, this pope's commitment to beyond-symbolic simplicity is causing religious leaders, journalists, diplomats and Catholics at every level to wrestle with the importance of his Jesuit roots, as well as his devotion to St. Francis of Assisi.

The symbolism began with his introduction, when he wore simple white vestments – the papal equivalent of street clothes – and declined a formal, ermine-trimmed red cape. He has been wearing his steel pectoral cross, rather than an ornate gold papal model. He has favored black walking shoes over dramatic red footwear.

Greeting the masses in St. Peter's Square, he bowed and said: "Before the bishop blesses the people I ask that you would pray to the Lord to bless me." Then he rode the bus with the cardinals, one white skullcap among the red ones. He returned to the Domus Paulus VI – where he roomed pre-conclave – to collect his luggage and pay his own bill. The pope has been placing some of his own calls, shocking clergy who answer their telephones and find the occupant of St. Peter's throne on the other end of the line.

Pope Francis is so reluctant to change his style, noted Palmo, that this trend even "extends under the white cassock, to boot: the Argentine pontiff's preferences don't just make his move to keep wearing black pants visible through the garment, but likewise highlight the untucked tails of his white dress-shirt.

"In other words, the lack of fuss isn't just a show for the world. But having declined the archbishop's residence in Buenos Aires for a flat where he did his own cooking, and riding around the city on buses and subways without an entourage, that was fairly well-established."

The connections to St. Francis are obvious and, this past weekend, the new pope explained to media professionals why he chose that name. But while telling this story, Pope Francis offered another layer of content for journalists who had ears to hear his deeper, more critical, message.

As the votes lined up in favor of the cardinal from Argentina, he said a friend hugged him and advised, "Don't forget the poor."

"And those words came to me: the poor, the poor," said Pope Francis, according to a Vatican Radio translation. "Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of all the wars. … Francis is also the man of peace. That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi.

"For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation. These days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we? He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace. … How I would like a church which is poor and for the poor!"

On one level, these remarks to the press focused on issues – economic justice, peace and the environment – that are usually framed in political language in news reports. However, Pope Francis stressed that it is crucial for journalists to realize that pivotal religious events, such as his election, cannot be reduced to mere politics.

"Ecclesial events are certainly no more intricate than political or economic events," said the pope. Nevertheless, they "follow a pattern which does not readily correspond to the 'worldly' categories which we are accustomed to use, and so it is not easy to interpret and communicate them to a wider and more varied public. …

"All of this leads me to thank you once more for your work in these particularly demanding days, but also to ask you to try to understand more fully the true nature of the church, as well as her journey in this world, with her virtues and her sins, and to know the spiritual concerns which guide her and are the most genuine way to understand her."

The bottom line? "The church is certainly a human and historical institution with all that that entails," he said, "yet her nature is not essentially political but spiritual."