Orthodox bishop on hot spot

When an Orthodox bishop enters a sanctuary, he is traditionally greeted with the following words chanted in Greek – "eis polla eti, despota."

In English this means, "Many years to you, Master." Witty bishops in the Orthodox Church in America have started using this sentiment as the punch line in a joke about the impact the episcopate can have on their egos.

"What happens to a guy?", said Bishop Jonah, during the church's All American Council in Pittsburgh. "You put him on a stand in the middle of the church, you dress him up like the Byzantine emperor and you tell him to live forever. You know?"

The audience of clergy and lay leaders laughed, but it was nervous laughter. The atmosphere in the recent gathering was so tense, Bishop Jonah said later, that some of the bishops were afraid that "everything was about to unravel."

Only 10 days earlier, the 49-year-old monk had been consecrated as assistant bishop of Dallas. Now, he was facing the clergy and lay leaders of a flock that was reeling after years of bitter scandal – including the disappearance of $4 million – that had forced the church's last two leaders out of office.

The new and, thus, unstained bishop volunteered to face the assembly and answer hard questions about reform. The bottom line, he said, was that investigators found a "fundamentally sick," corrupt culture inside the national headquarters that was rooted in fear and intimidation.

"Yes, we were betrayed. Yes, we were raped. It's over. It's over," said Bishop Jonah. In fact, whenever church members seek healing, "we have to confront the anger and the bitterness and the hurts and the pain and the resentment that we have born within us as reactions against the people who have hurt us.

"By forgiving, we're not excusing the actions. ? We're not justifying anything. What we're saying is, 'My reaction is destroying me and I need to stop it. If I value Jesus Christ and the Gospel and communion with God, I need to stop it and move on.' "

The audience responded with a standing ovation.

Then, 11 days after he became a bishop, the assembly – in a move that shocked young and old – elected Jonah as the new Metropolitan of All America and Canada. Current plans call for his enthronement at on Dec. 28th at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

The new leader of the Orthodox Church in America, which has its roots in Russia, was born James Paffhausen in Chicago and raised as an Episcopalian. He converted to Orthodoxy during his college years in California, went to seminary and, while studying in Russia in 1993, became a novice at the famous Valaam Monastery. After returning to America, he was ordained and spent 12 years building several missions and the Monastery of St. John of San Francisco in northern California.

Becoming a bishop turned his once secluded life upside down, explained Jonah. Now it's hard to even discuss his stunning election as primate on Nov. 12.

"They talk about 'his beatitude' and I wonder who that is," he said. "Your beatitude? Who? Where?"

On his 12th day as a bishop, he found himself delivering an address on his "vision for the church." The new Metropolitan Jonah stressed college ministry, calling for Orthodox housing facilities and evangelistic ministries near as many campuses as possible, to help students living in "Animal House" conditions rooted in "sex, drugs, alcohol and despair."

It's also time for leaders in the church's many ethnic U.S. jurisdictions to work together on charitable projects whenever and wherever they can, grassroots projects that he said will eventually produce Orthodox unity at the national, hierarchical level. Where are the Orthodox hospitals, schools and nursing homes?

If nationwide change is going to happen, said Jonah, it will have to grow out of respect and cooperation at all levels of the church.

"Hierarchy is only about responsibility, it's not all of this imperial nonsense," he said. "Thank God that we're Americans and we have cast that off. We don't need foreign despots. We are the only non-state Orthodox church. In other words, we are the only Orthodox church that does not exist under the thumb of a state – either friendly or hostile.

"So the church is our responsibility, personally and collectively, individually and corporately. What are you going to do with it?"

When journalists don't get religion

Richard N. Ostling has never gotten used to seeing journalists commit sins of omission and commission on the religion beat.

Religion can get very complicated, with layers of emotion stacked on centuries of history, doctrine, symbolism and ritual, said Ostling, who is best known for his decades of work with Time and the Associated Press. But mistakes are mistakes and it isn't good for readers to keep seeing stories that, week after week, cause them to mutter, "Wait a minute. That's just wrong."

Here's a prime example, a mistake Ostling keeps seeing in reports about the declining number of ordinations to the Catholic priesthood. This mistake often shows up in news coverage of mandatory celibacy for priests or the scandals caused by clergy sexual abuse.

Journalists often report that Rome does not ordain married men.

"Now it would be accurate," said Ostling, "to say that the overwhelming majority of men ordained as Catholic priests are not married. It would even be accurate to say that 'almost all' priests are not married. But what about Eastern Rite Catholicism, where you have married priests? Then there are the married men who have been ordained in the Anglican Rite, who used to be Episcopal priests. You have a few Lutherans, too."

Journalists will always argue about the meaning of words like "objectivity," "fairness" and "balance." But at some point reporters and editors should agree that accuracy is important and that it's a bad thing when – year after year – critics accuse journalists, with good cause, of getting the basic facts wrong.

That's the bottom line in my chapter in "Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion," a new book produced by my colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life. It's hard for journalists to do a credible job covering religion events and trends when they cannot keep their facts straight. This is true whether one is parsing Vatican documents, the sermons of Iraqi clerics, the canon laws that affect millions of dollars in pensions and properties during a global Anglican schism or the faith testimony of an evangelical seeking the vice presidency.

The problem is that journalists who cover religion news – along with those who cover other complicated beats such as science, sports, law and the arts – must write stories that work on two levels. Their stories must be accessible enough for readers, yet accurate enough to pass muster with clergy, scholars and devout believers.

How can journalists "get" religion? How do we improve the odds that our newsrooms get it right? It's crucial that journalists find journalistic solutions to this journalism problem.

* Journalists must face this reality: It's impossible to understand what is happening in our world without understanding the power of religion in real life at the local, national and global levels.

* Journalists must be more humble and own up to our mistakes. In particular, we need to be more careful about our use of religious language, especially loaded labels such as "moderate" and "fundamentalist."

* Newsroom managers, even during these hard times, must seek out skilled professionals who want to work on this beat, while striving to promote cultural and intellectual diversity. They need to offer training to other journalists whose work constantly veers into religious territory. Today, religion stories are everywhere.

* Reporters and editors who cover religion must find ways to get inside the daily lives of the people they cover. When religious believers tell their stories, we have to understand what they are saying and try to accurately capture their point of view, even when what they believe is controversial.

Yes, this can get complicated.

Does an Orthodox rabbi have the same beliefs as a Reform rabbi? Do "moderate" Baptists (think Bill Moyers) have the same beliefs as "conservative" Baptists (think Rick Warren)? Will an Anglican bishop in Nigeria automatically have the same doctrinal beliefs as one in New Hampshire? Will a Sufi mystic in Kashmir have the same understanding of the word "jihad" as an Islamist in the mountains of Pakistan?

Words matter, on the religion beat. Some of them are even sacred.

"Some people would say that little mistakes like this do not matter all that much," said Ostling. "Well, they matter to the people who read the story and know that what they are reading is wrong. What does this say about our journalistic standards?"

Hiding behind altars

If you want to cause trouble for American bishops, stick them in a vise between Rome and the armies of dissenters employed on Catholic campuses.

But the bishops had to vote on Ex Corde Ecclesiae ("From the Heart of the Church"). After all, they had been arguing about this papal document throughout the 1990s, trying to square the doctrinal vision of Pope John Paul II with their American reality. Rome said their first response was too weak, when it came to insisting that Catholic schools remain openly Catholic. Finally, the bishops approved a tougher document on a 223-to-31 vote.

Soon after that 1999 showdown, someone "with a good reason for wanting to know" emailed a simple question to Russell Shaw of the United States Catholic Conference. Who voted against the statement?

"There was no way to know. In fact, the Vatican doesn't know – for sure – who those 31 bishops where," said Shaw, discussing one of the many mysteries in his book, "Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication and Communion in the Catholic Church.

"The secret ballots were destroyed," he noted. "These days the voting process is even more secret, since the bishops just push a button and they've voted. Even if you wanted to know how your bishop voted, or you wanted the Vatican to know how your bishop voted, there's no way to do that."

Professionals have learned to read between the lines of debates held in the open sessions that the U.S. bishops choose to schedule. Outside those doors, insiders talk and spread rumors. Some bishops spin the press and others, usually those sending messages to Rome, hold press conferences, publish editorials or preach sermons. But many of the crucial facts remain cloaked in secrecy.

Of course, noted Shaw, few leaders of powerful institutions enjoy discussing their crucial decisions – let alone corporate or personal sins – in public. When Catholic insiders complain about "clericalism" they are confronting a problem that affects all hierarchies, from government to academia, from the Pentagon to Wall Street.

"It's a kind of elitism, a way of thinking and behaving that assigns to the managerial class a superior status," he said. "They are chiefs and everyone else is an Indian. They set the agenda. They always make the final decisions. They get to tell everyone else what to do."

Of course, there's truth in the old image that puts the pope at the top of an ecclesiastical pyramid, with ranks of clergy cascading down to the pews. Catholicism is not a democracy and there are times when leaders must keep secrets. That's "a truth," said Shaw, but it is "not the only truth," since the whole church is meant to be knit together in a Communion built on a "radical equality of dignity and rights."

Part of what is happening, he explained, is that some bishops are protecting a "facade of unity" that hides their doctrinal disagreements with the Vatican. While Shaw believes the bishops are more united with Rome now than they where were about 25 years ago, some bishops may be pushing for more and more closed "executive" sessions as a subconscious way to protect themselves.

Take, for example, the brutal waves of scandal caused by the sexual abuse of children and teens by clergy. For several decades, argued Shaw, the bishops have been afraid to openly discuss "the causes of the dreadful mess – nasty things like homosexuality among priests, theological rationalizing on the subject of sex and the entrenched self-protectiveness of the old clericalist culture."

That's the kind of scandal that creates global headlines. But, for most Catholics, more commonplace forms of secrecy shape their lives at the local level, said Shaw.

Consider another story reported in Shaw's book, about a woman who quietly confronted a priest after a Mass in which he omitted the creed. When he failed to acknowledge the error, she said, "Father, you teach your people to be disobedient when you disobey the Church."

The offended priest was silent. Then he leaned forward and whispered, "You know what honey? You're full of it." The priest walked away, giving the woman and her husband what appeared to be "the single-digit salute."

Truth is, said Shaw, "clericalism is often alive and well at the local level. That's the kind of secrecy and dishonesty that really cuts the heart of many local parishes, destroying any hope for real Communion there."

Hiding behind pulpits

Reporter Louis Moore didn't know much about the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod when he began covering its bitter civil war in the 1970s. Nevertheless, as a Southern Baptist with a seminary degree he knew a biblical-authority battle when he saw one – so he caught on fast. Soon he was appalled by the viciousness of the combat between "moderates" and "conservatives" as the 2.7 million-member denomination careened toward divorce.

Things got so bad he told a Houston Chronicle colleague that if the Southern Baptist Convention "ever became embroiled in such a heinous war, I would rather quit my job than be forced to cover it," noted Moore, in "Witness to the Truth," his memoir about his life in the middle of some of America's hottest religion stories.

"Regrettably, years later, I was an eyewitness to SBC behavior that made the Lutherans' battle look like a Sunday school picnic."

The Lutheran fight was his "learner schism" and Moore witnessed many other skirmishes in pulpits and pews before – like it or not – he was engulfed by the battle to control America's largest non-Catholic flock. He also served as president of the Religion Newswriters Association during that time.

The Southern Baptist Convention's return to the theological right would be near the top of any journalist's list of the pivotal events in American religion in the late 20th Century. This Bible Belt apocalypse also affected politicians ranging from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, and anyone else who sought national office in the "culture war" era following the 1960s and, especially, Roe v. Wade.

After leaving daily journalism, Moore saw the Southern Baptist world from the other side of the notebook for 14 years, serving as an SBC media aide on policy issues and then with the convention's giant foreign missions agency.

Moore said that in the "best of times" he saw believers in many flocks who were so "servant-hearted and so demonstrative of Godlike virtues" that the memory of their faithful acts – in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example – still inspires tears. But in the worst of times?

"I have seen church people ... violate every one of the Ten Commandments, act boorish and selfish, be prejudiced, broadcast secular value systems and in general behave worse than the heathen people they tried to reach," noted Moore. In fact, just "name some sin or some act the Bible eschews, and I could pair that vice up with some church leader or member I have known."

Moore said his career affirmed basic values that he learned as a young journalist, values he saw vindicated time after time in the trenches. Wise religious leaders, he said, would dare to:

* Adopt "sunshine laws" so that as many as possible of their meetings are open to coverage by journalists from the mainstream and religious press. "When you're dealing with money your people have put in the offering plate, you should be as open as possible," he said. "The things that belong on the table need to stay on the table."

* Acknowledge that "politics is a way of life and they need to make it clear to the people in the pews how the game is played," he said. "I truly admire the people who let the covert be overt."

* Come right out and admit what they believe, when it comes to divisive issues of theology and public life. "Say what you mean and mean what you say," he said. "Way too many religious leaders take one position in public and say something completely different somewhere else."

It's easy to pinpoint the root cause of these temptations, said Moore. At some point, religious leaders become so committed to protecting the institution they lead that they are driven to hide its sins and failures. There's a reason that clergy and politicians share a love of public relations and have, at best, mixed feelings about journalism.

"People who get caught up in this kind of group think spend so much of their time testing the waters and floating their trial balloons," he said. "I prefer to deal with the people who are honest about what they truly believe. ...

"Of course, the other side of that equation is that these authentic believers are often politically naive and that means that they don't survive the realities of the political process."

NEXT WEEK: Why Catholic doors kept closing.