February is traditionally Catholic Press month, a time to reassess the good being done when world and local news about things religious and secular is conveyed to readers for their uplift. It is a kind of a ministry of the word both to inform and to inspire. Like secular news-casting it conveys the truth for the truth’s own sake. Sometimes the truth is pleasant. Other times it is downright repugnant, as when Catholic News Service relayed to subscribing newspapers, for instance, what the Star Herald reported in December, the failures of the Dublin Archdiocese to quell clergy child abuse for long periods of time.
Mores change. It would have been unthinkable for a metropolitan paper, much less a diocesan weekly, to report such scandalous material just a decade or two ago. Perhaps that is why this crisis of global proportions was allowed to fester in secret for so long. May God grant that with heightened supervision by church leaders, it may go no further. Those mores and customs adapt, with push and pull, to the public’s sensitivities, so it is difficult to know what is worthy copy for a Catholic paper today no less than before.
A Catholic newspaper can be a force for change for the better. By challenging error in government, perhaps it can awaken a public reaction to accomplish a non-partisan good. By appealing to the reader’s sense of virtue, it can call on basic honesty to overturn red-lining if realtors in a particular area are excluding buyers on a discriminatory basis. Or else it can inform readers of Catholic teaching on chastity or on the common good.
This is by way of prelude to a November editorial of the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for the church to stop using its paid lobbyists to influence legislatures while still claiming its non-profit tax-exempt status on issues like de-funding abortions in the heated health-insurance reform before Congress. The Inky found it inappropriate, saying we were trying to legislate Catholic pro-life morality on the nation at large while saying we had not compromised our neutrality as a church. Catholics should stop trying to shape laws, they say.
Would the Inquirer of the 19th century have objected if the bishop of a given diocese barred from Communion a pro-slavery politician, claiming it “should not pressure elected officials to choose between full membership in the church and carrying out their sworn elected duties”? After all, the same Supreme Court legitimized both slavery and abortion, tawdry and unpleasant as both institutions are by the admission of their own proponents. Such proponents would reply that, if you dislike either legal institution, don’t own slaves or don’t procure an abortion. But let those who want them have legal access to them.
Would a Catholic newspaper’s editorial back in ante-bellum America have violated the separation of church and state, which separation is found only in the “penumbra,” or shadow, of the constitution, the only place a life-trumping right of a woman to privacy is found? Nowhere did the above Inquirer editorial enlighten us by saying that while perhaps ten U.S. bishops publicly barred from Communion pro-choice politicians from Communion in their dioceses, the entire U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted in plenary session to decline a national policy of such exclusion from Communion.
Moral commentary on slavery, abortion, Vietnam, Iraq (which war, according to the late John Paul II, was “without legal or moral justification. . . .”), racism, women’s equality, protection of immigrants, the environment, a handgun in every crib, every person’s right to affordable health care — and many more issues rises far above denominational lines. In fact it positively cries out for religious leadership.
I think it would be a fascinating search through Inquirer archives. It might show an inconsistency of the paper lauding bishops and religious newspapers for championing social causes approved by the Inquirer, as with Selma, or Vietnam, when and where they occurred. With those issues that the Inky spurns, like anti-abortion, we are told to be silent lest we cross over into secularity’s domain and risk our tax exemption. I guess it all depends on whose ox is gored, as usual.