Simple and direct explanations are usually true

Does Glenn Beck ever stop at the Woodrow Wilson Rest Stop?

So ran a random thought in my frequent travels up and down the New Jersey Turnpike. Obviously, I’ve been watching too many cable television talking heads.

If you’ve had opportunity to watch Fox News’ Beck — who communicates in retro chalk and blackboard, a la Fulton Sheen — you know that, for some reason (I think it might have something to do with the income tax), the bespectacled former New Jersey governor and 28th president of the United States is a symbol of unvarnished evil. A memorial, even a humble one like a rest stop, I suspect might well set off the cable talkie. Does he see it as part of a hidden progressive agenda?

Beck is, of course, not alone in hyperbolic rant.

Keith Olbermann, Beck’s MSNBC counterpart, only recently retired his “Worst Person in the World” feature, used as a frequent vehicle to castigate Bill O’Reilly, another Fox talkie. One thought: wasn’t Osama bin Laden in the running?

Many inveigh against the poisoning of our political discourse these days, and of course the non-stop cable shouters have much to do with that.

But Glenn Beck’s sermons and Keith Olbermann’s fulminations seem to extend beyond the arena of political gabfests. They reflect the suspicion that permeates everything.

I’ve visited the Woodrow Wilson Rest Stop while commuting, temporarily, between my old home in New York and my new work in South Jersey as director of communications for the Diocese of Camden.

Much of the work involves talking to callers, sometimes reporters, and other times regular parishioners, who want to know the diocesan side of an issue or another. These chats frequently involve school and parish closings and consolidations.

As an outsider familiar with how other dioceses work, this is not an uncommon story. I was in Detroit during the first round of major parish closings there back two decades ago, and that experience proved it is never easy. Similar steps are in process or already accomplished in Cleveland, Boston and Albany, and are in the process of beginning in my previous home diocese, Brooklyn. Few dioceses in the northeast or industrial Midwest have been spared.

That many are experiencing the same process offers little consolation. American Catholics have long seen parishes and Catholic schools as the center of their spiritual and community lives. While the issues that have caused these changes are national in scope, the pain is always local, personal, and real.

While the grieving abounds, we live in a time of suspicion. Authority is questioned. Conspiracy theories abound. Simple explanations about changing population patterns, declining church attendance and a lack of new priests are rarely taken on face value. Somewhere, the thought lingers, there is a less noble reason lurking for these upheavals.

Most times, the simplest and direct explanations are true. But communicating that in a landscape where conspiracies are said to abound is a large part of the challenge of this job.

Meanwhile, in my travels down the turnpike, I’ll just keep in mind that sometimes a rest stop is simply a rest stop, even if it is named for Woodrow Wilson.

Peter Feuerherd is communications director for the Diocese of Camden and associate publisher of the Catholic Star Herald.