Category: The Press

Your piece about ex-Catholics who formally withdraw from church membership referred to the act as being “debaptised”. It even spoke misleadingly of a “debaptismal certificate”, as if the Church were agreeing to cancel someone’s baptism. The Church has no such procedure. Baptism is a permanent fact, according to Catholic teaching, and cannot be undone, even if a person leaves the Church. I expect the reporter used this terminology in order to shock listeners and get attention, but it was quite wrong. Did your reporter realize that she was misrepresenting the facts? It only adds to the existing impression that BBC is hostile to the Catholic faith.

The newspapers and bloggers got this one wrong: there is no plan afoot in Iran to make Christians and Jews wear special insignia on their clothing.

To pick up on John’s point below about muddle-headedness that favors the enemies of our country, here’s an example of AP’s thinking in a photo caption:
Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is seen in this April 1998 file photo in Afghanistan….
“Dissident”? Y’know, I don’t think the attacks on the US Embassy in Kenya, the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers, the WTC (in 1993 and 2001), and the Pentagon are really summed up by the word “dissident”. (And throw in the various attempts to kill Middle- and Near East heads of state, anti-Taliban Afghan leaders, and Iraqi democrats.)
Perhaps AP will start to describe Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski, and the guy who was sending out those anthrax-express letters as “dissidents” too.

After about thirty years, the Benedictine abbey in Pecos, NM may have to give up its somewhat experimental way of life as an unofficial “double” monastery. I say “unofficial” because the men’s community was founded in 1955, but the women’s community associated with it has never been formally established as a monastery in its own right: the combination was considered a daring experiment when it started in the heyday of charismatic-renewal communities. I think couples and families lived there too for a time.
It seems that the Benedictine higher-ups in Rome and the Congregation for Religious have told the abbot to get this all reorganized in a more conventional way, so that the women would be under their own elected superior, and the women’s monastery could have its own property not totally dependent on the goodwill of the monks.
Alas, it’s not working out that way. Of the five women who resided there, three have decided to join existing monasteries elsewhere rather than form a new house at Pecos, which would no doubt be a big job. Of course, their departure pretty much scotches the project for the other two, who have to seek another solution.
When the NYT got hold of the story, little gears turned in the reporter’s head, and he slotted it into a conventional paradigm: “liberal nuns vs. male hierarchy”, and portrayed it as a clampdown:

the women were told by the Vatican that they were not nuns in the opinion of the church

Get the spin? The reporter takes a judgment that’s probably a cut-and-dried matter of canonical facts — e.g., “you didn’t go through the usual procedure, so you aren’t legally bound by vows as religious sisters; if you want, you can remedy that by doing [XYZ]” — and he makes it sound like a personal snub based on “opinion”.
Then, without having any interviews with the departing sisters (who wisely have been turning down the press), he portrayed them as refuseniks choosing to “leave the monastery altogether rather than submit to the requests from Rome”.
Sorry, sisters, this Times guy’s trying to draft you into the war of All Women against The Male Vatican Hierarchy. (I think he fooled Mark Shea into believing it.) I salute you for passing up that invitation!

CNN’s Aaron Brown just interviewed EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo, a resident of New Orleans, for several minutes. Mr. Arroyo got his family — including his 10-day-old newborn — to Birmingham in time but, alas, lost his family’s restaurant; and his kids have lost the neighborhood where they lived.
Oddly, perhaps amusingly, Brown seemed unaware that Arroyo’s the news director from another cable channel. Really, what good is the little earpiece Brown wears if nobody’s going to fill him in?