The item Joe posted earlier today, “Who Decides Who’s a Catholic?” reminded me of something I wrote just a few years ago on the same subject — journalistic definitions — a few years ago. Here it is, for those who are interested:
Another sad story of people playing dress up: Women Anointed Catholic Deacons, Priest in S.B. from the Santa Barbara Independent. It’s the usual story: lifelong Catholics, love the Church, feel called to priesthood, Church misogynist, hope for future change, women were priests in the early church, have to stay to promote change, accepted someday, international movement, and so on, though it leaves out the almost inevitable “the church is not the magisterium” line and adds the faux reassurance that excommunication “does not remove one from the church” but only bars one from the sacraments. (Not, of course, that they care.)
And like so many articles on this subject, the reporter took seriously and without question the claim that these women were Roman Catholic bishops and priests. They are doing what the Church expressly forbids, they don’t represent any Catholic official or institution, they have no place in the Catholic system, no Catholic official or institution recognizes them (other than, perhaps, some secretive order of aging leftwing nuns and even they don’t support them in public), but nevertheless the reporter and the editor who wrote the headline declare them to be Roman Catholics.
Let’s imagine some reporters from the Independent started publishing a separate edition of the newspaper, complete with editorials taking positions contradictory to the official newspaper’s. Suppose they talked about how they’d worked at the paper for years, and love the paper, and can’t imagine not being a part of it, but it isn’t living up to its founding vision, which they believe themselves to incarnate, and eventually the old guard will come to agree with them and accept their work, and they feel called to edit the newspaper, but for now they must do so secretly. And suppose the newspaper they put out looked a lot, at first glance anyway, like the official one.
The owners and editors of the real newspaper would insist that these people are imposters, whatever their ideals and feelings and would be imposters even if they’d worked for the newspaper since birth, and if forced to explain this the owners and editors would point out thatthey’ve got the newspaper’s jobs and the titles, and they work in the newspaper’s building, and they own the newspaper’s copyright, and they’ve got the newspaper’s bank accounts, and they say in its pages what the newspaper’s always said, and they publish the newspaper that’s been published for decades, and the city knows who they are (they get the tax bill), and every other newspaper knows who they are, and heck, everyone knows which is the real Independent.
In other words, the newspaper’s version of the arguments a Catholic would make if asked why these poor people in the interfaith center weren’t Catholics and why these women got up from kneeling no more Catholic priests and deacons than they were before. The arguments that would work for the newspaper work for the Church.
So why call the women in their collars “Roman Catholics”? You can’t rule out simple incompetence and ignorance when asking this question of journalists.
But I think, whatever the case for this story, the repeated treatment of people who do this kind of thing as real official Catholics advances the secularist’s cherished belief that the Catholic Church isn’t so intransigently “sexist” as she appears and is just a change or two from endorsing the sexual revolution.
Plus, to be fair to the newspaper, which wants to sell copies, if these women aren’t Roman Catholics there’s not much of a story. A tiny group of eccentrics with no visible organization or presence in the community creating new officers is just not the kind of story people buy a newspaper to read. It’s as interesting or relevant as “Children on Fourteenth Street Chose Sides for Kickball. Details on page 5.” A degree of inflation is built into the journalistic enterprise.
Though whether lying because you’re greedy is better than lying because you’re an ideologue, I’m not sure. And this kind of exaggeration is, I think, a form of lying.
Also, while I’m writing on the story, the service featured a new hip inclusive name for God of which I did not know:
The ceremony, which took place on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, also differed from the standard Catholic ordination in the names the presiding clergy used for God, who is ordinarily referred to as “the Father.” The female priests instead referred to “Mother and Father” and to “God/de.” (The latter is pronounced like “God,” with the silent, extra letters hinting at a goddess that those in the ceremony declined to refer to explicitly.)
Not entirely honest, that hinting at a goddess while sounding to the people listening to you like you were praying to God. The reporter then reassures us that “Jesus Christ retained his masculine identity, however.”
September 2nd, 2011 | 2:16 pm
Do I remember incorrectly? Or was there actually a time when at least some news media cared about truth enough to get, for example, the local bishop’s take on this “ordination”, even if the media disagree with the bishop.
September 2nd, 2011 | 3:05 pm
There are two separate questions—(1) whether the ordinations are valid, and (2) whether the participants are Catholics. I really don’t find analogies to rival versions of newspapers helpful. The story linked to is flawed in that it doesn’t give enough information on the official Catholic position on the illicit and invalid nature of ordaining women. But I see no reason why the reporter should have made some kind of determination that the participants weren’t really Catholic. Maybe they are misguided Catholics, or mistaken Catholics, or dissident Catholics, but who (even a bishop) can say that they are not Catholics?
It seems to me that this kind of post takes us into “no true Scotsman” territory, where surveys must show that 100% of Catholics oppose same-sex marriage, because anyone who claims to approve of same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed to claim he or she is a Catholic.
The other post that raised the same question involved conservative Catholics who claimed the Church was right about geocentrism 400 years ago and Galileo was wrong. Neither geocentrism nor heliocentrism is a matter of faith or morals, and I see no reason why someone who believes in geocentrism, or flat earth, for that matter, can’t be considered a Catholic. Also, the Society of St. Pius X was involved in some way, but as best I can tell, there is no reason to claim members of the SSPX are not Catholic, especially given the lifting of the excommunication of the four bishops ordained by Lefebvre. How can the pope lift the excommunication of people who are not Catholics?
September 2nd, 2011 | 3:32 pm
@Mike Melendez
was there actually a time when at least some news media cared about truth”
Perhaps you could have left the question at that.
September 2nd, 2011 | 4:23 pm
@ John V: I did. That was meant to be a question.
Maybe David is right about the SSPX as Catholics, but another post noticed that their web site posted a disclaimer about geocentrism, i.e. SSPX does not subscribe to geocentrism. One is still left to wonder about the reporter’s sources.
I would note that I disagree with David about the parallel newspaper analogies. They do get to the heart of the matter. Whatever the women or the people in the geocentrism article claim to be, they are not representative of Catholicism. In the later, that they may be Catholic in some sense of the word is irrelevant to the article, as David notes, but that Catholicism is the emphasis. In the former, excommunication makes the women heretics, to use the archaic technical term, as they claim to continue to be Catholic.
I’ve commented on the poll elsewhere, more than once: good news fodder, limited scientifically. Choose a different “representative” sample of 3,000 people and ask the same questions. The results can vary wildly in spite of the claimed “margin of error”.
September 2nd, 2011 | 5:37 pm
“Maybe they are misguided Catholics, or mistaken Catholics, or dissident Catholics, but who (even a bishop) can say that they are not Catholics?”
A bishop is exactly who can say it. That’s what excommunication *is.*
And we may be splitting hairs, here, but let’s stop worrying about whether the people are “Catholics,” and focus on whether it’s accurate to say that these women have become Catholic priests and deacons. The first can be argued over unless an order of excommunication exists (or no actual Catholic affiliation ever existed); the second can be clear even to a journalist, from the easily known fact that there is no such thing as a woman Catholic priest or deacon, and that Catholic priests and deacons can only be created by Catholic bishops, which evidently don’t exist in this case either, since there is no such thing as a woman Catholic bishop.
September 2nd, 2011 | 6:08 pm
A bishop is exactly who can say it. That’s what excommunication *is.*
pentamom,
You are mistaken. An excommunicated Catholic remains a Catholic.
I noted elsewhere that I agree that the story should have made it clear official Catholic teaching is that ordination of women is both illicit (forbidden) and invalid (that is, ordaining a woman a deacon or priest does not make her a deacon or a priest).
September 2nd, 2011 | 8:54 pm
David, you might be right, and I’m willing to admit the possibility that I’m wrong, but note that you’re quoting a commentary, not canon law itself or the catechism. So I’ll concede that I’m likely wrong, but your testimony is not airtight.
September 3rd, 2011 | 1:03 am
[...] How Newspapers Decide Who’s a Catholic, and Who Isn’t – David Mills, First Things [...]
September 3rd, 2011 | 1:20 am
Does anybody who critically thinks, i.e. those not educated in public schools and some private schools, really believe what is printed in most of the newspapers and television media, including many so called Catholic newpapers and Catholic media?
I question everything and then look at proven sources that I deem trustworthy and have a record for honesty that are on the internet.
A Catholic is one who practices his faith. The practice of the Catholic faith can be found in the Catechism, encyclicals, etc., e.g. a Catholic cannot believe in abortion, homosexual marriage,
etc. otherwise you are not Catholic. If a person says they are and hold erroneous beliefs then they are hypocrites and frauds.
September 3rd, 2011 | 12:42 pm
George Kadlec,
You are giving a very simple answer to a very complex question. It would mean that a person who was did not know about a particular Catholic doctrine at all, a person who innocently held an erroneous view, and a person who had studied and prayed long and hard and held a dissenting view, all were “not Catholic.” Also, in Catholicism, there is something called “the hierarchy of truths.” Someone who denied the Incarnation, for example, would be in much more serious disagreement with the Church than someone who disagreed with Church teaching on, say, indulgences.
A good test case regarding encyclicals and the Catechism is capital punishment. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.’”
I believe it is the case that no one has ever escaped from a “supermax” prison. So it seems to me there can be no reason to resort to capital punishment in the United States. Pope John Paul II (who is briefly quoted in that Catechism entry) said in Evangelium Vitae:
Some conservative Catholics, however, maintain that what the pope said is not authoritative Catholic teaching, but basically the pope’s personal opinion (even though it is in an encyclical), and that capital punishment in the United States, including in states like Texas, can go on as it always has. If someone is convicted of a capital crime, he (or she—e.g. Karla Faye Tucker) can be executed, because he has forfeited his life, and it does not make any difference that society could lock him up in a supermax prison and he would no longer be a danger to society.
September 3rd, 2011 | 2:39 pm
You are giving a very simple answer to a very complex question. It would mean that a person who was did not know about a particular Catholic doctrine at all, a person who innocently held an erroneous view, and a person who had studied and prayed long and hard and held a dissenting view, all were “not Catholic.”
It’s not complex.
It’s deliberately misleading.
Journalism has standards. Those standards are both easily accessible and well known, so it’s no sense pretending they don’t exist or that there’s something difficult to understand about ‘em.
Reporting like this “do violence to” those standards (to borrow the words of popular lefty critical theories).
September 3rd, 2011 | 2:46 pm
A Catholic is one who practices his faith. The practice of the Catholic faith can be found in the Catechism, encyclicals, etc., e.g. a Catholic cannot believe in abortion, homosexual marriage,
etc. otherwise you are not Catholic. If a person says they are and hold erroneous beliefs then they are hypocrites and frauds.
Wonder if David Nickol would be so generous to a vegetarian who says it’s okay for vegetarians to eat certain types of meat.
Or a Buddhist who says that some of the core tenets of Buddhism are optional.
Or a person claiming to be a “gay rights advocate”, who claims that surgery and training can cure homosexuality.
Somehow I think he’d suddenly remember that journalism’s standards are pretty well known and reasonably clear cut.
September 3rd, 2011 | 3:27 pm
“I believe it is the case that no one has ever escaped from a “supermax” prison.”
Murdering fellow prisoners and guards in a supermax prison isn’t “harm?”
But I quibble. Blake summed up the real point pretty well.
September 3rd, 2011 | 3:39 pm
The key question is not whether one ceases to be a Catholic, but to what extent a person is in communion with the Catholic Church.
The general principle in Canon Law is that once you’re baptized a Catholic you’re always a Catholic, unless you formally defect — make a formal statement to your pastor that you are leaving the Church. That’s very rarely done. It’s actually very difficult to stop being a Catholic. Merely committing a sin is not enough.
Maintaining full communion with the Church, however, is different. Full communion can be impaired by many things, such as heresy (rejection of a truth divinely revealed), schism (no longer attending Mass, but instead joining a religious group that is not in communion with the Holy See), etc. Failing to live a life in keeping with the teaching of the Church will also impair one’s communion (e.g., openly cohabiting with a non-spouse). In most of these cases, full communion is restored by sacramental Confession.
The USCCB described this once as “If a Catholic in his or her personal or professional life were knowingly and obstinately to reject the defined doctrines of the Church, or knowingly and obstinately to repudiate her definitive teaching on moral issues…he or she would seriously diminish his or her communion with the Church.”
Penalties like excommunication or interdict do not eject someone from the Catholic Church. Instead, they are penalties that publicly declare that a person has breached communion with the Church in a significant way (e.g., those who participate in the purported “ordination” of women as priests). In these cases, full communion has to be restored, often by some other public judicial act.
So, the folks who participate in these mock “ordinations” have breached communion with the Church by their actions. Under Canon Law they have incurred an automatic excommunication. In no way are they Catholic priests. But they are still Catholics.
This is actually not that hard for a journalist to find out. All they would have to do is contact the local diocese and speak to a canon lawyer. Or google “canon law” and contact Ed Peters (he’s the fifth entry that comes up, after all the actual Canon Law sites), who is the leading American expert on this. About five minutes of research.
September 3rd, 2011 | 4:21 pm
Blake and pentamom,
Read Ed Mechmann. He gets it exactly right, and you probably don’t feel duty bound to contradict everything he says.
September 3rd, 2011 | 5:03 pm
Murdering fellow prisoners and guards in a supermax prison isn’t “harm?”
pentamom,
I think John Paul II probably took that possibility into account when he wrote Evangelium Vitae.
But I quibble. Blake summed up the real point pretty well.
Yes and no. :P
A vegetarian who advocates eating meat, and eats meat himself or herself, is not a vegetarian. A Catholic who is in dissent on a specific issue, or even who is excommunicated, is still a Catholic.
Check out this article about a Maryknoll Priest who was excommunicated for attending a ceremony at which women were “ordained.” Note the spokesperson for the Marknoll order’s response to the question, “He can be excommunicated and still be a Maryknoll?”
September 3rd, 2011 | 5:17 pm
Wonder if David Nickol would be so generous to a vegetarian who says it’s okay for vegetarians to eat certain types of meat.
Blake,
I am not giving my personal opinion about who is a Catholic and who is not. I am giving the official Catholic teaching. If you don’t agree with it, take it up with the Catholic Church.
September 3rd, 2011 | 6:14 pm
One additional fact about excommunication in the Catholic Church. If you are excommunicated by a bishop, you can appeal to Rome (to the Apostolic Signatura, which is something like the supreme court of the Church). It may be declared that you excommunication was invalid.
September 3rd, 2011 | 8:18 pm
Don’t you know by now, David, that whatever you say is not only terribly, terribly wrong, but deceitful as well, an attempt to befog the issue rather than inquire into the boundaries and limits of whatever issues are under discussion?
To stop being facetious for a moment, I’m trying to say that one thing I admire about your posts is that you often bring in outside information, which makes your posts interesting even when I think you have the argument wrong.
Because I know you have a JD from the Google School of Law, I’m hoping you also have a history degree from Google U. I’ve posted a research question that I hope you’ll answer; it’s on another First Thoughts thread, the one titled “A Breakdown of Support for Gay Marriage by Religion.”
As a gift, I’ll offer you this: I know you like to cite the online Roman Catholic encyclopedia. Have you read the entry on Torquemada? It’s a howler.
September 3rd, 2011 | 9:11 pm
David Nickol:
Then you shouldn’t use Catholic as a term at all, because it’s meaningless. What actually is one is one in “full communion with the church.” Otherwise you have no real standard of belief considering you can be in another religion and still be counted a Catholic. Or deny any tenet of the faith.
You may prove a point, but you wind up destroying what you prove.
September 4th, 2011 | 8:08 am
It is worth noting that, historically, no one has ever proposed a doctrinal test for membership of the Catholic Church. Catholics are simply those who are in visible communion with the see of Rome. No doubt, in the long run this means the people who are so orthodox that Rome has seen no reason to excommunicate them, so that unity and orthodoxy still react upon one another.
Historians of the early church, who label this party “Catholic” and that party “heretical,” will be found, on examination, to be applying this test and no other. Likewise, theologians’ appeal to the Sensus Fidelium would become purely circular, unless the term “fideles” has a definite meaning in extension. From this it follows that there must be some means of determining who the fideles are, without examining their tenets.
September 4th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
Dave “Dblade” Dutcher,
It is amazing that this is getting so much discussion. We have two stories, one in which some “conservative Catholics” deny heliocentrism, and one in which women are “ordained.” In neither story are they Catholics who have become atheists, or converted to another religion, or joined a schismatic group.
Heliocentrism is not a tenet of the Catholic religion. It is not a matter of faith or morals. One can believe the earth is the center of the universe and still be a perfectly orthodox Catholic.
In the story about women’s ordination, I can’t see any reason to deny that all involved are Catholic. They are dissenting on the issue of women’s ordination. By the official teachings of the Church, they are not only wrong on the issue, but they have committed an offense. One of the priests who attended has been excommunicated. But they are all still Catholics.
Here’s an excerpt from a recent news story:
These people are Catholics. The story is correct in calling them dissidents, but they are still Catholics.
I certainly agree that it would be very misleading and dishonest if a reporter gathered together a group of Catholics who had ceased to believe in God but who are technically still Catholics, interviewed them about God, and published a story saying, “Catholics don’t believe in God!” But we are not talking about anything approaching that here. The stories under scrutiny are not cases of “non-Catholics” misidentified as Catholics. They are stories about Catholics who don’t speak for the Church (in the case of geocentrism) or Catholics who are in dissent over women’s ordination.
September 4th, 2011 | 10:01 pm
They aren’t Catholics in any meaningful public sense. Both of the parties in the articles are in open revolt against the Catholic church.. You are playing technicality games like being an excommunicated Catholic means any real thing. Who goes to the excommunicated members of any belief system and assumes they are typical, or anything but being outside the label itself?
What’s galling is if it were Mormons and Polygamy, this would be zero issue, and it would be clearly reported on what the status of polygamists in the church are. For example:
. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism that believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, has more than 10,000 followers who consider Mr. Jeffs to be God’s spokesman on Earth. The police raided the group’s West Texas ranch in April 2008, finding pregnant under-age girls. The call to an abuse hot line that prompted the raid turned out to be a hoax, and more than 400 children who had been placed in protective custody as a result of the raid were returned to their families.
from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/us/10brfs-POLYGAMISTLE_BRF.html?ref=polygamy
None of this “a few catholics” business.
September 4th, 2011 | 11:27 pm
They aren’t Catholics in any meaningful public sense. Both of the parties in the articles are in open revolt against the Catholic church.
Dave,
Those who are actively pushing for women’s ordination are in dissent. Those who believe in geocentrism are in no way defying Catholic teaching. It is not a Catholic teaching that the earth is, or is not, in the center of the universe.
I do think the belief that Catholics are still Catholic if they abandon their faith or convert to another religion is a religious belief of Catholics which those of other faiths can’t reasonably accept. Catholics accept converts from other religions, so they accept the idea of conversion. But they maintain you can only convert to Catholicism and not from Catholicism. So unless a reporter is writing for a Catholic newspaper, he or she would have to say, “Even though so-and-so now says he doesn’t believe in God, Catholics believe he is still a Catholic in the eyes of God (or in the eyes of the Church).”
For a secular or non-Catholic reporter, “once a Catholic, always a Catholic,” is not a fact, but a Catholic belief, and should be reported as such.
However, the priest excommunicated for participating in the ceremony “ordaining” women was definitely a Catholic. Dissenting on one issue doesn’t turn a Catholic into a non-Catholic.
Now, if you were to say, “Come on, you know what I mean,” I would say, “Sure, I know what you mean.” But saying “they’re not Catholic” is a way for very conservative Catholics to dismiss more liberal Catholics, and it is also a way for very liberal Catholics to dismiss more conservative Catholics. Neither side should be allowed to get away with it. Instead of dismissing those Catholics you disagree with by saying they are not Catholic you should point out the nature of your disagreement.
September 5th, 2011 | 9:29 am
David Nickol is correct to call for greater precision in the use of the term “excommunicated,” especially since it is a technical term in canon law and Catholic theology. That said, his posts seem to imply that the practices of these women’s ordinations are not really a big deal and that the coverage, while mistaken, isn’t that big a mistake either. The bottom line is this: the story confuses readers because the writer will not engage the deeper theological issue and simply reports the story as one of conflict, good-guy dissidents vs. mean officials.
September 5th, 2011 | 10:36 am
“The bottom line is this: the story confuses readers because the writer will not engage the deeper theological issue and simply reports the story as one of conflict, good-guy dissidents vs. mean officials.”
That criticism could apply to about 80% of stories written today — not necessary the dissidents vs. the officials, but every story simply being about the conflict between two or more parties over what’s going on, rather than about what’s going on. You even see things like fires or crimes reported this way — the story is about what the police say and what the neighbors say, rather than about what can be observed to have happened. One gets the feelings journalists don’t use their eyes at all any more, only their ears to gather what people say about things.
September 6th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
Dave’s right: The article correctly reports these women as being Catholics. I’m not sure why other posters keeping bringing up this point when it’s pretty clear that the Church itself still considers these people Catholic.
Having said that, the article is an utter failure because it reports these women as bishops and priests as if they actually were. It should have made very clear that those are self-imposed designations by the women themselves, and that they enjoy no official status whatsoever in the Church.
September 6th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
What’s most interesting to me is all the secrecy.
A secret RC bishop, secret film footage, secret ordinations, a secret inter-faith center,… I thought reporters wanted facts.
So this, in fact did not occur out in the open in a Catholic Church.
Evidently, no legitimate Catholic parish openly embraces or calls these women their own. They legitimately shepherd no flock – in fact they seem to have other full time careers. The only sacrament they can administer is Baptism, and even that possibility is an extreme. They absolve no sins. The bread and wine remain merely bread and wine. My blessing is as efficacious as theirs’.
They have nothing – except their secrets.
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