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  Catholics Claim Bias in Coverage
Media Emphasize Conflicts and Ignore Cohesion, They Say

By Steve Scott
Pioneer Press [St. Paul MN]
November 1, 2005

Nearly 8,000 Roman Catholics overflowed the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul last month for a daylong celebration of their most sacred ritual. Four days later, 75 gathered on the steps of the Cathedral of St. Paul to question church teaching on homosexuality.

Some Catholics are irritated that the second event garnered more media attention than the first, a long-planned Eucharistic Congress hosted by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

"It's news when people are attacking the teaching of the Catholic Church, but evidently it isn't news when people are celebrating the teaching of the Catholic Church," said Lisa Hambidge, a parishioner from St. Paul. "It just isn't balanced."

Shocking revelations last month about a priest found responsible for two murders in Hudson, Wis., made the special Eucharistic celebration even more important to area Catholics, said the Rev. Joseph Johnson, an official of the archdiocese who helped plan the Congress.

"Some of their frustration may be, here's one terrible thing that one sick individual in the church did and it's front page every day, and then 8,000 people do something good and it doesn't get noticed," he said.

On the one hand, many Catholics hold fast to the unity they celebrate in Holy Communion — the subject of the Eucharistic Congress. But that unity is like a large umbrella, under which many lay Catholics actively question aspects of church teaching and practice, and therefore frequently find themselves debating and challenging each other — liberals versus conservatives, progressives versus orthodox.

Some feel caught in the middle.

"There are people on the fringes of so many things," said a discouraged Hambidge, who called the Pioneer Press recently to say that "clearly, people on either side aren't speaking for us."

Yet reporters and cameras readily show up when 75 Catholics take to the steps of the largest church in the Upper Midwest to voice dissent.

"Just about any reporter who can fog up a drinking glass can go cover a protest," said Mark Neuzil, an associate professor of journalism at the University of St. Thomas. "It's a lot harder to cover 8,000 people at a Eucharistic synod, which is a lot more subtle and nuanced."

Neuzil found merit in complaints about scarce coverage of the Eucharistic Congress, compared with the Catholic Rainbow Parents rally at the Cathedral.

"They're both news," he said. "It's probably not so much that the 75 got too much coverage. It's maybe that the 8,000 didn't get enough."

Neuzil teaches a course on religion and media at St. Thomas, a Catholic university. Questions of fairness, however, cross denominational lines.

Lutherans and Episcopalians bristle that only hot-button issues such as homosexuality receive coverage.

Evangelical Christians accuse mainstream media of marginalizing their faith. Many of them complained loudly about scant media attention of a prayer service that drew nearly 30,000 people to the Metrodome after Sept. 11.

The twist on covering conflict within the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church is that the laity have appeared increasingly vocal and organized since the clergy abuse scandal broke in 2002. Emboldened by the Internet and e-mail, they have found strength in numbers as they speak out on issues ranging from priestly celibacy to sexuality to church structure.

Groups — some of them named, some of them anonymous — occasionally publicize each other's events on Web sites and mass e-mails in hopes of encouraging dissenters to show up.

But such grass-roots involvement by lay Catholics preceded the technology that now encourages it, experts say.

Much of it dates to the 1960s.

"Issues of the authority of the church and conscience and dissent really surfaced in fundamental ways immediately following the Second Vatican Council," said Don Briel, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

In convening the Vatican Conference II in 1962, Pope John XXIII famously said, "I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in."

The political and social changes that helped bring about Vatican II only accelerated after the council ended in 1965. As the church moved to more closely engage the world, that world was in upheaval.

"All of that came together to produce this new sense of being anti-authoritarian, emphasizing private judgments, and the notion of dissent became for the first time a kind of slogan of righteousness," Briel said.

As a result, he said, Catholics and others now said: Nobody will tell me what to do with my body, whether I must go to war, what I must believe.

"Issues such as homosexuality became a kind of political movement of liberation that really redefined the whole question of the role of homosexuality in society," Briel said.

Rooted in five decades of social change, the rumblings among dissatisfied Catholics today clearly disseminate faster and more widely.

"People before would perhaps try to do something in their parish, and people could put things in the context of who is this person saying this," said Johnson, an assistant chancellor of the archdiocese. "Now you can put things on the Internet and people have no (context) to evaluate it. … Is this just some person having delusions or is this something authentic? How do you know? It's just out there."

Catholics calling themselves progressive say the church should be more inclusive — whether of gays and lesbians, married clergy or divorced people — as a matter of social justice. Those calling themselves orthodox say Catholics must maintain full and total obedience to the infallible magisterium, or teaching authority, of the church.

"There's not a whole lot of fruitful dialogue that goes on when people have already gotten to the point where they're convinced they've been dubbed by God to fix problem X, Y or Z, whether that is homophobia or militant homosexuality, either way," Johnson said.

Conversely, when Catholics gather for events such as the Eucharistic Congress — which was preceded the night before by 5,000 people making a candlelight procession from the Capitol to the Cathedral — many of them think their unity is more newsworthy than the widely reported conflicts.

"The Eucharistic Congress was phenomenal," said Monsignor Aloysius Callaghan, the new head of the St. Paul Seminary. "It was one of the high points of my life as a priest, and to open the paper the next day and not see anything — what a disappointment."

Callaghan said in the aftermath of the Rev. Ryan Erickson being found responsible for the Hudson homicides, Catholics needed to be reminded of the essence of their faith.

"The heart of the matter is the Eucharist," Callaghan said. "That's what a man is ordained for, to bring the sacraments to the people. All those things get precious little attention. Somehow we miss what is probably the life of the church."

 
 

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