BOSTON (MA)
The Heights
March 19, 2019
John L. Allen Jr., editor of online Catholic newspaper Crux, and Rev. Matt Malone, S.J., president and editor-in-chief of American Media, spoke on a panel titled “Revitalizing Our Church: Ideas from the Catholic Press” on Thursday. University Spokesman Jack Dunn moderated the event, the first part of The Church in the 21st Century Center’s three-part Easter Series conversations.
The talk, stylized in a question-and-answer format, was part of an ongoing discussion surrounding numerous sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church. Dunn asked the panelists questions pertaining to both the crisis in general and the media’s role in providing solutions.
“There are things now that we can do that we don’t have to wait to do,” Malone said. “We don’t have counsel. We don’t have to have a change in the magisterium’s articulation of the church’s doctrine. For example, if who is in the room when the decisions are made matters, let’s get a greater amount of diversity in the room where the decisions are made.
“We should take an inventory of every job in the church in this country and ask ourselves if it really has to be done by a cleric, and if it doesn’t, then it should be done by a layperson with a preference for a woman. … If we change the people in the room, the culture will follow.”
Malone also said that introducing more women into the clergy would be beneficial, noting that there are already female chancellors, or bishops’ law officers.
“If we keep governing the church as if it’s 1955, it’s going to be a long way to Easter,” he said.
Dunn asked Allen about the role of the Catholic press in the journey toward the renewal of the church. Allen replied that he sees himself as a journalist who happens to be Catholic rather than a Catholic journalist, maintaining that the press is formed by secular institutions and that it should remain a secular enterprise uninfluenced by Catholic doctrine.
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