THE CATHOLIC PRESS TODAY
Adamo, Salvatore J.
THE CATHOLIC PRESS TODAY SALVATORE J. ADAMO In search of a future Everyone knows statistics can be twisted, but there is one set of numbers that tells us something significant about, the...
...Quite different was the action of the Twin Cities Newspaper Guild later in July 1976 which publicly criticized Archbishop Roach, publisher of The Catholic Bulletin, for his "abdication of responsibilities as a newspaper publisher" in suppressing a story about how his archdiocese got skinned in a real estate deal...
...Despite its verbal dedication to a free press, when things get hot the CPA wilts...
...It goes back to their seminary training when they were forbidden to read daily papers or popular magazines and where the truth of current history as recorded in news events was scorned as exercises in triviality...
...The same man was one of the most vociferous objectors to the floor resolution at the CPA annual meeting which indirectly had condemned Bishop Cronin's censorship crudities...
...True, there are winter flowers in a Catholic press that has been barren for so long it doesn't even yearn for the full life of freedom any more, only survival...
...The fear is compounded by a Catholic Press Association that is dead but remains unburied because no one has come forth to embalm it...
...Incidentally both reports were penned by gal reporters...
...As it did early last year in the case of the firing of Father Ed Byington, former editor of The Anchor, by Bishop Daniel Cronin of Fall River...
...The Bible is so forthright and honest because it recognizes we are all but dust and were it not for God's mercy we'd all perish...
...But most people don't give a damn...
...Men of the caliber of a John O'Connor or a Msgr...
...Of course, the editor of the Bulletin, Bernie Casserly, came forth and took the blame for the decision to drop the story, admitting unashamedly that his newspaper was no more than "the house organ of the archdiocese...
...I've resisted and protested, and sometimes prevailed...
...i ecclesiastical bureaucracy, forever trembling between genuflections before the National Council of Catholic Bishops...
...So the readers in North Jersey learned about the matter indirectly and incompletely...
...I mentioned merely the ones with which I'm more familiar...
...Judas would disappear without a reference...
...The grand truths of theology and philosophy and scripture alone mattered...
...It would take pages of print to itemize and explain all the switches and defenses that took place in the ensuing weeks...
...There are exceptions but they are no more than a dozen or so...
...For example, the great archdiocese of Chicago has been iU-served by a former head of NC news service who managed for a half-dozen years to produce the most vapid newsweekly in America...
...Personally, I doubt it...
...Wall can do much better or merely add some cosmetic touches to The New World remains to be seen...
...Peter would never be revealed denying Christ...
...In the interval the CPA hierarchy engaged in a series of obstructionist tactics that proved again it was no more than a eunuch in the kingdom of the print media...
...Recently, Bishop Gracida of PensacolaTallahassee, Florida has joined Bishop Tanner of St...
...Pat Joyce, the young editor, told me in a phone conversation that the article provoked more letters than ever, most of them critical...
...Of course, the people themselves could get behind lively religious newsweeklies...
...even Our Lord's cry of agony would be omitted lest it seem He was complaining that the Father had abandoned Him, and the first one to see the Risen Christ would have been Peter, as became the first Pope, not Magdalen the reformed prostitute...
...Even when it does issue a big story it will minimize it with frantic changes in the lead, corrections, explanatory notes and so forth 'ad nauseam.' A case in point was the recent explosive report on Catholic Relief Services in the National Catholic Reporter in mid-December, which NC retold in its customary cautionary manner...
...Subsequently Detroit's Miclu'gan Catholic did a broader article on the subject...
...For such prelates the press is a one-way street, an extension of their preaching...
...I often like to imagine what would have happened to Matthew's story of Christ's Passion if one of our American bishops were supervising its publication...
...As he put it, "We were just trying to tell the truth about something important to Catholics...
...It is incredible but true that no more than one or two of the major archdioceses possess a lively, imaginative newspaper...
...Yet there is a lesson in the Bible that they steadfastly refuse to recognize: the passion for truth in recording the failures and triumphs, the shame and the glory of prophets, kings and people...
...The Dec...
...Why did he print the story...
...THE CATHOLIC PRESS TODAY SALVATORE J. ADAMO In search of a future Everyone knows statistics can be twisted, but there is one set of numbers that tells us something significant about, the Catholic Press in America today...
...Occasionally, there are some bold stories that somehow make it in our sedated Catholic press...
...Others should be given the last rites as soon as possible--like The Delmarva Dialog of Wilmington, the Clarion Herald of New Orleans, the St...
...Despite contrary indicators for 1976, over the last several years Catholic magazines have gained 3 million readers, while the newspapers have lost close to one million...
...So the problem of a free press is not simply a question of educating the bishops or persuading them to practice what the Church teaches...
...It's dormant, not moribund, I MSGR...
...I have struggled to keep it free and paid the price in the process...
...Top talent has fled or been cowed into submission...
...Francis Maurovich, to name but two, are a vanishing breed...
...Why the shift of interest...
...Augustine, Florida (prior to his enthronement in 1968 he had been chief censor at the old NCWC News Service) in this narrow enterprise...
...In my own diocese of Camden, departed priests are reduced to non-persons as their successors are named without any reference to them...
...Actually the man never sent anything to the paper but the idea was to take no chances...
...In that incident the short-lived editor objected to a memo from the Chancellor directing him never to print anything that might issue from the pen of a charismatic enthusiast, one Paul Methia...
...SALVATORE J . ADAMO /.g completing fi[teen years as Editor o] the Catholic Star Herald, Camden, New lerseys diocesan ne ,'sp~tper...
...That is why some bishops have now turned to buying a page of space in local dailies to get their messages across to people...
...though...
...But NC News Service is the pitiful captive of the Washington IIII i i See page 163 for related editorial comment...
...Religious News Service is only mildly afflicted...
...After all, if our bishops were heroically humble and could bear close public scrutiny of their official acts, they would be so saintly that there would be nothing to embarrass them...
...But some Of the great diocesan newsweeklies of the Vatican II era have either died like The Oklahoma Courier or been reincarnated like the Catholic Reporter, now the National Catholic Reporter...
...It should be the guide of all editors, especially those of religious newspapers...
...At least, I've never surrendered to 'mitred" censorship or smoothed it over as "editorial judgment...
...Papers like The Tablet of Brooklyn, The Church World of Maine, the Herald Citizen of Milwaukee, the Providence Visitor and The Advocate of Newark remain vibrant...
...Commonweah 177...
...Some are only shadows of their former selves like The Voice of Oakland, The Universe-Bulletin of Cleveland, The Criterion of Indianapolis, and, alas, The Pilot of Boston...
...The irony is that most diocesan papers give such stories a kiss-off, anyway...
...Very few were the papers that went and did likewise...
...From Boston to San Francisco it is a wasteland...
...It is so sadly reminiscent of the Knights of Columbus' ads for the Faith during the fifties and into the sixties...
...Sometimes it is hampered by ecumenical fears and will speak in whispers when it should be roaring...
...Even the two religious news services--NC and RNS--suffer from what I would call, novaphobia--fear of the news...
...In South Jersey, where the Star Herald is published, the story made the front page of the Dec...
...The fact is that most bishops dread the news...
...Incidentally, newspapers cited here for good or ill are only meant to be samples, not an exhaustive list...
...10, 1976 issue of The Catholic Review in Baltimore carded a lead article on six priests who had left the priesthood...
...In some papers, like The Beacon of Paterson, the CRS tale sneaked in via the commentary of Father John Rcedy's column...
...Fear makes their cold print sweat...
...There is a loss of nerve among most Catholic editors, clerical and lay, and there is a growing sycophancy among them too...
...It created a storm, of course...
...Particularly the metropolitan areas...
...And that is why within a decade or less the Catholic newspapers in America will hardly be worth the paper they're printed on...
...Louis Review, the Monitor of San Francisco (that newsless wonder of the West) and quite a few others that I shall not mention in order to keep my list of potential enemies from growing too long...
...since a nearly-universal taboo had been violated...
...Whether his 18 March 1977:176 successor, A.E.P...
...9 It may be, as one bishop told me, that a diocese should not try to publish anything other than a house organ because it cannot really face up to a candid mirroring of its life...
...It's arguable but I believe the newspapers have lost their sense of news and have become house organs in most dioceses...
...Instead we have to turn to the secular press to learn what we should never have forgotten: that truth is inviolable...
...17th issue...
...In fact, were it not for the National Catholic Reporter countless crucial news events that concern Catholics would go unreported...
...It would take an entire book to record the misleads placed on vital stories by NC News Service, to say nothing of all the news it judged unfit to print...
...The Star Herald which I have edited for some 15 years has declined too...
...It was such a petty act of tyranny but the CPA would take no action until it was forced to do so by the adoption of a resolution on the floor of the annual convention in May 1976...
...Unfortunately, they are only flesh and bone, like the rest of us and they're not about to support open, honest newspapers...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 6
