Bishops' Statements on Media Raise Questions
New protocol offends sensibilities of journalists and editors
(Sept./Oct. 2000)

BY JAY McNALLY

MORE THAN A FEW veteran journalists in the Catholic press were amazed—and even amused—when the U.S. bishops in June approved two statements directed at them, one called "Civility in Media" and the other establishing a volunteer process in which Catholic electronic media outlets may seek formal ecclesiastical approval to operate and still call themselves Catholic.

Many Catholic journalists were unaware the bishops were even considering such documents, especially the "Protocol for Catholic Media Programming," which gives to the bishops extraordinary power to give and take away official approbation.

And, upon learning of the measures passed at the bishops’ annual spring meeting, many working journalists discounted the new documents as part of a clumsy, continuing effort by the bishops to shut down or diminish Mother Angelica's Eternal World Television Network, not to mention the growing number of Internet sites and radio stations that are solidly grounded in the magisterium.

Charles M. Wilson, executive director of the St. Joseph Foundation, which assists lay Catholics in defending their rights according to canon law, published a long critique of the documents in the July 15 edition of Christifidelis, his group's newsletter.

Wilson noted that, quite unlike their very public efforts over a full decade with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which seeks to regulate Catholic higher education, the bishops' effort to regulate Catholic media was prepared with "impenetrable secrecy."

Wilson agrees that the bishops have a right, and even a duty, to insure that those claiming to be Catholic actually be in accord with Church teaching. But, he wrote, "the Protocol is a curious document. In his frank admission that it is ‘imperfect,’ Bishop Robert Lynch may have made the understatement of the year," Wilson explained. As chairman of the Committee for Communication, Bishop Lynch oversaw the production of the Protocol.

Wilson cited several problems with the Protocol, including its "burdensome system of prior censorship" and the odd fact that it has no force whatsoever under canon law, and thus will not be reviewed by the Holy See.

But the most significant problem, he writes, is that the "Protocol provides diocesan bishops with unlimited discretion and provides no protection against arbitrary decisions. The Protocol establishes no uniform standards for the granting or withholding of approval, and allows the withdrawal of same for any reason whatsoever. A media outlet that is denied approval has no right to a written description of the reasons for such a denial, and the Protocol provides no right of appeal from a decision to withhold or revoke approval."

The authoritarian and arbitrary nature of the Protocol, of course, predictably offends the sensibilities of real journalists, and there are no known U.S. editors or journalists in the independent Catholic press who have applauded the bishops’ new initiatives.

"Prior consultation with some of the Catholic media outlets that are actually working in this field might have helped to produce a Protocol that actually would have addressed the most pertinent issues," Wilson wrote. "By contrast, when the NCCB was deliberating on norms for the implementation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the bishops engaged in extensive consultation with presidents and faculty of Catholic universities. No such consultation took place during preparation of the Protocol ..."

The NCCB "lists 34 persons who worked on the draft Protocol, but all of these persons are either members or staff of the NCCB. None are owners or managers of any of the media outlets that are be regulated by the Protocol," Wilson wrote.

Choking off the competition?
"I think generally bishops are not in a good position to instruct the media how to behave," said Phil Lawler, editor for the last seven years of Catholic World Report, the international monthly news magazine published by Ignatius Press.

Lawler is also one of the country's Catholic Internet pioneers, having founded Catholic World News, a twice-daily email news service that competes directly with the U.S. bishops’ Catholic News Service.

And Lawler's CWNews.com is only one of several Catholic news agencies that have sprung up in the last six years and send out weekly and sometimes daily reports. Additionally, there are said to be more than 10,000 Catholic Internet web sites, many dedicated to promulgating the truths of the Catholic Church in accord with the magisterium.

Thus, in addition to the obvious concerns that the Protocol provides a powerful extra-legal means for individual bishops to harass news outlets and web sites they may not like on theological or catechetical grounds, Lawler is also mindful that there are financial advantages for the NCCB or a bishop to shut down or hinder his or any other Internet operation.

"According to this Protocol, I should get approval from the NCCB, which is the board of directors of my competition," Lawler said. "The diocesan newspapers are all dying, because they can't attract subscribers. The bishops are heavily subsidizing CNS, which is a ‘tame’ media outlet. So if they can just choke off the competition …"

In the secular press there is a well-established tradition (not always followed of course, but nevertheless paid homage to) that newspapers are supposed to provide "balance," especially on its editorial pages by offering space for varying opinions representing the broad range of debate on issues of the day.

One of the common complaints about many diocesan newspapers is that there is no meaningful effort at providing the sort of balance common to the secular press. Indeed, there is often systematic diocesan suppression of legitimate opinion and censorship of the news, and the Protocol is representative of this reality. This is the main reason much of the independent Catholic press has sprouted up since Vatican II.

Lawler and Keith Bower, director of communications and editor of the Diocese of Duluth’s Catholic Outlook from 1984-1992, both maintain this pattern of censorship accounts in large part for the general mediocrity of the diocesan press.

Bower, who today is senior editor at the Foundation for the Family in Cincinnati, said he recalls that many priests generally despised his newspaper, and long before he ever arrived on the scene.

He said he was sometimes forbidden to publish certain categories of news thought to be "politically incorrect" by his superiors in the chancery. But, for a brief time period when he was between bishops he was effectively without a supervisor for nine months and was able to publish stories without being censored by a higher-up.

"I went into that period trying to publish as little ‘bumpf’ as I could, trying to tell what the issues in the Church were and report Rome's decisions and the teachings of John Paul II. I editorialized against the Persian Gulf War, because I found it failed to meet the Just War theory. That wasn't wise," Bower explained. "It wasn't that the liberals in The Club disagreed with me. I was told that it was presumptuous for a layman without a degree in theology to tell other people what St. Augustine meant."

Then later, Bower said, "The diocese was involved in United Way and we pointed out that the local abortion clinic was indirectly funded through it. I think that tore it, but the official excuse for my constructive dismissal was that the Bush Recession and the 3-cent raise in postage rates had dried up the money. There was also an expensive out-of-court settlement on a pederasty suit in Brainerd."

Nevertheless, Bower said, "when I was pretty much putting out my own paper, I started receiving some respect from unlikely sources for the first time. I think it was because the Guys (priests) could see I was being a professional, not a houseboy."

In short order Bower found himself looking for another job: "The paper was made a quarterly and I went to half-time and half-pay, less benefits. That was about a 60-70 percent cut in pay in real terms. They hired a local feminist to ‘consult’ me on the publication. She'd co-written some things with a priest, who had been leader of the former bishop's not-so-loyal opposition."

Before becoming editor of Catholic World Report, Lawler served a short term as editor for Boston’s archdiocesan paper. He said he too was forced out of his job even though circulation of The Pilot doubled under his leadership, in which he stressed reportage of issues of concern to readers, rather than treating the paper as a house organ.

"The criticisms of me were that I covered too much secular news and was too controversial," Lawler explained. "The critics were mainly priests of the archdiocesan offices, and they were very rarely made to me directly."

Lawler's focus on contraception was a huge problem: "I wrote an editorial saying there should be more preaching of Humane Vitae," Lawler said. "A lot of priests got angry about that. First, they claimed the content upset them, and the second objection was that they thought it unseemly that a layman would criticize priests. There is a very clerical atmosphere in Boston and that was unheard of. Toward the end of my tenure there was criticism I wrote too much about abortion."

As time rolled on, Lawler said, pressure from priests for his removal increased and he was asked to resign by a chancery official even though Cardinal Bernard Law, "was always supportive of me whenever we spoke."

John Mallon, contributing editor of the international magazine Inside the Vatican is well acquainted with the criticism of priests for pro-life commentary.

Mallon was director of communications and editor of the Sooner Catholic, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma, for more than three years (1994-1997) before he was forced to resign by Bishop Eusebius Beltran, who said he supported Mallon's aggressive support of the magisterium, but could no longer contend with mounting pressure from priests who despised the journalist.

Mallon, who earned a master's degree in theology from Franciscan University in Steubenville, Oh., took the job at the invitation of the archbishop who telephoned him "out of the blue" and told Mallon he expected the diocesan paper to be totally Catholic.

"He told me that if I went against any papal teaching it would be grounds for immediate dismissal, and I told him I wouldn't have it any other way," Mallon said.

In time, Mallon found himself being encouraged by his archbishop to "keep doing what you're doing" but learned he was the object of a campaign against him by priests.

"Certain members of the clergy were up in arms over my refusal to be ‘politically correct.’ Another thing was a statement I made to the local daily paper in an interview. [I said] that one of the saddest compliments I received from people in the archdiocese was their telling me that they were getting from the newspaper what they weren't getting from the pulpits," Mallon said. "Although true, in hindsight that statement was a mistake. The archbishop told me three years later that they were still screaming about that quote in their priests' council meetings. He was amazed that they hadn't let it go or forgotten about it."

Meanwhile, much like Lawler and Bower, Mallon found acceptance for his work among the laity. "I was overwhelmingly well-received by the people of the archdiocese who would always come up and thank me for what I was doing in defending and informing them of Church teachings. I have no doubt that my popularity with the people only fueled the determination of their pastors to get rid of me," he said.

In retrospect, all three former editors said their dismissals from the Catholic press led to significant financial hardship, in part because, as Lawler put it, "Once you are in the Catholic press, you are radioactive; it is very difficult to get a new post in the secular press."

When asked what he thought about the bishops' call for civility in the media, Mallon replied that he had not read the statement, "but it certainly sounds like a good idea, but here again, the Church has to clean up its own house.... It should come as no surprise to anyone involved in the cause of Catholic orthodoxy that the injustices and abuses—even cruelties—I experienced were heaped on me by those priests who prided themselves on the ‘bold stands’ for ‘social justice.’"

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