By Kiera Butler
The Sunday after Father Thomas J. Reese, S.J., left his post as editor-in-chief of the Jesuit-run America magazine, Father James Martin, S.J., an associate editor at the magazine, went to mass at St. Ignatius Loyola Church, not far from America’s midtown Manhattan offices. Afterward, several parishioners told him how sorry they were that Reese had to go. “People were crying,” he says.
A few days later, Martin was at a pub with some friends. “The Irish bartender found out I was a priest,” he says. “And not knowing where I worked, he said ‘Oh, it’s horrible about that Father Reese. He seemed like such a nice guy.’”
The next week, Martin was visiting an order of cloistered Dominican nuns in the Bronx. One of the sisters offered her condolences about Reese.
“From the Irish bartender to the cloistered Dominican nun,” Martin says, “if it goes from one end of the spectrum to another, it’s a pretty good indication of how people felt.”
And that was only the beginning. Over the next few weeks, America received 1,200 letters and e-mails, most of them from people who had heard the rumors about Reese’s departure, that Reese had paid a price for taking the magazine in a direction the Vatican found unacceptable. America’s 45,000 readers knew Reese as an intellectual whose editorial fingerprint was one of careful moderation and whose magazine had been inhabited by thinkers from both the conservative and liberal theological traditions.
But the rumors were true. Because no one — not the staff of America, not Reese, and not Vatican officials — ever announced that Reese had been fired, some observers have claimed that Reese left voluntarily and that there is no reason to accuse church leaders of censorship. But Reese’s departure from America was the culmination of a five-year struggle between the magazine and church authorities. Reese became an emblem of the larger struggle within Catholic journalism about the nature of its mission.
America was founded by a group of Jesuits in 1909, and today priests on staff both live and work at the magazine’s headquarters, an elegant, understated townhouse on West Fifty-sixth Street. Reese, who likes to describe America’s signature mix of politics, theology, and devotional content as “Catholic PBS,” became editor-in-chief of America in 1998. By 2000, complaints from the Vatican had trickled down to the staff of the magazine. Although no specific names were ever attached to grievances, one thing was clear: the rumblings of disapproval had begun in the Holy See, in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a branch of church leadership that defends the teachings of the church. For the twenty-four years before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Congregation.
In 2002, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Jesuits, told America that the Congregation had objected to several of the magazine’s articles, arguing that they made open discussions out of matters that the church regarded as closed. Among the articles in question was one that, in light of the AIDS crisis, reconsidered the morality of the church’s condemnation of the distribution of condoms. Another critiqued Dominus Iesus, the 2000 Vatican document on the primacy of the Catholic faith, as having set interfaith dialogue back a step. Reese was issued a warning: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had appointed a board to oversee America. If Reese continued to print articles that challenged church teaching, he would be fired.
Reese says he took the complaints seriously. During the time the magazine was under scrutiny, the staff redoubled its efforts to explain the church’s position on sensitive issues. They invited conservative bishops to write articles; Ratzinger himself contributed a piece on the importance of the universal church over local parishes.
In 2003, the magazine received word that it was no longer under scrutiny by the Vatican. But the next major doctrinal document that the church published condemned gay marriage. The America staff deliberated about how to respond. A year later the magazine printed an article supporting the Vatican’s position, followed by responses to it, and then, responses to the responses. The exchange between scholars, priests, and journalists represented a wide breadth of viewpoints, and Reese got word that church leaders disapproved of one article that defended gay marriage. When, in 2005, Ratzinger was elected pope, Reese knew his relationship with him would not help the magazine, so he told his staff that he would resign. The staff convinced him not to. But when Reese told this to his boss, Father Brad Schaeffer, the head of the Jesuits in the United States, he was informed that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had already demanded his resignation.
For those who follow trends in the Catholic press, what happened at America was anything but a surprise. In two other well-publicized cases, the Congregation had also issued complaints against articles in Stimmen der Zeit, a 134-year-old German Jesuit magazine, and U.S. Catholic, a magazine published by the Claretians. And if editors at other church-run publications felt ripples of censorship after Reese’s dismissal, those ripples had come from a stone cast long before Reese left America. This was simply the latest chapter in a decades-long debate about the mission of the Catholic press.
Father Richard John Neuhaus, an outspoken conservative Catholic thinker and editor-in-chief of the ecumenical magazine First Things, says a church-run publication is akin to a house organ at a business, where the best interests of the organization come first. “Any editor with his or her head screwed on right knows that the purpose of the publication is to advance those interests,” Neuhaus says. The “fair and balanced” journalistic ideal toward which the secular press strives doesn’t apply.
“What’s balance?” Neuhaus says. “If you’re a publication that aims to advance the mission of the Catholic Church, is it balance to publish material fifty percent in favor and fifty against? That’s not balance, it’s undermining the mission of the magazine.”
Reese, now a visiting scholar at Santa Clara University in the Silicon Valley, says that the comparison to a house organ doesn’t fit; the church isn’t a business, he says, it’s a “community of believers.” Modern Catholics live in a politicized world. Issues such as gay marriage and abortion don’t exist in a vacuum of church teaching. “In previous centuries, when the laity were not educated, these issues could be dealt with by the clergy,” Reese says. “Well, that’s not going to work today. It’s very healthy for the church to allow freedom of the press and academic freedom.” Reese and others point out that dissent and discussion within the church have led to some of the most important reforms (consider Vatican II) in the long and complicated history of Catholicism.
“This idea that a Catholic publication should only print what Rome agrees with is essentially un-Catholic,” said Tom Roberts, editor-in-chief of the independent Catholic newspaper National Catholic Reporter. “Our tradition shows, much as people would not like to admit this, that the church has changed its mind on some very significant issues.”
Roberts’s national weekly, along with Commonweal, a Catholic biweekly, both criticized the firing of Reese on their editorial pages. But unlike America, both are published by lay people, not priests, and therefore are not subject to discipline by church authorities.
Church-run publications were not so willing to offer up a challenge. In May 2005, at a meeting of the Catholic Press Association, Meinrad Scherer-Emunds, executive editor of U.S. Catholic, proposed that members issue an official statement expressing their concern over Reese’s dismissal. But the association is composed mostly of journalists from church-run publications, and some members backed off. “In the beginning, it seemed as if people were going to support the statement,” said Scherer-Emunds. “But then the atmosphere in the room changed to one of fear. Several respected editors spoke out against it, and eventually it was voted down.”
Some 170 diocesan papers are published in the United States, and although they share the common goal of reporting news of the church, their scope and content vary dramatically. Some are little more than bulletins, where Catholics can read about church events and view photos of bishops grinning from all corners of the front page. Others are much more news-oriented and ambitious.
Unlike America or U.S. Catholic, diocesan newspapers have a local focus, and their readers are a diverse bunch, with varying interests and levels of education. The local bishop is each paper’s publisher, and the church gives the bishop the responsibility of using it to inform and evangelize, in whatever balance he sees fit. But each bishop handles this balance differently, and sometimes a change in bishops means a drastic change in the paper.
When Robert Finn became bishop of Kansas City and publisher of The Catholic Key earlier this year, he replaced Bishop Raymond J. Boland, who had been in charge of the paper for twelve years. During Boland’s time as publisher, the paper won more than thirty awards, and earlier this year, he received the 2005 Bishop John England Award, an honor the Catholic Press Association presents yearly to bishops who do outstanding work defending First Amendment rights.
Albert de Zutter, who has been editor and general manager of The Catholic Key since 1990, says Boland’s philosophy — that newspapers do not exist simply to regurgitate church doctrine — allowed him to write award-winning editorials that sparked debate on sensitive church issues. “Bishop Boland must have said a hundred times, ‘If you want a catechism, go buy a catechism. A newspaper is not a catechism,’” de Zutter says. In a September 2004 editorial in the “Viewpoints” section of the paper, de Zutter argued that Catholics should not judge politicians solely on their stance on abortion. In 2001 and 2002, in several editorials about the sex-abuse scandals, he called for more accountability on the part of the church.
But Boland announced his retirement in the May 27 edition of The Catholic Key, and as of early October, the local portion of the “Viewpoints” section had made only one appearance under Finn: a curmudgeonly look at shopping for school supplies. Finn also discontinued a syndicated column by Father Richard McBrien, a somewhat incendiary — and liberal — Catholic writer.
Finn says that news stories that include multiple points of view on an issue are one thing, but opinion pieces are another. He told CJR: “To take something which is clearly defined in authentic church teaching, and to put it side by side with someone else who believes something different — I don’t think that fulfills the role of the Catholic press, from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know what to believe.”
Bishop Finn’s editorial philosophy is on the extreme end of the spectrum, but in no way is it unique. In 2003, a bishop in Raleigh, North Carolina, fired the editor of a diocesan paper who published an interview with a theologian who criticized the church. And bishops across the country have demanded that papers drop McBrien’s column.
Some speculate that freedom of the diocesan press peaked after the liberal reforms of Vatican II, and that in the years since, free speech has been on the decline. Bishops appointed during the past two conservative papacies are less likely to allow controversy within the church into the pages of the diocesan newspapers.
Some evidence suggests that the bishops’ effort to rid diocesan papers of controversy might be backfiring. In response to a recent poll in U.S. Catholic, 80 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement, “Catholic newspapers that steer clear of controversial or difficult issues have contributed to the loss of credibility the church has suffered in recent years.” Only 5 percent reported that they got most of their news about the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic church from diocesan papers; most relied instead on the secular media. It’s impossible to say whether those trends accurately reflect the opinions of all Catholics, since the sample size was small and the respondents were all readers of U.S. Catholic, but the starkness of the figures suggests that there is, at the very least, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the diocesan press.
Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, co-director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York City, says the rigidity of the Catholic press could make it vulnerable to misrepresentation in the secular media. “I would think it would be in the best interest of the bishops to think seriously about the consequences of the major media being the main outlet for Catholic news,” says Steinfels.
But for national Catholic publications like America, the role of church leaders is more complicated. Censorship does not start with local bishops; it filters down through a complex chain of command that begins with Vatican authorities. Reese believes that the Congregation’s ironclad approach to dissent might have as much to do with culture as it has to do with Catholicism. Catholics in Europe, Reese said, might disagree with church teaching, but the strident way in which Americans voice their disapproval would be anathema to most Europeans, including those in Rome.
Reese’s successor, the veteran America editor Father Drew Christiansen, is a less public man than Reese (Reese frequently explained the Roman Catholic church to the secular press), and he says he will have a different editorial focus.
“I’m probably more interested in the church’s intersections with the world than in the internal politics of the church,” says Christiansen. “My concerns are more with how the U.S. church relates to the church around the world. I’ll probably also take a more international perspective. I’m concerned that Americans know what’s going on with the wider church.”
After Ratzinger’s election as pope but before Reese’s dismissal, this line appeared in an editorial America published: “A church that cannot openly discuss issues is a church retreating into an intellectual ghetto.” The magazine has said that on this principle, it will not waver. Christiansen’s shift of focus away from controversy within the church might ease some of the tension between America and the Vatican. But he knows he’s in a delicate business. “We’ll watch ourselves, but we’ll also try to offer things that are quite substantive in content,” he says. “We hope to be a serious journal that airs serious views on issues of concern to the church.”
This won’t be an easy line to walk. For example, in September, a new document from the Vatican was leaked to several major publications. It called for an inspection of each of the 229 seminaries in the United States. Already, one section of the document — the part that suggests seminaries should bar gay men from entering — has drawn considerable criticism from those who see a witch hunt.
The inspections will touch many communities in the United States, and diocesan papers — and the bishops who publish them — will have to decide how to cover them. The staff of America has already been contemplating their response: Christiansen has commissioned several pieces on the subject. In the wake of the dismissal of Thomas Reese, the world will be watching.
Kiera Butler is an assistant editor at CJR.
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