Politics and religion can make for strange bedfellows. We know that from the past four years and the cozy alliance President Donald Trump forged with conservative Christians.
Evangelicals and traditional Catholics in large numbers voted for Trump over the last two elections, many with enthusiasm and others with great reluctance. The fallout from that voter trend will be felt for years to come.
President-elect Joe Biden is the nation’s second Catholic president, the first since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Biden didn’t run away from his faith in 2020. Instead, he embraced it.
Biden’s brand of Catholicism resonated with the mainstream press and many voters. The election now over, how Biden navigates the complicated world of the church’s hierarchy will be a big storyline.
There will be a general sense of calm in news coverage once Biden starts his term. That means the typical honeymoon period offered every president (with the exclusion of Donald Trump) will stretch far beyond the first 100 days.
How religion is covered in this climate — and Catholicism specifically — by mainstream newsrooms will affect many news stories. Look for stories that celebrate any and all Catholic images and teachings cited by Biden in support of left-of-center political efforts. There will be a revival on the religious left.
Coverage during recent weeks may serve as a prelude to what’s to come. Many journalists feel that the press helped elect Trump, offering waves of coverage of his candidacy during the GOP primaries before the 2016 election. This year, the Hunter Biden scandal offered the press a chance to beat up on Joe Biden and we could have seen a repeat of 2016. Instead, the press ignored the scandal — with help from Big Tech — and blamed it on Russian disinformation.
With the election now over, we have learned that there was an investigation underway and that this topic would have been fair game for coverage.
You don’t need to be a Trump fan to see that many professionals in America’s press have gone astray. Many journalists are now rationalizing an advocacy brand of journalism, instead of doing what they traditionally have been paid to do — report the facts and give readers and viewers unbiased reporting.
How will these trends affect coverage of Biden’s faith and Catholicism in this country? It appears that how Biden is viewed politically will impact how mainstream reporters cover faith storylines that emerge during his administration.
For example, The Boston Globe, the same newspaper that brought the Catholic clergy sex-abuse scandal to the forefront two decades ago, ran a news story on Nov. 28 under this headline: “Joe Biden’s Catholic faith has shaped his life and approach to politics. How will it shape his presidency?” Here’s a sampling from the piece:
Biden always carries a rosary in his pocket and laces speeches with scripture. On the campaign trail, he was known to stop for a moment of quiet prayer, sometimes alone, sometimes with someone he had just met. Throughout his political career, it was not uncommon for Biden to attend a Saturday morning event with churchgoers and still make an evening service, his longtime friends and staffers say.
Indeed, his central pitch to voters as he paved his path to the White House this year carried a religious overtone: Americans were in “a battle for the soul of the nation.”
“I don’t think you go to Mass on Election Day to make a political statement,” said Margaret McGuinness, a professor of religion at La Salle University in Philadelphia. “We don’t have a tradition of that in this country. I think you go because you care and it means a lot to you.”
Despite breaking with Catholic doctrine on key issues such as abortion, Biden is expected to draw on a branch of his faith that is strongly rooted in social justice and reform for his governing philosophy. Rather than being in conflict, religious observers say these beliefs complement his worldview and permeate his deal-making approach to politics — a strength, supporters say, as he attempts to unify a splintered country.
But much like the rest of America, Catholics are polarized. Biden will have to build trust and bridge divides as he seeks to bring people of faith into the Democratic fold, despite those who see his desire for compromise and calls for unity as belonging to a bygone era.
Ah, yes. There’s that crucial word — “polarized.”
How secular newsrooms cover this new administration and faith is something readers should watch closely. Despite Biden’s positions on abortion, religious liberty and LGBTQ issues, we can expect favorable coverage compared with that seen by Trump and religious conservatives.
Actions and statements by the newly-minted Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., will be crucial. Whether he is or isn’t close to Biden, Gregory be linked to him given geography and the power that comes with running the D.C., archdiocese. As a result, he will be seen as a de facto Biden spiritual adviser.
Readers can expect waves of glowing coverage when Gregory agrees with Biden’s actions and use of Catholic imagery and thin coverage when the cardinal dissents.
Religious conservatives didn’t do themselves any favors at that “Jericho March” rally in Washington, where Trump supporters continued to argue that the election was stolen. Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative has arguably the best analysis of the six-hour event.
On the same day as the Globe story, The Washington Post ran a story under the headline “Biden and Cardinal Wilton Gregory share a mandate for healing divisions.”
What divisions will they heal? The ones that Trump and his supporters created, of course.
Just a few days earlier, the National Catholic Register offered up an analysis of Gregory’s statement that he has no plans to deny Biden communion. That alone will be a major talking point come next month, especially when Biden attends Mass each Sunday in the Washington area. The piece does a good job explaining Catholic doctrines on this matter. Not surprising, the coverage from this conservative Catholic publication is loaded with quotations from Catholic teachings, using texts often ignored by secular news publications.
Gregory’s comment is sure to raise questions about the Church’s pro-life witness. But for some Catholics, the remark might also raise questions about the sincerity of U.S. bishops on the topic of ecclesial reform.
In 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Church’s doctrinal office, told U.S. bishops in a memo that a Catholic politician “consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws” is engaged in “manifest” and “formal cooperation” in grave sin.
In such a case, the politician’s “pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist,” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote.
If the Catholic perseveres in grave sin and still presents himself for Holy Communion, “the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it.”
Cardinal Ratzinger’s memo was an application of canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law, which says that Catholics “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.”
What happened to these effort by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would then become Pope Benedict XVI? His strong words were hidden from public discussions of this controversy by the now disgraced Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop in Washington, D.C., at that time. Will that name — McCarrick — make it into many news reports on these issues during a Biden administration? Don’t hold your breath.
Former Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput elaborated on the Holy Communion debates in a piece for First Things. Here’s the main takeaway from his piece:
The implications for the present moment are clear. Public figures who identify as “Catholic” give scandal to the faithful when receiving Communion by creating the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional. And bishops give similar scandal by not speaking up publicly about the issue and danger of sacrilege.
For secular newsrooms, Biden may be seen as an acceptable type of Catholic. He’s someone who attends Mass and is deemed practicing, but is progressive on a host of social and moral issues. We can expect journalists to present Biden as a “moderate” and centrist Catholic voice in a faith that includes what they purport to be extremists not hip to the politically woke agenda.
In this regard, The National Catholic Reporter ran an opinion piece under a headline, “The media is not the church’s enemy,” that took aim at prelates who have recently attacked the news media and Biden’s political positions that come into direct contract with church teachings.
It’s true that there are so-called media outlets masquerading as legitimate news organizations in the church (I’m talking to you, LifeSiteNews), but these general indictments of “the media” by bishops sadly echo a certain soon-to-be-ex-president, who specialized in yelling “Fake news!” whenever the news was bad.
The bishops, collectively at least, also have a history of blaming the media, most notably when journalists uncovered sexual abuse of children and the related coverup by bishops. At the time, the prelates hurled accusations of anti-Catholicism at reporters who were actually doing the church a favor by exposing its weaknesses.
Today, most bishops know to avoid such blatant deflection, and they publicly call for “accountability” and “transparency.” Some bishops at the November virtual meeting called for more sunshine, rather than less.
Also, a Washington Post story this week argued that Biden could “redefine” what it means to be an American Catholic in “good standing.” This is a theme that is likely to drive a bigger wedge between Catholics in this country, especially the ones who regularly attend church and, in high numbers, voted for Trump — twice.
Biden is a modern Catholic, you see, and he is opposed by ancient, judgmental Catholics. For many journalists, there is nothing at all complicated with Biden. If anything, it’s the church — and its arcane positions on a host of social issues — that is the problem here. For a deeper look at the progressive lens through which many journalists view these issues, see tmatt’s post from this past Monday.
It’s true the media is not the enemy. However, the secular press and the church often have different agendas and priorities. The old-school view is that journalists should be working on an examination of what’s happening in the world, rather than work as an advocate for progressive positions.
In this case, solid news coverage would reveal big cracks in the relationship between Biden and the teachings of his faith (the same has been true, of course, for some Republicans such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani). Instead, the coverage has been largely focused on any similarities between Gregory and Biden.
The president-elect actively supports a progressive, evolving brand of Catholicism, something that often clashes with Catholic doctrines and traditions on a host of issues that will manifest themselves politically over the next few months and years. The church, meanwhile, is often slow to change, but has a tradition rooted in the Bible that goes back 2,000 years. That’s something news stories rarely emphasize, offering quotes from Catholic laws and the Catechism.
Yes, politics and faith make for strange bedfellows. We will see that again with Biden over the next four years. The issue is whether most journalists will accurately and fairly cover voices on both sides of debates among Catholics during that period of time.
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