When preparing news reports about a chess match, it really helps if reporters quote one or more experts on the rules of chess.
The same thing is true when covering the FIFA World Cup. At some point, it would help to have an expert define “offsides” and some of soccer’s other more complicated rules.
When covering the U.S. Supreme Court, it helps to have a reporter on the team with a law degree and some serious experience covering debates in elite courtrooms.
This brings me that New York Times article the other day about that eyebrow-raising wedding at Westminster Cathedral between the current prime minister of England and his latest of many lady friends. The double-decker question covered many essential facts:
Why Could Boris Johnson Marry in a Catholic Church?
The British prime minister was married twice before, but the church didn’t recognize those unions because they were not Catholic.
Now, this article did some things very well, including offering a crisp, clear summary of Johnson’s complicated history as a husband and lover. Read that, if you wish.
However, I was struck by two words that were missing in this article — that would be, “Canonical” and “form” — even though discussions of this legal term was all over Catholic Twitter once the secret wedding was made public.
What, pray tell, is “Canonical form”? We will get to that in a moment.
In terms of journalism basics, the crucial point is that it really would have helped if the Times team had interviewed one or two Catholic Canon lawyers who understand this term and the history behind the church’s teachings on this subject. As things turned out, readers ended up knowing more about how this rite offended the sensibilities of Catholic LGBTQ activists than the specifics of the church laws that allowed the wedding to take place. Here’s the overture:
LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s marriage to his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, on Saturday caught even his closest advisers off guard. Yet, perhaps the most surprising thing about the stealth ceremony was how by-the-book it was.
The bride wore a flowing white dress and a crown of white flowers in her hair; the groom a dark suit with a boutonniere. They were married by a Catholic priest in Westminster Cathedral in London, the seat of the English Catholic Church.
That last detail has become a subject of lingering intrigue because, after all, this was Boris Johnson, no altar boy, walking to the altar. The question bubbling in Catholic circles: How did a twice-divorced man, with at least one child born out of wedlock, manage to get married in the Roman Catholic Church?
Good question. Let’s continue.
The answer is simple and, to some people, unsatisfying: Mr. Johnson, 56, and Ms. Symonds, 33, were both baptized as Catholics. Neither of Mr. Johnson’s previous two marriages was in the Catholic Church so the church does not recognize them, and Ms. Symonds had never married.
As a matter of canon law, it is cut and dried — except that when Mr. Johnson was a teenager at boarding school, he was confirmed as a member of the Church of England. Then, of course, there is the issue of double standards: Many other practicing Catholics who are divorced are turned away by the church when they seek to remarry — to say nothing of same-sex couples who are Catholic.
However, when it comes to marriage in the modern world, few issues in Catholic Canon law can accurately be called “simple.”
In this case, it may be accurate to say that church law on this subject is “cut and dried.” However, as I stated earlier, it would have helped to have allowed a Canon lawyer to explain why that is the case.
Catholics are bound to canonical form for validity. If Mr. Johnson previously attempted marriage outside canonical form, he did not contract marriage validly, and was therefore free to marry.
That’s not modernism. Canonical form has been a requirement for validity since Trent. https://t.co/BQWSWDdm0x
— JD Flynn (@jdflynn) May 30, 2021
Set aside, for a moment, the issue of whether Johnson stopped being a Catholic when he was confirmed as an Anglican. On that point, the Times had this to say:
The church apparently overlooked Mr. Johnson’s conversion to the Anglican faith because under church law, it is now all but impossible — once baptized — to formally defect from Catholicism. (He inherited the faith from his mother.) Mr. Johnson was confirmed in the Church of England with his class at Eton College, though some students choose to opt out of the process.
What, precisely, do Catholic officials say on that point? Reporters could have talked to a bishop, I guess, but it also would have been logical to have asked (wait for it) a Canon lawyer.
But let’s just say that journalists may need to concede that Catholic church officials get to decide who is and who is not a Catholic and when people are or are not Catholics.
If that is the case, this brings us to the term “Canonical form,” when applied to a marriage rite. Here is one online discussion:
… What is the canonical form? According to canon 1108, para. 1, it is the requirement for validity of marriage, that when a Catholic marries another Catholic or when a Catholic marries a non-Catholic, such a marriage must be contracted in the presence of the local bishop or the local parish priest (or a priest or deacon delegated by either of them), with the assistance of two witnesses. The principle here is the territorial one, in the sense that outside his diocese or parish neither the bishop nor parish priest can validly act. The use of the words “valid” and “validity” signifies that the Catholic Church will not recognise as substantially adequate the marriages of those bound by the form if contracted outside the form.
Thus, readers really need to know — if the goal is understanding Catholic law on this point — the when, where and how factors in the earlier Johnson marriages. Were they civil ceremonies? Were they Anglican rites? Maybe they were non-denominational weddings with vague Christian content?
The essential question is whether these rites included the participation of a Roman Catholic clergyman. Does the Times feature address this question? Why not?
Let me state, once again, one of the “big ideas” preached here at GetReligion: Reporters DO NOT need to affirm the laws and doctrines of the Catholic church in order to cover subjects of this kind. However, it’s important for journalists to understand those laws and doctrines and, perhaps with quotations from experts, to cover them in an accurate and fair-minded manner.
I am assuming, of course, that the goal is accurate and fair-minded coverage. If that is the case, why not talk to a Canon lawyer or two — maybe one on the doctrinal left and one on the right — when covering this story?
Then again, maybe the closing paragraphs of this news report contained the material that mattered the most for Times editors. Is this the thesis statement?
For some Catholics, the issue is less Mr. Johnson’s picaresque route to the altar than the inability of other Catholics to make the same journey.
“Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were married within the rules of the Catholic Church. And I wish them well,” the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and the editor at large of America magazine, wrote on Twitter. “I also wish that the same mercy and compassion that was offered to them, recognizing their complex lives, could also be extended to same-sex couples who are lifelong Catholics.”
The Gray Lady has spoken. Let enlighted readers attend.
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