Goodbye, Good Journalism?
Commentary & Opinion
National Catholic Register
June 30-July 6, 2002
by DAVID PEARSON
If I had a family member serving in the military right now, there’s only one thing I’d dread more than a knock on the door in the middle of the night:
Word that my loved one had lost his life at the hands of his own comrades.
“Friendly fire,” they call it. Such a congenial term for so bitter a pill — one that no mother, father, son, daughter, sister or brother should ever have to choke down.
The way I see it, when one of our boys is cut down by the enemy, his family can take consolation in the honor bestowed on all those who die fighting for a just and noble cause. When he’s accidentally killed by his own buddies, all the surviving relatives are left with are unanswered questions. Who? Why? How?
That’s the best analogy I can come up with to convey how I felt when I opened the May issue of the New Oxford Review.
There, right up near the monthly journal’s front end, a priest who happens to be a personal friend of mine comes under withering fire from a letter-writer who holds him responsible for a litany of outrageous offenses against Catholic orthodoxy. The most despicable of the allegations describes his presiding over ersatz, anything-goes liturgies at which the Blessed Sacrament is “crushed into the floor [as] the electric guitars shatter what should be a sacred silence.”
The letter-writer is a student at a Catholic high school in Rhode Island. My friend, one of the most steadfast and dedicated priests I know, is chaplain at the school.
I probably wouldn’t have bothered to answer the charges this wacky rant levels against Father Marcel Taillon, who also serves as vocations recruiter for the Diocese of Providence, had the salvo been fired in isolation. But the letter represents the third shot in what has become a sustained volley.
The hostilities began with a less hysterical, but equally irresponsible, section in one of the hottest-selling books on the Catholic bestseller lists right now — Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church by Michael S. Rose. Shot No. 2 was an excerpt from the book that ran as a guest column in the February issue of the New Oxford Review. These, too, falsely accused Father Taillon (pronounced “Tie-own”) of offenses against orthodoxy.
A book, a column, a letter. All adding up to a hail of badly misguided missiles finding their mark in the reputation — and thus the ministries — of one very faithful priest.
Confounded Conjecture
As a Catholic, I’m hopping mad about the evident lapses in judgment that led to a scurrilous and damaging barrage being unleashed on a priest whose fidelity to the Church is exemplary. As a journalist, I’m irritated by how hastily the escalating bombardment was carried out, with so little regard for the facts. So I’m going to set the record straight on Father Taillon. And pontificate, with all due apologies for any presumption on my part, about the responsibilities of Catholic journalists and publishers to serve the Church by serving the truth.
Space restrictions prevent me from giving an adequate accounting of all the ways Father Taillon has impressed me over the past seven years as one of the holiest priests I’ve ever had the privilege to know. Suffice it to say that he is a priest profoundly in love with Christ and a man whose very life is rooted in, and centered on, his trust in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. I’ve seen him consecrate and adore and reverence and preach the Eucharist so zealously and so often that I can no longer call one to mind without thinking of the other.
That’s why the rubbish about his having anything to do with desecrations of the Blessed Sacrament proved the stink bomb that finally drove me to my keypad.
Meanwhile, Michael Rose’s main beef with Father Taillon is over a 30-second recruitment commercial the Providence Diocese occasionally runs on MTV, the raucous cable network aimed at teens and young adults. Rose wonders if the innovative ad placement is a sign that “the diocese is trying to attract ‘unchurched’ men that they can then mold easily into their ‘re-envisioned’ image of the priest.” Then he fills in the holes on his speculation by quoting an anonymous former seminary candidate from the diocese who presents himself as “an orthodox Catholic” and claims the seminary rejected him specifically because of his orthodoxy. Rose quotes the young man as saying he “wouldn’t be caught dead watching MTV” and concludes: “Thus, amidst an expensive media campaign to attract ‘suitable’ candidates, the Diocese of Providence rejected as ‘unsuitable’ a young man who watches EWTN instead of MTV. This perhaps partly explains why this diocese of 700,000 Catholics had just 25 seminarians in 2001 and will be ordaining not even one man to the priesthood in 2002.”
In fact, Providence did have an ordination this year and, indeed, by the end of 2004, the diocese’s office of vocations will have had one of the best five-year periods in its history: 23 new priests.
That’s just one important and telling detail Rose would have gotten right if only he had done what any good reporter needs to do before running with a story — any story, but especially an accusatory one: Interview multiple sources. Only quote people willing to give their names and speak on the record. And check facts.
Instead, Rose pits his conjecture and the anonymous source’s hearsay against snippets from articles in Providence’s diocesan newspaper. So it is that Rose sees fit to lump Father Taillon in with the book’s lineup of Church dissidents and dissenters. So it is that he gets the story so wrong. So it is that he does injury to a great priest’s thriving ministries.
Why did Rose, billed on his book’s sleeve as an investigative reporter, fail to interview Father Taillon? Why did he not call on the seminary’s rector, Auxiliary Bishop Robert J. McManus, to ask about the ad campaign? What kept him from scheduling time with Providence Bishop Robert Mulvee, who appears prominently in the ad, to talk about the seminary and the state of vocations in the diocese?
Those are questions only Michael Rose can answer. (When I contacted him to ask if he had interviewed, or attempted to interview, anyone from the Providence seminary, he referred me to the footnotes in his book that cite the diocesan newspaper snippets. I took that as a “No.”)
I do know that Rose’s star is rising — he’s been turning up with his sensational, sordid accounts on secular news shows — and his book is doing some brisk business. And I believe it’s a shame that, in taking on such a potentially worthwhile assignment, he has, with his slapdash reporting, shot his own credibility squarely in the foot. There may well be some fine reporting elsewhere in the book. But I, for one, will never see it. I don’t have time to sift through unreliable information. (The May 2002 issue of Culture Wars magazine — which would otherwise be a booster of the book — claims there are more problems with its reporting.)
As for the monthly journal, its editor should have checked the facts on its letter-writer’s accusations before presenting the tirade without disclaimer or comment. I’m speaking firsthand when I tell you that publications get all kinds of mail from all kinds of people. Religious publications seem to get more than their fair share from individuals who either have axes to grind or are unbalanced mentally or emotionally. Teen-agers who rail against the authority figures in their life should be at the top of the list of those whose accusations should never run unchecked.
We Catholic editors who read the mail need to pray for all the aggravated souls who write in, but we don’t need to publish whatever they write. And we need to be especially wary about letting them use our publications to hurt the Church and libel its people.
Words are All We Have
“Was MTV a good place for our ad? That’s a fair question to ask,” said Father Taillon when I called to ask about how he’s been affected by the hubbub. “It’s too bad we didn’t get a chance to answer it for this book, because we’ve given it a lot of thought and prayer.
“This situation is especially sad since I probably agree with a lot of what Michael Rose is trying to accomplish,” he added. “As it is, he’s hurt our ministry. We’ll recover, but, for the time being, he’s taken the focus off Christ around the school and the seminary, and put it on me. It only makes recruiting good candidates that much harder.”
Memo to Catholic publishers and news directors: In order for Catholic journalism to serve the truth, Catholic reporters must strive to be guided not only by the Church’s teachings on morality and ethics in the workplace, but also by the highest standards of the journalism profession. Sacrifice journalistic excellence for the sake of sounding off, increasing sales or conducting a crusade — no matter how well-intentioned — and you’re in the propaganda business. And propaganda in Catholic publishing is a sure way to sabotage the Church’s communications mission: evangelization, catechesis and formation of conscience.
I believe there’s a lesson in this series of rear-guard gaffes that have dinged up Father Taillon’s front-line ministries, and it’s not just for the journalists, writers and editors in our ranks. At a moment of siege and scandal like the one the Church is suffering through right now, we have to ask ourselves every day: Are we using our words to build up the Body of Christ — or to hand the enemy just the ammunition he needs to bring it down?
[Editor's note: For sound journalism on the seminary crisis, see John Burger's "What's Going on in the U.S? Seminarians Have Surprising Answers to the Pope's Question" from the April 21-27 National Catholic Register.]
David Pearson edits the Register’s commentary, arts, books and travel sections.
