Crux: A New Player in Catholic Media

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Sister Mary Ann, thank you for your cogent blog on Crux Now. Like you, I appreciate the possibilities and rationale for this venture and, as a weathered Bostonian and local Catholic educator, I am watching to see how it develops. Perhaps AMERICA readers will be interested in my questions and hopes for the site, as below in a letter sent to to Crux editor Teresa Hanafin last week. September 3, 2014 To the Editor of CRUX, Local, national, and global reasons why the newspaper of a major American city, in this case Boston, would develop a news section for “all things Catholic” should be apparent. Over 40% of the population of greater Boston is at least nominally and culturally Catholic, a fact that helps account, perhaps, for the remarkable turn of step toward the injured in the Marathon bombing. In the past decade The Globe itself performed and was duly applauded for its investigative reporting and coverage of the clerical sexual abuse tragedy. Having focused narrowly if necessarily on documenting the scandal and pushing for accountability, beefing up an hypertrophied institutional definition of the Church, it seems clear that new ownership and editorial direction want to set a better balance and offer a truer, wider perspective. This is all to the good. The national tendency to read Catholicism in terms of our American political division of liberal/conservative, even in Catholic media, has left many Catholic voices out of the national conversation, silencing not only the purported center but also depth and breadth. Catholicism is a religious faith whose members endure significant persecution and martyrdom in too many places in the world today, but that story hardly makes the news. The worldwide footprint of Catholic works of mercy and the Pope’s voice make it an organization present on many frontiers and able to speak to social justice issues affecting humanity. So, kudos for trying something new and launching Crux to fill a real void. I am encouraged that Margery Eagan, one of your writers, has noted that her column will be about “how faithful Catholics live out their beliefs in the world and what it means to be Catholic today.” That said, I have some doubts and fears that “all things Catholic” will not, in fact, be “all things,” and that Catholicism is in for another battering in the press. I am waiting to see how you manage, how you differentiate yourselves from newspapers like NCR and journals like America, Commonweal, or First Things, which many Catholics read. Will The Boston Globe really give voice to a faith and reason over 2000 years rich, including the diverse opinions of well informed laity, youth, the elderly, religious women and men, and priests in Catholicism as it is practiced in the street, marketplace, financial center, family, university , parish, hospital, social service agency? Will you strike a balance and indicate depth and breadth in recognizing the sometimes unutterable effects in human character of a lifelong practice of a spirituality that puts its body where its mouth is? Or will you just fall into the same old culture wars with only a handful of voices allowed to speak, and those in narrowly and perhaps lazily conceived journalistic frameworks of oppositional reasoning, in which case you will be talking primarily to yourselves and, unintentionally, perhaps, just driving a political agenda? Catholics “on the ground” know and feel, I think, a certain institutional expression of Catholicism crumbling and choose to believe that the Holy Spirit in whom all things work together for good is guiding even that. What are you aiming to build up and strengthen with your discourse, and what are you willing, without presumption, to destroy? Talking/writing and education are certainly something, but everything depends on how you do it and, like William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow, on the believing, laboring, loving, praying, and suffering community of faith, often in a creative silence, where the action of change really goes on in Catholicism today. M. J. Doherty, PhD