Bishop Addresses Competence of Communications Directors in Catholic Media

Most people in the Catholic Media have no sense of mission or even an rudimentary understanding of the Catholic Faith. Father McCloskey controls an expensive glossy magazine with a substantial readership of elderly Catholics who seem to be satisfied with a highly Americanized Catholicism.

He may not be interested in differentiating his message, whatever that might be, with that of the Methodists or other main-line protestant denominations, but he's really out of touch. Once again, there's a lack of accountability at the top.

Franciscan Father Pat McCloskey, editor of St. Anthony Messenger magazine, used coverage of health care reform as a case in point. He said many Catholic publications were criticized when they reported not just that the bishops had, in the end, rejected the reform over the abortion issue but also reported that the Catholic Health Association supported the reform measure. Can a "faithful" Catholic news organization cover both sides? he asked. [No]

"The answer is yes," Archbishop Aymond said. A Catholic publication must explore both sides "without bias," he said. [Whose side are you on, anyway?] However, rather than just report that one group is saying this and the other is saying that, he continued, the publication also has a duty to report why the church teaches what it teaches on a particular issue.

But sometimes, Communications Directors, for all the money they're paid, don't know whose side they're on. In fact, in a lot of cases, they don't really seem to know what the Church teaches on any given issue during the day. It's unclear whether anyone cares though, because often, Communications Directors don't seem to be subject to the same levels of performance and accuracy that their counterparts in the corporate world normally would.

The bishops agreed with that view of interdependence, with Bishop Herzog adding that bishops need to trust that their editors or communications directors are competent and are not going to undermine them. He added that in a smaller diocese, like his, which does not have the bureaucratic levels of large dioceses, it is easier to have a close relationship with his editor, not to oversee what goes into the paper but to keep communication lines open.

Read article...