UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis’ Synod in three weeks, Wall Street’s pre-US election push with Vatican help, the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) censorship strategy, the disappointing start for the Boston Globe’s Crux website for Catholics, the “new rolling of the Nuns on the Bus” and efforts to protect children from priest rapists — these are all seemingly about to collide!
The apparent conservative takeover of NCR continues. Its “lifting” of David Gibson’s Religion News Service (RNS) report, about Sr. Simone Campbell (of the Nuns on the Bus) and “dark money”, has been “planted”, apparently, where it is inaccessible to NCR blogger comments. It inexplicably has been placed in NCR’s conservative “Hilton Foundation funded Global Sisters Happy Talk private enclosure” on NCR’s website. Other RNS “lifted” stories are not usually so restricted by NCR. Why is this being sealed off from comments?
NCR’s “spin tricks” continue to proliferate, it seems, no? For more background, please see my “What Is Really Up At the National Catholic Reporter?” here
Of course, “dark money” manipulation apparently may include some of NCR’s donors, not just the Koch Brothers (who donated $1 million recently to the US bishops’ Catholic University of America), no?
Who do you suppose are behind some of NCR’s key donors and advertisers, such as FAIDICA’s Hilton Foundation and the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management? Hardly Mother Teresa types, to be sure!
Please see, for example:
[FADICA – Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities]
and
[The National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management]
I now have to wonder who suggested to billionaire financier, John Henry, to set up the Boston Globe’s new website, Crux, and to call and hire for Crux John Allen, NCR’s former chief “papal spinner”, now replaced at NCR by Tom Reese, a pliable and obedient Jesuit who is still swooning over a Jesuit Pope, even one who reportedly was quite disliked by many Argentinian Jesuits.
John Henry obviously has many Wall Street contacts, likely including some associated with key donors and advertisers at NCR. Disappointingly, Crux’s early efforts seem to me mostly to indicate just another papal spin outlet. This is what I had expected it would be, especially given Allen’s extensive history of”softball” papal promotions at NCR. A reporter like Allen apparently can get more interviews “pitching softballs” and accepting uncritically papal propaganda, than by being an objective and critical thinker. Allen may not understand that there is a difference between journalism and cheer leading.
I hope the Boston Globe newsroom has, at least, put some drapes over its earlier Pulitzer Prize for its game changing stories a decade ago about Cardinal Law and the Catholic hierarchy’s broader priest child abuse cover-ups. Wow, does the Vatican papal media machine recover quickly, or not?
Of course, Pope Francis had earlier worked closely with Cardinal Law and Carl Anderson in Spain, well after the Boston scandal disclosures, on a Curial Commission about “family matters”.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.