To me this is an inane variety of Catholic piety. My God! Hundreds of thousands of human beings are dead, millions injured, and even more rendered homeless, in Syria and Turkey. Even as we speak, there may yet be those dying agonizingly--children, mothers, fathers--underneath rubble, or alone on overcrowded makeshift hospital hallways. But CNA thought this was the story:
For them, apparently, it is conceivable that the God who fails to intercede to save human lives nevertheless chose to protect a mediocre, plaster statue of his mother.
It should be a WTF? moment for Catholic media in the United States--but it won't be.
After all, CNA is a fully-owned media outlet of Eternal World Television Network (EWTN), which more than any other Catholic organization has tried (and largely succeeding) in politicizing American Catholicism. EWTN (which acquired the National Catholic Register many years ago, immediately retrofitting that Catholic newsweekly to hard-right wing clone of the cable television, satellite and radio media giant, has been promoting its own vision of Catholic Orthodoxy for more than three decades. Through its affiliates on cable, satellite and radio, it has been skewing Catholic Church teaching toward the far-right wing of American politics, specifically the hard right and even alt-right of the Republican party for decades.
In an undeclared war with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) since at least the mid-1990s, EWTN has in a sense achieved its victory.
The USCCB leadership is increasing conservative and more overtly political leaning.
The media arm of the USCCB had been maligned, discredited, and has now been eliminated.
And members of the USCCB are now also on the Board of Executives of EWTN.
Essentially, by honing on those aspects of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (first published in the early 1990s) that align most strongly with right-wing American political positions, the rest of Church teaching is ignored. This has been the EWTN M.O. for decades but now they have the power as well.
No More Catholic News Service
Catholic News Service (CNS) had been founded in 1920 by the USCCB, then known as the NCCB. However, it was defunded and relegated to the dustbin in 2022, following the latest USCCB elections. CNS's domestic services shut down effective December 31, 2022.
What's left for Catholic media in the US?
There are some good options. Our Sunday Visitor has always been a slightly more moderate source of Catholic News. But in the toxic alt-right Catholic climate, the very hint of any kind of openness to discussion or introduction of faith informed by reason in the best Thomistic traditions will be likely decried as liberalism. OSV has also recently acquired parts of the defunct CNS.
America magazine is a great source of intellectual discourse among Catholicism, but is more or less marginalized by nearly four decades of anti-Jesuit propaganda by EWTN and its affiliates. They have promulgated the idea that all but a handful of the most scholarly religious orders such as the Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Cistercians, etc., have gone astray. It is part of the EWTN narrative that has been rather skillfully promulgated and imbibed like mother's milk by generations of American Catholics.
So forget it, Crux, National Catholic Reporter, and other fine Catholic publications who are also willing to communicate the full range of Catholic discourse in the United States. It is an uphill climb to to even be considered by the close-minded, ever rigorous, scrupulous-to-a-fault American Catholics who have been drinking the EWTN Kool-Aid their entire lives.
So expect more headlines like this one:
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