Saturday, July 23, 2005
Confluence
It's my diocese. Parishioners have complained to me about it. (Why exactly, I'm not sure.) And St Blog's has taken up the theme on a handful of sites. Three times a charm.
Our new bishop has deep-sixed Richard McBrien's syndicated column from the diocesan newspaper. Those seem to be the headlines. Said newspaper ran a nice interview with Bishop Finn this week.
I confess I don't have a strong opinion about the McBrien column or its axing. I also confess I don't read the Key too much, unless something on the front page catches my attention. It reprints CNS stories you can get here, in both long and short formats. In other words, it's not much different from other diocesan newspapers I've known. Anita felt badly about using it for the bunnies' litter boxes. I told her not to give it another thought.
What did strike me about Bishop Finn's comments was this:
"We need clear expressions of the meaning of faith, why we believe and how we can inspire each other," he said. "We've got to give people hope and direction, and we don't have a lot of time and space (in the newspaper) to do that. I think we can do a whole lot better."
I agree. We can indeed do a lot better. I would see that as one of the incomplete mandates of Vatican II: nothing less than the sanctification of the entire Catholic laity.
Do dioceses print newspapers to imitate the secular media? Or do they have a mission other than the communication of news and opinion? Perhaps our diocese and others should reexamine their print media. Maybe the time has come for old formats to be updated and replaced by something more progressive. It certainly couldn't sink circulation rates. Our parish is required to buy 720 subscriptions to keep the Key afloat. I tend to doubt that a collection of favorite columnists of any ilk is going to float a periodical like this. So long as the diocese and parishes subsidize this type of journalism, why not make it more like a tool for ministry and faith, rather than merely an outlet for news and opinion?
