Failure of Liberal Catholic Media on Catholic Nun /Sister Leadership Story

It is a depressing aspect of progressive Catholic media ( U.S. Catholic , America , NCR, etc ) that they just report ( preach) to the amen choir. Too much of their reporting has a US Versus Them quality. For example Bishops vs everyone else, Vatican versus us for instance.

The inability of the Catholic  press to be self critical to their own audience is a increasing depressing feature. This become more of a problem since these are the folks that often get quoted in the secular press.

An example of this is the Vatican intervention as to American Nun/Sister Leadership. The whole " but they are for the poor" and no need to proceed further is just idiotic in my mind.

Ross Douthat in the NYT has a great column at  The Nuns and the God Within which talks about some of the problems including the whole "moving beyond Jesus" thing.

He says in part:

...To return to Sr. Brink’s framework, I’m not sure I would actually describe this kind of theology as having moved entirely “beyond Jesus,” since Hubbard seems very interested in casting the post-resurrection Jesus of Nazareth as an ideal type for her vision of humanity’s spiritual evolution. She has this interest in common with many of the popular contemporary spiritual writers, from James Redfield to Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle to Paulo Coelho, who focus on what my book calls the quest for “the God Within”; indeed, the way that these figures almost always try to appropriate the life and message of Jesus rather than rejecting it outright is one reason why I find it more useful to describe the current American religious landscape as “heretical” than “post-Christian.”



But whatever else it is, Hubbard’s message is clearly post-Catholic, in a way that’s qualitatively different from a liberal Catholicism that wants the Church to ordain women and focus more on social justice but accepts the basic story of the gospels and the basic parameters of the Nicene Creed. And while the liberal Catholic/conservative Catholic divide will no doubt remain important, I suspect that the religious trends that a figure like Hubbard embodies — which lead further away from core Christian ideas without shaking off the Christian influence entirely — may be more important to the future of American religion than the more familiar post-1960s story that the press has been telling about the nuns and the Vatican these last few weeks.

I think he is quite right on that. But it's a story many of the more liberal leaning Catholic media outlets don't want to venture in I suppose.Fr. James Martin, S.J.,  does a twitter hashtag , and that becomes the  big story. It's a sad state of affairs. There is a much larger story going on here , and much too much of the  Catholic media does not seem to want to go outside their readerships comfort zones.



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