Separation of Church and News.

This is a funny example of the allergy that secular institutions - such as the media - have when confronted from that other culture, where people speak in Bible verses. You can see the reporter thinking "abort, abort, abort - someone is going to be 'offended'" as the interviewee threatens to launch into Joshua 1:9. On the other hand, isn't news sometimes about what people experience, even if they are as socially unacceptable to the opinion classes as that weird non-mainstream group known as "Evangelical Christians?"

The Magisterium of the Media.

As a Catholic when you really need to get the final word on matters of faith and morals, you obviously turn to Time Magazine, which has determined that women claiming they are Catholic priests are actually Catholic priests.  In the opening paragraph, the "journalist" Dawn Reiss states:

Alta Jacko is the mother of eight children. She is also an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Jacko, 81, who earned her master's degree in pastoral studies from Loyola University, a Jesuit Catholic school, says being a priest is what she was called to do.

So, Jacko really is an "ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church" is the burden of the opening paragraph.

Of course, this is nonsense inasmuch as the Catholic Church says that Jacko is no such thing.  So, Reiss weasels in the next sentence:

Officially, of course, the Catholic Church's Canon Law 1024 says that only baptized men can receive holy orders.

Oh, sure, "officially" Jacko is no more a priest than she is a potted petunia, but the text has already set up the notion that "unofficially" or, better still, "really" Jacko is a priest.

Get Religion observes that this article is unmitigated journalistic malpractice:

Time Magazine has an interesting story. Here’s how it begins:


Alta Jacko is the mother of eight children. She is also a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees. Jacko says that playing baseball is what she was born to do.

Just kidding.

The Get Religion post is worth reading for dissecting all the other tropes of bad religion writing, particularly bad religious writing involving the Catholic Church, which includes lining up quotes only from the liberal side and using weasel words and unsourced claims to advance the political goal of the author.  Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion concludes:

Perhaps the story is so laughably bad, so unbelievably silly, because the reporter failed to speak with anyone she disagreed with. That’s bad enough in a story that quotes only one or two people. But in a story of this length, in this high profile of a publication, it’s an embarrassment. It’s as if Time is going after the Newsweek demographic.


Also, these stories are so routinely and increasingly bad that I’m almost beginning to wonder if there’s some kind of Bulwer-Lytton-type contest for who can come up with the worst.

Mollie Hemingway also notes that Reiss responded to criticisms of her article at another blog by (a) waiving around her credentials as a journalist and (b) using more weasel words.

And the media wonders why it is dying.