Informed Information

My friend Father Jim Garvey’s first assignment was with Msgr. Charles Owen Rice, the nationally known “labor priest,” or as he was known in some Pittsburgh rectories, “that damned pinko commie liberal.”  Jim told me when he first got to St. Anne’s that he was amazed at the number of publications Msgr. Rice subscribed to and read, even to getting the Berkeley Barb. 

But I’ll bet Msgr. Rice didn’t read “the other side of the story.”  I once asked him if he got much hate mail from his weekly column in the Pittsburgh Catholic.  Oh, lots, he said—and then smiled, “But I never answer them.  That’s my secret, m’ boy.” 

Among the many things my parents taught me—by example, without every speaking about it—was to read the daily newspaper.  Reading the Post-Gazette every morning is part of my routine, along with a shower, prayers, morning Mass, and Lean Cuisine.  When I go on vacation I love to pick up and peruse all manner of local papers, four or five a day.  Dad got our household a subscription to Sports Illustrated when I was nine or so.  This was catnip for my brothers and me, because sports meant everything to us.  We didn’t know we were reading some fine writers—even Myron Cope!—we just knew this magazine was a vehicle to learn about sports.

Keeping up with the news was something I did because I liked to when I was first ordained.   Somehow awareness of the world outside the parish has always been part of my makeup, along with opinions about politics and culture.   But when then-Bishop Wuerl gave me the job of diocesan secretary for social concerns, it became part of my ministry.  Because of my interest in Catholic social thought, it remains to this day. 

The internet makes this easier and harder.  Easier, because you don’t have to pay expensive subscriptions to receive, say, The New York Times or the Boston Globe, or even L’Osservatore Romano in English or the Japan Times.  A flick of the wrist, a click of the mouse, there you are.  Harder, because there is so much out there.  (And with this blog I’m contributing to it!)  The huge amount of news sources threatens to overwhelm.  It certainly makes discerning the grain from the chaff very difficult.

In my parish ministry I find that few parishioners are up on the national and international news.  But parishioners do gobble up local news.  They latch onto the almost-nightly tragedy on the 11:00 p.m. tv news about a toddler who drowns in a suburban backyard pool or the murder-suicide in a central Pennsylvania county.  (You know the tv news axiom, “If it bleeds, it leads.”)  I gave up watching the 11:00 pm news decades ago, in part because I can’t stand that kind of stuff.  But I have learned to expand my reading to whatever the local paper is, and stay attuned to parishioners’s interests.

German Lutheran theologian Karl Barth was supposed to have said, “Have your bible in one hand, and the daily newspaper in the other.”  The Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary could not find that on the record, but it did find a quote from a 1963 interview with Time magazine, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”   (Thank you, internet.)  I believe the thought and have tried to practice it daily, even as fewer and fewer people do.