Religion beat became a test of faith

[Ammonius_Saccus]

I wasn’t sure it this should go in secular news or here. Fell free to move it if I made the wrong choice.

To summarize: the author, William Lobdell, tells his story of lobbying to get the job of religion writer because he thought religion needed to be portrayed in a better light and he thought it would increase his faith:

WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers.

As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show.

I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people’s lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier.

But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.

Lobdell speaks of covering a series of faith rattling stories, starting with the Catholic Church pedophile scandals:

IN early 2002, I was assigned to work on the Catholic sex scandal story as it erupted across the nation. I also continued to attend Sunday Mass and conversion classes on Sunday mornings and Tuesday nights.

Father Vincent Gilmore — the young, intellectually sharp priest teaching the class — spoke about the sex scandal and warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. Otherwise, we’d be committing “spiritual suicide.”

As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the victims — people usually in their 30s, 40s and up — should have just gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of them were needlessly stuck in the past.

But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.

Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to escape prosecution.

I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies — many of them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.

Lobdell says he then looked away from the clergy to the laity for faith:

continued in next post…

 

[Ammonius_Saccus]

I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, spoke out for the victim.

On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn’t belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn’t go through with the rite of conversion.

I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?

Lobdell goes on to detail covering some other stories, including TBN and “prosperity theology” among other things. He end his piece by telling a story about watching a court trial involving the callous treatment of a woman who is seeking child support from a priest who impregnated her.

Lobdell ends the article by saying he went outside to call his wife on his cell phone and telling her that he wanted a different beat.

I just heard Lobdell on a radio show today. He said (as he says in the article) that he recognizes these were failures of humans, not God, but that the lack of what he called “light” in the rank and file laity had a lot to do with killing his faith.

He also rightly pointed out that faith is a dependent variable, not an independent one and that it’s not something that can be switched on or off at will. It just went out for him and that’s that. He said on the radio that he would like to have it back but that he finds himself becoming more cemented in his lack of faith than otherwise.

Anyway, it’s an interesting and sad little article.

latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lostfaith21jul21,0,3530015,full.story?coll=la-home-center

 

[estesbob]

Anyway, it’s an interesting and sad little article.

latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lostfaith21jul21,0,3530015,full.story?coll=la-home-center

And the point is?

 

[puzzleannie]

the point is, reading the article from the link (no need to post long quotes which is also against forum rules) is that most people are driven away from Christianity in general, and from CAtholicism in particular, but the sinful scandalous actions of Christians, than by any doctrine or practice of the faith. Those who did the sin and caused the scandal will be answerable to God in His just judgment for every soul lost because of their actions.

 

[Ammonius_Saccus]

And the point is?

I was just passing it along because I found it interesting.

 

[fix]

I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?

I do not deny faith needs to be nurtured or that bad example can play an important role, but perhaps we too often view faith as we tend to view love that is simply as an emotion. As soon as we no longer “feel” faith then it is gone.

Also, as a sinner I find his logic perplexing. Which orgaization has no sinners? If the standard set is to only belong to a religion with no sinners then then the answer may be nihilism.