CV NEWS FEED // In a detailed, strongly-worded op-ed, Pope St. John Paul II’s biographer has explained how a little-known British journalist from a dying English Catholic paper has succeeded in promoting a caricature of the Church in the United States.
“Let’s begin the Year of Our Lord 2024 with a critique of the MAD magazine-like caricature of U.S. Catholicism currently being propagated,” wrote George Weigel in a piece published by First Things on January 3:
During his years with the London-based Tablet, Christopher Lamb never evinced a serious understanding of the Church in the U.S. or its relationship to American public life. My personal experience of this involved his suggesting in early 2017 that I might be Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Holy See; Lamb was evidently unaware that I had publicly opposed Trump’s nomination and had begun my post–2016 election column with the lede, “The good news is she lost; the bad news is he won.”
“Such foolishness mattered little in the real world, though, given the Tablet’s relatively limited reach,” Weigel pointed out. But now that Lamb has become a Rome correspondent for CNN, his “cluelessness” about U.S. Catholicism has become an international narrative.
“Exhibit A,” wrote Weigel, “was his recent article ‘Pope Francis takes on unprecedented attacks from American opponents,’” in which
we “learn” that the pope who has peremptorily removed bishops from their sees, denied devout Catholics a form of worship they find spiritually enriching, excoriated priests, criticized the sartorial interests of seminarians of whom he knows nothing, and warned the media against coprophagia is, at bottom, the pope “who insists on a merciful Catholic Church open to everyone.”
The “only witnesses” Lamb cited “in defense of today’s papal autocracy were such acolytes of the pontificate as Austen Ivereigh, David Gibson, and Massimo Faggioli,” Weigel pointed out, “the functional equivalent of Tucker Carlson writing a piece entitled, ‘Donald Trump takes on unprecedented attacks from his opponents’ and sourcing it with quotes from Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert.”
“This isn’t journalism; it’s blatant advocacy,” Weigel wrote. “And it should be named as such.”
Weigel believes that simplistic, advocacy-like journalism will contaminate a necessary discussion about the complex legacy of Francis’s pontificate, especially if Lamb’s “cartoon of the merciful, open-minded pope versus close-minded, anti-Vatican II U.S. Catholics becomes the dominant storyline.”
“So, let’s get a few things straight about the Catholic Church in the United States,” Weigel wrote:
– “First, the U.S. bishops are among the most loyal hierarchies in the world—an order of magnitude more loyal to Pope Francis and the Apostolic See than the German episcopate.”
– “Second, for all its difficulties and challenges, the American Church is the liveliest, most vital local Church in the developed world. Period.”
– “Third, U.S. Catholicism is evangelically vibrant, living what Lamb describes as the pope’s call ‘to bring the Christian message into the world’ far more energetically than the Church in Italy—or Argentina. Catholic campus ministry in the U.S. is experiencing a golden age, and FOCUS missionaries (a fruit of World Youth Day 1993 in Denver) now bring Christocentric evangelical dynamism to 193 campuses in six countries.”
Weigel concluded:
American Catholicism is striving to live the missionary discipleship for which Pope Francis called in the 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. It’s doing so through dynamic orthodoxy, not Catholic Lite. If it’s too much to ask for that to be understood in Rome, perhaps it could be understood at CNN?
Readers can find Weigel’s full op-ed here.