Activist Pope Puts Catholics at Front of Media Attention : Journalism: In general, religion receives short shrift in TV, newspapers. But charismatic John Paul II is exception.

Of the more than 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States today, fewer than 70 have a full-time religion reporter. Among the television networks, only ABC has a full-time religion reporter. Clearly, religion is not a high priority for the American media.

But one religion gets substantially more than its share of this small pie--coverage “out of proportion” to its numbers, says a man who should know, Father Kenneth Doyle, former press secretary to the United States Catholic Bishops Conference.

Doyle, now a pastor in Albany, N.Y., is by no means alone in this assessment. Catholics make up approximately 22% of the U.S. population and 17% of the world population, but they routinely receive a far greater percentage of the news media time and space devoted to religion.

Why?

One explanation is that Roman Catholicism is a single denomination--unlike, say, Protestantism, which is fragmented into many denominations. In addition, the “precipitous decline” of mainline Protestant churches as “social and philosophical pillars . . . has lifted the Catholic Church and the Catholic bishops to a position of near-authority in this country’s religious life,” says Jordan Bonfante, who covered the Vatican for Time magazine from 1973 to 1979 and is now the magazine’s Los Angeles bureau chief.

Perhaps even more important, the Catholic Church is “splendid theater,” in the words of Father Andrew Greeley, the author and sociologist--a religion replete with sharp conflicts and interesting personalities, all spicy ingredients for the journalistic food mill.

But the best explanation for the relatively extensive media coverage of Catholicism is the Pope. This has long been true but never more so than at this time, with this controversial, activist Pope.

“The Pope was invented for a mass communications age,” says Michael Novak, an author and resident scholar in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. “The Pope is photogenic in the way the National Council of Churches can’t be.”

John Paul II has been on TV so often that for some, he seems more real on the tube than in the flesh; when he was in Bolivia in 1988, a small boy asked him: “Are you really the one I saw on television?”

Not surprisingly, the Pope is covered most heavily where there are the most Catholics. Over the past eight years, for example, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune--newspapers in the cities with the two largest Catholic archdioceses in the country--have put the Pope on Page 1 more than any other newspaper.

But John Paul II is a world leader whose appeal is not limited to Catholics. He is, in effect, the first global media Pope, a charismatic figure whose recorded recitation of the rosary became a best-selling compact disc in Europe and whose book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” is a bestseller in 20 countries.

John Paul has published a book of poetry, another of prayers and devotions and a third on “Love and Responsibility.” He has also written 11 encyclicals; the most recent, “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”), made Page 1 news throughout the world when it was issued late last month and is now available as a general-interest paperback and on a computer disk, the first papal encyclical so presented.

A major biography of the Pope was published this month (and excerpted in a Newsweek cover story). Another (by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame) is expected by the end of this year. A third may be finished next year.

Time magazine put John Paul II on the cover as its “Man of the Year” last December, accompanied by glowingly favorable stories, and both the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic published cover stories on him the same week. The Time cover was John Paul’s 12th in 16 years. (Pope Paul VI made the cover of Time just three times in his 15-year pontificate, 1963-1978.)

Some of Pope John Paul’s media exposure accrues to him inevitably as the leader of the largest continually administered institution in western civilization. Some is the byproduct of his being, by far, the most widely traveled of all Popes.

Pope John XXIII ventured outside the Vatican, and Pope Paul VI became the first Pope since the Napoleonic Wars to leave Italy, but John Paul II has traveled so much that he could be a one-man frequent-flyer club. He has made 119 trips to various parts of Italy, and his four-country tour of Asia in January was his 63rd trip abroad.

Some question the “commercialization” and “vulgarization” inherent in these trips, with the unseemly hawking of papal T-shirts, coffee mugs, calendars and lollipops--or “Pope sicles”--and the wall-to-wall media coverage.

More coverage doesn’t necessarily mean better coverage, though, and papal supporters and critics alike fault the media for their coverage of the 74-year-old pontiff. They say that the controversies surrounding him are given far more attention than is warranted by the actual impact of those controversies, either on Catholics or on society at large.

Public opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of Catholics disagree with the Pope on such issues as artificial contraception and the ordination of women and married men. But those polls seldom distinguish between committed, go-to-Mass-weekly Catholics and people who were born and baptized Catholics but no longer really practice Catholicism.

“It’s not as if most U.S. Catholics are engaged in daily battle with the Vatican” over these issues, says Father Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame and a frequent critic of Pope John Paul II. “Catholicism is not about birth control and obedience to the Pope. It is about Jesus Christ and his gospel of love and forgiveness.”

Thus, despite strong disagreements on specific issues, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll conducted just before the Pope came to Denver for World Youth Day in 1993, found that 73% of Catholics approved of how John Paul II was doing his job.

Readers and viewers would not get this impression from most stories published and broadcast on the Pope and the U.S. Catholic Church. “60 Minutes” broadcast a program on the U.S. Catholic Church early this year, for example, that included 25 sound bites from critics of Church doctrine and not one from a supporter of the Pope. (Criticism of the program was so strong that “60 Minutes” broadcast a second program Sunday night featuring interviews with advocates of traditional church doctrine, including most prominently Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles.)

But John Paul is not a passive bystander, a mere “victim” of negative media coverage. He is, in fact, the most media-savvy Pope in history, a strong-willed former actor and playwright whose personality “can overshadow his message,” in the words of Father Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, who’s writing a book on the Vatican.

John Paul II clearly knows how to use, even to exploit and manipulate the media.

When the Pope paid a Christmas season visit in 1984 to the jail cell housing Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to assassinate him three years earlier, he could have done so quietly. Instead, a cameraman from the Vatican television service was present, and the Pope’s bestowal of personal forgiveness was beamed around the world . . . precisely in keeping with the message he had chosen for that year: “Penance and Reconciliation.”

George Weigel, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., says that when John Paul was inaugurated after his election as Pope in 1978, Polish television wanted to give the ceremony two hours of live coverage. But Weigel, who has visited with and written about the Pope, says John Paul knew the ceremony probably wouldn’t last a full two hours, and he worried about what the Communists who then ran Poland would do with that left-over time, given his longstanding, public opposition to them.

Weigel says John Paul told the person organizing the ceremony: “It has to last two hours.” People later wondered why there was “this endless procession of cardinals to greet him,” Weigel says. It was because “he wanted the last (television) picture to be of him” and the cardinals, not of “proponents of Communist orthodoxy” providing their own spin control.

Pope John Paul II and the media have a “symbiotic relationship,” says Margaret Steinfels, editor of the Catholic magazine Commonweal. “I think this Pope is a modern man, and he’s highly conscious of the role the media play in modern societies, and I think he has made it probably one of the tasks of his papacy to . . . try to use that to do what he really believes in, which is to be the teacher.”

Father McBrien puts a somewhat less benign interpretation on the Pope’s relationship with the media. McBrien says the Pope has “totally personalized the papacy” and has created a cult of celebrity around himself.

“He’s a media star, and I believe he is self-consciously and deliberately that,” McBrien says. “The last thing you’d say about the Pope is that he’s humble. . . . He believes that the more attention he gets . . . it’s good for the Gospel and the faith.”

But McBrien says there is no evidence that John Paul’s papal globe-trotting “makes a significant spiritual difference” to those who see him, “any more than there is evidence that anyone becomes a better singer because they go out to hear a rock star sing.”

Catholic Church officials insist that the Pope’s travels do make a significant spiritual difference, but “it’s very difficult to quantify that,” says Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the director of the Vatican press office.

Neither Navarro nor the U.S. Catholic Conference was able to provide statistics showing that church membership, contributions, Mass attendance, ordinations or any other quantifiable measure of religiosity increased in any country after a papal visit.

In general, however, the trend line on most numbers in the Catholic Church are not very encouraging, and that may help explain why church officials feel so embattled and resent so strongly the continuing media accounts of dissent within the church.

As Tad Szulc points out in “John Paul II: The Biography,” his newly published book: “In the second half of the 20th Century, the Church has suffered a vast loss of the faithful, in part because so many Catholic men and women refuse to observe the teachings on contraception or are antagonized by other aspects of Vatican Catholicism they regard as too conservative and out of touch with the world’s reality.”

Catholic Church losses have been particularly great in the United States. Nationwide, Sunday Mass attendance--generally considered the most reliable measure of Catholic commitment--has fallen since the 1960s from “two-thirds of the people who call themselves Catholic” to 37%, according to a New York Times/CBS poll. A study by a researcher at the University of Notre Dame early this year suggested the number may be even lower--26.7%.

As the New York Times pointed out in a series on the U.S. Catholic Church last spring, “Over the last three decades, one of every three Catholic schools closed . . . more than 10% of the 20,000 parishes in the United States . . . do not have a resident pastor.”

Richard Schoenherr of the University of Wisconsin, who teaches the sociology of religion and also researches the changing organizational structure of the Catholic Church, says that between 1966 and 2005, the number of active diocesan priests in this country will have fallen by 40%, even as the Catholic population will have increased 65%. Still more worrisome, the number of students in Catholic seminaries has dropped by more than 85%, from 42,767 to 6,030, since 1966.

Enrollment in Catholic schools, which peaked at more than 5 million in 1965, is now 2.6 million (although it has increased slightly the last two years, as have worldwide ordinations).

Total Catholic population in this country has continued to increase significantly, but most of that increase is attributable to Latino immigration (up about 40% since 1980) and, to a lesser extent, Asian immigration. Even Latinos, however, are shifting away from Catholicism in greater numbers than ever before.

“The critical mass of Catholic population in the world will be in the Third World in the 21st Century,” Weigel, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said on CNN last fall. “We’re going to be a Third World church.”

Hence the Pope’s four-day trip to Asia in February and his announced plan to visit Africa this summer, for the 11th time. And hence the shift in the College of Cardinals, which has historically been dominated by Italians and other western Europeans. Five of the Cardinals whom John Paul named last year are from Latin America, bringing the total from that region to 28; 17 cardinals are from Africa, 15 from Asia. There are 167 cardinals, 120 of whom are eligible to vote for the next Pope.

As the New York Times magazine said last fall, “it is to Africa and the rest of what only yesterday was called the Third World that the Pope increasingly looks for the future growth of Catholicism and an antidote to the western world’s moral degradation.”

But few in the media have looked at the underlying reasons for the Pope’s focus on the Third World. His sympathy for the poor and his belief that Christian teaching can help them and give them hope is unquestionably genuine. Yet theologians say he also realizes that the generally lower educational level there means fewer challenges, less skepticism and more devotion.

Schoenherr of the University of Wisconsin says, however, that as people in Third World countries become more educated, they will develop “the same kind of questions and doubts” that many Catholics in more developed countries already have.

The media do not generally pay much attention, though, to people’s actual faith (or their doubts), whether they’re Catholics or members of other religions.

“For tens of millions of Americans, and literally for billions around the world, religion is a central fact of life,” E. J. Dionne, a columnist for the Washington Post, said last year at a forum on “Religion and the Media” sponsored by Commonweal. For many, Dionne said, religion is “more important than politics and . . . more important than sex. Yet religion is often covered most when it is an adjunct to something else, especially . . . politics and sex.”

One reason for this, of course, is that the media have “a distinct bias for the unusual, the sensational and for conflict,” in the words of Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, director of the office of media relations for the U.S. Catholic Conference.

“The church is supposed to do good,” Maniscalco says. “What’s the news there?”

Maniscalco acknowledges that church officials must share the blame for the generally ill-informed coverage that Catholicism receives.

“Religious people . . . display their own kind of ignorance toward the world of the media and their own form of arrogance,” he says.

But the primary blame for the generally inadequate religion coverage in the nation’s news media clearly lies with the media and their general ignorance of, indifference toward and, at times, hostility toward, religion.

One should not speak of “the media”--or even the “news media”--as if it were a monolith, of course, given that the term encompasses outlets as diverse as “Hard Copy,” the National Catholic Reporter, the Utne Reader and the Wall Street Journal. News organizations, like other institutions, are made up of individuals, and much of what a newspaper, magazine, wire service or television station does every day is dictated not only by institutional priorities and traditions but by the interests, talents, experience and idiosyncrasies of its individual reporters and editors--all of which may change over time.

Historically, for example, the New York Times has long given more prominent attention to religion than perhaps any other newspaper in the United States (as witness the two full pages it devoted to the Pope’s “Evangelium Vitae” encyclical last month and the four-part series it is publishing this week on churches with more than 2,000 weekly worshipers).

Times editors have traditionally felt that religion is--in the words of columnist and former Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal--”an elemental life force, and . . . elemental forces are the essence of news and journalism.”

Peter Steinfels, now teaching a class at the University of Notre Dame in religion, morality and the media while on a one-year leave from the New York Times, is fond of saying--with a big smile--that his paper is especially interested in the Vatican because “it’s the only other institution that sees itself as infallible.”

Steinfels has spent much of his career in religious journalism, and he continues to write the Saturday “Beliefs” column for the Times while on leave.

When Steinfels began his leave last year, the New York Times hired the widely respected Gustav Niebuhr, grand-nephew of the late, eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, to cover religion. Niebuhr came to the Times from the Washington Post, which has traditionally shown less interest in religion than have many other American newspapers--in part because politics is the true religion of the nation’s capital and in part because of the perception that “the verities involved in religion are eternal and unchanging,” as Benjamin C. Bradlee, the paper’s former, longtime executive editor once put it.

Although Bradlee’s successor, Leonard Downie, has given religion considerably more attention, Bradlee’s attitude is probably much closer to that of the typical big-city journalist.

A 1980 survey by academics Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman found that 86% of what they termed the “media elite”--journalists at 10 major news organizations based largely in New York and Washington--said they seldom or never attended religious services.

Twelve years later, John Dart and the Rev. Jimmy Allen, working under the auspices of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, came to a different conclusion. Dart, who writes about religion for the Los Angeles Times in the San Fernando Valley, and Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, surveyed almost 1,000 clergy and journalists and found that 72% of newspaper editors nationwide said religion is personally important to them.

Most journalists are probably neither as irreligious as Lichter/Rothman depicted them nor as religious as Dart/Allen suggest. But interviews over the years, combined with actual religion coverage, leave little doubt that religion is not a dominant force in the thinking of most of the big-city media executives who set the nation’s news agenda; even Dart and Allen found that newspapers and broadcasters “largely refuse to take religion seriously.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times several years ago, Robert Bellah, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, said, “Most journalists are simply blind to religion. They think it’s . . . something only ignorant and backward people really believe in.

“This is not necessarily a conscious judgment,” Bellah said, just part of most journalists’ “general world view.”

The United States is a secular, pluralistic society, with a constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, so perhaps a basic indifference to and even ignorance of religion in the media are inevitable.

“Newspaper editors and, particularly, TV folks don’t realize that . . . (religion) is a very complex” subject, says David Crumm, religion reporter for the Detroit Free Press. Too often, Crumm and others say, reporters with no knowledge of religion are assigned to religion stories; editors tolerate ignorance and errors that they would not tolerate on their sports pages--or in the coverage of any other specialized fields.

Almost 60% of the reporters assigned to cover religion full-time have had no formal training in religious studies, according to the Dart/Allen study. Moreover, religion stories that intersect with other subjects--politics, the law, medicine, education--often are covered by reporters not on the religion beat and possessed of even less knowledge of, or interest in, the subject.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that when a religion professor at Baylor University mentioned the book of Revelation in the course of briefing reporters during the 1993 standoff between government agents and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, one reporter interrupted him to ask: “Where do we find this book of Revelation? I’m not very knowledgeable.”

Similarly, when the Pope came to Denver a few months later, William Montalbano, traveling with him as the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Rome, remembers encountering a reporter who didn’t know there had never been an American Pope.

Many journalists compound the sin of ignorance with that of laziness. Battling the pressures of deadlines and overwork, they often take the quick, superficial approach. When the Pope issued his apostolic letter last year reaffirming the church’s ban on the ordination of women as priests, one reporter called Msgr. Maniscalco at the U.S. Catholic Conference and said he was interested in more information on the Pope’s edict.

Maniscalco said the papal statement was only a few pages long, and he’d be glad to fax or mail a copy to the reporter.

“Well, I’m not that interested,” the reporter replied.

Steinfels of the New York Times recounted this story last fall during the Commonweal forum on “Religion and the Media.” In the course of his remarks, Steinfels attributed the attitude of most journalists toward religion to what he termed a “para-ideology.”

One of the crucial elements in this “para-ideology,” Steinfels said, is a “suspicion of figures in authority and of all high-minded statements.”

Father Avery Dulles, a professor of theology at Fordham University in New York, says the media--being iconoclastic, rather than reverent--”revels in exposing what is pretentious, false and scandalous.” Writing in the Catholic magazine America last fall, Dulles suggested that the church, “with its exalted claims, is a particularly tempting target.”

The church, he said, “seeks to maintain continuity with its own past” and seeks to “promote unity and reconciliation,” whereas the press “lives off novelty . . . thrives on the ephemeral and (specializes) in disagreement and conflict.”

Dionne of the Washington Post, who covered the Vatican when he was a correspondent in Rome for the New York Times from 1984 to 1986, said the conflict between skepticism and faith lies at “the heart of the problem” between religion and secular journalism.

While religious people base their beliefs on faith, Dionne told the Commonweal forum, American journalism is “the quintessentially Enlightenment profession. St. Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas, could be our patron saint. Our rules say ‘Prove it. Show me. Give me the evidence.’ ”

Dionne argued that “a certain skepticism is an inescapable, and in most ways healthy, aspect of the modern journalist’s mind.” But he said many journalists err in refusing to recognize and acknowledge that “religious belief is usually built upon an intellectually serious foundation.

“It is simply misinformed--bad reporting, if you will--to assume that religious faith is nothing but prejudice or superstition. And I do believe there is a temptation on the part of some in my profession to believe that.”

Next: The papal death watch.

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

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About This Series

The Times today presents the third in a four-part series examining how the media cover the Pope.

* Sunday: A propensity for sensationalism, conflict and oversimplification and an ignorance of (and often hostility toward) religion in general and Catholicism in particular have skewed media coverage of the 16-year papacy of John Paul II.

* Monday: The Pope’s spin doctor is a former foreign correspondent and a psychiatrist who has made things much easier for reporters. But many say the Vatican still is as closed and secretive as the Cold War Kremlin, and journalists assigned there cannot interview the Pope himself.

* Today: Religion gets short shrift in the mainstream U.S. media, but Catholicism gets a disproportionate share of that small pie, in part because it’s great theater and in part because it has a single, controversial leader who knows how to use (and manipulate) the media.

* Wednesday: Many in the media thought the Pope was dying when he began to look frail and sickly last year. Now he has resumed his global travels, determined to live at least until 2000. Why were the media so quick to assume the worst?

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Media Programs

Several studies, seminars and stories have examined media coverage of religion, and virtually all have concluded that institutional differences between religion and the media help undermine that coverage. Commonweal magazine, center, and Foundation and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities Inc., left, sponsored symposia on the subject. Avery Dulles wrote about it for the magazine America, right.