Catholic In Name Only

Published on November 25, 2003

In his cover story for this month’s edition of Crisis, the conservative Catholic magazine, Mark Gavreau Judge never explains what exactly he thinks “makes Maureen Dowd look like Brian Lamb.” But The Revealer guesses it isn’t their hair. Judge’s essay is a passionate rant against what he sees as the betrayals of Catholics in the mainstream media, or CINOs (“Catholics in Name Only,” as he […]

In his cover story for this month’s edition of Crisis, the conservative Catholic magazine, Mark Gavreau Judge never explains what exactly he thinks “makes Maureen Dowd look like Brian Lamb.” But The Revealer guesses it isn’t their hair. Judge’s essay is a passionate rant against what he sees as the betrayals of Catholics in the mainstream media, or CINOs (“Catholics in Name Only,” as he calls them) — people such as Dowd, E.J. Dionne, and Mike Barnicle. Judge may be onto something when he charges that CINOs “define their Catholicism by the leverage it gives them in the liberal culture.” On the other hand, it’s hard to see how Judge’s hero — G.K. Chesterton (to whom a new magazine, Gilbert!, is dedicated) — did differently when he wrote much of what would become his classic work, Heretics, as a sort of devil’s advocate for Jesus in a socialist paper. Faith is as faith does — a point made elsewhere in the issue by Reverend Raymond J. de Souza. The Church’s greatest mistake in the ongoing scandal, he argues, has been in refusing to play the media’s game. Like it or not, “the media world is the real world.” So how should the Church respond to the press’s focus on the sex scandal? Not through reform, apparently, but through better training: “every bishop [needs] to be media-savvy.” More from media-savvy and morally dubious Father Souza…

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