June 11–18, 1998
cover story
Sects, lies and video-conferencing. How tension between the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and theInquirer led one reporter to take his critical profile of Cardinal Bevilacqua to another paper.
by Frank Lewis
In the long and often bitter war of words between the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Inquirer, one brief, off-the-cuff remark made in a phone conversation stands out from all the rest.
On one end of the line was an Inquirer editor; on the other, a representative of the Archdiocese. The call was just one of many made in late 1996 and early 1997, a period in which representatives of the two city institutions met several times to discuss—sometimes heatedly—the Inquirer's past and future coverage of the Archdiocese.
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In this call, the Church's PR specialist made a surprisingly candid remark. The Archdio-cese is the spiritual home of approximately 1.4 million Catholics, he said, and "we have a responsibility to make sure the newspaper doesn't tell them things we don't want them to know."
What's more startling than his candor, however, is that he and his associates may have succeeded in their mission.
Next week, the National Catholic Reporter, a Kansas City-based weekly newspaper written and edited by lay Catholics, will publish an in-depth and unflinching look at Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua's leadership of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia since 1988. The focus is on pricey projects he approved—like the construction of a multi-media conference center, the renovation of a Jersey shore vacation home, and relationships with high-priced consultants—during the period in which the Archdiocese closed or consolidated parishes, most in poor, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in North Philadelphia and Chester.
Most of the information in this article never appeared in the Inquirer, but many at the paper have heard it before. In fact, the NCR article was written by Inquirer staff writer Ralph Cipriano. (The quote above, from the Archdiocese representative to the Inquirer editor, appears in the NCR article.)
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Tierney compared Cipriano to "A low-grade infection
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There is no easy answer. Archdiocese representatives continue to maintain that Cipriano is a biased and unethical reporter, and one Inquirer source admits that Cipriano's zeal for the story may have clouded his judgment.
But even if true, neither point would explain the other questions surrounding the Inquirer's uneasy relationship with the leadership of the Archodiocese. Why was Cipriano's successor on the religion beat publicly denounced—as an "enemy" of Catholicism, according to one source—when even the Archdiocesan spokesperson at the time supposedly couldn't figure out what he'd done to earn such damnation?
Why did an in-depth article on parish closings by that reporter never see the light of day, despite his and an editor's assurances to an interested party that it would?
Why do two former, longtime columnists say their work was more closely scrutinized—and, on two occasions, flatly rejected—when the topic was Catholicism?
And whatever happened to the Inquirer's planned and frequently discussed series on Catholic Life 2000, the Archdiocese's $100 million fundraiser?
Whatever the reason, the Inquirer seems to tread lightly when dealing with the Catholic Church in the news. And whether or not the Church does receive special treatment, the Philadelphia Archdiocese is ever ready to use any weapon it can muster, including personal attacks on reporters, to combat what it perceives as unfair coverage.
As columnist B.J. Phillips puts it: "I write, therefore I am a Catholic basher."
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According to Cipriano, his article will be the first to talk about Archdiocesan spending in the context of parish closings. The story will reveal the following:
In and around the period in which poor parishes were closed and consolidated, the Archdiocese spent $500,000 on renovations to St. Joseph's Villa by the Sea, a home in Ventnor, NJ, used by the Cardinal and retired priests for summer vacations (an expenditure the Cardinal's appointed advisers weren't made aware of beforehand, in contrast to usual procedure); $1.5 million on renovations to the Archdiocese's Center City headquarters; "hundreds of thousands," according to a former employee, on the Cardinal's City Avenue residence; and at least $70 million on construction in the suburbs, where the Catholic population has been booming.
The combined deficits of the North Philadelphia parishes that were closed and consolidated was $1.2 million.
Under Bevilacqua's leadership, the Pittsburgh Diocese (his post before coming to Philadelphia) ran deficits four years out of five, totaling $6.9 million. A priest appointed by his successor to deal with finances said, "It makes me very sorry that an Archbishop of the Church is really not following the Gospel."
The article gets into Bevilacqua's personality as well. For example, Cipriano reports that the Archdiocese once paid $87,500 to settle a claim by a former longtime employee who said he suffered physical and emotional distress as a result of Bevilacqua's "rude and abusive behavior."
The Archdiocese does not intend to comment.
"Just last spring, the Archdiocese challenged the accuracy and fairness of a story that Mr. Cipriano wrote for the Inquirer," wrote Rossi in a statement faxed to City Paper. "There is no reason for the Archdiocese to purposefully place itself in the position of answering to a reporter with whom it has significant misgivings.
"Many of those questions [submitted by NCR] go back to issues of the early 1990s and were of the same nature as those addressed for the Inquirer story a year ago as well as Inquirer stories in years past. There is no reason to revisit issues that the Archdiocese previously ad-dressed with this reporter."
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"Newspapers have a responsibility to point out hypocrisy," says Steve Lopez, "and the church has been wonderful in offering opportunities."
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Cipriano contends that the Archdiocese has never adequately explained itself on the parish closings—nor has the Inquirer pressed for answers.
"I went to National Catholic Reporter because I thought Cardinal Tony Bevilacqua was not above examination," he says, "and I thought my newspaper had given this guy a free pass for years."
Cipriano took over the Inquirer's religion beat in 1991, and managed to annoy the Archdiocese almost immediately. His first article was about Dominic Bash, a self-described spiritual guide for gay Catholic men dying from AIDS—who, incidentally, had once helped organize a demonstration at the Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul during Cardinal Bevilacqua's first service for persons with AIDS. One demonstrator—not Bash—dumped condoms on the altar.
"The day that story ran, I had a huge fax on my desk from Jay Devine, accusing me of anti-Catholicism," Cipriano recalls. Devine is an associate of Brian Tierney's, whose public relations firm Tierney Group is retained by the Archdiocese.
In mid-1992, Cipriano learned of the multi-media conference center. Situated on the 12th floor of the Archdiocesan headquarters on 17th Street in Center City, the room was outfitted for tele- and video-conferencing; the table has 12 monitors built into it. Archdiocese records show the room cost slightly more than $500,000, though this would be disputed (the Archdiocese says that this money was for the entire floor).
But Cipriano says he was told by an Inquirer editor (he won't say which one) that under no circumstances would this information appear in the Inquirer as a news story. He says he was told it would only get in as part of a profile of Bevilacqua, so in early 1993 he wrote "The Shepherd with a Briefcase," a lengthy story that included the conference center, and the Cardinal's reasons for approving its construction: "If Jesus Christ were alive today, He would have used all of the electronic media of today."
The article also mentioned the then-looming parish closings; the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the Archdiocese; and the deficits Bevilacqua had left behind in Pittsburgh.
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As he'd promised while negotiating to get the story in, he left the religion beat peacefully after the story was published. He now works as a general assignment reporter.
The announcement of the parish closings in 1993 marked the beginning of what is arguably the most controversial period of Bevilacqua's tenure here. With all of the parishes in impoverished neighborhoods, the appearance was that the Archdiocese was turning its back on the poor.
Protestors were relatively small in number, but vocal. Some who had donated or pledged money to Catholic Life 2000, the $100 million fundraising drive launched the year before, reportedly demanded their money back, saying they'd been duped into believing the money would be used to save parishes that had been struggling.
There were demonstrations as well, some of which were rather theatrical—or blasphemous, depending on your point of view. Members of The Catholic Worker, a group devoted to serving the poor, staged a hunger strike and an exorcism (of the influences of greed) with a real priest outside the Archdiocese's headquarters.
Though no longer on the religion beat, Cipriano was sent to cover one demonstration because he was available. That day, with television cameras rolling, the protestors claimed that the same Archdiocese that was too strapped to support these poor parishes was renovating the Cardinal's shore house. Cipriano says he called this in to the city desk, and was told to check it out. He and two of the demonstrators piled into his company car and drove to Ventnor. "They knew how to get there," he explains.
Scaffolds stood around the home, but no work was going on that day, so they drove to the town hall and reviewed the records of the construction permits. Cipriano called this in to the city desk as well, and it ran the next day.
But the story grew in the retelling. Brian Tierney spun various versions, Cipriano says, including ones in which Cipriano broke into the home; climbed the fence surrounding the property; stood on someone's shoulders to see over the fence; and had driven the demonstrators there so they could protest and he could cover it. The latter was cited as evidence of Cipriano's lack of "journalistic ethics" in a May 1997 letter to the editor signed by Stan Retif, Secretary for External Affairs.
"Tierney was repeatedly told that story wasn't true" when he raised it in meetings with Inquirer editors, says Cipriano. "The truth to him is Silly Putty, he can twist it any way he wants."
When contacted by City Paper, Tierney compared Cipriano to "a low-grade infection that keeps coming back," but declined to discuss him further.
The religion beat was turned over to William Macklin in 1993. Inquirer sources say he eventually earned the distinction of being denounced from the pulpit, though exactly how or why this occurred isn't clear.
Macklin's colleagues who are familiar with the story say an open letter from Bevilacqua either was read aloud by priests at Sunday Mass, or distributed after Mass. The one statement sources recall clearly was that Macklin was an "enemy" of the Church.
And sometime later, they add, Macklin wrote a passionate memo to his editors, begging off the religion beat.
Last year, Macklin told City Paper the letter didn't refer to him as an enemy, but simply warned parishioners not to speak to him. He also couldn't recall writing a memo like the one described; he simply accepted an offer to join the features department.
Macklin could not be reached before press time.
Current religion reporter David O'Reilly, who accepted the assignment in 1995, says he still can't understand the Archdiocese's antipathy toward Macklin. O'Reilly says he scanned every Macklin article that dealt with Catholicism, and "could not see any evidence of animus toward the Catholic Church."
Nor could former Archdiocese communications office director Susan Gibbs, according to O'Reilly. Gibbs left her job last year—primarily over differences with Tierney's more confrontational media relations style, O'Reilly says—but declined to be interviewed for this story.
Ironically, the source of tension between the Archdiocese and Macklin might have been a story that was never published. According to Catholic Worker member Frank Maimone and several Inquirer sources, Macklin wrote an in-depth, "one year after"-style piece on the parish closings. The story sat in the paper's computer system for so long, they say, some began to joke that it would become a "two years after" account. (An Inquirer source who read it says the story opened with a description of a drug dealer sitting on the steps of an abandoned North Philly church, calling out, "Works. Works.")
Maimone says he and other Catholic Worker members had helped Macklin get started in his research by telling him about Detroit, where parish closings five years earlier had driven African-American and Latino Catholics to other Christian denominations.
This apparently was what Macklin found in Philadelphia. In late 1994, a member of CLASSP (Catholic Lay Alliance to Save Schools and Parishes), a city and suburban Catholic group, asked Macklin about the status of his story. According to the minutes of a November '94 CLASSP steering committee meeting, "Macklin's own assessment of the closings are that they were not a total disaster, but that the wounds will take years to heal. He believes that the Archdiocese could not have treated the black and Hispanic leaders more poorly. In some instances, churches which were supposed to be strengthened have been, in fact, weakened."
The minutes also state that "Macklin assured [a CLASSP steering committee member] that neither he nor the Inquirer had been gagged by the Archdiocese. [The member] got similar responses from [then executive editor] Jim Naughton…"
Still, the article never ran, and in fact "mysteriously disappeared" from the system after Macklin moved to features, a source says.
Naughton recalls at least one brief conversation with the CLASSP representative, who was a member of the same parish. "I tried to assure him there was not some hand reaching out from the Archdiocese, clasping around the throat of this story," he says.
And the real explanation? "The story wasn't really complete, it needed a lot of additional reporting," he says. "It was a work in progress when I left the paper" in early 1996—more than a year after the CLASSP meeting at which it was discussed—and what happened to it after that, he can't say.
Maimone says he never found out what Macklin went through, but could see its effects.
"When he started [on the religion beat], he came on like gangbusters," Maimone recalls. "He held people accountable, both us and the Archdiocese, for what we said."
Maimone says he asked Macklin about the story several times. "He never really gave an explanation. All he'd say was, 'Look, it's out of my hands.' And he became less and less friendly about it, too.… He was like a beaten man. It was like he didn't even want to fight anymore."
Clark DeLeon's "Nearer My God to Mary," published in 1994, began as a paean to his beloved, departed mother-in-law. But because the two had spent years debating the Church's position ("Her style was passionate, thoughtful and considerate, while mine was passionate, loud and unrelenting…"), the piece turned into a confession of sorts about DeLeon's estrangement from the Church in which he was raised.
The column generated more response than any other DeLeon wrote—at least 100 letters and 100 phone calls, he says. So naturally he wanted to explore the topic of "disaffected Catholics," as he'd described himself, a little further.
But the follow-up, a sampling of the letters, was canned—the first and only time this happened in all his years as an Inky columnist. DeLeon says he was told "we don't do letters columns," but he found this absurd. He'd never heard of a no-letters-column policy, and besides, since when did editors spike a column without at least consulting the writer?
"Clearly to me, it wasn't that it was a letters column," DeLeon says, "it was a Catholic column."
And while the spiking was an isolated incident, DeLeon says it was always clear to him that certain editors, including Naughton, were uneasy anytime he wrote about the Church. Those columns were read more thoroughly, and by more editors.
Another former columnist, Steve Lopez, was spiked just twice—once in 1991 for sarcastically endorsing Ed Rendell for mayor over Wilson Goode because Rendell supposedly told fewer lies in a debate just before the election, and once in 1987 for riffing on the efforts to have the late Philadelphia-born nun Katharine Drexel named a saint.
Lopez says he later saw the wisdom of canning his Rendell column; his editors were right not to let him endorse or denounce a candidate, however mockingly, in the final days of the campaign. But he still disagrees with the call on the Drexel piece.
"I just found the whole [canonization] process pretty hilarious," he recalls. Drexel gave her inherited wealth to the Church and devoted her life to serving the poor, but canonization requires evidence of miracles that occurred through the candidate's intervention. The tongue-in-cheek column—which included Lopez's suggestions for a "sainthood scoring system"—generated "universal concern" in the newsroom, he says.
"I know it was irreverent, but I don't think it was in bad taste," Lopez says. "I was told, 'You can write another column or you can have a blank space, but this thing isn't running.'"
He doesn't remember who made the call. "I know Naughton was involved, but I liked Naughton," he says. "Jim was the guy in the newsroom who watched out for everybody's sensibilities."
Lopez reworked the Drexel column, and the rewritten version eventually appeared. "But it was so gutted I ended up regretting it."
Naughton says he doesn't recall specifics of the DeLeon and Lopez spiking incidents. "My suspicion is that [DeLeon and I] had dozens of coversations, not about one column, but about pieces of many columns… in which Clark had gone too far." Typically, Naughton adds, DeLeon's choice of words was the issue, not the topic.
But were different—and more restrictive—standards applied when the Archdiocese or the Catholic Church was the topic, as DeLeon, Lopez and other Inquirer staffers have suggested?
"Yes and no," says Naughton, who's now president of the Poynter Institute, a leading journalism think tank. On the one hand, there was a general belief that the paper should be as painstakingly accurate and thorough in its reporting on matters involving the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as in any other area. On the other hand, however, "There's no question it is more commonplace for a newspaper to mock a politician than a cardinal," so therefore journalists have a responsibility to be more careful when they do, he explains.
"It's not exactly the same as covering City Council."
So how about when a cardinal testifies before Council, as Bevilacqua did recently as part of the Archdiocese's full-court press to defeat the domestic partnership bills? Is the Church fair game when its leaders step into the political arena?
Of course, says Rick Hinshaw, communications director for the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which publishes an annual report on anti-Catholicism in the media and other areas. The Catholic League takes exception, Hinshaw explains, when "the Church's very right to speak out is questioned," or when the Church is unfairly maligned. (Making prominent mention of a crime suspect's Catholic background, whether it's relevant or not, is distressingly common in newspapers, he says.)
"We don't see this with other faiths," Hinshaw says. "It's been said that anti-Catholicism is the last respectable bias in the United States."
Much of the Catholic League's 1997 report bears this out. It cites example after example of blatant hatred: a full-page ad in a Carbondale, PA newspaper—paid for by the paper's religion reporter—that accuses the Church of "detestable teachings" and "cannibalism"; Yahoo magazine's article calling America OnLine's OnQ "the largest information provider… to the largest concentration of gay folks anywhere, if you don't count the Catholic priesthood"; and a South Carolina paper quote from a man who'd been robbed twice in the same day: "We're as nervous as pregnant nuns at morning Mass."
With some examples, however, the report borders on the absurd. An Oregon newspaper column on kids' "yuletide bloopers" is cited because it contains this "blatantly offensive" remark: "Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption."
So is the Church at times too thin-skinned? It is in Philadelphia, according to Inquirer columnist B.J. Phillips.
"I have lived and worked all around the world, including Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland," says Phillips, "and I've never in my experience seen—even in Ireland in the early '70s—a Church hierarchy as sensitive to analysis and differing opinions as here. I don't think the Irish Times ever got so many letters to the editor [from angry Catholics] as the Inquirer does."
Though never singled out like Macklin or Cipriano, Phillips says she's received more than her share of letters and calls from Catholics—some of them priests—accusing her of anti-Catholic bias. Many came after a 1993 column in which she pointed out the apparent hypocrisy of the Archdiocese's ardent support for school vouchers: "When the [state] legislature balked at direct subsidies, the Archdiocese had to take a hard look at the numbers. They were not pretty. In fact, they were ugliest in communities that needed quality education the most—in the poorest neighborhoods where black families struggle to expand their children's horizons beyond the drug corner. When the time came to put its money where it wanted the taxpayers to put theirs, the church remembered that it was in the business of educating Catholics, not educationally deprived African American Protestants."
Phillips doesn't recall the Archdiocese's "official" response to her column, but did note "striking similarities in some of the language" in the many letters she received.
"The motive ascribed to anything they don't like… is that it is deliberate and conspiratorial Catholic-bashing," she says.
But perhaps no one at the Inquirer has been tagged anti-Catholic as frequently as Steve Lopez was. He still bristles at the label.
Columns that dealt with Catholicism "always got the quickest and harshest response," he says. "Years after I wrote a particular column I would still get calls, calling me a Catholic-hater.
"What I was trying to write about wasn't the Church so much, but hypocrisy… Newspapers have a responsibility to point out hypocrisy, and the Church has been wonderful in offering opportunities."
And these were the columns people remembered—not the "three or four times as many" he wrote in praise of specific priests and nuns and other Catholics. He got a half-dozen or so out of a Camden priest who organized a kids' baseball league.
"Within the Catholic community [when you stop practicing the faith], you've sort of given up your rights to speak out about the Church," says DeLeon, explaining the often virulent responses he and other columnists received. "The problem is, people within the Church never speak up."
Cipriano's April 1997 article on the multi-media conference center didn't make the Catholic League's annual anti-Catholicism report, but Hinshaw remembers it anyway. The reporter, as he recalls, ignored certain facts and twisted others to make it appear that the Archdiocese had spent much more on the conference center than it really had.
Cipriano stood by his story—as did then-editor Max King. But the months leading up to and following its publication may have been the most difficult ever in the Inquirer's often strained relationship with the Archdiocese.
In August 1996, Cipriano was asked to write another profile of Bevilacqua, this time for Sunday Magazine editor Avery Rome. In the course of researching it, he "came into possession of a group of documents about spending at the Archdiocese" in and around the period of the parish closings. This made the story "too hot" for the magazine, Cipriano says, and it was turned over to the news staff.
After encountering resistance there as well, he suggested pegging it to a close look at Catholic Life 2000, and how the Archdiocese had put that $100 million to work. Eventually, several writers and editors would be brought into the project.
In the fall of 1996, Cipriano says he went to the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) to look up the building permits for Archdiocese projects; he'd heard some work had been completed without permits. Apparently, however, the Archdiocese heard about his visit to L&I; a Church representative called the paper soon thereafter.
This, Cipriano says, is when the threats began.
"Tierney himself told me he would run a campaign against me and the Inquirer" if Cipriano persisted in pushing the spending issue, he says. Other Inquirer sources support this. Last year, Tierney denied making any threats.
Three or four generally contentious meetings were held between Inquirer staffers and Archdiocese representatives, according to various sources who attended. But ultimately, the Archdiocese never turned over any of the Catholic Life 2000 records that had been promised, or arranged any interviews with high-level officials, sources say. But Cipriano continued to lobby for a story on spending, and an editor eventually suggested that he write what he had and turn it in for review.
"God, they had more meetings about that," recalls O'Reilly, who had the religion beat at the time but was not involved in Cipriano's piece. "It was written and rewritten, they had meetings over here, meetings over there."
Cipriano says the article was systematically dismembered, losing "an arm on Monday, a leg on Tuesday." The multi-media conference room story was the result. It made no mention of parish closings.
The reaction from the Archdiocese was swift. Cardinal Bevilacqua denounced Cipriano in the next edition of his monthly newsletter, accusing him of "unfair and inaccurate reporting" and suggesting Cipriano harbored an "intentional bias" against the Archdiocese. He also blasted the Inquirer for allowing a reporter who once admitted in a first-person article that he "shuns organized religion" to cover the story.
"Despite what I believe to be clear and convincing evidence concerning the bias of this writer," Bevilacqua wrote, "the Inquirer chose to print this distorted article."
To date, the disputed account of the trip down the shore and the "shuns organized religion" quote are the only pieces of evidence the Archdiocese has offered to support its claims against Cipriano. And when the Inquirer published a letter from an Archdiocese official in response to the conference center story, King took the unusual step of writing a letter of his own. The article was "accurate, fair and responsible," King wrote; Cipriano "has been objective and ethical in his reporting."
Others in the newsroom, however, say Cipriano's style was what got him into trouble.
"When Ralph's working a story, he can be pretty rabid, and he wants you to join in," says Lopez.
"Certain reporters just thrive on controversy and conflict," says another Inquirer source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They like it better than nuance and complexity."
This source also contends it was "problems with the reporting," and not hyper-sensitivity, that delayed and reduced the scope of Cipriano's spending story. "It was not timidity on the part of the paper," the source says. "I'd say it was professionalism at work."
Cipriano disagrees.
"Professionalism is scuttling a story based on the Archdiocese's own documents and Catholics [speaking] on the record?" he asks. "Part of a newspaper's job is to cover controversy, and not to favor the side that can afford hired [PR] guns.
"I've been a reporter for 22 years, and I've covered a lot of nuances and written about lots of complexity. To me there are no nuances on sacred cows. [Bevilacqua's] either a sacred cow or he isn't."
Convinced that the Inquirer would never tell the whole story, Cipriano pitched it to National Catholic Reporter (Inquirer staff writers can write for non-competing publications). NCR is a 30-year-old weekly with no ties to the Church hierarchy. According to its mission statement, "Our spirit is independent, our management lay…. We attempt to contribute to our company and wide Catholic community by supporting openness, honesty, freedom and shared responsibility."
Managing editor Tom Roberts says Cipriano's proposal "expedited" a series NCR had been considering on East Coast cardinals nearing retirement age (New York's Cardinal O'Connor was profiled in the most recent issue). Roberts calls Cipriano a "credible" journalist, and says he turned in a "well-written, well-researched article."
Inquirer Editor Bob Rosenthal declined City Paper's request for an interview.
Cipriano admits he does in fact shun organized religion. But that's not the whole story.
The quote comes from a 1993 Sunday Magazine article he wrote about tagging along when televangelist Benny Hinn and a few hundred followers journeyed to Israel. In the piece, he asserts his skepticism—he was never more than an "ostensible Catholic," he admits, and he typically skip-ped Sunday school—but also recounts his experience at one of Hinn's typically raucous and theatrical tent-revival-style services:
"He blows into the microphone, and rows of people tumble over in front of me. 'He isn't putting me down,' I say to myself. I dig in my heels, and celebrate staying upright. I just wish I could explain the wind I feel rushing around my legs."
He stopped short, however, of describing how the trip changed his life.
Wanting to interview Hinn, Cipriano says he got in line for a baptism in the River Jordan. When it was his turn, he made up his mind on the spot to go through with it.
"I felt like I was being hugged under the water," he recalls. "I didn't want to come up. They had to pull me up. I was completely baffled when I came out of the water… but I was just on cloud nine the rest of the day. My mother told me, when she saw the [video] tape, she said, 'You never looked so happy in your life.'"
Today, he and his family attend a non-denominational Christian church. He has read the Bible cover to cover, and can quote from it, chapter and verse. When he talks about the Cardinal, he uses words like "pharisee."
"The Jesus I read about in the Bible is the opposite of what Cardinal Tony Bevilacqua is," Cipriano says. "Jesus ate with the pharisees and tax collectors, and this guy has condemned me in every house in the Archdiocese. He's a poor advocate for his faith. Actually, he's a pharisee."
O'Reilly, who marked three years on the religion beat last month, says covering the Archdiocese hasn't exactly been easy. Archdiocese officials, he recalls, "greeted me with clubs behind their backs" when he took the beat, and he once received a letter from a "high-ranking Archdiocesan priest" who asked, "Is it your purpose to destroy the Catholic Church?"
"That really astounded me," he recalls. "What is the depth of the animosity between our two institutions?"
Overall, however, the tension has cooled considerably from the brief period last year when the Archdiocese imposed a news blackout.
"It still remains difficult to pick up the phone and call a [parish] priest," he says. "The Archdiocese wants the press to make inquiries through the communications office… But at least, over time, they've realized that David O'Reilly, at least, was not out to get them."
He attributes this to his efforts to prove how seriously he takes his work. "I see my job as carrier of their voice," he says. "It's my job to hear not just with my ears but with my heart, [and understand] 'What are they trying to say?'"
How Cipriano's article in National Catholic Reporter will affect the relationship, if at all, remains to be seen. But what does the article's appearance in another publication say about the Inquirer? Cipriano declined to speculate.
"In the end I guess I'm just happy the story gets a national audience," he says, "and presents the complete picture about the Cardinal. As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing turned out for the best."
Or, he adds, as it says in Romans, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God."
National Catholic Reporter can be read online at www.natcath.com. Cipriano's article is scheduled to appear in the June 19 edition.
