Missing News Coverage from In Spirit and Truth? Check Out These Alternatives to Stay Informed.
It was a hard decision to stop sharing daily news on the In Spirit and Truth Facebook page and to end the biweekly News Roundup posts. I really value reading widely and staying informed about the issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and I know that many of you do as well. But as I shared last week, I feel called to take this blog in a new direction, which means spending less time reading and summarizing news stories and more time listening to survivors’ voices and sharing them with all of you.
Based on feedback from readers, I’m going to experiment with publishing a monthly roundup of some of the most important or thought-provoking news, articles, and videos I’ve come across each month. This should give you some of the basics, but it will be less comprehensive and less current than what I have done in the past.
If you want to keep up with news about this issue on a more regular basis, I have a few recommendations to share -
If you want to get news in your email inbox, try:
Crux - offers a daily email with their coverage of the top 3-4 current Catholic news stories from a fair and balanced perspective (a quick way to make sure you’re not missing anything important)
The Pillar - a newer but very welcome entry to the Catholic media landscape; their twice-a-week email newsletter on all things Catholic includes a lot of in-depth reporting on abuse and corruption in the Church, with a strong grasp of theology and internal church politics
Always Forward - a content-packed daily email newsletter from Angelus News that offers a wide variety of national and international Catholic news as well as analysis and reflections from diverse sources
Bishop Accountability News - daily email collecting current news stories on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and related issues, from a variety of (primarily secular) news sources; email sheehan1777@aol.com to be added
If you like to see news stories on Facebook, check out these pages:
Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) - sharing breaking news and analysis as well as resources and writings from SNAP
The Pillar - the quickest way to see their latest coverage as it’s published
The Catholic Project - sharing news stories and Catholic quotes related to their mission to “bring about effective collaboration between clergy and laity to renew the Catholic Church in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis”
I also watch for articles on this topic from America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, National Catholic Register, Catholic News Agency, and Commonweal. Each of these sources has their own particular perspective and bias, but you can find important writing in each of them.
A note on secular news coverage:
As I hope you can tell by now, I am not a person who believes that the secular media is somehow out to get the Catholic Church when reporters cover issues of abuse, cover up, and other corruption in the Church. I think Catholics owe a debt of gratitude to secular reporters who have helped uncover huge problems that some church leaders were hoping to keep buried. (You’ve seen Spotlight, right? That may be the most high-profile example, but it’s not the only one by any means.)
My experience has been that some secular news media does an excellent job covering the bigger news stories related to abuse in the Church. Many national news rooms have extensive resources for investigating significant stories like the scandals with Theodore McCarrick and Michael Bransfield, which often allows for more in-depth research and reporting than Catholic media sources. (The Washington Post seems to do a particularly good job of this, in my opinion.)
I’ve found reporting from local news outlets a bit less reliable; you can often find important local stories covered there, but sometimes those reports are not very detailed, or they lack an understanding of the bigger picture and current situation in the Church.
Please don’t think I’m recommending you only read Catholic news coverage of this issue! But for the smaller, daily Church news that doesn’t grab national interest, it’s the Catholic media that is more likely to be paying attention and offering thoughtful analysis. I find the Bishop Accountability email that I listed above the simplest way to keep up with coverage in secular media across a variety of sources.
I hope you’ll explore some of the above options for being informed about the news. Then stay tuned here to become more informed in a different way, from listening to the voices of survivors. More on this soon.
Lord, give us wisdom, prudence, and discernment as we seek truth.
Bless and guide all reporters as they tell the stories that need to be told.
Amen.