Have you ever read or heard a news account of an event that you know something about and found it to bear little or no resemblance to what happened? That was the case for me with The New York Times version of the U.S. bishops’ proposed statement on the Eucharist and “eucharistic consistency” as it emerged at their June 16-18 assembly. After long and sometimes heated debate, the bishops voted 168 to 55 with 6 abstentions to have their doctrine committee draft a document on “The Meaning of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church.” Although the meeting was available via live stream to anyone interested, the account by Times Rome correspondent Jason Horowitz can most kindly be described as tendentious and misleading. Horowitz, I should add, is hardly the only journalist who blew this story, but the Times is the Times, so let me focus on it. Horowitz’s version featured a dystopian picture of the Church in America as presented in a book by a French journalist who covers the Vatican. The book, he wrote, “explored the ties of conservative American bishops to a well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine [the present] pontificate.” Scary isn’t it?
The media vs. reality when it comes to Eucharistic consistency – Catholic World Report
The media vs. reality when it comes to Eucharistic consistency – Catholic World Report
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