Our team of copy editors reads and posts most of what you see on the websites for National Catholic Reporter, Global Sisters Report and EarthBeat. The Copy Desk Daily highlights recommended news and opinion articles that have crossed our desks on their way to you.
Pastoral change, new oratory spark dissent at suburban Detroit parish: “There is clearly some broken thinking going on that is causing great damage to the church. We are in a black-and-white, either-or situation here,” Terry Gonda told NCR. Gonda, who is married to a woman, was the popular music director of St. John Fisher Chapel University Parish for the past six years, and she served as an assistant director for 30 years before that. The archdiocese dismissed her June 24. Longtime SJF members call her dismissal a “gut punch.”
How to help the pandemic-stricken Amazon? ‘Amazonize yourself,’ says new campaign. Brian Roewe reports how the campaign “seeks to raise awareness of the many ways that COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, endangers communities and forests in the globally critical biome. It brings together a coalition of Catholic groups, indigenous peoples, scientists, researchers, actors and artists in defense of the Amazon.”
Progressive millennials offer the church much hope and promise: Longtime NCR columnist Jamie Manson finished Emily M. D. Scott’s new memoir For All Who Hunger. Manson has an interesting take on the memoir. She calls For All Who Hunger “an inspiring and affecting answer to the question I have been getting for over a decade: ‘Why aren’t millennials interested in the church?’ As I’ve said before, young progressives really do care about the church.”
Bishop Barron hosts invite-only meeting to discuss ‘rad trads,’ online vitriol: Christopher White reports on Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron’s invite-only meeting of Catholic media professionals last week to discuss “disturbing trends in the online Catholic world.” The content director for Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries confirmed to White that the meeting served to discuss the online “culture of contempt” among Catholics; the rise of “tabloid style” news in the Catholic press; and the influence of the so-called “radical Traditionalist” (or “rad-trad”) movements. Brandon Vogt called it “simply a bishop having a pastoral discussion with Catholic leaders in the media, in his capacity as shepherd of souls.”
Sarah Salvadore, one of NCR’s outgoing Bertelsen interns, reports on one of the sites in the country most vulnerable to COVID-19: nursing homes. More than 40% of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have been linked to nursing homes, according to the Times. Salvadore spoke with leaders of nursing homes with Catholic ties. Some of them lost many residents in the first wave of the pandemic; all of them are preparing for what’s next. ‘Not out of this yet’: Nursing homes face ongoing threat of COVID-19.
Want to keep updated with the latest news from the National Catholic Reporter? Sign up here for news updates by email — including one that will send you Copy Desk Daily every Monday through Friday.
