The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced it would be closing the domestic operations of the Catholic News Service (CNS) as part of what James Rogers, executive director of the Communications Committee called a “significant realignment to utilise better the resources entrusted to the conference by the faithful in a manner that fits the communications environment today”.
The cutbacks come at a time of strained resources within the USCCB and were approved by the bishops in executive session last November. Several bishops, however, indicated that it had not been made clear to them when voting that this would result in effectively eliminating the wire service.
CNS was founded in 1920 and had been providing professional journalistic coverage of events in the Catholic Church as a wire service, syndicating stories to other papers across the world. Their articles were picked up by other media outlets such as the Jesuit-run America magazine and the independent, lay-run National Catholic Reporter, but their principal clients were the many diocesan newspapers which relied on their coverage of events.
“We can’t cover national news with a staff of five people,” said Malea Hargett, the editor of Arkansas Catholic. “We can’t cover what’s going on at the Supreme Court or what’s going on at the USCCB. We just don’t have the staff.”
In addition to lower church revenues, Bishop Christopher Coyne of Burlington, Vermont, a former chair of the communications committee, said “you could see the handwriting on the wall” as some dioceses switched from a weekly newspaper to a monthly magazine format.
The advent of the Catholic News Agency, an ideologically driven wire service owned by the conservative media conglomerate the Eternal Word Television Network (Ewtn), which distributed its content to diocesan papers at no fee, further undermined CNS. “I think Catholic News Agency was really the death knell for CNS, because it was free, and CNS wasn't,” said Coyne.
Christopher Gunty, chief executive of the Catholic Review, the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s newspaper, speculated that several diocesan papers might need to pool resources and create their own news cooperative in order to fill the gap left by the CNS closure. “We might end up having to share our stories,” he said. “We're going to have to find other ways to do this.”
The news broke as a new report from the US Interior Department detailed efforts to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children at schools funded by the US government. The report in question looked at 408 schools in 37 states or territories which tens of thousands of children attended from 1819 to 1969. Approximately half of the schools were administered in conjunction with Christian denominations, both Catholic and Protestant.
Education programmes often coincided with efforts to steal the land belonging to the Native tribes, whose treatment at the hands of settlers of European descent has been the subject of renewed scrutiny.
Through much of those same years, newly arrived European immigrants were also forcibly assimilated to U.S. cultural norms in public and many private schools, and fights within the Catholic hierarchy in the last half of the 19th century were common between German prelates seeing to avoid assimilation and Irish bishops favouring it.
In addition to the schools, the new report identified 53 marked or unmarked burial sites close to the schools.
“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies – including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as four years old – are heartbreaking and undeniable,” said Interior Secretary Deborah Haaland when releasing the report. An additional report will delve into some of the cultural legacies more deeply. She also announced plans to start an oral history project among those Native persons who remember the schools.
The report was authorised last year by Haaland, a Catholic who is also a part of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. She is the first Native American secretary of the department that oversaw the management of federal lands during the contested Westward expansion. Her decision to begin the investigation followed last year’s report on the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada, where the remains of 215 Native children were found buried, sparking public outcry and calls for an historical reckoning.
The report comes when Pope Francis’ plans to visit Canada, in part to atone for the Church's treatment of Indigenous Peoples, have brought the issue to worldwide attention.
Elsewhere in the United States, the Catholic University of America presented an honorary degree to Hong Kong human rights’ activist and media mogul Jimmy Lai as part of its graduation ceremonies this month. Lai, who converted to Catholicism in 1997, is in prison awaiting trial on charges of sedition after he was arrested pursuant to a draconian anti-democracy law foisted upon Hong Kong by the Chinese government in 2020. He previously was sentenced to a year in prison for unlawful assembly.
The honorary degree was accepted by his son Sebastien. “I’m sure he’ll be very happy to receive this award, and I’m sure knowing that all these people are praying for him, and knowing that all these people have the same thoughts towards freedom and freedom of religion, freedom of expression, will make him incredibly happy,” said the younger Lai in a recent interview.
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