On the ambivalence of ‘journalistic malpractice,’ and a note on Crux reporting

ROME – Pope Francis this week approved the expulsions of ten members of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), a controversial Peruvian lay movement, over various charges of misconduct, including one sanctioned in part for the novel offense of what might loosely be called “journalistic malpractice.”

It’s an important and, in some ways, potentially double-edged precedent, and it deserves to be examined closely.

The individual in question, Alejandro Bermúdez, is the former director of ACI Prensa in Spanish and the Catholic News Agency in English, which is owned by EWTN. He now operates more or less independently, including maintaining a highly active social media profile.

I’ve known him for years, and at one point I was part of a supper group in Denver organized by Archbishop Charles Chaput in which Bermúdez also participated. In fact, it would be difficult to have been involved in Catholic journalism, in either English or Spanish, for the last quarter-century and not to have crossed paths with Bermúdez at some point.

Among other things, the charges against Bermúdez include that he uses his media perch to polarize and stoke division rather than to foster ecclesial communion, including bullying and denigrating people in public. (To take one example, the other day he referred to a fellow journalist as a “weasel,” a “coward” and a “disgrace,” and those are among the more polite terms he sometimes employs.) It’s also alleged that Bermúdez has sometimes used suspect journalistic methods, such as the invasion of privacy.

Without adjudicating any of those complaints, let me stipulate that as a rule, I don’t like the idea of punishing journalists for what they write or say, for three basic reasons.

The first is an obvious concern for freedom of the press, which is essential for the health of any society, including the Catholic Church. The second is a “there but for the grace of God” worry – a tool today being used against another journalist could easily, one day, depending on who’s wielding it, be turned upon the rest of us.

The third consideration is that in my experience, trying to punish or intimidate journalists, especially the outspoken subset we call “pundits,” almost always backfires, turning them into martyrs among their most devoted followers and actually encouraging the very traits authority was trying to suppress.

To be clear, it’s not that there isn’t an awful lot of vitriol and character assassination out there today masquerading as journalism, which does tremendous harm not only to the individuals involved but to the basic health of public life. I’ve written an entire book on the subject, Catholics and Contempt, and at one level it’s nice to see someone in the Vatican paying attention. Social media in particular has become a vast toxic waste site, which is why I avoid it at all costs.

Most of us would love someone to make all that magically go away. In reality, however, attempts by authority to suppress such speech, no matter how obnoxious, are not only dubious ethically, they generally only make things worse. Rather than attempting to muzzle people who traffic in bile, I usually suggest simply ignoring them — which, for personalities who crave attention the way addicts crave their next fix, is perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

And, yet.

Yet it’s important to note that Bermúdez has not exactly been sanctioned as a journalist – he wasn’t expelled, for instance, from the Catholic Press Association. Instead, it was his standing as a consecrated member of a papally recognized society of apostolic life that has been revoked, with the point being that his journalistic activity could be interpreted as taking place with the blessing of the church.

In other words, what the Vatican appears to have considered is not primarily someone’s obligations as a journalist – which, frankly, they’re not equipped to judge – but as a Catholic.

St. Thomas Aquinas famously dealt at some length with the sin of iniuria verborum, or “verbal injuries,” even providing a brief checklist of examples in question 72 of the second part of the second section of the Summa Theologica: “Reviling, backbiting, tale telling, derision and cursing.”

“If, by his words, the speaker intends to dishonor another person … this is no less a mortal sin than theft or robbery, since a person does not love his honor any less than his possessions,” Aquinas wrote.

If the church is going to have such sins on the books, then presumably it needs a mechanism to sanction instances. To put the point differently, expelling a member from an official Catholic entity for engaging in iniuria verborum is tantamount to the church declaring, “Not in our name.”

It doesn’t mean the reprimanded individual can’t be a journalist, they simply can’t do it with a patina of ecclesiastical approval.

Whether Bermúdez is the appropriate test case for this new standard is for others to assess. Going forward, however, one hopes such disciplinary measures are used sparingly and with great caution, so they don’t simply become a tool for discouraging speech with which someone in officialdom disagrees.

On the other hand, if such a punishment serves as a wake-up call to rethink the nasty, spiteful, and reckless media climate we’re all complicit in creating, then it will have served a good purpose. As the Zen master famously said, “We’ll see.”

* * *

As a rule, journalists should not inject themselves into the stories we cover. However, because the integrity of Crux’s reporting on the SCV story has been called into question in some quarters, I wouldn’t want my silence to signify consent, so I’ll briefly address the question here.

The complaints boil down to two main points.

First, Bermúdez has charged that reporting on the SCV story by my wife, Elise Ann Allen, is tainted because she is a former member of an SCV women’s group and a former employee of the Catholic News Agency during his tenure as editor, as well as someone who provided testimony as part of the Vatican’s investigation of the SCV.

All of that is true. We’ve disclosed her previous relationship with the SCV and CNA before, and I’m doing so again now.

It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder if that background creates a conflict of interest. On the other hand, there is no hard and fast rule in journalism that having once been part of a group, you can never report on it. In fact, such experience sometimes can lend a depth of understanding that otherwise would be impossible to acquire.

In the end, reporting has to be judged on its merits – fairness, accuracy, context, etc. – and not on the presumed biases of the reporter. By that measure, and allowing for the fact we’re hardly perfect, I’m nonetheless confident that Crux’s coverage passes the test.

Second, Bermúdez and others have alleged that Elise has done something wrong because she appears to have information from well-placed sources.

Setting aside the irony of one journalist complaining that another’s sources are too good, such objections seem a way of attempting to impugn the integrity of the Vatican investigation by suggesting that someone involved is leaking to the media.

Without any breach of confidence, I can say that I’ve had the benefit of watching Elise work this story for months, day in and day out, and I can attest that her set of sources is as long as my arm, not just in Rome but in Peru and all over the world. The mere fact she often knows things others don’t does not, in itself, prove anything about where that information was obtained, and suggestions to the contrary amount to baseless (and, possibly, malicious) speculation.

Finally, I note that in one recent social media comment, Bermúdez referred to my 2020 marriage to Elise as “surprising.” I honestly have no idea what he meant by that, but there’s nevertheless a sense in which I fully concur.

I too have been deeply surprised by it all – to invoke C.S. Lewis, I was, and I remain every day, “surprised by joy.”