It wasn’t my job to prove the Lord’s existence or the worth of someone’s faith—unless its worth could actually be proven. I operated on the premise that God and their faith were real to the people I interviewed. This allowed me to slip into their skin and feel what they felt. David Waters, a Washington Post editor and one of the country’s best religion writers, developed a list of Ten Commandments for reporters on the faith beat, which I followed probably better than the Bible’s Ten Commandments.
First Commandment: “God is real. For billions of people on this planet, God is more than a fact. God is a central factor in their lives, their values, decisions, actions and reactions.” This was easy for me. It was the reason I got on the religion beat.
Second Commandment: “God is everywhere. Don’t think of it as the religion beat. The world is our beat. Worship attendance is 24 to 40 percent [of the American population]. But belief in God is more than 90 percent.” I tried to find stories in places other than church, as they made for richer tales: the struggle of a Jewish father to get his son’s prep football game moved from Friday night because it fell on Yom Kippur; the controversy over a Muslim football league whose team names included the “Infitada,” “Mujahideen” and “Soldiers of Allah”; and the success of UCLA scholars in building a virtual-reality theater that acts as a time machine, dropping visitors off onto the dusty streets of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain in 1211 to tour the cathedral there.
Third Commandment: “God really is in the details. John Ashcroft’s father, a Pentecostal preacher, died the day after his son was sworn into the U.S. Senate. ‘John,’ his father said to him the night before, ‘I want you to know that even Washington can be holy ground.’” David’s point is that stories about God can be found everywhere, even in throw-away lines in articles or interviews. Also, he advises us to dig deep in our interviews. I almost always uncovered the most revealing insights at the end of my interviews, when everyone was relaxed and less guarded.
Fourth Commandment: “God is the object, not the subject. You don’t have to write about God (or religion) to write about the difference God makes in the way we live.” This is great news for religion writers, because it means that almost any piece of news can be turned into a religion story. In July 2001, I wrote a front-page story about how church leaders were taking advantage of the $600 tax rebate Americans were getting from the federal government by asking their congregations to simply sign over their checks.
Fifth Commandment: “God is good. Behind many if not most stories of hope, struggle, sacrifice, survival, forgiveness, redemption and triumph is someone’s faith.” I found if I probe deep enough into any dramatic story, I find religion near its roots. I did a story about a guy who ran across the country at the pace of a marathon a day (26.2 miles). The reason? He had prayed for a way to raise money for needy children—and he heard God tell him to run an extreme distance.
Sixth Commandment: “Don’t just write for the Church Page. God created the world in seven days, not one. No need to cram all the God-related copy in one weekly ‘Faith & Values’ section or page. Write for every section. Write for every day of the week.” I had a running competition with a colleague whose beat included Disneyland over who could get their stories in the most sections of the paper. In one year, I was able to get onto the front page and in the Metro section, the Sunday magazine, the Calendar section and the business section. (She still beat me.)
Seventh Commandment: “Don’t take weekends off. Friday night through Sunday night is Game Day for most religious folk. You can’t understand someone’s faith unless you experience the public expression of it.” I found this to be invaluable in learning about different faiths, though I tended to find my actual stories outside of the religious services.
Eighth Commandment: “Don’t spend too much time in your head. Faith isn’t just expressed. It’s experienced. It’s belief and behavior. It’s intellectual, emotional, and, above all, spiritual.” I tried to report on mystical experiences with the same level of objectivity as a denominational squabble. When the marathon runner said he was ordered by God to run across America, I wrote it in a straightforward manner, without a snicker. For context, I did contact those around him to see if his behavior had changed since becoming a Christian, and checked criminal and civil court records to see if anything interesting turned up. But as for people’s alleged interactions with the Lord, I simply reported what their experiences had been. I tried to follow the example set by Supreme Court Chief Justice William O. Douglas, who in 1944 wrote the majority opinion in the United States v. Ballard case. Guy Ballard claimed, through mass mailings, to be a healer and prophet of God (he also claimed to be Jesus, St. Germain and George Washington). The government convicted him of fraud, which he had undoubtedly committed. But the Supreme Court overturned the conviction, with Douglas stating:
Heresy trials are foreign to our Constitution. Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
…The miracles of the New Testament, the Divinity of Christ, life after death, the power of prayer are deep in the religious convictions of many. If one could be sent to jail because a jury in a hostile environment found those teachings false, little indeed would be left of religious freedom.
Ninth Commandment: “Fear not. Even God had editors. They might not always get what you’re trying to do or say, but keep at it.” Religion frightens a lot of editors, many of whom aren’t used to the subject and are uncomfortable with expressly religious terms. For one of my early stories, I covered the Harvest Crusade in Anaheim, California. The three-day event is designed to convert nonbelievers to Christianity. I wrote a line in the story that went something like this: “About 20 percent of the crowd came out of the stands and onto the outfield to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.” The editors on the copy desk flipped over that line. They said it implied that Jesus Christ was everyone’s savior. No, I replied, it said that these people accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. It was just a fact. That’s what happened. That was the whole point of the Harvest Crusade. They thought the line was still offensive and wanted to change it to something like “About 20 percent of the crowd came out of the stands and onto the outfield to express their new belief in God.” I actually had to appeal to some supervising editors to keep the reference to Jesus Christ in the story.
Tenth Commandment: “Forget the flood. Interview God. No matter the story, ask people about their faith and how their faith guides their thoughts and actions.” For me, this is derivative of Waters’s Fourth and Fifth Commandments. I suspect that my friend had a hard time coming up with a fresh Tenth Commandment, and David Waters’s Nine Commandments didn’t have the proper ring.
Waters’s Ten Commandments served me well on the religion beat, and the Seventh Commandment—thou shall not take weekends off—allowed me on a personal level to sample a wide variety of Christian denominations and churches and find where I wanted to make my spiritual home. We had left the feel-good theology of my mega-church for a Presbyterian setting with more rituals, traditions and probing sermons. Yet mainline Protestantism felt to me one step short of my final destination, the Catholic Church. In my decade as an evangelical Christian, I had studied the Bible, especially the New Testament, extensively—something most Catholics don’t. Yet that knowledge gave the rituals of the Catholic Church deep meaning and beauty. Attending a Mass, I felt like I was standing on the shoulders of 2,000 years of Catholics who went before me, an unbroken line that could be traced directly back to Christ and His apostles. This filled me with a sense of awe and humility—and a little pride.
I did have problems with parts of the Catholic theology, including its sexual teachings (for example, a ban on condoms, even if it meant millions dying in AIDS-plagued Africa). More fundamentally, I couldn’t accept transubstantiation, the climax of the Mass when, according to the chur
ch, bread and wine are literally turned into the body and blood of Christ. Of course, I wasn’t alone. Millions of Americans—whom some orthodox Catholics derisively call “Cafeteria Catholics”—don’t agree with many of these teachings (40 percent don’t even go to confession, a basic requirement of the church). If Catholics truly believed they were in the real presence of Jesus during the Eucharist, they would fawn over and worship the Blessed Sacrament, the unused but consecrated bread and wine that is placed, in most churches, in a golden tabernacle; the Blessed Sacrament usually sits off to the side of the altar, ignored by the faithful, except for a few true believers who can occasionally be found before it in prayer and adulation.
I didn’t only rely on the comfort of the crowd. Written into the Catechism of the Catholic Church—a reference book that outlines church teachings—is a wonderful loophole called “personal conscience.” If something, even church doctrine, goes against your conscience, you’re allowed to follow the moral voice inside your head. As the Catechism says, “A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself.”
My conscience allowed me to practice birth control without guilt or fear of eternal damnation. It allowed me to view the Eucharist as only a symbolic representation of the Last Supper. I planned on being a Cafeteria Catholic, picking which parts of church doctrine I would keep and which I would ignore. But my selection was based on conscience, not convenience.
To become a Catholic officially, I needed to go through a year-long process that consisted of some introductory courses and then months of classes. I signed up in the summer of 2001. Greer wanted a refresher course in her childhood faith, so she came along. We had a vague idea that after I was received into the church, we would have a proper church wedding and get rid of the Catholic stigma that we were adulterers not worthy to receive Communion.
On Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings we arrived at Our Lady Queen of Angels in Newport Beach to learn about the church, its history and its doctrine. Father Vincent Gilmore led the program, which was called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Father Vincent was part of the conservative Norbertine order, on loan to the Queen of Angels parish because of a priest shortage within the Diocese of Orange. In his late 30s, he rode mountain bikes and was a gifted teacher who believed squarely in the church’s teachings. He explained them passionately, simply and thoroughly. I was also assigned a sponsor. I was fortunate to get Bob Gannon, a lanky gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair whose decency and kindness knew no bounds. Though soft-spoken, he was a prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, so I knew he could be tough. To me, he was a loving soul who patiently answered every question I threw at him.
As the people in the class began to get friendlier, some discovered that I was a religion writer with The Times. The recognition wasn’t unpleasant. Some remembered stories I had written before the class started. A few talked about a story I had written just before Easter, some months before. It focused on retired Bishop Norman McFarland, a giant of a man at least six-foot-four with a wide girth and booming voice. He was known for his gruffness. When his successor, Bishop Tod D. Brown, publicly released the diocese’s finances for the first time, many priests within the diocese heralded the move as the start of a new era of openness. They implied that Bishop McFarland had run the diocesan finances with an iron fist and in secret.
I had called him on a Sunday afternoon to get a response. Knowing his reputation, I dialed his number with trepidation. The bishop’s phone rang several times before he picked it up and growled an irritated, “Hello!”
“Hi, Bishop, this is Bill Lobdell with the Los Angeles Times,” I started, trying to keep the quiver out of my voice. “I’m working on a story and would like to get a comment from you.” I paused, trying to think of something to break the ice. “How are you doing today?”
“Pretty good until you called and interrupted my goddamn football game,” he barked. “What do you want?”
The conversation didn’t get any better.
My Easter story, written much later, put Bishop McFarland in a far different light. I watched him and Father John McAndrew minister to inmates inside the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange, California, on the eve of Good Friday. There I met inmate Anthony Ybarra, who claimed he was experiencing the best day of his life. He had been upset because he didn’t know when he would see his two-week-old son, and was crying hard. But a priest was washing his feet, just as Jesus did for his 12 surprised disciples at the Last Supper. Father John McAndrew cleaned and kissed Ybarra’s feet, along with those of 11 other prisoners. Bishop McFarland then heard Ybarra’s confession.
“My heart is still pounding,” Ybarra told me afterward. “Things just flowed out. He told me God loves me no matter what I’ve done. Something just came over me—a peace.
“The feeling is a better high than any drugs I’ve had. It was quite a surprise. This service is the best thing that’s happened to my life so far.”
The services took place in a stark chapel. White plastic chairs served as pews. Four sheriff’s deputies took the place of ushers. In between squawks on the deputies’ radios, the prisoners sang, took Communion, joined hands and got down on their knees on the polished cement floors to pray. And they cried—often.
“This is a wonderful moment,” McFarland had told the 28 inmates in orange jumpsuits gathered for one of two afternoon Masses. “There are very few times in our lives where we can say we’re doing exactly what God wants us to do.”
McFarland’s interest in the inmates at Theo Lacy began three years earlier, when the bishop faced a life-threatening aneurysm. At the time, a jail chaplain had the prisoners write get-well letters to McFarland. The bishop could still recite by heart one of those 40 letters, which read in part:
Dear Bishop McFarland,
Hi there, Norman. I’m a prisoner here in Theo Lacy because of something I’ve done. You’re a prisoner because of your health.
The writer of the letter went on to tell the bishop that he was praying for him because he could identify with being helpless. The letters touched the bishop. He received hundreds of get-well cards, but saved only those from prisoners.
Soon after that, Bishop McFarland accepted an invitation to visit the inmates for the first time. Indeed, it was his first jail visit during his 11-year tenure as bishop of Orange. He gave a homily on Christ’s conversation with the two criminals who were crucified alongside him. The inmates gave the bishop a standing ovation.
Father McAndrew told me the story: “It was hard to tell at that moment who was more moved. Beginning with that experience, there was some sort of connection that spoke to some place inside of him that no one ever got access to.”
My story on the softer side of the bishop surprised many Catholics, creating a nice buzz. I’m sure it didn’t exactly hurt my standing with Father Vincent at Our Lady Queen of Angels, either. Shortly after that, I stumbled upon another Catholic-based story that became much talked about. In the lead of the story, I called it “Eight Weddings and a Fiesta,” the real-life drama of a pastor of an impoverished Latino parish eager to see his congregation’s couples married in the church.
For the eight brides and eight grooms who said “Si, te acepto” on a Saturday night when I visited Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Santa Ana, Father Bill Barman offered the deal of a lifetime: a wedding they otherwise couldn’t afford, along with a chance to get back in harmony with the Catholic Church. Unable to shoulder the financial burden of an expensive church wedding, many of the working-class couples already had tied the knot in civil ceremonies. But those weddings aren’t recognized as valid church unions. Father Bill’s weddings offered them an easy way back. He gave a Mass wedding, picking up the bill for the photographer, decorations, three-tiered cake, deejay and flowers. The brides and grooms needed to do only three things in return: attend a 12-week marriage class, find something to wear on the big day and have their famil
ies bring their favorite Mexican dishes to the reception.
Father Bill’s idea was so clever and the night so joyous that I didn’t think about the absurdity that underlined the story: that his parish’s married couples—devout Catholics—had been barred from the Lord’s table during Communion because they could afford only a civil marriage. As a journalist, it pains me to say that the thought never crossed my mind. It wouldn’t have changed what I had written, but I should have thought about it.
The absurdity didn’t bother most people. The story was picked up by The Times’s wire service and ran nationally. After reading about it, priests in other poor parishes in America started the multiple wedding concept. And the article raised my profile a little higher in my conversion class. I didn’t mind the minor celebrity status—at least not then, when my stories on the Catholic Church had a feel-good quality to them.
In August of 2001, Jean Pasco again stopped by my desk.
“Hey, you remember those legal documents I dropped off some months back about the Father Harris case?”
Crap. I had forgotten all about them. As Jean stood before me, I guiltily unearthed the papers from a pile on my desk.
Losing My Religion Page 8