Religious faith in the daily paper, Tom Roeser, Andrew Greeley, Mike Royko, Bob Newhart, Chelsea Clinton, Al Gore, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Mary Lefkowitz, Mel Holli, Seneca, Paddy Bauler . . .

. . . made Blithe Spirit in May of '97

Faith in the market place . . . Reporters don't report faith-content aspects of Chicago's new archbishop [Francis George] because they are agnostics, says Tom Roeser in his 4/21 Trib column. Not counting the Sun-Times religion writer, who's a Catholic deacon, by the way.

The question is whether there's a market for faith-content reporting in the secular press. Roeser's example of what's not said was that the new archbishop is "the link to the apostles Jesus Christ gathered around himself 94 generations ago" and that the church is "the one Christ built by precepts, suffering and promulgation."

There's no market for that kind of talk except in a highly personalized column such as Roeser's. And if he rode that horse too heavily in an every-day paper, his column might fall by the wayside too.

Watching what you say . . . As a reporter, I could have quoted Roeser saying that, identifying him as a traditionalist or conservative Catholic or some other description he and I could agree on. But I couldn't have presented it on my own authority.

Nor could I get away with quoting just anyone. In a Catholic newspaper column, Andrew Greeley likened dipping the paschal candle in Easter Vigil holy water to the marital act. The city editor drew the line at my quoting him, which admittedly is not what Roeser has in mind for enlightened reporting. But Greeley wasn't making that up. He was reporting the tradition, dating from ages long gone in which plainer speaking (or symbolizing) was the norm.

Neither could I use the expression "according to" -- a staple of newspaper-style attribution and incidentally a way to distance oneself from what's reported -- referring to a gospel account. The gospel according to So-and-so is standard in Christian liturgy. I used it in a way to evoke that distancing, as if to say it might not be so; and the editors axed it.

Those crazy non-Christians . . . But I wasn't being impious. Rather, I was taking it as seriously as anything the governor or bishop said about such and such. I was zeroing in on the gospel account as a serious statement rather than a mantra. But it was too much for the editors, who did not want to give the appearance of flouting — or for that matter, flaunting — a Christian mantra.

Not so with other mantras. I could get away with questioning non-Christians, as in a story in which I more or less played the Bob Newhart marketing man questioning Abner Doubleday on his new game called "baseball" -- "If the ball lands on one side of the line, it's fair, on the other foul? (Heh-heh) Why is that, Ab?" My piece was about an Eastern sect with a far-fetched cosmogony. Mike Royko, strolling down the news room aisle from his office to my desk, held that story up before me. He knew what I had done, and I had to admit I couldn't have done it to a Christian or Jew.

Leaping the secular gap . . . On the other hand was the problem of semi-literacy in religious matters on the part of this or that editor. Once I called in a story that didn't get past the desk man, to whom it made no sense. It drew too heavily on Reformation history, in which he was not well versed. Council of Trent? What's that?

This is not quite agnosticism, though that too probably, but ignorance. That was in no way the problem of another, younger city editor, the son of a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod teacher, and a full-service human being. He was there to censor me for insensitivity to evangelical consciousness, taken as a broad enough context to include Missouri Synod members. He it was who caught me up in the Greeley matter, as he was also on suggesting a long assignment which took me to churches to watch, look, and listen and take them seriously indeed on their own terms.

This is what Roeser wants, and there's not enough of it, though maybe it's less agnosticism than illiteracy in these matters. In another column he objects to Greeley as a standard source for reporters, demoting him to "pollster" status. Greeley admits to making surveys and further to being a sociologist.

But no one has more fervently decried the lack of media seriousness toward religion than Greeley, complaining for instance that his surveys (polls, whatever) show widespread mysticism or mystical bent among average people -- bus and subway strap-hangers and the like. People pray a lot, Greeley has found, doing his own systematic reporting; but you wouldn't know it from reading the newspapers.

The sleaze brigade . . . Shifting to the political, an Al Gore buddy, big money-raiser, questionable from past business dealings and skirmishes with the law, brings questionable people to a party for Bill Clinton, demands they be allowed entrance, gets his way.

Not what we advise, say State Dept. types, but Clinton people are not big on protocol or fussbudget FBI approvals. Lot of them resent the FBI from old antiwar days, not to mention drug days past and present. Chelsea calls her Secret Service man a pig, he corrects her, she says, “Why not? That's what my parents call you.”

The Gore buddy is Howard Glicken of Miami, who got limited immunity for testifying against a former partner now doing 27 years for bad behavior involving the laundering of drug money. Glicken was finance vice chair for the DNC in the last campaign. His friends at the party included a Buenos Aires mayoral candidate whose picture with Bill landed big in local papers. The guy (Glicken) raises millions, can't he get his buddy in the paper with Bill? What are those millions for, anyway?

There goes Nancy again . . . Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford "like all writers, put entertainment first and exaggerated for effect," says WSJ reviewer Florence King 4/29, reviewing The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. She exaggerates for effect, but the point's made.

Mitford tweaked Waugh about his Catholicism, comparing the resurrection of the body to "finding your motor car after a party" and marveling at how mourners say of the departed, "'She must be in heaven now' -- as though she'd caught the 4:45." Waugh called this "a fatuous intrusion" into a world she knew nothing of. Clever, though.

U. of Illinois at Chicago hits a line single . . . Classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz, author of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History talked at U. of I. @ Chi, was calm about it. She has a very irenic manner for one who beards lions. Her talk was a run-through of her book. Discussion from the floor included comments by an "Egyptologist" from the U. of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who was also very good. And this only a short Blue Line ride from Oak Park, plus the talk was free.

Asked by the only hostile questioner -- and not quite hostile, at that -- why she tarred all Afrocentrists with the myth-as-history brush, she calmly noted major university affiliations of the myth-pushers. They came out of Temple U. and the like, not out of the West Side or even Oak Park.

The questioner also asked, why give us this fact business now, when "we" (blacks) were so done in by myths about "us"? He meant racist myths, which indeed Lefkowitz had alluded to earlier: master-race stuff out of Europe in the '30s and '40s. "I wasn't the one who taught you" those myths, responded L. "Nor was I taught that way myself." You have to take people one by one, she said, sounding much like human-relations speakers of the '50s and '60s, countering myths about black people.

The man unfortunately sounded as if he thought one myth deserves another, when Lefkowitz wants to treat myths for what they are. I wouldn't have mythed her talk for anything. As for extended give-and-take in writing by her and the author who set her work in motion, see the author here and Lefkowitz here.

Another hit by U. of Illinois at Chicago . . . The envelope has been opened, and -- ah-hah! -- the best U.S. mayor since 1960 was Richard J. Daley of Chicago. Mel Holli of River Forest, of UIC, found this out by asking 69 professors coast to coast. Frank Rizzo of Phila. (1972-79), everybody’s bad guy, came in last.

On being nice but not sloppy . . . The wise man relieves misery calmly, tranquilla mente, vultu suo, says Seneca -- without the sort of weeping and wailing that with a buck and a half gets you a ride on the Blue Line. And a wise judge sentences a wrongdoer non sub formula sed ex aequo et bono, acting for the good of all concerned.

The common good, that is. In Germany buses run on schedule partly because they don't stop for latecomers. If you're one second late, you're out of luck. Harsh by individualist (vs. communitarian) standards. But what do we prefer, buses on time for the many or buses stopping to reopen doors for late ones?

On the other hand, German drinking laws are very liberal. Lubeck city council members tipple when debate gets boring, WSJ reports 5/7. Aldermen repair to their 400-year-old bar for wine and beer. The Green Party, five out of 50 council members, want to change that. But is Lubeck ready for reform, any more than Chicago was under Paddy Bauler?