No, that’s not a typographical error in the title: the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. We use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Journalism at least used to be a profession concerned with the 5 Ws + H: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Those were the questions reporters were supposed to answer if at all possible. Now that print newspapers have been in great decline, and newspapers in digital form are the wave of whatever future newspapers have left, the space limitations that used to hem in stories as measured by word count of column inches are mostly gone. Editors may have to pare down things that are going to be printed in the dead trees editions, but digital bandwidth is incredibly cheap. And Associated Press reporter Nicole Winfield left out a really big answer to “why.” Was it because the “why” is completely politically incorrect?

Pope Francis apologizes after being quoted using vulgar term about gay men in talk about ban on gay priests

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni issued a statement acknowledging the media storm that erupted about Francis’ comments, which were delivered behind closed doors to Italian bishops on May 20.

by Nicole Winfield | Tuesday, May 28, 2024 | 11:18 AM EDT

Nicole Winfield, in Los Angeles, January 4, 2015.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis apologized Tuesday after he was quoted using a vulgar and derogatory term about gay men to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s ban on gay priests.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni issued a statement acknowledging the media storm that erupted about Francis’ comments, which were delivered behind closed doors to Italian bishops on May 20.

Italian media on Monday had quoted unnamed Italian bishops in reporting that Francis jokingly used the term “faggotness” while speaking in Italian during the encounter. He had used the term in reaffirming the Vatican’s ban on allowing gay men to enter seminaries and be ordained priests.

Bruni said Francis was aware of the reports and recalled that the Argentine pope, who has made outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics a hallmark of his papacy, has long insisted there was “room for everyone” in the Catholic Church. . . . .

Francis was addressing an assembly of the Italian bishops conference, which recently approved a new document outlining training for Italian seminarians. The document, which hasn’t been published pending review by the Holy See, reportedly sought to open some wiggle room in the Vatican’s absolute ban on gay priests by introducing the issue of celibacy as the primary requirement for priests, gay or straight.

The Vatican ban was articulated in a 2005 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, and later repeated in a subsequent document in 2016, which said the church cannot admit to seminaries or ordain men who “practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture.”

The article continues to note that there remains a high percentage of priests who are homosexual, and that the Church has been accused of hypocrisy on this matter due to that high percentage. But what the article does not tell readers is the reason for the 2005 document. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and was elected Pope in 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, and the Vatican was hugely concerned about the problem of priests who had sexually abused minors. The John Jay Report, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002, and it reported:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Naturally, the Usual Suspects, in their great desire to reduce criticism of homosexuality itself, made all sorts of efforts to claim that the great preponderance of victims of an all-male clergy were boys was not due to homosexuality, but claimed that it was more of an access issue, that boys were simply more available to be victims, given that only boys could be altar boys until 1994. But, whatever the outside politically correct cries were, the hierarchy of the Church knew better: they knew that there was a significant percentage of priests who were homosexual, and did the math. The homosexual rights advocates had done the math, and said that 2+2=5, while the hierarchy understood that 2+2=4. That’s why the aging Pope John Paul II and then the newly enthroned Benedict XVI realized that continuing to ordain homosexual men as priests posed a real problem.

The sexual abuse allegations against then-Archbishop Theodore McCarrick were not public knowledge in 2005, but there were those in the Church who had at least heard about them. While several diocese had been required to pay monetary sexual abuse claims earlier than that, settlements resulting from Cardinal McCarrick’s personal offenses began to be paid in 2005. While there are always questions of who knew what and when did they know it, settlements paid to priests who had been abused by Cardinal McCarrick was known throughout the Vatican; those things were secrets which could not be kept.

The Church had to act, and one way of acting was to increase the scrutiny of prospective seminarians; the Church knew that homosexual males were a huge part of the problem.

But Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield made absolutely no mention of that. No mention was made of the fact that the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, condemns homosexual activity. Instead, she concluded with this:

New Ways Ministry^[1]We have previously noted the New Ways Ministry, never positively., which advocates for LGBTQ+ Catholics, welcomed Francis’ apology Tuesday and said it confirmed that the “use of the slur was a careless colloquialism.” But the group’s director Francis DeBernardo questioned the underlying content of the pope’s comments and the overall ban on gays in the priesthood.

“Without a clarification, his words will be interpreted as a blanket ban on accepting any gay man to a seminary,” DeBernardo said in a release, asking for a clearer statement on Francis’ views about gay priests “so many of whom faithfully serve the people of God each day.”

A reader with no outside knowledge of the situation could easily conclude that the Church was simply being mean to homosexuals. Yes, there are priests who are homosexual, so the reader might conclude that His Holiness the Pope was being hypocritical.

Was that intentional on Mrs Winfield’s part? I certainly cannot read her mind, but she has been the Associated Press’ Vatican correspondent since 2001, and is in no way ignorant of these matters. The measures to keep homosexual men out of the seminaries were taken directly to combat the problem of sexually abusive priests, and Mrs Winfield knows that. The reporter did not directly lie to readers, did not write anything which was false, but her coverage omitted a huge truth, in a way which could only mislead readers as to why the Church has policies to exclude homosexuals from the seminary.