Like so many of us, I enjoy watching football on a Sunday afternoon, especially if the game includes my beloved Philadelphia Eagles.
Football and baseball are my sports. Basketball, if it includes specific teams, and hockey if the Flyers are winning, but much less so than the first two.
I’m also a news junkie, for better or for worse. I remember once telling a bishop friend that I feared I was too much addicted to news.
“But that’s your business,” he replied.
It made me feel better, but that seems so long ago.
Among my favorite settings that offers the perfect segue is Sunday evening when the 4 p.m. football game concludes and CBS draws me in with previews of its news magazine menu.
They get me just about every time, which they did Dec. 1. The fabled “60 Minutes” news program previewed an in-depth piece on the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The centuries-old church fell victim to a horrific fire watched by millions of TV and Internet viewers at every end of the earth five years ago when it plunged to the ground as victim of an historic tragedy.
This news piece focused on the rebuild and the fastidious craftsman who were part of reinvigorating the fallen shrine.
It was about halfway through the informative, carefully produced program when it struck me.
“You know what I haven’t heard them say yet?” I inquired of my wife who was with me in the living room.
“God.”
An in-depth story about an international icon of worship and nowhere to be heard were the words Jesus, religion, Catholic or faith. And God.
How can that be?
My wife is accustomed to enduring my tangentially challenged rants. She agreed with my point, but it wasn’t a lengthy conversation.
A day or two later, a coworker who also suffers from a somewhat lesser case of news addiction, asked me if I had seen “60 Minutes” on Sunday and if I’d noticed anything missing from the cathedral item.
I was stopped in my tracks.
God.
How can this be? My colleague picked up on it, too.
I was so confounded, I needed to go back and watch it again. I had missed the latter portion of the segment during the first airing.
Upon rewatching, the theme remained.
Among the words describing what happened at the cathedral:
“The restoration of Notre Dame … preservation of where we came from.”
Ah-hah, where we came from. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“The great Gothic church.”
Church? We’re getting closer. Let’s hear about faith, belief, prayer, the creator.
Nope.
“Church” and “where we came from” are as close as we’ll get from the journalist Bill Whitaker in this segment from the news stable that once included Walter Cronkite.
“This is sort of a metaphor for what our societies … what our democracies need,” French President Emmanuel Marcon said in an interview.
Was he getting to people’s belief that this cathedral is a place to worship our maker and such a belief is maintained by an estimated 1.3 billion worldwide Catholics, the largest Christian grouping.
“Rebuilding Notre Dame was in a way rebuilding yourself.”
Wait! Is he getting there?
No. It wasn’t even the beginning of talk about people wanting to live in the image of God.
The segment did mention “a new rooster and a cross” placed at the top of the steeple.
The rooster, it was explained, is a symbol of strength, courage and patriotism in France.
The cross? No mention of who was on it. Or why. Or if it mattered
Yet, the tribute went on.
“Ceilings show starry nights … kaleidoscopes.”
“This symbol of Paris and France.”
“It symbolizes something universal.”
“As Notre Dame’s great doors reopen, might that spirit be a little bit contagious?”
Universal? Spirit?
Was CBS trying to say God?
No.
It was quite obviously trying to avoid the topic. The three-letter word wasn’t uttered once in a 20-minute report.
The smarties in the newsroom will tell you it wasn’t a story about religion, another word that was never spoken. There will be plenty of time, they would say, for stories about faith, love, peace, Jesus our Lord and prayerful distribution of the Eucharist and what Catholics believe to be the body and blood of Christ.
Yet as a certain element of the recent electorate tries to shake off the idea of “woke” and equity and respecting everyone’s beliefs, there was not one editor or producer who raised a simple question that needed to be answered in this story?
What do people do in this building? Why is it so important to them?
Don’t miss our next episode. Because it wasn’t in this one.
Joseph P. Owens is editor/general manager of The Dialog.
