William Lobdell: Religion beat became a test of faith
Brett
>From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Religion beat became a test of faith
A reporter looks at how the stories he covered affected him and his
spiritual journey.
By William Lobdell
Times Staff Writer
July 21, 2007
WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God
had answered my prayers.
As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the
mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a
freak show.
I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief
shapes people's lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would
grow deeper and sturdier.
But during the eight years I covered religion, something very
different happened.
In 1989, a friend took me to Mariners Church, then in Newport Beach,
after saying: "You need God. That's what's missing in your life." At
the time, I was 28 and my first son was less than a year old. I had
managed to nearly ruin my marriage (the second one) and didn't think
I'd do much better as a father. I was profoundly lost.
The mega-church's pastor, Kenton Beshore, had a knack for making
Scripture accessible and relevant. For someone who hadn't studied the
Bible much, these talks fed a hunger in my soul. The secrets to living
well had been there all along - in "Life's Instruction Manual," as
some Christians nicknamed the Bible.
Some friends in a Bible study class encouraged me to attend a men's
religious weekend in the San Bernardino Mountains. The three-day
retreats are designed to grind down your defenses and leave you
emotionally raw - an easier state in which to connect with God. After
36 hours of prayer, singing, Bible study, intimate sharing and little
sleep, I felt filled with the Holy Spirit.
At the climactic service Sunday, Mike Barris, a pastor-to-be,
delivered an old-fashioned altar call. He said we needed to let Jesus
into our hearts.
With my eyes closed in prayer, I saw my heart slowly opening in two
and then being infused with a warm, glowing light. A tingle spread
across my chest. This, I thought, was what it was to be born again.
The pastor asked those who wanted to accept Jesus to raise their
hands. My hand pretty much levitated on its own. My new friends in
Christ, many of whom I had first met Friday, gave me hugs and slaps on
the back.
I began praying each morning and night. During those quiet times, I
mostly listened for God's voice. And I thought I sensed a plan he had
for me: To write about religion for The Times and bring light into the
newsroom, if only by my stories and example.
My desire to be a religion reporter grew as I read stories about faith
in the mainstream media. Spiritual people often appeared as nuts or
simpletons.
In one of the most famous examples, the Washington Post ran a news
story in 1993 that referred to evangelical Christians as "largely
poor, uneducated and easy to command."
Another maddening trend was that homosexuality and abortion debates
dominated media coverage, as if those where the only topics that
mattered to Christians.
I didn't just pray for a religion writing job; I lobbied hard. In one
meeting with editors, my pitch went something like this:
"What if I told you that you have an institution in Orange County that
draws more than 15,000 people a weekend and that you haven't written
much about?"
They said they couldn't imagine such a thing.
"Saddleback Church in Lake Forest draws that type of crowd."
It took several years and numerous memos and e-mails, but editors
finally agreed in 1998 to let me write "Getting Religion," a weekly
column about faith in Orange County.
I felt like all the tumblers of my life had clicked. I had a strong
marriage, great kids and a new column. I attributed it all to God's
grace.
First as a columnist and then as a reporter, I never had a shortage of
topics. I wrote about an elderly church organist who became a
spiritual mentor to the man who tried to rape, rob and kill her. About
the Orthodox Jewish mother who developed a line of modest clothing for
Barbie dolls. About the hardy group of Mormons who rode covered wagons
800 miles from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, replicating their
ancestors' journey to Southern California.
Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism, with its low-key evangelism and deep
ritual, increasingly appealed to me. I loved its long history and
loving embrace of liberals and conservatives, immigrants and the
established, the rich and poor.
My wife was raised in the Catholic Church and had wanted me to join
for years. I signed up for yearlong conversion classes at a Newport
Beach parish that would end with an Easter eve ceremony ushering
newcomers into the church.
By then I had been on the religion beat for three years. I couldn't
wait to get to work each day or, on Sunday, to church.
IN 2001, about six months before the Catholic clergy sex scandal broke
nationwide, the dioceses of Orange and Los Angeles paid a record $5.2
million to a law student who said he had been molested, as a student
at Santa Margarita High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, by his
principal, Msgr. Michael Harris.
Without admitting guilt, Harris agreed to leave the priesthood. As
part of the settlement, the dioceses also were forced to radically
change how they handled sexual abuse allegations, including a promise
to kick out any priest with a credible molestation allegation in his
past. It emerged that both dioceses had many known molesters on duty.
Los Angeles had two convicted pedophiles still working as priests.
While reporting the Harris story, I learned - from court records and
interviews - the lengths to which the church went to protect the
priest. When Harris took an abrupt leave of absence as principal at
Santa Margarita in January 1994, he issued a statement saying it was
because of "stress." He resigned a month later.
His superiors didn't tell parents or students the real reason for his
absence: Harris had been accused of molesting a student while he was
principal at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana from 1977 to 1979;
church officials possessed a note from Harris that appeared to be a
confession; and they were sending him to a treatment center.
In September 1994, a second former student stepped forward, this time
publicly, and filed a lawsuit. In response, parents and students held
a rally for Harris at the school, singing, "For He's a Jolly Good
Fellow." An airplane towed a banner overhead that read "We Love Father
Harris."
By this time, church leaders possessed a psychological report in which
Catholic psychiatrists diagnosed Harris as having an attraction to
adolescents and concluded that he likely had molested multiple boys.
(Harris, who has denied the allegations, now stands accused of
molesting 12 boys, according to church records.) But they didn't step
forward to set the record straight. Instead, a diocesan spokesman
called Harris an "icon of the priesthood."
Harris' top defense attorney, John Barnett, lashed out at the priest's
accusers in the media, calling them "sick individuals." Again, church
leaders remained silent as the alleged victims were savaged. Some of
the diocese's top priests - including the cleric in charge of
investigating the accusations - threw a going-away party for Harris.
At the time, I never imagined Catholic leaders would engage in a
widespread practice that protected alleged child molesters and
belittled the victims. I latched onto the explanation that was least
damaging to my belief in the Catholic Church - that this was an
isolated case of a morally corrupt administration.
And I was comforted by the advice of a Catholic friend: "Keep your
eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the
altar."
IN late 2001, I traveled to Salt Lake City to attend a conference of
former Mormons. These people lived mostly in the Mormon Jell-O belt -
Utah, Idaho, Arizona - so-named because of the plates of Jell-O that
inevitably appear at Mormon gatherings.
They found themselves ostracized in their neighborhoods, schools and
careers. Often, they were dead to their own families.
"If Mormons associate with you, they think they will somehow become
contaminated and lose their faith too," Suzy Colver told me. "It's
almost as if people who leave the church don't exist."
The people at the conference were an eclectic bunch: novelists and
stay-at-home moms, entrepreneurs and cartoonists, sex addicts and
alcoholics. Some were depressed, others angry, and a few had
successfully moved on. But they shared a common thread: They wanted to
be honest about their lack of faith and still be loved.
In most pockets of Mormon culture, that wasn't going to happen.
Part of what drew me to Christianity were the radical teachings of
Jesus - to love your enemy, to protect the vulnerable and to lovingly
bring lost sheep back into the fold.
As I reported the story, I wondered how faithful Mormons - many of
whom rigorously follow other biblical commands such as giving 10% of
their income to the church - could miss so badly on one of Jesus'
primary lessons?
As part of the Christian family, I felt shame for my religion. But I
still compartmentalized it as an aberration - the result of sinful
behavior that infects even the church.
IN early 2002, I was assigned to work on the Catholic sex scandal
story as it erupted across the nation. I also continued to attend
Sunday Mass and conversion classes on Sunday mornings and Tuesday
nights.
Father Vincent Gilmore - the young, intellectually sharp priest
teaching the class - spoke about the sex scandal and warned us
Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics.
Otherwise, we'd be committing "spiritual suicide."
As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the
victims - people usually in their 30s, 40s and up - should have just
gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of
them were needlessly stuck in the past.
But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the
victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term "sexual abuse" is
a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by
someone they and their family believed was Christ's representative on
Earth. That's not something an 8-year-old's mind can process; it
forever warps a person's sexuality and spirituality.
Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of
abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to
another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families
into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few
instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to
escape prosecution.
I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies - many of
them right there on their own stationery - out of my head. I had been
in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes,
other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different - the
children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so
sick and bishops so corrupt.
The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my
hands.
I sought solace in another belief: that a church's heart is in the
pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my
stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God's house. Instead,
I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested
children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering
them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often
to their faces.
On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched
congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime
pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred
that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people
of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in
the crowd, an Orange County sheriff's deputy, spoke out for the
victim.
On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn't belong to the Catholic
Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn't go
through with the rite of conversion.
I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But
in a way, that was the point. I didn't see these institutions drenched
in God's spirit. Shouldn't religious organizations, if they were God-
inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government,
corporations and other groups in society?
I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few
months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going
altogether.
SOME of the nation's most powerful pastors - including Billy Graham,
Robert H. Schuller and Greg Laurie - appear on the Trinity
Broadcasting Network, benefiting from TBN's worldwide reach while
looking past the network's reliance on the "prosperity gospel" to fuel
its growth.
TBN's creed is that if viewers send money to the network, God will
repay them with great riches and good health. Even people deeply in
debt are encouraged to put donations on credit cards.
"If you have been healed or saved or blessed through TBN and have not
contributed ... you are robbing God and will lose your reward in
heaven," Paul Crouch, co-founder of the Orange County-based network,
once told viewers. Meanwhile, Crouch and his wife, Jan, live like
tycoons.
I began looking into TBN after receiving some e-mails from former
devotees of the network. Those people had given money to the network
in hopes of getting a financial windfall from God. That didn't work.
By then, I started to believe that God was calling me, as he did St.
Francis of Assisi, to "rebuild his church" - not in some grand way
that would lead to sainthood but by simply reporting on corruption
within the church body.
I spent several years investigating TBN and pored through stacks of
documents - some made available by appalled employees - showing the
Crouches eating $180-per-person meals; flying in a $21-million
corporate jet; having access to 30 TBN-owned homes across the country,
among them a pair of Newport Beach mansions and a ranch in Texas. All
paid for with tax-free donor money.
One of the stars of TBN and a major fundraiser is the self-proclaimed
faith healer Benny Hinn. I attended one of his two-day "Miracle
Crusades" at what was then the Pond of Anaheim. The arena was packed
with sick people looking for a cure.
My heart broke for the hundreds of people around me in wheelchairs or
in the final stages of terminal diseases, believing that if God deemed
their faith strong enough, they would be healed that night.
Hinn tells his audiences that a generous cash gift to his ministry
will be seen by God as a sign of true faith. This has worked well for
the televangelist, who lives in an oceanfront mansion in Dana Point,
drives luxury cars, flies in private jets and stays in the best
hotels.
At the crusade, I met Jordie Gibson, 21, who had flown from Calgary,
Canada, to Anaheim because he believed that God, through Hinn, could
get his kidneys to work again.
He was thrilled to tell me that he had stopped getting dialysis
because Hinn had said people are cured only when they "step out in
faith." The decision enraged his doctors, but made perfect sense to
Gibson. Despite risking his life as a show of faith, he wasn't cured
in Anaheim. He returned to Canada and went back on dialysis. The crowd
was filled with desperate believers like Gibson.
I tried unsuccessfully to get several prominent mainstream pastors who
appeared on TBN to comment on the prosperity gospel, Hinn's "faith
healing" or the Crouches' lifestyle.
Like the Catholic bishops, I assumed, they didn't want to risk what
they had.
AS the stories piled up, I began to pray with renewed vigor, but it
felt like I wasn't connecting to God. I started to feel silly even
trying.
I read accounts of St. John of the Cross and his "dark night of the
soul," a time he believed God was testing him by seemingly withdrawing
from his life. Maybe this was my test.
I met with my former Presbyterian pastor, John Huffman, and told him
what I was feeling. I asked him if I could e-mail him some tough
questions about Christianity and faith and get his answers. He agreed
without hesitation.
The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to
bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God
get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why
do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he's never
been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?
In one e-mail, I asked John, who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an
atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents
dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to
understand?
He sent back a long reply that concluded:
"My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is
in charge. He knows what I don't know. And frankly, if I'm totally
honest with you, a life of gratitude is one that bows before the
Sovereign God arguing with Him on those things that trouble me,
lamenting the losses of life, but ultimately saying, 'You, God, are
infinite; I'm human and finite.' "
John is an excellent pastor, but he couldn't reach me. For some time,
I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and
infinitely loving God with what I saw, but I was losing ground. I
wondered if my born-again experience at the mountain retreat was more
about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability than
being touched by Jesus.
And I considered another possibility: Maybe God didn't exist.
TOWARD the end of my tenure as a religion reporter, I traveled to
Nome, Alaska. Sitting in a tiny visitor's room, I studied the sad,
round face of the Eskimo in front of me and tried to imagine how much
he hated being confined to jail.
Peter "Packy" Kobuk was from a remote village on St. Michael Island in
western Alaska. There natives lived, in many ways, just as their
ancestors did 10,000 years ago. Smells of the outdoor life hung heavy
in his village: the salt air, the strips of salmon drying on racks,
the seaweed washed up on the beach.
But for now, Packy could smell only the disinfectants used to scrub
the concrete floors at the Anvil Mountain Correction Center.
Unfortunately, alcohol and a violent temper had put Packy there many
times in his 46 years. For his latest assault, he was serving three
months.
The short, powerfully built man folded his calloused hands on the
table. I was surprised to see a homemade rosary hanging from his neck,
the blue beads held together by string from a fishing net.
I had come from Southern California to report on a generation of
Eskimo boys who had been molested by a Catholic missionary. All of the
now-grown Eskimos I had interviewed over the past week had lost their
faith. In fact, several of them confessed that they fantasized daily
about burning down the village church, where the unspeakable acts took
place.
But there was Packy with his rosary.
"Why do you still believe?" I asked.
"It's not God's work what happened to me," he said softly, running his
fingers along the beads. "They were breaking God's commandments - even
the people who didn't help. They weren't loving their neighbors as
themselves."
He said he regularly got down on his knees in his jail cell to pray.
"A lot of people make fun of me, asking if the Virgin Mary is going to
rescue me," Packy said. "Well, I've gotten helped more times from the
Virgin Mary through intercession than from anyone else. I won't stop.
My children need my prayers."
Tears spilled from his eyes. Packy's faith, though severely tested,
had survived.
I looked at him with envy. Where he found comfort, I was finding
emptiness.
IN the summer of 2005, I reported from a Multnomah County, Ore.,
courtroom on the story of an unemployed mother - impregnated by a
seminary student 13 years earlier - who was trying to get increased
child support for her sickly 12-year-old son.
The boy's father, Father Arturo Uribe, took the witness stand. The
priest had never seen or talked with his son. He even had trouble
properly pronouncing the kid's name. Uribe confidently offered the
court a simple reason as to why he couldn't pay more than $323 a month
in child support.
"The only thing I own are my clothes," he told the judge.
His defense - orchestrated by a razor-sharp attorney paid for by his
religious order - boiled down to this: I'm a Roman Catholic priest,
I've taken a vow of poverty, and child-support laws can't touch me.
The boy's mother, Stephanie Collopy, couldn't afford a lawyer. She
stumbled badly acting as her own attorney. It went on for three hours.
"It didn't look that great," Stephanie said afterward, wiping tears
from her eyes. "It didn't sound that great ... but at least I stood up
for myself."
The judge ruled in the favor of Uribe, then pastor of a large parish
in Whittier. After the hearing, when the priest's attorney discovered
I had been there, she ran back into the courtroom and unsuccessfully
tried to get the judge to seal the case. I could see why the priest's
lawyer would try to cover it up. People would be shocked at how
callously the church dealt with a priest's illegitimate son who needed
money for food and medicine.
My problem was that none of that surprised me anymore.
As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I
felt used up and numb.
My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago - probably
around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in
denial, had finally caught up.
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded,
requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of
faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into
existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state
of your soul.
Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my
wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the
paper.