John L. Allen Jr., Catholic Journalism’s Balancing Act, Leaves A Lasting Void
(ANALYSIS) The Boston Globe headline was blunt: “Church allowed abuse by priest for years.”
This massive investigation into sexual abuse by Catholic clergy won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, forcing major newsrooms to cover a scandal that had festered for decades. The shockwaves continued in Boston and, more than a decade later, The Globe began a website — Crux (Latin for “cross”) — to cover Catholic news.
Reporter John L. Allen Jr. was a pivotal figure in that project since he was already an established expert on all the roads that lead to Rome. However, Crux quickly showed that the news was there, the readers were there, but the dollars didn't add up — yet.
Allen got the green light to create an independent Crux, which launched on April 1, 2016. The question was whether he could build a coalition of donors and organizations — the Knights of Columbus, for example — that would support real journalism.
Truth is, the “people on the other side of the deal have to believe in what you are doing and see the wisdom of becoming part of your brand,” Allen told me at that time, via telephone from Rome. “Your partners also have to be smart enough to realize that a key part of your brand is that you are seen — by your readers — as being truly independent.”
The bottom line: Allen was a journalist who was a Catholic and an active Catholic who was a real journalist, and he fought to balance that equation in his daily reporting, his 11 books and his commentary for CNN, CBS and others. His death on Jan. 22, after a long battle with cancer, left a strategic hole in Catholic life. His funeral Mass was celebrated on Monday at the Basilica of Sant'Eugenio in Rome. He was 61.
When describing the "brand" he wanted, Allen stressed this word — “balance.” In an early update to Crux 2.0 readers, he wrote: “We're unambiguously committed to the teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church. We believe the Church, for all of its undeniable failures and challenges, is fundamentally a force for good in the world. ... We also believe deeply in that famous line from Chesterton: 'Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.’ ... My personal definition of success will be if, over the long haul, smart readers have a hard time saying whether they find us 'liberal' or 'conservative.’”
The news of Allen's death led to tributes and expressions of sorrow across the wide spectrum of church politics and doctrine in online Catholicism.
Robert Moynihan, of the conservative Inside the Vatican website, hailed Allen as “the leading English-speaking Vaticanist of our time.” Through the years, he added, “I came to respect him deeply for his honesty, his balance, his courage, and his very hard work.”
Allen broke big stories, even when it was “difficult to contact people and to get them to talk about the story.”
At the same time, wrote Moynihan, Allen was a “man with a passion for what is good, true, and beautiful, and a man of faith, hope, and love — so, a man of the classical universals, and of the three Christian theological virtues.”
It is almost impossible to describe Allen's "omnipresence" in Catholic journalism in recent decades, noted Father James Martin, a Jesuit who, through his cooperation with Pope Francis, has become Catholicism's best-known activist on LGBTQ+ issues.
Often, Allen “seemed to be everywhere at once,” noted Martin on Facebook. “John's knowledge of the Vatican and of church history, as well as his familiarity with everyone from a cardinal-prefect of a Vatican dicastery to the newest papal appointee in a far-flung diocese, was nothing short of encyclopedic.”
Religion Unplugged editor Clemente Lisi, my colleague in numerous journalism education projects, praised Allen's positive impact in “a world where reporters cover the Vatican more like a political state rather than a religious institution.”
After decades in Rome, Allen “explained things — both fairly and with plenty of context — to a world largely unfamiliar with how the Vatican works. ... He was the one who could tell readers not only what was happening, but why it mattered and why people might disagree about it.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.