It looks like the pro-choice, same-sex marriage, and women’s ordination advocates may have to find another site to vent their anger at the Catholic Church now that their loudest mouthpiece, the National Catholic Reporter, has laid off some of their biggest allies in their fight against the unchanging truths of the Church.
In a tweet on June 18, Heidi Schlumpf, former senior editor at the progressive publication announced:
After 16 years with the National Catholic Reporter (as a columnist, correspondent and executive editor/VP), I have been laid off for financial reasons. I’m proud of the work I did and will be taking some time before deciding what’s next.
Just prior to that, on May 30, National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent, Christopher White, penned an article on the NCR site revealing that after four years in Rome, and a total of six years with NCR, he was “bidding farewell” to the Roman cafés and Vatican culture.
Ever faithful to the NCR ideology of “progressive reform,” White continues to advocate for change in the Church that he converted to. Recently, White cited a New York Times piece suggesting that “Leo’s multicultural background could help turbocharge some long-overdue Vatican reforms.” Maintaining that he will continue to write about the Pope Leo papacy for NCR from his new perch at Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, White laments that he will have to do so “from afar—likely with more mediocre wine and coffee than I enjoyed at these fine cafes that have served as my second offices around the Vatican and where I came to better understand its culture.” It is uncertain whether NCR will post another journalist in Rome.
Many faithful Catholics—including the bishops who have unsuccessfully attempted to stop what they viewed as the heretical views published at NCR—suggest that the publication has never really understood the teachings and the culture of the Catholic Church. Instead, the publication has spent much of its time trying to change those teachings by changing the culture from one of faithfulness to one of dissent.
The presiding bishop of Kansas City at the time of NCR’s founding, Bishop Charles Helmsing— who initially authorized NCR’s existence—condemned the paper in 1968, demanding it remove the word “Catholic” from its name. Helmsing claimed that NCR had a “policy of crusading against the Church’s teachings” and considered it a “poisonous character.”
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