Sullivan ignores that no protocol was broken by the Pope on Obama, and that if she thinks the oft quoted L’Osservatore Romano article on Obama’s 100 first days reflects how the Vatican feels about Obama, she should read what the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, another Vatican dicastery, had to say about him.
But the most surprising quote from Sullivan’s article is this:
"Obama is broadly popular among American Catholics, 67% of whom gave him a positive approval rating in a recent Pew poll. At a time when the U.S. Catholic Church is losing members — a separate Pew study found that for every American who joins the Catholic Church, four others leave — Benedict may not be willing to test the costs of opposing Obama."
What? Is Sullivan suggesting that the Pope is afraid of losing Catholics by confronting Obama? The same Pope who had no problem in rejecting condoms to fight AIDS in Africa, thus angering the whole secular world and part of the lukewarm Catholic one as well?
No wonder, Damian Thompson, the top religious blogger at "The Telegraph," describes Time’s piece as "a thoroughly biased article by Amy Sullivan which dismisses the unprecedented Catholic opposition to Obama's commencement address as the work of, wouldn't you just know it, ‘a small but vocal group of conservative Catholics.’"
According to Thompson, "‘Small but vocal group’ is the media's code for a protest that offends them. You rarely see small but vocal groups of liberals described thus."
"Amy Sullivan –Thompson continues- isn't above a bit of wedge-driving herself, by the way. She implies that the Vatican is laid back about Notre Dame's decision, unlike Cardinals George, DiNardo, Stafford and Archbishop Dolan. No, it isn't. The Pope, for perfectly good reasons, is leaving the protests to the local Church rather than turn Fr. John Jenkins' disastrous invitation into an international diplomatic incident."
Catholic blogger Amy Welborn, for her part, provides some good advice for budding journalists: "the Sullivan special is where you claim some special knowledge that is not shared in detail with readers. It may be conservatives secretly giving her, a liberal reporter, information off the record that miraculously supports her point. Or maybe it's just a personal interpretation of data. It's kind of hard to know how seriously to take these anonymous sources since they appear so frequently in Sullivan's pieces and always in favor of the point she's so obviously trying to make."
Welborn finally poses the right question: "how does the ‘reporter’ ‘reporting’ on the story for a ‘news magazine’ not manage to speak with a single, solitary person in favor of the campaign? Is Sullivan's advocacy so fragile that she can't actually discuss the topic with someone who doesn't share her views? Does she need help locating the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops? She should just follow this hard-to-find link for better sources on future stories."
Of course, there is the temptation to provide a fairly easy answer to Sullivan’s mishap… but that would definitively be a bad example for interns to come.