The editor of America, Drew Christiansen, SJ, has a knockdown post on last week’s meeting between Obama and select members of the Catholic press (and one WaPo religion writer). It’s a particular examen of the profession and the church rather than Obama. Father Christiansen is rightly (to my biased mind) laudatory of daily wordsmiths like Pat Zapor of Catholic News Service–a top-notch outfit that is undervalued and underfunded. Those who can, write on deadline. Those who can’t, criticize them.

But Christiansen’s most incisive words are for a fellow participant, Fr. Owen Kearns, publisher of National Catholic Register, the newspaper of the right-wing Legionaries of Christ. I’d heard that Father Kearns laid something of an egg with his question-accusation to Obama, but Christiansen has the full story:

Fr. Owen Kearns, L.C., publisher and editor in chief of The National Catholic Register, wanted to press the president on the anti-Catholicism in his administration. Citing a line in the president’s Cairo address about hiding hostility to religion behind the pretense of liberalism, Father Kearns asked whether the administration didn’t harbor anti-Catholic sentiment. The president asked for specifics, and Fr. Kearns identified Joshua Du Bois, the director of the White House Office for Faith-based and Neighborhood Initiatives, as an offender. Rev. DuBois, Fr. Kearns alleged had called the pope “a discredited leader.”Kearns added that the president had backed him up.

The Rev. DuBois, sitting directly behind Father Kearns, denied the accusation and identified the offender as Harry Knox, an outside advisor to the office, who is the religious liaison for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay and lesbian organization. It was the first the president had heard of the incident, and he had never backed up such an offending statement.

Journalists should know that if you are going to call an official out to his face you ought to have your facts straight. But nothing can deter the Catholic right’s idee fixe that Barack Obama is bound and determined to do the worst he can by the pro-life agenda., even when their position is shown up as empty prejudice as it was that morning.

Michael Sean Winters, though he didn’t participate in the round robin and, as far as I know, didn’t have access to the full transcript, gave the president a ‘B’. It is not exactly clear to me why. But, I am sure it grabbed readers’ eyes. Our meeting wasn’t a philosophy seminar, as MSW seemed to understand. Was it simply because the president couldn’t grant everything we Catholics would ask on the abortion question? That seems inappropriate for journalists to expect from any politician.

There were only two questions related to abortion. One on the conscience clause and one on the committee searching for common ground. The president’s response to the first was in the affirmative, but the specific policy is still under review, and in the case of the committee, though it has been corresponding and holding conference calls, its first meeting will only take place sometime soon. On both counts, it seems we will have to wait to see how the president and his team score on a Catholic test.

The weakness in the meeting, it seemed to me, was on our side. Only two journalists’ questions dealt with the president’s meeting with the pope and the broader international agenda they anticipate discussing–the reason the White House had brought us there. We Catholic journalists were preoccupied, I am afraid, with American Catholic politics. We couldn’t see beyond the eastern seaboard, it seemed. Perhaps the appearance Tuesday of Pope Benedict’s new social encyclical will open our eyes to the global responsibilities both pope and president want us to address.

The current president has cited the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin before, most recently in his speech at Notre Dame: ”He was a kind and good and wise man,” Barack Obama said then of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. “A saintly man.”

And the “Common Ground” approach of Chicago’s Bernardin and Chicago’s Obama have great resonances. At a meeting this morning with eight [mainly] Catholic journalists ahead of his meeting next week with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, Obama invoked Bernardin again–and, as the WaPost’s Jackie Salmon writes, he “promised a ‘robust’ federal policy protecting health-care workers who have moral objections to performing some procedures.” (I think that’s the sound of another anti-Obama talking point falling.)

Tim Drake at the National Catholic Register has a write-up (the other NCR was also there, represented by editor Joe Feuerherd) based on a conversation with his publisher, Father Owen Kearns, who attended:

“The most noteworthy thing during the meeting was his dispelling of what you might call the expectation of the worst regarding conscience clauses,” said Father Kearns. “He said that the confusion regarding the issue was due to the timing of everything rather than what he was going to do. His administration saw the previous administration’s 11th-hour change as problematic, and so they undid that. He said that in Illinois he was a supporter of a robust conscience clause, something he reiterated in his Notre Dame speech. He added that the government has received hundreds of thousands of public comments and he promised that there would be a robust conscious clause protection in place, and that it would not be weaker than President Bush’s 11th hour change. Still, he added, it won’t please everybody.”

In addition, Father Kearns noted the president’s analysis of the divide in Catholicism.

“The president said he had fond memories of Cardinal Bernardin and that when he started his neighborhood project, they were funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development,” he said. “After the first question, from the National Catholic Reporter‘s Joe Feuerherd, the president jokingly asked, ‘Was there really [a controversy at Notre Dame]?’”

“The president spoke about how during Cardinal Bernardin’s time the U.S. bishops spoke about the nuclear freeze, the sanctuary movement, immigration, and the poor, but that later a decided change took place,” added Father Kearns. “He said that the responses to his administration mirror the tensions in the Church overall, but that Cardinal Bernardin was pro-life and never hesitated to make his views known, but he had a consistent ‘seamless garment’ approach that emphasized the other issues as well. The president said that that part of the Catholic tradition continues to inspire him. Those issues, he said, seemed to have gotten buried by the abortion debate.”

Paul Baumann represented Commonweal and he may have more at some point. Joe Feuerherd also has these bits just in:

Asked whether he sometimes felt he has been “dragged into a largely intra-Catholic family fight” on issues that divide liberal and conservative Catholics, Obama again recalled Bernardin’s example, particularly as it relates to the “seamless garment” of life issues the late cardinal saw as integral to Catholic teaching.

“Cardinal Bernardin was strongly pro-life, never shrank away from talking about that issue, but was very consistent in talking about a seamless garment and a range of issues that were part and parcel of what he considered to be pro-life, that meant that he was concerned about poverty, he was concerned about how children were treated, he was concerned about the death penalty, he was concerned about foreign policy.

“And that part of the Catholic tradition is something that continues to inspire me. And I think that there have been times over the last decade or two where that more holistic tradition feels like it’s gotten buried under the abortion debate.”

The president continued, “Now, as a non-Catholic, it’s not up to me to try to resolve those tensions. As I said, all I can do is to affirm how that other tradition has made me, a non-Catholic, I think reflect on how I can be a better person and has had a powerful influence on my life. And that tells me that it might be a powerful way to move a broader set of values forward in American life generally.”

Meantime, Pat Zapor at CNS was also there and reports in:

Obama said his encounters with the cardinal continue to influence him, particularly his “seamless garment” approach to a multitude of social justice issues. He also told the group of eight reporters to expect a conscience clause protection for health care workers currently under review by the administration that will be no less protective than what existed previously.

In addition to Catholic News Service, the round table included reporters and editors from other Catholic publications: National Catholic Reporter, America magazine, Catholic Digest, National Catholic Register, Commonweal magazine and Vatican Radio. The religion writer from The Washington Post also participated.

SNIP

“>Obama said in some ways he sees his first meeting with the pope as the same as any contact with a head of state, “but obviously this is more than just that. The Catholic Church has such a profound influence worldwide and in our country, and the Holy Father is a thought leader and opinion leader on so many wide-ranging issues. His religious influence is one that extends beyond the Catholic Church.”

He said he considers it a great honor to be meeting with the pope and that he hopes the session will lead to further cooperation between the Vatican and the United States in addressing Middle East peace, worldwide poverty, climate change, immigration and a whole host of other issues.

Several of the questions addressed the sometimes contentious relations between the Obama administration and some U.S. bishops, notably surrounding the president’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in May. The university’s decision to invite Obama and present him with an honorary degree led to a wave of protests at the university and a flurry of criticism by more than 70 bishops who said his support for legal abortion made him an inappropriate choice by the university.

Statements by the U.S. bishops also have chastised Obama for administrative actions such as the reversal of the Mexico City policy, which had prohibited the use of federal family planning funds by organizations that provide abortions or counsel women to have abortions.

But Obama said he’s not going to be deterred from continuing to work with the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, in part “because I’m president of all Americans, not just Americans who happen to agree with me.”

“The American bishops have profound influence in their communities, in the church and beyond,” Obama said. “What I would say is that although there have been criticisms leveled at me from some of the bishops, there have been a number of bishops who have been extremely generous and supportive even if they don’t agree with me on every issue.”

He said part of why he wants to establish a good working relationship with the bishops is because he has fond memories of working with Cardinal Bernardin when Obama was a community organizer, working with Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago.

“And so I know the potential that the bishops have to speak out forcefully on issues of social justice,” Obama said.

It’s interesting that if Bernardin was something of a prophet without honor in his own country–his common ground initiative met sharp resistance from his fellow cardinals–his ideas and spirit live on elsewhere. Salt of the earth, as Joseph Ratzinger (and someone before him) once put it.

Will Obama’s Bernardinesque approach work for America, or American Catholics?

(Above is White House photo via NCRegister)