Scribblers as honest brokers

There’s a great story about the late Cardinal John Foley—the long-serving Vatican hand who headed the now-defunct Pontifical Council for Social Communications from 1984 until 2007 before becoming the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre—ordained by Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia in the early ‘60s and every bit a Philadelphian.

When my son was a toddler, we ran into him in the airport—I don’t remember if it was coming or going—or which side of the Atlantic we were even on, but we were at the gate and I saw him and called to him, “Archbishop Foley!” and nudged my boy ahead of me to introduce him. He sort of half-recognized me from Roman circles and asked the boy’s name. “Joseph,” the boy offered.

“May he have your blessing?” I asked. Foley blessed him, and me, and then beat it with as much haste as was decent, and the next time I actually saw him it was several years later and he either had a red hat or knew he was about to get one.

He answered his own phone when I rang his office at the KHS headquarters across the street from Vatican Radio to ask for an interview. “Come over now,” he said, “I’ll be free in five minutes.” I grabbed a recording mic and ran out the door, reaching his with just about a minute to spare.

My mic wasn’t working, though I’d checked the batteries twice on the way and even brought spares just in case. I swapped them, no dice. I was mortified. He was all business.

He pulled out his black book pocket agenda, examined it, and said, “Come back tomorrow,” he said, and I think he indicated some hour of the afternoon.

That was it.

I was there, and boy, can you bet I had my gear checked nine ways to Sunday.

We talked for about an hour, if I recall, but I can’t for the life of me recall why I was interviewing him that day.

I know that at some point I asked him about the story he’d told to CNS, of the day Pope Benedict XVI announced his name along with those of 23 others slated to receive the red hat. Foley was wearing civvies because he’d been to the doctor and got to the square late, and stood next to pilgrims, one of whom asked him if he knew any names on the list?

“Quite a few,” Foley replied, mentioning that his own was among them. “I don’t think he believed me,” he added to CNS.

Those are two stories about Cardinal Foley, I suppose, but neither of them is the one I want to tell.

See, Foley was a scribbler.

He was a journalist—a Rome beat reporter, in fact—and later editor of the Philadelphia archdiocesan paper. When Foley was a young priest, he accompanied Cardinal Krol—who’d taken the then-Fr. Foley under his wing—to Egypt. Krol received an invitation to take a camel ride, and asked Foley whether he ought to accept. Foley counseled him against it. Krol accepted, anyway.

Foley snapped a picture of Krol, mounted and wearing a tropical white cassock and the local headgear. The photo made it into the archdiocesan paper and then made the rounds, causing something of a stir. Krol asked him why he took the picture after counseling him against the ride?

Those were heady days, in the mid-‘70s, with tensions high across the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict driving them. Such an image was bound to stir the pot.

Foley explained that he’d given his best advice as a priest to his superior, but when his superior decided to keep his own counsel and take a ride, Foley the journalist captured the moment in a photograph.

It’s hard to have one’s feet in two worlds, and the man who became Cardinal Foley couldn’t possibly have kept perfect balance every time, but I’ve always found that story edifying as well as delightful.

When Liev Schreiber’s Marty Baron meets another US cardinal, Bernard Law of Boston, in Spotlight, in Law’s study, the cardinal—played by the great Canadian character actor, Leonard Cariou—tells him, “I find that this city flourishes when its great institutions work together.”

“Thank you,” Schreiber’s Baron says. “Personally,” he continues, “I’m of the opinion that for a paper to best perform its function, it needs to stand alone.”

Who was right?

My sympathies are with Foley the newsman and Schreiber’s Baron, but the fact is that journalists aren’t supposed to answer that question or any question like it. Reporters are supposed to say what happened. Analysts say what it means—or could mean—or what it looks like, or how it fits into the big picture that nobody really likes, but everyone needs to see.

Even when scribblers write commentary, they’re offering partial takes on things about which they know, and ought at all times to be honest brokers who give everyone a fair shake, because the job is to shine a light, make folks look in a mirror, and sometimes hold feet to the fire, and those feet are always feet of clay, just like the ones that sometimes try to stride two worlds.