Context is such a help. My report that the Vatican is due to respond positively and very soon to the dialogue appeal by 138 Muslim scholars was based on several conversations these days in Rome with cardinals and Vatican officials. Our news stories have to pare comments down to the essential quote to keep the story to a manageable length. Adding more context to some of those comments can give a better feel for the way these leading Catholic figures view the Muslim letter.

The cardinals discussed the issue on Friday. The Vatican said: “Some speakers dealt with relations with Jews and with Islam. There was discussion of the encouraging sign represented by the letter of 138 Muslim personalities and of the visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to the Holy Father.” So we had a fact (”discussion”), a hint (”encouraging”) but nothing more than that.

Asking around, I got three cardinals who spoke about this on the record. Each deals with Islam in one way or another. Senegal is 95-percent Muslim, France has Europe’s largest Muslim minority and mostly Hindu India’s Muslims are a minority (13 percent of the population) but a larger one than its Christians (2 percent).

Note the way Dakar Cardinal Théodore-Adrien Saar insists the Church cannot miss this opportunity, an interesting point given the fact the Vatican’s hesitation raised concern that it might just have that effect:

“The Vatican will respond positively, and quite soon. We are very sensitive to this letter because we see in it a very positive sign. Rest assured we will not miss this opportunity to go further with them. When I heard about this, I was very pleased. It’s what we do in Senegal. We have a very good dialogue with the Muslims. So that would be reinforced by this. Seeing the Muslims of the Arab world taking a stand like this, asking for a dialogue with Christianity, that’s very positive for us. Yesterday, at the consistory, it came out that the response is being prepared. We are determined, in the Catholic Church, to seize the occasion to see all that we do with them. There will be a meeting with them to clarify what they want to do. After that, we’ll see what we can do.”

That last comment was more context — the plan seems to be that the Vatican will invite a small group of the letter’s signatories to meet Catholic leaders to figure out the way forward.

Mumbai’s Cardinal Oswald Gracias (his name is pronounced “gracious”) had an interesting way to react to the appeal. He put it into a religious context, something that seems natural but has not stood out much in the responses and seems to add weight:

“I think it’s a positive sign. It brings out many areas of commonality … In that sense, it’s a great step forward. I think it’s something we should build on. I’m absolutely delighted, happy. I think it’s an opportunity the Lord has given us and put in the hearts of people to work together. It’s a need of the times to work together. We discussed it a bit (in the cardinals’ meeting). It’s positive. All of us are happy.”

The Archdiocese of Paris reserved a terrace with one of Rome’s best views of St. Peter’s for Cardinal André Vingt-Trois to do some quick Q&As with French television after the consistory (I guess if you have Notre Dame de Paris as your home church, you don’t settle for just any backdrop!). He didn’t warm up to their soft questions but came straight to the point when I asked about the Muslim letter:

“It’s a very important element. It’s one of the rare times that Muslim leaders have taken a public initiative in a respectful, official and public way towards Christians. I remember a few years ago how we regretted that there weren’t any Muslim leaders who could take a public position, for example against terrorism. Furthermore, this is a significant step, an assumption of responsibility, with a content that’s quite interesting. The Holy See, which is only one of the addressees, is preparing a response that will be sent … when it is ready. This demands a lot of reflection. In France, this is very important. We try to maintain cordial relations with Muslim believers. What is more difficult is to identify the organisational and institutional leaders of Islam. Some are well known, but with others it’s not clear.”

Another element of context has come in from across the Atlantic. On November 18, the New York Times published a full-page ad in which more than 300 Christian leaders expressed their full support for the dialogue call (which is officially entitled A Common Word). The signatories just about cover the spectrum of Protestantism, an interesting aspect in itself. The statement was initiated by Yale Divinity School, which described it this way:

“Joining the Yale Divinity School scholars are Christians at various points on the theological spectrum, including, for example: Rick Warren, evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA and author of The Purpose Driven Life, and Harold Masback III of The Congregational Church of New Canaan in Connecticut; William Graham, dean of Harvard Divinity School, and Richard Mouw, president of evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary; John M. Buchanan of The Christian Century, a mainline Protestant publication, and David Neff of the evangelical flagship publication Christianity Today; Diana Eck of Harvard Divinity School and Marguerite Shuster of Fuller Theological Seminary.

“The Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s (director Miroslav) Volf, author of ‘The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World’ and described by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as ‘one of the most celebrated theologians of our day’, said: ‘The extent of agreement of major Christian leaders—representing a broad diversity of positions——in responding to the Muslim initiative is truly extraordinary, and may represent a sea-change in relations of Christians to Muslims.

“ ‘Evangelicals and liberals can now join in common effort, not just around the pressing problems of poverty and environmental degradation but around the issue of Muslim Christian relations—a defining issue of the 21^st century. This has the potential of being one of the most hopeful developments in inter-faith relations in recent decades.’ ”

During the cardinals’ meeting on Friday, London Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor repeated a call he’s made in the past for a broad meeting of the main Christian leaders. The word going around is that Pope Benedict politely brushed it off by saying it would be difficult to organise and not everyone would attend. Although he says ecumenism is the main goal of his papacy, Benedict has never liked these meetings where the Pope seems to be on the same level as other religious leaders.

But if any Christian-Muslim dialogue is to go ahead along the lines the 138 Muslim scholars would like, some kind of meeting of Christian leaders would probably be needed at some point. With the foot-dragging on the response to the Muslim appeal now apparently coming to an end, are we seeing the outline of a second round of foot-dragging further down the road?

You’ve probably seen on TV how reporters swarm around leaders coming out of closed-door meetings and the politicians step up to deliver their soundbites for the cameras. The Vatican held a big closed-door meeting on Friday and a wave of cardinals — the “princes of the Church” who rank among the most prominent leaders of Roman Catholicism — emerged at their lunch break to find a pack of journalists eager to pounce on them with questions. I’m in Rome for a few days and was out there waiting for them in a parking lot between St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope Paul VI Hall where they were meeting. The scene was quite different from those “normal” media scrums.

The session was a rare meeting of cardinals from around the world who are here at the Vatican for a ceremony on Saturday when 23 men “get their red hats,” i.e. join the College of Cardinals whose members under 80 years old elect the next pope. They were discussing the Catholic Church’s sensitive relations with other Christians — Orthodox they want to get closer to, Anglicans who are drifting further away, Protestants who are increasingly divided and Pentecostals who are encroaching on their flocks. These sessions presided over by Pope Benedict are supposed to remain confidential. So the men who emerged from the meeting looked and acted like anything but a bunch of politicians hoping to make it on to the evening news.

Some strode past the waiting journalists flashing half a smile and a quarter of a wave. Others found polite variations of the old “no comment”, like one who offered the (weak) joke: “If anything important had happened, you reporters would know it already.” Another walked straight up to a reporter from his home town, said he knew there was no way he could leave without talking to him, and then confessed with a smile: “But actually, I have nothing to say.”

Time passed and more silent cardinals glided by. There were dozens and dozens of them, all identically dressed in black robes with bright red buttons, sashes and skullcaps. One tall one sported a dashing cape. A shy one was nearly hidden under a kind of wide- brimmed hat that nobody outside Vatican City has worn in at least a century or three. We heard bits of talk in Polish and another language we couldn’t identify. When a gust of wind blew the skullcap off one cardinal, he cried “Halleluja!” and went scampering after it. I dutifully noted this down, not knowing if I’d get any other quotes for the day’s story.

Journalists scoured the crowd hoping to spot a familiar chatterbox. One slipped into a waiting car before any of us could reach him. The news spread quickly about the one who got away. Others just didn’t seem to be there. If the reporter was a devout Catholic, this was the time to start praying for news.

Finally, Cardinal Walter Kasper appeared and the pack converged around him. Kaspar is head of the Vatican department dealing with other Christians and had just delivered a speech on that issue, so he could speak with authority. As for confidentiality, well, we were only asking him to quote himself. Being the friendly, open man that he is, Kasper was sure to say something.

As the cardinal spoke, another ritual of Vatican reporting unfolded. The first journalist to buttonhole him started out in Kasper’s native German and he responded. But as soon as more journalists crowded around, Kasper switched to English, assuming that was the language all would understand. He outlined his speech in English, chuckling when he had to ask for a translation of an Italian term he had used in his speech. Once he got his message out in English, he fielded questions from radio and TV correspondents in French, Italian and then German again.

Speaking Italian is almost a prerequisite for the job as cardinal — this is, after all, the Roman Catholic Church. Most official documents and a lot of unofficial schmoozing among cardinals (such as before a papal election) goes on in the language of Dante. Many of them picked it up during graduate studies in Rome or an earlier stint working in the Vatican bureaucracy. Some of them, including Pope Benedict, can switch effortlessly among four or five tongues.

As for his comments, Kasper added one more piece to the puzzle about how Catholics and Orthodox Christians can work more closely in future. The Orthodox agreed in Ravenna last month — for the first time — to recognise that the Church was universal and the Bishop of Rome, i.e. the pope, is the highest-ranking figure in it. According to the hierarchy of the ancient Church, the patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul) is the second-highest. This is causing problems for the Russian Orthodox Church, which accounts for more than half the world’s 220 million Orthodox Christians and has become more active on the Christian world scene since communism collapsed in its homeland. The Patriarchate of Moscow and All Russia cannot see why it should be ranked behind the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has only a few thousand members in its church in Turkey. The Moscow Patriarchate was centuries away from its founding when the ancient Church ranked the five top patriarchates. If the agreement about the pope being the highest-ranking figure means that the Ecumenical Patriarch is automatically the second-highest, Moscow is likely to say nyet.

This is where Kasper made an interesting comment. There wasn’t enough space in the news story for the whole comment, but here it is in full: “Of course we cannot restore the system of the five patriachates of the ancient Church. We have to take seriously the Russian Orthodox Church. But what Ravenna said was that there is a universal level of the Church. That’s the first time they’ve said this. There are not only regional churches and patriarchates, but the Church on the universal level. And if one church is not in full communion on the universal level, the Church is wounded … Then Ravenna says that also, on the universal level, there is need (for) a protos , a primate, and according to the old taxis of the ancient Church, this can only be the Bishop of Rome. There is no other candidate. They recognise this. We did not say what the perogatives are, what we can and can’t do. That will be the issue of the dialogue. This is a very important step we have reached, but the way is still long.”

Hmmm. No mention of any number two slot here. Are they hoping to solve the Moscow-Istanbul rivalry by declaring that the standard by which any “victory” would be measured no longer applies in the modern world? I hestitate to write “watch this space” because progress on this will probably take years — if it comes at all. However, something’s moving there and a deal, if ever reached, could make Church history. I’ll tell you all about it if I don’t retire in the meantime.

Kasper’s comments on the Anglicans, Pentecostals and Protestants in general are in the main story.

After all this, let me ask if reporting about the Vatican confuses you. An institution like the Roman Catholic Church has so many traditions and quirks that it can take ages to get a good grasp of its complex ways. The Vatican is not undeciferible. Send in your questions and our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella and I will do our best to answer.

Italians have a wonderful phrase they use when things don’t work out as they had hoped: “It was better when it was worse.”

That was the thrust of controversial comments about the Catholic Church’s relations with Israel by Archbishop Pietro Sambi, currently the Vatican’s nuncio (ambassador) to the United States and formerly the papal envoy to the Jewish state.

Sambi, who was nuncio in Israel from 1998-2005, could not have been clearer about his discontent: “If I must be frank, relations between the Catholic Church and the state of Israel were better when there were no diplomatic relations.” That was the opening salvo in a long interview in Italian with www. terrasanta.net, an on-line publication of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.

After decades of work, Israel and the Vatican reached a fundamental accord in 1993 and established full diplomatic relations, the next year. But even when the long-awaited historic ties were forged, complex legal and financial issues about the status of the Catholic Church and its properties in Israel were left hanging on a promise and a prayer to sort them out as soon as possible afterwards.

Sambi indicated that the Vatican should have looked harder before it leaped: “The Holy See decided to establish diplomatic relations with Israel as an act of trust, leaving to promises the commitments to later on regularise concrete aspects of the life of the Catholic communities and the Church (in Israel).“

Juridical questions were ironed out in a 1997 agreement but work on financial and tax questions as well as issues of visas for foreign priests are still dragging on.

In words that were unusually blunt for a diplomat, Sambi said: “You can’t buy trust at the marketplace, it has to be consolidated with respect for accords that have been signed and fidelity to to one’s word.” In another section of the interview he lamented postponements of meetings by the Israeli delegation, the delegation’s lack of power to negotiate and what he called an absence of political will in Israel.

The whopper was perhaps this one: “The kind of trust one can place in Israel’s promises is there for everyone to see!“

Perhaps Sambi was so unguarded in venting his frustrations because the interview was given to what is a rather internal publication of the Franciscans. Perhaps he never expected it to spill over into the mainstream media.

But it was noticed.

The Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, Oded Ben-Hur, told Catholic News Service he was surprised by the comments, “especially coming from our good friend, Archbishop Sambi.“

The Vatican put out a statement (here in Italian ) saying Sambi’s words reflected his “thought and personal experience” and that the Holy See hoped for a “rapid conclusion to the important negotiations already in progress.” While some saw this as the Vatican distancing itself from Sambi, a more careful reading would perhaps be that the Vatican fully supported and appreciated what Sambi had said and done. After all, few Vatican diplomats have more personal experience in relations with Israel than Sambi.

The delegations are next due to meet December 12-13. Diplomats here are wondering whether Sambi spoke so bluntly on purpose, to push things forward. Do you think relations will be helped or hindered by these comments?

We noted here just the other day the all-but-absent ethical angle in the Daily Telegraph story about the creator of Dolly the cloned sheep and a new technique for creating stem cells without embryos. Now, we have two reports from Maggie Fox, our Health and Science Editor in Washington, that address the scientific and ethical issues.

Our story length limits meant the two had to be broken up, but they should be read in tandem.

One deals with the science:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two separate teams of researchers announced on Tuesday they had transformed ordinary skin cells into batches of cells that look and act like embryonic stem cells — but without using cloning technology and without making embryos.

The other deals with the ethics :

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists and ethicists alike welcomed the news on Tuesday that two groups had been able to reprogram ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells — the body’s ultimate master cell.

Now, that’s more like it.

Despite all the optimism, this doesn’t mean the ethical debate is over. As Maggie’s second story explains, scientists will still work on embryonic stem cells because they could prove more powerful in the end. My question in the last post was whether opponents of embryonic stem cell research would support public funding for the new technique. Now I’m wondering how the debate about funding will play out between these two techniques.

Donald Duck has been expelled from Noah’s Ark.

To be more precise, a Donald Duck film clip has been removed from a replica of Noah’s Ark in the Netherlands. That came after a local church protested that the film being shown to children visiting the ark strayed too far from the Bible story.

Some background first — a Dutch evangelical named Johan Huibers has built a 50-meter (164-feet) long replica of Noah’s Ark to teach children the Bible story that most didn’t know anymore. Finished last spring, it is about one-fifth of the size mentioned in the Bible but looks like the ship portrayed in religious art. Huibers and his staff have been docking it in Dutch port cities and towns including Amsterdam and Rotterdam for several weeks at a time so local children can visit it.

One of his teaching methods was a clip from the Walt Disney film Fantasia 2000 showing the Ark story. Donald Duck appears in it as Noah’s hapless helper, herding the animals onto the ship and busying himself with odd jobs during the voyage. In another non-Biblical twist, Daisy Duck also appears, but neither she nor Donald knows the other made it aboard before the Deluge struck. Their reunion on dry land is a classic Disney happy end.

“We want to teach the Ark story to as many people as possible,” Jacky Baken, one of the ship’s staff, told the Dutch newspaper AD. “The Donald Duck cartoon is a good way to do this. People remember it, especially people who don’t know the story.”

But some people at its latest port of call, Sliedrecht, remember the story quite well and are not impressed with the Disney version. “We must always try to stay as close as we can to the word of God,” a spokesman for the local church, a member of the Christian Reformed Congregations, told the public broadcaster NOS. “But that doesn’t happen in the way this film tells the story.” After a meeting with church leaders, the Ark staff decided to yank Donald for the rest of their stay.

“From a strictly Christian point of view, the film seems to be poking fun,” Baken told AD. “Of course, that is not the intention.” He added that the Ark would probably resume showing the cartoon once it left Sliedrecht.

Sliedrecht is located at the southwestern end of what the Dutch call De Bijbelgordel — their own Dutch Bible Belt. Our Amsterdam staffer Alexandra Hudson visited a town at the northeastern end for a feature earlier this year.

The cartoon has fabulous graphics and a fun music score. But that’s really not the point here. Is Disney a good way to teach the Bible? Are the good burghers of Sliedrecht overdoing it a bit?

The Daily Telegraph had a fascinating scoop over the weekend — Professor Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the cloned sheep, has abandoned the therapeutic cloning method for a new way to create stem cells without an embryo. In classic Fleet Street style, the London daily announced in the second paragraph that the decision “will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment.” It took another 16 paras to get to other constituencies for this story, who are mentioned in passing in the line that “there is an intense search for alternatives because of pressure from the pro-life lobby, the opposition of President George W Bush and ever present concerns about cloning babies.”

That doesn’t take away from their scoop in any way — it is primarily a science story, written by their science editor Roger Highfield, and it’s a good one. But this second angle is of enormous importance to many readers out there who have moral scruples about embryonic stem cell research.

I was intrigued by a line high up saying: “Most of his motivation is practical but he admits the Japanese approach is also “easier to accept socially.” If I read that correctly, it means that science — which helped create this moral dilemma by developing the embryonic stem cell technique — may solve it eventually with another breakthrough that looks equally (or more) interesting to the scientist. That could take care of this issue, but others are bound to pop up that cannot be solved with a technical fix. Wilmot discusses this on a linked page publishing an extract from a book that he and Highfield wrote called After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning. He believes an embryo cannot be considered a person until it is about 14 days old because it has no nervous system. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, counts personhood from the moment of conception, since it considers the potential in the embryo just as important as the cells that are already there. It’s hard to see how a technical breakthrough can bridge that gap.

Science writers like Highfield can explain the details of the procedure far better than I, so please look their way (here’s a quick Google News search) for more. What interests me is the impact this may have on opponents of embryonic stem cell research. Will they embrace this as the moral alternative, or oppose this as well as “playing God”? Would those who say they want the often-mentioned benefits of stem cell research but oppose public funds for the embryonic type on moral grounds now campaign to have this new method bankrolled with taxpayers’ money?

The Roman Catholic bishop of Arabia has published a letter on the dialogue call by 138 Muslim scholars pointing out possible stumbling blocs for future talks. The article by Bishop Paul Hinder in Oasis , a multilingual Catholic-Muslim dialogue magazine published in Venice, welcomes the appeal and says: “Here are Muslims offering a hand that we should take.”

The Swiss-born bishop is based in Abu Dhabi with responsibility for Catholics in the whole Arabian Peninsula. Just before the historic visit by Saudi King Abdullah to the Vatican on Nov. 6, he called in a Reuters interview for more freedom and security for minority Christians in Saudi Arabia and more freedom for foreign priests to enter the country to administer to them. There are about 1.2 million Christians in Saudi Arabia, nearly a million of them Catholics. Most are Filipino migrant workers.

In his Oasis article, Hinder listed several points that seem to have raised questions among Catholic theologians:

– There has to be further clarification about whether “the love of God” and the “love of neighbour” have the same meaning in both religions … we cannot speak about the love of God and love of the neighbour without taking a clear position regarding the human dignity of each individual person and his or her right to live and to grow in freedom … For Christians, love goes beyond neighbour to include the enemy too, whether that person belongs to their own religion or not…

– Another crucial point might be that Christians cannot simply see Jesus Christ as one among other prophets, but profess him in his divinity as the living Son of God within the belief in One God in three Persons.

– Looking at some of the signatories, the question might be raised of whether some of their earlier statements and publications can be interpreted or revised in the light of this letter, or whether its credibility should suffer because of their earlier statements. I am more than happy if the first of these two presumptions is the right one.

– Regarding the love of God and the love of the neighbour, Jews and Christians have literally a common ground, which is explicitly mentioned in the letter of the 138 Muslims. Taking the content and the quotations of the Open Letter I am surprised that it is addressed to Christian leaders only and not also to the Jewish leaders. Is it not a missed opportunity?

Hinder has also spoken to the Rome-based Catholic news agency AsiaNews about King Abdullah’s visit and what it could mean for Christians in Saudi Arabia.

Aref Ali Nayed, one of the 138 Muslim scholars, spoke to the BBC’s Reporting Religion programme on the twin theme of the appeal and Abdullah’s visit. And Adrian Pabst, a professor of religion and politics, wrote in the International Herald Tribune that “We need a real debate, not more dialogue.”

The tenor of the Muslim appeal seems to be that the issues Hinder mentions are minor, while some Catholic reactions hint they could be major hurdles.

Do you think these Catholic reservations should hold up a dialogue that many other Christian leaders have responded positively to?

A German businessman has plans to erect the world’s largest statue of Jesus Christ on a mountaintop in the Bavarian Alps. Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant churches there want it. A poll for the television channel Bayerischer Rundfunk showed 77.54 percent of those responding are also against it. The planners are not giving up, however. In a press release this week, they urged their critics to use the coming Christmas season to reconsider and open their hearts to “more tolerance and positive participation.” That includes a fund drive to raise the two million euros the project will cost.

Harry Vossberg, a construction magnate from Dresden, has launched an association called Christian Initiative Predigtstuhl to collect money for the over 50-meter-high statue. That would make it at least 10 metres higer than the famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In its PR, the association calls the statue “the eighth wonder of the world.”

“The giant statue, constructed to the highest artistic standards, will be built with the help of prestigious experts, engineers and statue artists out of permanently weather-proof and environmentally friendly materials,” said the press release announcing the project last month. “The exact height is secret. Completely new composite materials, such as ‘liquid wood,’ will be used. The base of the statue will include a room for pilgrims to pray and meet.”

The statue would be built on a mountain appropriately known as the Predigtstuhl , or Sermon Chair, in the Bad Reichenhall spa area close to the Austrian border. There is already a hotel there, built at an altitude of 1,583 metres above sea level. It even has a webcam to show the breathtaking views over the Alps from the peak.

An official for the archdiocese of Munich told the kath.net agency that the Catholic Church preferred a large cross or a chapel, not “a colossal Christ.” In the Protestant weekly Sonntagsblatt, the local Lutheran pastor called it “much too bombastic” and said an ecumenical chapel would suffice.

Does anybody out there think this is a good idea?

Two interesting dispatches from the God & mammon front on the Reuters file this week:

BRISBANE (Reuters) - Australia’s horse racing industry will get A$41 million ($37 million) in compensation to cover lost profits caused by Pope Benedict’s coming visit to a Sydney racecourse, officials said on Thursday.

Following months of squabbling over plans for Catholic World Youth Day to be held at inner Sydney’s Royal Randwick racecourse next year, national and state governments agreed to a taxpayer compensation deal, Racing New South Wales Chief Executive Peter Vlandys said…

The six-day gathering of young Catholics from around the world is expected to attract up to 600,000 worshippers to an evening Vigil and “sleep out under the stars” on July 19 next year and the Final Mass with Pope Benedict on July 20. The track venue was chosen because it offered a direct line of sight for 400,000 people to an altar to be used by the Pope. — Read the full story here.

LONDON (Reuters) - For years, Britain’s clergy have worried about falling church attendance. Now they’re worried about a group who turn up too often — thieves.

In the past year there has been a sharp hike in the theft of lead from church roofs, triggered by the price of the metal quadrupling on international markets.

At more than $3,500 a tonne, lead has become a major target for organized gangs looking to sell on to scrap merchants who trade into the booming markets in China and India. As a result, priests have turned up at churches to discover rainwater pouring through great holes in the roof after thieves stripped the heavy lead lining overnight.
— Read the full story here .

Covering religion may be harmful to your faith. Two leading religion journalists — one in Britain, one in the United States — have quit the beat in recent months, saying they had acquired such a close look at such scandalous behaviour by Christians that they lost their faith and had to leave.

Stephen Bates, who recently stepped down as religious affairs writer for the London Guardian, has just published an account of his seven years on the beat in an article entitled “Demob Happy” for the New Humanist magazine. Bates followed the crisis in the Anglican Communion for several years and even wrote a book on it, A Church At War: Anglicans and Homosexuality.

“Now I am moving on,” his article concludes. “It was time to go. What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close. A young Methodist press officer once asked me earnestly whether I saw it as my job to spread the Good News of Jesus. No, I said, that’s the last thing I am here to do.”

Bates announced his move back in September in another interesting article, this time for the website Religious Intelligence. Writing from New Orleans, where he was covering the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, he said: “Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”

Shortly before Bates called it quits, William Lobdell, who gave the Los Angeles Times first-class coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal in California, threw in the towel with a wrenching story of his own struggle with organised religion. His farewell story in July, “Religion beat became a test of faith“ was a moving testimony of a journalist who started off as a Presbyterian, was active with evangelicals and seriously considered becoming a Catholic. But, during his eight years on the beat, the Catholic clerical sex abuse scandal put him off religion so badly that he lost his faith altogether. For an example of what he came across, take a look at Missionary’s Dark Legacy, a powerful story from 2005 about the trail of sexual abuse a Catholic missionary left behind after seven years among the Eskimos. Nearly every boy in the settlement was abused.

What do readers think? Can you understand how Bates and Lobdell reacted? Do you think a journalist has to be a believer to be a good religion reporter?