{"id":587,"date":"2009-07-06T18:14:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-06T18:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/commonweal-editor-on-obama-mee.html"},"modified":"2009-07-06T18:14:35","modified_gmt":"2009-07-06T18:14:35","slug":"commonweal-editor-on-obama-mee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/commonweal-editor-on-obama-mee.html","title":{"rendered":"Commonweal editor on Obama meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal and participant at last week’s Roosevelt (that’d be TR) Room confab with the current POTUS in the White House, weighs in with the real deal on what went down in his essay, “Yes, Mr. President”<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It is necessary to report that although Obama is supposed to be 6’2?, he’s actually closer to 10 feet tall. There is also, as rumor has it, a glow or aura surrounding him that television cameras simply do not pick up. And then there’s his voice. You see his lips move, but his voice seems to come, in a kind of whisper, from somewhere above and beyond. Even stranger, Obama’s voice sounds nothing like it does on TV, but rather uncannily like that of John Houston’s narration in the movie The Bible<\/i>. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wow. Unfortunately, Paul is, as he says, joking. (Seriously. He’s JOKING<\/u>.) But the rest is serious and informative. E.g.:<\/p>\n

\n

Aside from abortion and a few other issues, it can be said that he “speaks Catholic” well, especially when discussing the church’s social-justice teachings. He is quite aware that he has become something of a proxy figure, as either a villain or a hero, in the long running battle between so-called liberal and so-called conservative Catholics. Asked about belligerent remarks made about the pope by some gay-rights advocates, predictably he urged polemical restraint on everyone. He then spoke with real conviction about why gays and lesbians might legitimately feel victimized by Christian churches.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

SNIP<\/p>\n

\n

At one level there is an “irreducible difference, conflict on the abortion issue,” he said. Still, both sides can work together to reduce the number of abortions. If given an opportunity for a follow-up question, I would have asked Obama to explain what exactly he understands that irreducible conflict to be. As long as Roe is the law of the land, the common ground the president so eloquently speaks of will continue to demand much from abortion opponents and few or no concessions from his political allies in the abortion-rights movement. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The rest is here<\/a><\/strong>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal and participant at last week’s Roosevelt (that’d be TR) Room confab with the current POTUS in the White House, weighs in with the real deal on what went down in his essay, “Yes, Mr. President”: It is necessary to report that although Obama is supposed to be 6’2?, he’s actually…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nCommonweal editor on Obama meeting - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/commonweal-editor-on-obama-mee.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Commonweal editor on Obama meeting - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}