{"id":5694,"date":"2006-01-08T01:09:18","date_gmt":"2006-01-08T01:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/the-popes-prognosticator.html"},"modified":"2006-01-08T01:09:18","modified_gmt":"2006-01-08T01:09:18","slug":"the-popes-prognosticator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/the-popes-prognosticator.html","title":{"rendered":"The Pope’s Prognosticator"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the newest issue of Foreign Policy, <\/em>there’s a profile of Sandro Magister, known to us through his articles on this website.<\/a> It’s fairly short, not available online, and written, interestingly enough by Stacey Meichtry, who works with John Allen in Rome. What’s interesting about that is that Meichtry highlights the irony of Magister (A professor of contemporary church history at the University of Urbino), whom, as he describes it, advocates a "muscular papacy" writing for a very liberal journal.  The comparison is not exact, of course, but the phenomenon of liberal publications hosting Vaticanisti<\/em> who are willing to be fair (or even, in the case of Magister, implicitly supportive) to Benedict and even the Curial way of doing things, even as they dig for insight, is something to think about. Just one snippet:<\/p>\n

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Among the most reliable and revered vaticanisti is Sandro Magister, who covers the Vatican for L\u2019espresso, an influential Italian newsweekly magazine with more than 600,000 readers. Magister is well regarded for both his acuity and his prolificacy. In addition to his print coverage, he writes a daily blog and a biweekly column for his Web site, www.chiesa.espressonline.it. Although L\u2019espresso is generally regarded as an organ of Italy\u2019s churchwary left (its rival is Panorama, a newsweekly owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi\u2019s media empire), Magister stands out because he typically leans more to the right in his editorial musings. His columns consistently advocate a muscular papacythat practices realpolitik abroad. He defends Catholicism\u2019s identity from precisely the same cultural and political influences that define L\u2019espresso: support for abortion rights, stem-cell research, religious pluralism, and a strict separation between church and state. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Big old head’s up and hat tip to Vatican Watcher<\/a> on this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the newest issue of Foreign Policy, there’s a profile of Sandro Magister, known to us through his articles on this website. It’s fairly short, not available online, and written, interestingly enough by Stacey Meichtry, who works with John Allen in Rome. What’s interesting about that is that Meichtry highlights the irony of Magister (A…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Pope's Prognosticator - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/the-popes-prognosticator.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Pope's Prognosticator - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the newest issue of Foreign Policy, there’s a profile of Sandro Magister, known to us through his articles on this website. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}