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I love cwnews.com and I greatly enjoy its blog, Off the Record, headed up by the incomparable Diogenes who is the best Catholic blogger on the net, by far, hands down. And it was only a short time ago that I realized, though the site as a whole professes to be a “news” site, I don’t know, like some general internet news service, and though I realized that they had a conservative bent, that the whole thing is really a glorified blog run by dedicated and plugged in persons. And there’s nothing wrong with this, and cwnews is my first stop for news, but occasionally the editor’s personal hand in everything comes poking out, as in this piece of self-aggrandizement from today’s story about the appointment of Cardinal Bertone:
The appointment of a new Secretary of State had been long expected, and Cardinal Bertone’s name had emerged in recent weeks as the Pope’s likely choice. (On the basis of reports from contacts in Rome, CWN editor Phil Lawler predicted in May that Cardinal Bertone would be the new Secretary of State.)
I imagine that there are several other people who work on the site, but Phil Lawler is the main man behind the operation. Yet he gives himself a pat on the back here (or allows himself to be patted on the back) like he’s some small-time blogger wanting to remind everyone just how cool he is. Phil, you have a great site, you don’t need to remind us that we heard it first at cwnews - where else would we go? Triumphalism is such a nasty vice, especially in these latter and end days, and it’s bad enough when we encounter it in our churches, so we don’t want to meet it also in our favorite Catholic news provider.
I think his actions are simply good marketing. He reinforces readers’ confidence by noting his organization’s accuracy, and he cross-references older stories to get people to stick around his site longer.
Indeed, I can appreciate such a thing. So another option here might have been to say: “CWNews, back in May, predicted….”
It sounded silly to me, when I have the impression that Phil Lawler is running the whole thing, to say “CWNew’s Phil Lawler predicted….” as though some other guy within this vast media organization was giving credit to one of its reporters. And since I figured it was very likely that he had written the article himself, and so was referring to himself in the third person. It all becomes a little overmuch, I mean, if one’s aiming to be classy.
Hey, if I had predicted something back in May, you’d see it all over this blog for a month: there’d be no end to my boasting. But we’re not a “news service” and we’re certainly not a classy operation. ; )
For lack of a better place, I’ll put this quotation here; fascinating stuff. Notice that some of the cardinals arrayed in opposition to Sodano’s depature are some of the main bad guys from Windswept House.
In the case of the secretariat of state, the announcement was moved forward at the order of Benedict XVI, who by doing this wanted to cut short the resistance posed by part of the curia against his decision to appoint Bertone.
Pope Joseph Ratzinger had opted for Bertone – his main collaborator in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1995 to 2003 – for a number of months. And he had decided a number of months earlier, at least since last February, on dismissing Sodano during the summer.
But Sodano did not willingly accept his exit from the stage. Formally, he said he was ready “to hand over to others my office whenever the Holy Father wishes”: a willingness he restated one last time in a June 18 interview. But in the meantime, he put into motion a campaign of support for his remaining in office until his 80th birthday, November 23, 2007. For his part cardinal Szoka, who is the same age as Sodano, entrenched himself behind the slogan: “As long as he stays, I’m staying, too.”
The campaign was carried out by some of the cardinals formerly of the curia who had been career diplomats: Achille Silvestrini, Pio Laghi, Giovanni Cheli. Their argument against Bertone’s appointment as secretary of state was his lack of diplomatic experience: an indispensable prerogative, in their view, for a prime minister of the Holy See, especially with a pope who does not have a diplomatic background either.
And I’m disappointed that Cardinal Szoka, a native of Grand Rapids, MI, and former Archbishop of Detroit, is such a jerk.
With tigers like these fellows prowling around him, it’s no wonder the pope can’t get anything done - or everything he does must be done as though walking on egg shells.
I’m sorry, that quotation is also from this http://www.chiesa story.