Brian Fraga

Six months before he died, the late Cardinal John Foley praised Catholic News Service in a 2011 speech he delivered to the annual Catholic Media Convention.

Christopher Gunty remembers Foley, who headed the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications for 23 years, saying that “if Catholic News Service didn’t exist, we’d have to create it.”

Gunty, now the associate publisher and CEO of the Catholic Review, a monthly magazine for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, says he and his paper “rely heavily on CNS to inform our readers on what’s going on in the nation and the world, and without them, it’s going to be nearly impossible for us to do so.”

Gunty and other Catholic media professionals, as well as some Catholic bishops and communications officials, lamented the pending loss of Catholic News Service, the U.S. bishops’ century-old wire service, which has been long respected for providing objective and balanced reporting on the church.

“This decision is a mistake. In this time, we need good information,” said Fabrizio Mastrofini, spokesman for the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, who told NCR in an email that shutting down CNS creates opportunities for ideologically driven news outlets to fill the gap.

“I do not know if U.S. bishops are really conscious about what they decided and what they provoked,” Mastrofini said.

Citing financial reasons, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced on May 4 that it plans to close CNS offices in Washington, D.C., and New York by year’s end, shutting down coverage of domestic news, while maintaining its Rome bureau to continue reporting on the Vatican and international events.

In total, 21 positions — 11 of them union jobs — stand to be eliminated at Catholic News Service and the conference’s public affairs, creative services and marketing and episcopal resources divisions.

“Obviously we’re disappointed that the bishops would make this decision, to shut down what is a very good objective news service reporting on the church and religious issues in general. We think it’s the wrong decision, and we’re sorry to see it happen,” said Paul Reilly, local representative for the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents CNS editorial staff.

“My readers are much less informed if we don’t have the news service,” said Gunty, who told NCR that he wrote a letter on May 5 to Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, urging him to do what he can to prevent the bishops’ conference from shuttering CNS’ operations.

The May 4 announcement arrived nearly five years to the day after announcement of an earlier 2017 restructuring plan, in which the bishops said 12 jobs were being eliminated — and 10 positions created — in the communications department to transition from a traditional print structure to a more digital model.

The bishops approved plans they knew would result in downsizing, but there appears to be uncertainty as to whether some bishops knew their vote would result in CNS’ domestic operations being shut down. One bishop who spoke to NCR on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters presented in executive session said he “would have remembered something that significant.”

“At this time, when there are so many so-called Catholic news agencies dominating the market, for us to not have an official news service, is not very wise,” he said.

Bishop Christopher Coyne of Burlington, Vermont, said the financial foundation for Catholic News Service had been eroding for several years due to changes in media technology and the inability of dioceses, many of them hard-hit by clergy sex abuse settlements and the COVID-19 pandemic, to continue paying for the news service.

“You could see the handwriting on the wall,” said Coyne, who served on the bishops’ Committee on Communications from 2012-2018 and currently sits on the Subcommittee on the Catholic Communication Campaign, of which he said a significant portion is used to pay for the bishops’ conference’s communications department.

According to a survey of bishops that the conference compiled in January 2021, 20 bishops said their dioceses couldn’t afford a CNS subscription, while 10 other bishops said their diocesan publications use “other regional or national-level” Catholic news services.

Some Catholic organizations have also increasingly been relying on coverage from Catholic News Agency, a free wire service offered by the Eternal Word Television Network, the conservative Catholic media conglomerate. (Several U.S. bishops, including conference president Gomez, serve on EWTN’s board of governors, according to the organization’s tax filings.)

“I think Catholic News Agency was really the death knell for CNS, because it was free, and CNS wasn’t,” said Coyne, who added that those economic factors made CNS’ financial model “not sustainable.”

With subscriptions paid by diocesan and other Catholic media outlets, Catholic News Service for decades was a self-sustaining entity within the bishops’ conference, so much so that the conference in the late 1980s charged CNS an assessment for its office space, which remained a sore spot for the wire service’s staff.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic significantly cut down spending on budget line items like traveling, Catholic News Service operated at almost a $500,000 surplus. But that year’s financial report also reveals that CNS had cut its spending on salaries and benefits by more than half since 2016. Staff members at CNS told NCR that a hiring freeze for several years had prevented positions from being filled, and that they often had to do more than what their job descriptions entailed.

Tony Spence, the former director and editor-in-chief of Catholic News Service, told NCR that the news of CNS’ shutdown arrived “like a dead bird falling on the dining room table during supper.”

“There was no public indication that this was coming down the pike,” said Spence, who led CNS for 12 years before stepping down in 2016. The bishops’ conference asked him to resign after right-wing blogs attacked him for tweets regarding controversial religious freedom bills in Georgia and North Carolina. Those sites accused him of “promoting the LGBT agenda.”

“The culture warrior bishops at the USCCB have always had a certain amount of animus to CNS because it offers straight unbiased reporting,” Spence said. “Culture warriors don’t want straight unbiased reporting. They want an echo chamber where everyone has the same opinion.”

Spence described the bishops’ plan to shut down CNS as a “huge loss” for the church.

“A lot of editors do not want to have to make the choice [of using other Catholic wire services] because those editors have professional standards and they know that CNS meets those standards,” Spence said.