It has been said on good authority that you can’t serve two masters.    But the Wilbur Awards, presented in New York the other night, suggest otherwise – at least when it comes to the coverage of Pope Francis and his United States visit.

The Wilbur Awards are presented annually by the Religious Communicators Council (founded 1929) to recognize “excellence in communicating religious issues, values and themes in the public media.”    This year the Awards recognized work in twenty-one categories, ranging from an Associated Press story on the Chinese government’s crackdown on the public display of crosses to the OWN network’s Belief series to a Slate story about a evangelical creationist’s change of mind about evolution.  

Three of the awards recognized coverage of Pope Francis: a group of NPR reports about his visit to the U.S. and Cuba; a Religion Dispatches series of posts about Francis’s efforts on ecology and climate – and my profile of Francis for Vanity Fair.

That’s what put the “two masters” insight in mind.    My professional training, such as it is, was in long-form journalism, and from the beginning it was my wish (and then my aim, and then my strategy) to write articles dealing with religion that would deliver all the satisfactions of the long-form magazine journalism I grew up reading, and would do so in ways that represented religious perspectives credibly, in all their complexity and depth.    

I worked at this for The New Republic, and Lingua Franca, and the Times Magazine, and the Atlantic. Lately I’ve had the opportunity to do such work for Vanity Fair; and when it came time to undertake a profile of Pope Francis, the two (master) editors I work with there – David Friend, who assigned and edited the piece, and also Cullen Murphy – let me follow a direction I found promising and write a piece in which I would see Pope Francis from multiple  perspectives: face to face; from the point of view of a pilgrim; through his friends and associates; in history and in the Jesuit milieu; in his role as pastor to the people of Rome, and as a spiritual leader initiating a Year of Mercy.

That the piece received a Wilbur Award suggests that it worked for people who know religious perspectives as well as for Vanity Fair and its diverse readers.    

It was an honor to be present at the banquet the other night and receive the award – and to meet some of the several dozen other journalists who have managed to serve two masters in their own ways.

The photograph shows an image from Pope Francis’s new Instagram account.