"Brother, If You Focus on the Numbers, You’re Missing the Story"

Saturday Night Live — or was it Seth Meyers? — got in a jab the other night at CNN’s low ratings, but you don’t have to watch cable (it’s not part of my basic package) to get the news from this still-giant, still-ambitious news organization.

You can get it on the CNN website, in articles like this extraordinary piece by Daniel Burke about the “Francis effect.”

It’s not easy to put together the pieces of Francis’s first year, but Burke has done it. He got the story by taking the approach Francis is taking, and is urging all of us to take – by going out in the world and listening to people. He went to Boston, a city deeply Catholic and deeply scarred by the crisis of priestly sexual abuse and the cover-up and campaign of stonewalling by the bishops, and found people “eager to share how one man, in just one year, has changed their lives.”

There’s the gay man who finally feels welcome in his church.

The woman who weeps when headlines deliver good news at last.

The former priest who no longer clenches his fist during Mass.

The Latinos who waited forever for a Pope who speaks their language.

"I’m telling you, brother, if you focus on the numbers, you’re missing the story," says the Rev. John Unni, a Boston pastor with an accent as thick as clam chowda.

"There’s an energy, a feeling, a spirit here. It’s like a healing balm."

The piece is thick of evidence that could tell against the “Francis effect.” John Paul II registered poll numbers just as high as Francis’s. Ten percent of Americans are former Catholics:

If they formed their own church, they’d be the country’s second-largest denomination, after the Catholic Church itself.

And yet that chowda-mouthed Boston pastor gets it right. ”I’m telling you, brother, if you focus on the numbers, you’re missing the story.” That is an apt diagnosis of the problems of the church in America in the past two decades. Demographics, assets and settlements and legal fees, budgeted parish and school closings, head counts of seminarians and priests – all these forced Catholic people to take their eyes off the prize.

Plenty of us journalists did, too. ”I’m telling you, brother, if you focus on the numbers, you’re missing the story.” That could be the credo for the kind of reporting and commentary about religious belief that I am trying to do and am trying to bring to attention with this site.

Here’s hoping Burke’s piece gets read in the Casa Santa Marta.

The photograph shows Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires on Ash Wednesday 2013, shortly before he left for Rome for the conclave in which he would be elected pope.

• 10 March 2014
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