Anna Arco meets Rocco Palmo the blogger who is successfully bridging the ideological divide in the American Catholic Church
Catholic Herald
Exiting St Patrick’s Cathedral into the damp heat of New York in September, I try to see if I can single out Rocco Palmo from among the tourists lounging under the scaffolding, grateful for a shady seat on the cathedral steps. Then I find him, shoulder bag slung to one side looking a bit scruffy (in a good way) and intent on his iPhone, looking for all the world like one of the boy-men of the internet age. He is in his mid-twenties, wearing flip-flops and baggy trousers, a T-shirt and sporting what looks like a three-day beard. He is a bit shorter than I expected, and slight, but his smile is enormous. Palmo is an unlikely grandfather of the Catholic blogosphere.
When the newly minted President Barack Obama took the second question in the first press conference of his term from a blogger, not a member of the media establishment, it became clear that blogs had become mainstream, if not quite respectable. The blog is as old as the internet itself, though it has evolved a great deal from the basic page where the blogger could dump content which was usually of a highly personal nature.
Blogging software was easier to handle than clunky web pages, as Chris Taylor, a journalist at Time magazine gushed in 2002: “Making journal entries is simplicity itself. Type your blindingly brilliant insight or cool link in a white box on the Blogger website, run it through the optional spellcheck, and hit the button marked PUBLISH. Blogger provides the date, the time and the layout.”
Anyone could run a blog. And it seemed that everyone did. For a while it was just college guys in pyjamas doing it, then soccer moms from Middle America began to take it up and enclosed religious orders discovered that they could show the world the way they lived. Even Bishop Richard Williamson has a blog.
Once the domain of amateurs, blogs today are even hosted on the websites of serious national newspapers, which allow for “user-generated content” and use social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook in order to promote their products.
Earlier this month one of the oldest of blog hosting programmes, Blogger, celebrated its 10th anniversary. According to the BBC, Blogger claims to have more than 300 million active readers and “enough words to fill about 3.2 million novels”. Let’s see a newspaper match those figures.
Rick Klau, a product manager at Blogger, told the Beeb: “Blogging has become part of the air on the internet. And I believe we will see a bit of a renaissance in blogging where whole new groups of people will understand this gives them a lot more control and flexibility in what they share and how they share it.”
Despite the growing reality that blogs are just as much part of our media landscape as newspapers, radio and television – so much so that Westminster auxiliary Bishop John Arnold mentioned the outpouring of emotion and joy in the blogosphere about the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux from the pulpit at Westminster Cathedral last week – they are still viewed with a great deal of suspicion, especially in the Church. Yet Pope Benedict XVI mentioned the new media positively in this year’s World Communication Day address.
He said: “The new digital technologies are, indeed, bringing about fundamental shifts in patterns of communication and human relationships.
“These changes are particularly evident among those young people … In this year’s message, I am conscious of those who constitute the so-called digital generation and I would like to share with them, in particular, some ideas concerning the extraordinary potential of the new technologies, if they are used to promote human understanding and solidarity. These technologies are truly a gift to humanity and we must endeavour to ensure that the benefits they offer are put at the service of all human individuals and communities, especially those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable.”
But the common perception is that bloggers are polemicists who specialise in half-truths, rhetorical flourishes and rumours. They are seen to further the rule of the mob, in the form of comment boxes or on social networking sites. And it is common knowledge that in order to succeed as a blogger you have to be angry, you have to have a Twitter account, you need to be controversial, you need to have an opinion and you almost certainly need to have comment boxes.
One of the chief criticisms thrown at the blogosphere, especially the Catholic blogosphere, is that it unleashes a wave of anger and fury and that many commentators show a lack of Christian charity that they would never show in real life.
Another truism of the blogging age is that the dead-tree press is hitting the recycling pile and throwing the long-standing tradition of quality “objective” journalism out with it, because there simply isn’t a demand for it.
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And yet in the Catholic corner of the blogosphere there is one extremely successful blogger, both by the narrow standards of its community and by those of the wider internet, who keeps old media precepts but applied to the new media form.
Palmo runs the highly popular Whispers in the Loggia blog, which has almost 11.5 million hits in five years. He does not allow comments on his stories. They are crafted in the best tradition of American journalism: earnest, informative and so balanced it is difficult to tell where he stands on a subject personally.
He is the kid in the pyjamas of the blogging archetype, but with the sort of journalistic standards that would put many a student even of the mega-earnest and prestigious graduate school of journalism at Columbia to shame.
Whispers in the Loggia carries news of appointments, passes on clerical gossip, explains the news, and sifts through arcane ecclesiastical processes. This year, the wiry Philadelphians broke the news of Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s appointment to the Archdiocese of New York, long before the mainstream press or even the nations’ Catholic press had a chance to write about the news.
For many religion journalists working for nationals newspapers, Whispers in the Loggia is the place to come for Catholic news.
In a medium that lends itself to fostering division Palmo sets out to straddle the gap between secular coverage of Catholicism and the religious press. He also attempts find ways of bridging a growing chasm between liberal and conservative Catholics who are increasingly polarised in President Obama’s America.
He says: “I have friends on both sides of the aisle and sometimes I lean to one side or another. wherever we are in the Church, we are always missing another half. It’s the only way we can be the best Church we can be is if we can be the fullest Church we can be.
“If you look at this country we have a 25 per cent Mass attendance, which means 75 per cent of the Church isn’t with us. What are we doing about that? A lot of these other controversies get us away from the big questions. We have a hurting world. We have challenges to human life and dignity every day. So what is all this doing? Are we just expressing our opinions or are we trying to build something?”
Born in Philly in 1983, Palmo really does come across in person as the new media whizz kid that he is. There is a touch of the geek about him, but these days geeks are the coolest people around. George Weigel wrote recently that Pope John Paul II ran the Church from his rooms in the Vatican, by-passing the Curia entirely. Perhaps it is fitting that Palmo, a true member of the JPII generation, writes Whispers from his parents’ house, bypassing the mainstream media and the Catholic press entirely.
Although he grew up in very Catholic Italian American family, Palmo really came to his faith through newspapers. His father worked on the circulation side of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Palmo often accompanied him to the office. He learned the ropes in the newsroom there, with a number of internships.
When the Philadelphia Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua was made cardinal in 1991, Palmo was entranced by the ceremony and wanted to learn more. He met Cardinal Bevilacqua and soon got to know some of America’s foremost churchmen because he was a curious and precocious teenager.
He says: “I came out of it with all these questions, I’d never been interested in it before so then I got to meet him and he became – in the Church – my father figure. He answered all my questions and always showed me the ropes of the Church while I had the news people showing me the ropes of journalism.”
Everyone expected Palmo would go on to be a priest, but instead he went to the University of Pennsylvania, studied politics and the Holy See and turned his passion for the Church and for journalism into a blog.
When he started, he says that people “wrote to me saying: ‘You really must be a cardinal writing under a pen name’ or ‘you applied to the seminary and you’re bitter that you got kicked out’.”
“I never applied. If anything I hope I wouldn’t have got kicked out or rejected or whatever, but really the blog just comes from loving the Church and wanting to just examine it. Not as in putting it on trial, but in order to show that there’s always more to the story. Because obviously, in the secular press you can only fit in a certain number of inches and there’s only a certain amount of interest.”
Palmo was surprised and a bit frightened by the success of his blog. “I started the page as a sort of catharsis with three people and never gave the address to anyone else and then five months later discovered it was written on napkins during the [2005 papal] conclave and passed around,” he recalls. “My first thought was, I need to kill this thing.”
The blog shows his development as a journalist: from the first days in 2004 where he promises an ambitious agenda (“short of seeking and highlighting truth, justice and fruitful discourse (or the lack thereof), I come (with no biases)” to today’s more polished writing. He retains the ease and folksy tone but it is clear that he is more careful about actually putting himself into the blog posts than he was when he started.
There are stories he would rather not publish. But that he feels he has a responsibility to as a journalist and as a committed Catholic. He says the watershed moment came when he was given a letter that was being anonymously circulated in the Archdiocese of New York, calling for a vote of no confidence on Cardinal Edward Egan. He says that he received a lot of flak for publishing it.
“This also came as a wake-up call for me and I thought: ‘God, I have to try to be even more responsible and take more of myself out of it.’ I found myself saying to myself: ‘If this is what new media can do in terms of policy and spread, in terms of how decisions are made and what decisions are made, then I need to be more careful.’”
He continues: “I always knew I felt I had an obligation to journalism and to the Church but that really made me a lot more cautious. That said, if I had to, I would do it again.”
In a way, Palmo sets out to do exactly what the Church sets out to do every day, which is to present an old message without changing it, using whatever new media are out there to do it. His faith informs his journalism and vice versa.
When he talks about difficult situations, he says: “The best thing for the Church sometimes means writing about difficult truths. Nobody likes them less than me, but at the same time there are always going to repercussions if people find out that we haven’t been honest, that we haven’t been as transparent as we should have, especially in these days. If we claim to have the capital ‘T’ Truth then we have to be realistic about the small ‘t’ truth, because if you ignore the second for the sake of the first you’re going lose both.”
He says that the Church is a great teacher of journalism. “I have the story, I have to present it, I can’t change it,” he explains. “And that’s what we have to do with the teaching of the Church. We have to present it. We can’t change it. We can’t make into what we want it to be. And if we do we’re being irresponsible.”
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Tags: Church Life, Internet & Technology, Media