PARISH DIARY

Cancel my subscription

I canceled my subscription to The Washington Post. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I begin my day without a printed newspaper.

I canceled for four reasons: financial, environmental, technological and personal.

The financial reason was simple. Times are tough. The parish had been paying a lot to have the paper delivered. Every penny counts. We also canceled some phone lines, got rid of equipment and cut back on utilities.

The environmental reasoning was also obvious. Every day this paper pulp was delivered and every day I threw away 90 percent of it.

I never read the sports section; I got sports from TV and radio. I never read the Style section. Who cares what they are wearing in Milan?

So every day, I stacked up unread newsprint and once a week we hauled it to recycling.

Three years ago, our parish made a decision to “go green.” Being a good steward of the environment meant less waste.

Technology has also bypassed the daily paper, which incidentally was disappearing before my eyes. It just wasn’t worth the subscription.

There were many other ways to get the same information the paper contained, and most of them are free. I get two daily newspapers online. Even my basic cable television has twice as many stations as I ever had when I was growing up.

Moreover, every month there was less and less to read. They eliminated business as a separate section. They did away with the Sunday book section.

When I was on retreat, a young priest said to me, “I don’t subscribe to any print media. I get it all online.”

Finally, even a baby boomer like me did not see the point.

But the final reason for cancellation was personal.

During Holy Week this year, The Washington Post printed a vicious cartoon by Tom Toles. It was a throwback to the anti-Catholic cartoons of Thomas Nast in the New York Post during the 19th century. Toles’ cartoon came out as the clergy sex-abuse scandal in Europe was in the headlines.

Toles drew a cartoon of two bullet-headed, evil-looking characters in clerical cassocks. The cartoon was labeled “Decades of Abusive Priests.” One priest had a lasso in his hand, which lay on the ground in front of a poster of Jesus, ready to ensnare a child.

The poster read: “Let the little children come to me.” The priest exclaimed, “What a great recruitment poster!” In the subtext, a tiny priest said, “How will we ever forgive ourselves?” The other priest said with delight, “We are priests!”

I was stunned.

It was a vicious attack. It made a mockery of who I am and what I do. Abusive priests deserve criticism and condemnation, but this?

It went way beyond legitimate criticism. It betrayed deep anti-Catholicism on the Post’s editorial staff.

Would the Post have published a cartoon in Ramadan, showing imams as fomenting terrorism?

Would the Post have published a cartoon at Yom Kippur showing Hasidic rabbis as religious zealots who cause violence in the Middle East by their fundamentalist extremism?

Would the Post have printed an Easter cartoon attacking Protestant televangelists as money-grubbing frauds?

So why do this to Catholic priests during Holy Week? Evidently because the editorial staff of The Washington Post just does not respect me or my religion. So as a matter of personal integrity, I canceled my subscription.

The Washington Post has every right to think and say what it wants, but I don’t have to pay for it.

I have been a newspaper junkie for 40 years, but I went cold turkey.

I am surviving just fine.