Light On Dark Water

Thank God for EWTN

And Catholic Answers, and other Catholic initiatives in the media world. During this past Lent, abstaining from listening to music in the car on my way to and from work, I listened to a certain amount of Catholic radio (we have a local station, Archangel Radio). Some of it was from EWTN, some from Catholic Answers, some of it locally produced. And the world is a better place because of what these people do.

Yes, I could find a lot to criticize in these efforts. I could watch EWTN anytime I want to, but I rarely do, because most of their programming doesn't appeal much to me. (I do watch The Journey Home sometimes, because the stories of converts are always interesting to  me.) But these are relatively small reservations, and I want to put them aside at the moment. EWTN has brought people to the faith, or brought people back, and if it has driven anyone away, I'd think he or she has deeper spiritual problems than EWTN can be held responsible for.

What struck me most was the Catholic Answers talk show that was generally in progress during my drive home. Over and over again I listened to knowledgeable, articulate, courteous hosts field a wide range of questions from a wide range of people, from committed Catholics wanting clarification of some point of doctrine or morals to atheists wanting to argue. I never heard them at a loss for a response, and I never heard them sound irritated or bully a caller. The most uncomfortable things ever got was when a caller rambled and the hosts couldn't bring him round to a specific question, but it's the nature of radio that you can only allow that to go on for so long before you have to stop it for the sake of your listeners. I was especially impressed by the way they dealt with a young man having serious personal problems, making an effort to get him in touch with counselors who could help him face to face. And with the recurring program where they invite atheists and agnostics to call in and discuss the existence of God or anything else relating to religion; they were unfailingly capable, patient, and good-humored. 

They're performing a great service to the Church and to the world, and, again, I thank God for them. 

Maclin Horton
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49 responses to “Thank God for EWTN”

  1. Art Deco

    They’re performing a great service to the Church and to the world, and, again, I thank God for them.
    I wish Karl Keating were a cheaper date. There was a complaint lodged recently by Michael Voris about the salary scale at certain apostolates. His complaint was over done, but he did have a point about Catholic Answers.

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  2. Mac

    Yes, I caught the distant sounds of a controversy about that a month or two ago. If I had my druthers I’d choose mendicant Dominicans or Franciscans for the job, but I’m glad it’s being done. I’m sure they’re open to criticism–I could come up with a list of my own, just based on what I can see–but I’m just as sure that they’re doing useful work.
    I don’t really know who Michael Voris is, but there seem to be at least as many people complaining about him as he complains about.

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  3. Art Deco

    No doubt they do. I would not defend his advocacy generally and I think his complaint about EWTN’s executives (who are paid less than Karl Keating with 10x the staff) was not valid. His point about Keating and some others on the payroll there was valid. There’s a great deal of distance between a monk paid a stipend and living communally and Karl Keating’s salary. The vast majority of people live in that distance in this country.
    Other than hospital administrators, the presidents of research universities, the presidents of mega-philanthropies like the Red Cross, and absolutely upper echelon civil servants and soldiers, you should not see bodacious salaries among non-commercial employers.

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  4. Louise

    Well, God bless them. They certainly do good work, on the whole.

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  5. Mac

    Keating’s salary does sound, as the pundits like to say, “troubling.”

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  6. Marianne

    I’d make that very troubling.
    In his apostolic letter, On the Service of Charity, Pope Benedict said that a bishop should “see that the management of initiatives dependent on him offers a testimony of Christian simplicity of life. To this end, he will ensure that salaries and operational expenses, while respecting the demands of justice and a necessary level of professionalism, are in due proportion to analogous expenses of his diocesan Curia.”
    I would like to think folks in Keating’s line of work would aim for that “testimony of Christian simplicity of life” as well.

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  7. Mac

    I would, too. Even more that bishops would do the same.

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  8. Mac

    Not that all of them are so bad, but there’s that recent to-do about the one who was building more or less a palace. I really don’t think opulence should be the reward for climbing the hierarchical ladder.

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  9. Paul

    It’s not the sort of work I could do. I find it hard not to let my exasperation show if I get the impression people are being deliberately dense.

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  10. Art Deco

    It would not be all that troubling if he had about 150 employees and a demonstrated skill set at running an enterprise more complicated than an information bureau. I think he has fewer than 20 employees.

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  11. Robert Gotcher

    What I think is weird is the cruises. I will never ever be able to afford any kind of cruise. This just seems unnecessarily opulent.

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  12. Mac

    I certainly understand this criticism, and I’m not trying to dismiss it. But the point I wanted to make was that these efforts are worthwhile in spite of their defects. I mean, unless it turned out to be a Maciel-level scandal. My natural fault-finding impulse is extremely robust, and I really tried to hold it in check when I wrote this post. I assure you I could find quite enough in the public face of EWTN et.al. to criticize at length, even without knowing about something like Keating’s salary.
    Having said that, I will turn the impulse loose for a moment and say: the thing that jumped out at me from the Catholic Answers web site was…cruises? I know cruises are a mass-market thing now, and you don’t have to be particularly affluent to go on one (I know some people of very modest means who do it every few years or so). But still…cruises?

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  13. Mac

    Nor could I, Paul. My own density would be a problem if that of the callers was not. I could never be quick-witted enough to debate effectively that way. There’s a reason why I write more than I talk.
    I’m sure, however, that they screen out the callers likely to be obnoxious or hopelessly inarticulate. The conversations I heard with atheists didn’t involve the posturing and cheap shots that you usually get in those.

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  14. Mac

    Cross-posted with you, Robert. Figured I was not the only one who was bothered by the cruises. However, they may be less expensive than you think, as I was saying about the people of modest (and I mean very modest) means I know.

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  15. Mac

    I’ll say, too, that if Keating is getting rich off CA I wouldn’t donate to them.

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  16. Louise

    It’s not the sort of work I could do. I find it hard not to let my exasperation show if I get the impression people are being deliberately dense.
    Me too, Paul! I think such people are saints if they can hold onto their patience under such circumstances.
    What I think is weird is the cruises. I will never ever be able to afford any kind of cruise. This just seems unnecessarily opulent.
    Oh yes! The parishes here have cruises too – I just can’t my head around it. It’s not that it’s bad, IMO, but it just seems a bit incongruous. I could afford to go on a cruise here in the States (without the rest of my family…ahhhh… lovely thought… where was I?) as they are much cheaper than back home, but even then – I just don’t “get it.”

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  17. Louise

    I didn’t mean to get on the critical bandwagon – really I admire these people a lot and may God bless all their efforts.

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  18. Mac

    Typepad is experiencing another criminal attack.

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  19. Marianne

    Here’s the cabin price list for their Mediterranean cruise.
    I want the $9,697 sky suite with verandah.
    😉

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  20. Robert Gotcher

    I’m not likely to have $5200 lying around any time between now and the time I die to pay for the cheapest cabin for my wife and me.

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  21. Mac

    $5200? I’m seeing the cheapest one as $2678. I hear people around here talking about the $2000 range, and waiting for discount deals. But look at the dates, too–10 days. The ones that do the mass-market business in this area are frequently five or fewer days, so that’s bound to make a big difference.
    I’ve actually been on one of those 5-day ones, 8 or 9 years ago for a niece’s wedding. It was partly subsidized by the family but I think it was around $2000 for my wife and me. We had one of those Category 10 cheapo rooms. It was sorta fun but not really my cup of tea. The people I mentioned who don’t have much money but really like to go on these things save for several years and no doubt pay the cheapest fares.
    Can’t imagine spending almost $10,000 on something like that, even if I had that much to spare. Sorta like luxury cars. Even if I could afford a Mercedes or something, I wouldn’t.

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  22. Mac

    Just took a look at Carnival cruises out of New Orleans. They’re offering per-person prices for a 4-day cruise starting at $299. Even cheaper than I thought, even if you assume that price is nowhere near the whole story.

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  23. Marianne

    For the Catholic Answers Mediterranean cruise you’ve also got to add on the airfare to and from Rome. That’s not included in the cabin price.

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  24. Paul

    Having been on some long North Sea ferry crossings in the past, I suspect I would find any such cruise pretty penitential. So perhaps not entirely incongruous.

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  25. Marianne

    While poking around the Web reading about the salaries of the CEOs of charities, I learned that the compensation for Father Larry Snyder, the president of Catholic Charities USA, as reported on his 2013 W-2 form was $338,956. He also received an estimated $36,223 in other compensation. That information is on the organization’s 990 tax form that’s posted on its Web site here.
    I have a hard time with such a royal sum of money paid anyone involved in charitable work, but a priest? Or am I missing something? Maybe he gives most of it away, and maybe he accepts it because a CEO’s salary sets the standard against which an organization’s other executives’ salaries are determined. In any case, it all seems a closed game that sets a very bad example.

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  26. Mac

    You have to have an extremely weak stomach to get sick on these giant ships, which have very effective stabilizing mechanisms. My wife can get seasick in a rocking chair, and she did fine, with a bit of pharmaceutical help.
    I hadn’t even noticed the CA cruise is in the Mediterranean.

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  27. Art Deco

    They’re offering per-person prices for a 4-day cruise starting at $299.

    Stopped up toilets and salmonella included, no doubt.

    I was told by a sociologist about 17 years ago that he had noticed that black and white Southerners in the diaspora tend to spend all their free time in their home town. Seen that up close and personal. (So is it that you live in your home town or you’ve not been a proper Southerner?).

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  28. Mac

    For what it’s worth, I spoke to someone who was on that infamous cruise where the ship had to be towed in, and she said the reports of misery were rather exaggerated. This was a stranger, standing in line at a restaurant, so, like I said, for what it’s worth.
    There are several ways in which your sociologist’s observation doesn’t quite apply to me, chief of which is probably that I don’t have a true home town. Next is the concept of “free time,” which doesn’t really exist for me except in increments of an hour or two. But I still live in the state where I’ve spent my whole life except for one year. The cruise, actually, was in effect a visit home, as there were 20 or 30 family members on it.

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  29. Mac

    I cross-posted with your last comment, Marianne. I agree, it’s really bad example. Bad enough for a lay Catholic, but a priest? I do hope most of it goes somewhere besides in his bank account. Surely…? The head of the Knights of Columbus also makes a pretty grand sum, I’ve heard.

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  30. Paul

    It’s not seasickness. That’s never bothered me. It’s boredom. Slot machines and lounge singers and shops with luxury goods at bargain prices hold no attraction for me. And to pass the time reading, you have a choice of sitting amidst the inane chatter of the bar, on the windy deck, or in the cramped and airless cabin. Backgammon is a lifesaver, but you can’t play it for 48 hours.

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  31. Paul

    That professional charity workers should be paid professional salaries has never bothered me. I don’t find it at all as shocking as the salaries that banks or firms of brokers pay out to people whose main job seems to be to turn the savings of the elderly into used cocaine. And it’s not as though diocesan priests take vows of poverty.
    But like lawyers who give a voice to the voiceless for a hefty fee, or restaurateurs who get rich feeding the hungry, or landlords who pile up wealth by providing shelter to refugees, it’s hard not to think that they do good work but have had their reward already.

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  32. Robert Gotcher

    $2678 pp X 2 = more than $5200.
    Luxury qua luxury makes me uncomfortable, esp. after having worked with the poor in Appalachia for a year and a half.
    I’d rather spend whatever extra cash I manage to store up on a cabin “up north” as they say here in Wisconsin or a trip to Europe. British Isles would be nice. Never been there.
    My view on large incomes for lay people is that it can be used for the common good, in which case, I’m not too critical. For a priest, it is scandalous because the priest is in persona Christi capitis.
    I’ve known priests who don’t seem to be aware that their luxurious way of life has adverse affect on their effectiveness in proclaiming the gospel. Diocesan priests may not take a vow of poverty, but they are strongly encouraged by the Magisterium to lead a simple, austere way of life. See Pastores Dabo Vobis 30.

    Priests, following the example of Christ, who, rich though he was, became poor for love of us (cf. 2 Cor. 8:9) – should consider the poor and the weakest as people entrusted in a special way to them, and they should be capable of witnessing to poverty with a simple and austere lifestyle, having learned the generous renunciation of superfluous things(Optatam Totius, 9; Code of Canon Law, Canon 282).

    A priest needs to live in such as way that the witness value of his poverty is not inadvertently compromised.

    Nor should the prophetic significance of priestly poverty be forgotten, so urgently needed in affluent and consumeristic societies: “A truly poor priest is indeed a specific sign of separation from, disavowal of and non – submission to the tyranny of a contemporary world which puts all its trust in money and in material security.”(84)

    The footnote refers to “Proposition 10” from the 1990 Synod of Bishops on the formation of priests.

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  33. Grumpy

    I read Mac’s article and before there were any comments, I googled ‘Karl Keating’s salary’. The article I read was so toxic (the author had no time for Voris – ‘we’re coming for him in a minute’, he said, and he did) that it made me feel that grousing about people’s salaries is not good for one’s moral health, or anyway not a sign of good moral and spiritual health. I don’t know if I would have thought this if I hadn’t read this evil piece, but my reaction to it was that he seems to earn somewhat more than twice as much as I do, and he’s probably twice as good at what he does as I am.
    Educational cruises are fairly common. I hear about professors going on them. They get a free holiday in some area they know a lot about – say, Greece or the Middle East, and, I suppose, the other travelers get to spend a holiday with someone they think is twice as knowledgeable as themselves.
    My hairdresser goes on cruises very regularly, but I doubt if these are very educational or very expensive. They seem to be land-and-sea (both the educational ones and the snorkeling ones). From what she tells me, they seem to make land and go to restaurants and so forth.

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  34. Art Deco

    that it made me feel that grousing about people’s salaries is not good for one’s moral health, or anyway not a sign of good moral and spiritual health.
    As a rule, you may be right. The problem is that with commercial employers, the compensation of the CEO and his camarilla are not arms length transactions. Some of the 990s coming to light indicate that about the same is the case re certain philanthropies (just on a more constrained scale). IIRC, one of the worst offenders over the years was FreedomWorks; another was Hillsdale College. The architecture of corporation law should put the brakes on this sort of looting; the interests of share-holders, donors, and clientele are injured by it.

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  35. Mac

    Getting ready to go to a grandchild’s birthday party, and it will probably be a good bit later before I can reply at leisure. But, Robert, I thought those prices were for two people. I can’t get to the web site to check. And in general I do agree with you, Grumpy, that “grousing about people’s salaries is not good for one’s moral health.” There are the factors Art cites that make it a matter of wider concern, but I start with your view. And your hairdresser’s cruises probably confirm what I was saying about them not being the province of the unusually affluent.

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  36. Robert Gotcher

    I’m all for educational trips. I’m neutral on the salary question for lay people, although we always need to consider whether we are giving scandal in the technical sense.

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  37. Art Deco

    That’s never bothered me. It’s boredom….And to pass the time reading, you have a choice of sitting amidst the inane chatter of the bar, on the windy deck, or in the cramped and airless cabin.
    Well, you could just go mad like Gilbert Pinfold.

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  38. Mac

    I had zero interest in the casinos etc. on the cruise ship. I hoped to spend most of my time in a deck chair reading and sipping silly “tropical” drinks like pina coladas. The first part of the fantasy was fulfilled, but the drinks were so overpriced that I don’t think I ever had more than one day, and then it was something ordinary like scotch and soda.

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  39. Mac

    Back to Paul’s comment from yesterday: “That professional charity workers should be paid professional salaries has never bothered me.”
    There is some justification for those salaries, too. Successful fund-raising is actually a pretty difficult thing to do, and therefore there aren’t that many people who can do it well, and therefore there is some competition for them. I’m not talking about CEO-level multi-million salaries, of course, but the Catholic Charities figure mentioned above is probably not out of line for non-profits of similar size (leaving out the fact that the incumbent is a priest–as I said I do hope it’s not going into his bank account).

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  40. Paul

    Art, you made me laugh out loud.

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  41. Marianne

    Here’s Barbara Stocking who was the CEO of Oxfam up until last year:
    “I earned £119,000 [about $200,000 U.S. dollars] the year I left. I don’t think that’s excessive. Oxfam has a turnover of £400m a year and operates in 53 of the most difficult countries in the world. But I was conscious of it. I turned down a number of salary increases and didn’t go above £100,000 for years.”
    Nice to know that at least one of the top folks at the big charities has a few qualms about such high pay.

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  42. Mac

    Yeah, that’s definitely to her credit.

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  43. Daniel Nichols

    Uh, it is?
    Whatever good EWTN does must be balanced by its slant to the political right. Plus Raymond Arroyo, who alone offsets a thousand good points.

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  44. Robert Gotcher

    I don’t watch EWTN often enough to know whether its slant to the political right is problematic, but I do agree that Arroyo is not an asset simply because he is so smug and snarky, at least the few times I’ve seen him. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, though: perhaps he was having a bad hair day the times I saw him.

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  45. Mac

    “Uh, it is?” Yes, it’s to her credit that she appears to see the problem, and turned down increases.
    Never had a very strong reaction either way to Raymond Arroyo, not that I’ve seen that much of him. [shrug] He’s a TV host.

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  46. Daniel Nichols

    Sure, better to turn down the raises, but even better to accept only a living wage, even a generous one.
    EWTN is the voice of a certain faction of American Catholicism, no more, no less. It is not the Voice of the True Faith, as it is very selective in what it airs, and the slant it gives. Sometimes hideously so. That said, there is a lot of good too, though things like Catholic apologetic cruises and six figure incomes and the ever-present Fr Sirico indicate that this human structure is not free of the general fuckupedness of the human condition, Catholic or not.

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  47. Grumpy

    Six figure salaries? I must have mis-read the article about Keating.

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  48. Daniel Nichols

    Keathing gets $242,000 a year. Chump change compared to a corporate CEO, but a lot of money if you mission is deemed apostolic.

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  49. Mac

    “this human structure is not free of the general…”
    Of course it isn’t. I never suggested otherwise.

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