28 June 2025

Should Faithful Catholics Welcome Layoffs at National Catholic Reporter

Some years ago, Fr Zed published a prayer for the downfall of NCR. It ends with "[T]hat He will pour abundant graces upon the staff of that organ of dissent the National catholic Reporter so that they will either embrace orthodox doctrine concerning faith and morals or that all their efforts will promptly fail and come to their just end."

From Crisis

By Anne Hendershott

Pro-choice, same-sex marriage, and women’s ordination advocates may have to find another site to vent their anger at the Catholic Church now that the National Catholic Reporter has laid off some of their biggest allies.

It looks like the pro-choice, same-sex marriage, and women’s ordination advocates may have to find another site to vent their anger at the Catholic Church now that their loudest mouthpiece, the National Catholic Reporter, has laid off some of their biggest allies in their fight against the unchanging truths of the Church.

In a tweet on June 18, Heidi Schlumpf, former senior editor at the progressive publication announced: 

After 16 years with the National Catholic Reporter (as a columnist, correspondent and executive editor/VP), I have been laid off for financial reasons. I’m proud of the work I did and will be taking some time before deciding what’s next. 

Just prior to that, on May 30, National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent, Christopher White, penned an article on the NCR site revealing that after four years in Rome, and a total of six years with NCR,  he was “bidding farewell” to the  Roman cafés and Vatican culture. 

Ever faithful to the NCR ideology of “progressive reform,” White continues to advocate for change in the Church that he converted to. Recently, White cited a New York Times piece suggesting that “Leo’s multicultural background could help turbocharge some long-overdue Vatican reforms.” Maintaining that he will continue to write about the Pope Leo papacy for NCR from his new perch at Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, White laments that he will have to do so “from afar—likely with more mediocre wine and coffee than I enjoyed at these fine cafes that have served as my second offices around the Vatican and where I came to better understand its culture.” It is uncertain whether NCR will post another journalist in Rome.

Many faithful Catholics—including the bishops who have unsuccessfully attempted to stop what they viewed as the heretical views published at NCR—suggest that the publication has never really understood the teachings and the culture of the Catholic Church. Instead, the publication has spent much of its time trying to change those teachings by changing the culture from one of faithfulness to one of dissent. 

The presiding bishop of Kansas City at the time of NCR’s founding, Bishop Charles Helmsing— who initially authorized NCR’s existence—condemned the paper in 1968, demanding it remove the word “Catholic” from its name. Helmsing claimed that NCR had a “policy of crusading against the Church’s teachings” and considered it a “poisonous character.” 

Decades later, in 2013, Kansas CitySt. Joseph’s Bishop Robert Finn echoed Bishop Helmsing’s concerns, writing that NCR “undermines Church teachings and lionizes dissident theologies.” Though NCR has been called on to remove the word “Catholic” from its title, the recalcitrant editors of the publication have, instead, often mocked the bishops themselves. In an especially disrespectful essay, the NCR editors quoted H.L. Mencken and his oft-repeated statement that “one of the jobs of a journalist is ‘to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,’” adding “that’s not all we do, but it’s a pretty good start.” 

Continuing their intractable stance today, NCR has often cited the awards they receive from the Catholic Press Association:

We report and comment on church matters, including official teachings. We also report and comment on those who call into question some of these official teachings. Meanwhile, we are a part of the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada, an independent membership association comprised of Catholic media organizations and individuals. The CPA is an approved Catholic organization listed in The Official Catholic Directory, commonly called the Kennedy directory. The chairman of the Committee of Communications of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference, currently Bishop John Wester of Salt Lake City, is the honorary president of the CPA. CPA judges have repeatedly cited us with awards for our coverage of the church.

It is true that NCR has indeed called into question the official teachings of the Church—but even worse than that, NCR has made it their mission to personally attack and attempt to humiliate those faithful Catholics who support those teachings. Heidi Schlumpf has been especially vitriolic in her investigative reports. 

For example, in her attempt to “recover” a progressive St. Thomas Aquinas from the conservatives, Schlumpf claims that conservative Catholics like Matt Fradd, the popular Australian podcaster (Pints with Aquinas) and anti-pornography advocate, does not understand Aquinas and, instead, distorts the writings of Aquinas to provide his listeners with “black and white answers” on what she believes are the contested terrain of abortion and same-sex marriage. 

In an article titled “Would Thomas Aquinas be a Thomist?” Schlumpf maintains that the “right wing” is using Aquinas to justify its support for Catholic teachings on same-sex marriage, abortion, and IVF. Schlump criticizes the 2024 Alabama Supreme Court ruling that drew upon Aquinas in the opinion that frozen embryos used for in vitro fertilization are to be legally considered children. She writes that no court should be citing Aquinas on issues like IVF because “Aquinas did not believe that human life came into existence until well into pregnancy.”

Schlumpf then goes on to criticize Bishop Barron, founder of Word on Fire media ministries, because he described Aquinas as a “spiritual master”; and then she took a swipe at Fr. Mike Schmitz of The Bible in a Year podcast, who called Aquinas the “theological heavyweight champion of the world.” Schlump pointed to Franciscan University of Steubenville Professor Scott Hahn’s project to translate and publish all of Aquinas’ writings to show that scholars of Aquinas have taken “an extreme right-wing turn” in recent years.   

Bishop Barron continues to draw the ire of NCR columnists—mostly because his engaging videos and podcasts are especially popular among faithful Catholics and beyond, bringing the Truth of Catholic teachings to the mainstream. Bishop Barron’s Catholicism series was highly popular and became a mainstream media phenomenon. It was viewed as an effective tool for catechesis and widely praised for its portrayal of the Church’s history, beauty, and good works. Premiering in 2011 on PBS, the series was later released on DVD and online and became a huge success, with many Catholic educators using the series to teach both children and adults about the Catholic Faith. Barron’s series was widely praised for its portrayal of the Church’s scope, history, beauty, and the diverse faces of the Church, past and present. 

But for NCR, Bishop Barron—like the other faithful Catholic media commentators—is a constant reminder that there are absolute Truths in Catholic teachings. Earlier this month, Michael Sean Winters took on Bishop Barron yet again in a column which criticized the bishop for what Winters believes is the bishop’s failure to listen to the views of those who may disagree with him: “Also worth noting is the absence of listening in various social media ministries such as Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. There, the answers are prepackaged and ready to be shared with the docile audience.”  

The hostility toward Bishop Barron, Fr. Mike Schmitz, Professor Scott Hahn, and Matt Fradd reveals a deep-seated NCR animus toward those who successfully evangelize—those who bring the Good News of the Gospel to the masses through their ministries. And their hostility is not just toward the well-known evangelizers in the Catholic Church. 

Several years ago, in a three-part investigative report on FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, NCR’s Heidi Schlumpf attempted to bring attention to the incredibly successful evangelizing group’s financial model of ministry sponsorship. In an article titled “FOCUS Campus Ministry has Big Money and Conservative Connections,” Schlumpf claims that FOCUS’ $57 million budget in 2017 is double its operating budget from just five years before. Claiming that these numbers dwarf comparable organizations such as Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which raises and spends approximately $5 million a year—one-tenth as much as FOCUS—Schlumpf suggests that there must be a conservative cabal of right-wing rich Catholics operating behind the curtain to evangelize on college campuses to bring Catholics closer to the Truth, as if that is a bad thing. 

She also suggests that FOCUS is racist because “every member of FOCUS’ 21-person advancement group is white, and the 18-member board of directors includes one Latino.” Schlumpf devoted much of her investigative reports to decrying the fact that “like many of our Catholic institutions,” FOCUS benefits from “people with financial resources, usually older white men.”

National Catholic Reporter has long provided a welcoming platform to pro-abortion politicians like Nancy Pelosi. In fawning interviews, NCR has normalized these politicians and tried to convince readers that faithful Catholics could vote for them despite their anti-life positions and policies. And although most bishops have refused to try and address the propaganda that has been promoted by NCR, the courageous Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone issued a public pastoral message in 2024 to NCR and Pelosi by posting a statement on the San Francisco archdiocesan website that stated:

Nancy Pelosi’s recent interview with the National Catholic Reporter has elicited a number of requests of me to offer a comment on it. First and foremost, I would like to renew my request for prayers for the Speaker’s conversion on the issue of human life in the womb, that it be consistent with the respect for human dignity she displays in so many other contexts.  

It is likely that National Catholic Reporter will continue to mislead Catholics for a while longer. But there is great uncertainty about its viability. Like its progressive allies in the Democratic Party, which have run out of ideas and money, NCR ran out of ideas decades ago. And now it seems that they have run out of donors who are willing to subsidize their attempts to create dissent within a Church that is ascendant under the faithful papacy of Pope Leo XIV.

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