Face to Face with... John Allen

A Dialogue with Journalist John L. ALLEN, Jr. National Catholic Reporter Senior Correspondent CNN Senior Vatican Analyst

Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 7:00PM Milbank Chapel, Teachers College Columbia University TRANSCRIPT PHOTO GALLERY

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FROM THE OPENING SPEECH The reason why we are truly delighted to meet and discuss with John Allen is simple: we think that John is today one of the most important journalist in the US who specializes in covering the life of the Catholic Church. And why is that? The principal reason, in our view, is not his extensive network of contacts, or the quality of his reporting and writing skills and so on. In our opinion, the primary reason why John has shined in the firmament of Catholic journalism over the last few years is much more basic. As soon as he started writing from Rome for the National Catholic Reporter in 2000, it became obvious to everybody that here was somebody dedicated to reporting what is happening in the Church, offering both a wealth of information and a balanced judgment. If that sounds banal to you, perhaps you have not noticed that over the last 40 or 50 years, roughly since the time of the Council, the professional vocation of many of John's colleagues has not been primarily to describe what the Church IS, but rather what the Church SHOULD BE. Even in the Catholic press, much of the reporting about the Vatican has been often tinted by ideological preconceptions. Accordingly, it was very hard to read anything about Church life without perceiving that we were being exposed to some variety of either "liberal" or "conservative" agenda. Not that there is anything wrong, mind you, with having a "working hypothesis" about what is happening. But our prejudices should not prevent us from looking at reality. And this is where John was different. From the beginning his work showed that, whatever his own opinions may be, first of all he wants to know, he is curious about what is happening in the Church. This simple desire to know the reality of the Church, rather than to confirm his own preconceptions, is what has made him a great journalist. At the beginning of his book on the Church, Msgr. Luigi Giussani remarked that the Church is first of all A LIFE that propagates though the centuries of human history. John's columns always reflect a passion to describe this life as it unfolds, and for this we thank him.