Correspondent brings ‘Religion & Ethics’ home

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Judy Valente.

	The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

Judy Valente, Chicago-based correspondent for “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” spent 15 years working for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—where, she said, she tried to “sneak in” religion stories whenever possible. Valente, a Catholic, always wanted to cover religion, and she got her chance when she met Religion & Ethics host Bob Abernethy in 1997. In addition to her journalism career, Valente is a poet who recently earned a master of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute.



The Catholic New World: How did you end up working for “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly”?

Judy Valente: I wanted to take a break from journalism, so I was teaching in the journalism school at Northwestern. I was asked to be a consultant to their Center for Religion and News Media, and I was asked to help put together a conference for editors over religion reporters. While I was there I met Bob Abernethy, and he was starting this show. It wasn’t much of a leap for me to be very interested in what he was doing. He said to me very casually, “If you have any ideas, send them along.” So I sent him a six-page memo of story ideas, and about six months later, he got back to me and said, “Hey, do you think you could do a story for us?” One story turned into the next three years of my life.



TCNW: What was that first story?

JV: I’m very grateful to the Archdiocese of Chicago, because that first story was a profile of Cardinal George. Apparently, they had been trying to reach Cardinal George for I think a couple of months, and to no avail. They weren’t able to set up the interview. I knew a lot of people who were very close personal friends of the cardinal, so I called them and said, “I really need to talk to the cardinal.” Within about two days, we had the interview set up, we were going to go to the basketball game with him, he was doing some sort of special service for the employees. So boom, boom, boom, I was able to set everything up, and that was my first story. “Religion & Ethics” was very grateful, because they had a story they wanted, and this was my entrée. It made them look good and it made me look good.



TCNW: Why were they so interested in a profile of Cardinal George?

JV: First of all, they were interested in him because he was replacing Cardinal Bernardin. Who was this man who was replacing such a prominent American churchman? And then, he was one of only two American cardinals to be named that year. So we had this story ready to run pretty much the week he was named cardinal.



TCNW: Did you have contacts from doing stories or from your personal experience as a Catholic in the archdiocese?

JV: That’s an interesting question, because all my hard work as a lay person on committees and boards and at conferences really paid off. While I was at the Wall Street Journal in Chicago, I always felt the need to feed my spiritual side. So I became involved in a number of organizations, like Crossroads Center for Faith and Work, and subsequently, the National Center for the Laity, Business Executives for Economic Justice … I was always active on committees and boards, and I was always active in whatever parish I was in, and that paid off grandly for me when I began to cover stories.



TCNW: Why did you want to cover religion?

JV: It goes to the heart of what we’re all about, what we’re here on this earth for. You can only get so far looking at science and philosophy before you come to the point where there’s got to be some meaning beyond that. When I was in college (Jesuit-run St. Peter’s College, Jersey City, N.J.), my minor was in philosophy and theology, my major was English. Way back then, I recognized that was an interest of mine, and my reading was always in the area of spirituality, philosophy, theology. I always felt intensely called to work on the spiritual part of my life.



TCNW: How does your work life intersect with your faith life?

JV: Sometimes it challenges it, because you learn things you wish weren’t true about the Catholic Church, or another church or another religion. We covered the story last year about how poorly paid Catholic Church employees are, and that’s a bit distressing, because the Catholic Church has the greatest body of literature on economic justice probably that was ever written, and yet it wasn’t following its own teaching. That’s the negative. On the positive—and there’s far more positive than negative—we’ve met really extraordinary people who are truly trying to live as Christ asked people to live. People going to extraordinary lengths to live a contemplative life in the world, to be Christlike in the world. These people are the people that I meet every day, that I interview every day, and they’ve had a profound effect on my life.



TCNW: Is it difficult to find religion stories to do in Chicago and the Midwest?

JV: No. This is an incubating point for religion stories. I’ve often said I could fill the entire show with stories out of Chicago and the Midwest.



TCNW: Why do you think that is?

JV: I think people take their faith very seriously in this part of the country. Faith is not a fashion accessory here in the Midwest. People go to church, they’re involved in their community, they’re engaged by their faith. They’re not going to church just to be seen. And there’s a lot of creative thinking going on in this part of the country. For example, we did a piece on a group of Catholic and Christian businessmen in Chicago who were trying to determine what is a just wage. For corporate executives to be caring about this is a big deal. The thinking was coming from Chicago, but it was really a national issue.



TCNW: What purpose does a program like “Religion & Ethics” serve?

JV: We desperately need a program like “Religion & Ethics” because religion is as much a part of American life as our political life, our economic life, our social life. Religion literally permeates many Americans’ lives, and to ignore it and say it’s not a topic worthy of news coverage is ridiculous. We have shown with our program that you can cover religion as news. There is no proselytizing. It’s not namby-pamby. Every reporter on the show has been a news reporter for all of his or her career. There’s not one person covering religion on our show who was a priest, a minister, a Buddhist monk. We’re all professional reporters. We’ve all covered everything else. And we cover it as news. We cover it as it relates to economics, as it relates to community life. I think it’s absolutely crazy that the networks don’t have regular religion reporters and spend so little energy covering religion when it permeates every part of your life. There’s a religion factor in so many stories.



TCNW: Why do you think they don’t?

JV: I think there’s a fear of proselytizing. There’s the idea that you have to be very careful with religion because you have to use the word “Christ,” you have to use the word “God,” you’re going to have to use the word “Allah,” and that’s going to somehow come off as though you’re agreeing with this position. People are going to be talking about what their beliefs are, and there’s this fear that you’re going to offend somebody.



“Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” airs in Chicago at 11:30 a.m. Sundays on WTTW-Channel 11 and at 9 p.m. Sundays on WYCC-Channel 20.