Three weeks ago, a documentary was released in which Pope Francis appeared to support civil unions for same-sex couples. Even though papal interviews like this are personal reflections and have no effect on the magisterium (teachings) of the Church, parties on both the left and the right immediately concluded, with elation or horror respectively, that Church teaching was changing on marriage and family. Believe me, Pope Francis is not one to hold back; if he actually wanted to change Church teaching, he would have done it already through an encyclical or an edit to the Catechism. He has not done this.
Nevertheless, I think this is an opportunity to do some reflection on where we get our Catholic news. Unfortunately, many Catholic news sites are almost exclusively opinion and commentary, without any real dedication to journalism. Opinion and commentary is fine, as long as we understand the biases present on our preferred sites. Publications like the National Catholic Reporter, for example, generally want Church teachings to change, so they will (and did) use moments like this to push the hope that Catholic belief may finally be aligning with their progressive politics. Sites like LifeSite News, on the other hand, believe that the hierarchy is corrupt and will (and did) use moments like this to push the narrative that our bishops and Pope are opposing the tenants of the faith.
Instead, I strongly recommend going first to an actual news site before reading the commentaries. I, personally, rely on the Catholic News Agency (CNA) and Crux, both of which take the journalism portion of their jobs very seriously. CNA, for example, put out an excellent FAQ immediately after the news broke, and later published an investigative piece definitively showing how the Pope’s comments were stripped of some very important context.
We all have our preferred commentaries, and I think these have their place. We just have to be careful to pair them with hard journalism, too, and to not jump to conclusions until all of the facts are known.
Fr. Moore 