A year into her tenure as religion reporter, Annysa Johnson is giving Journal Sentinel coverage of the beat a more aggressive flavor reminiscent of the past.
Johnson, who came to the paper in the late 1990s as an assistant business editor but was reassigned to suburban reporting, scored a noteworthy scoop just last week: revealing that Archbishop Jerome Listecki had phoned Marquette University President Robert Wild to question the university’s job offer to lesbian scholar Jodi O’Brien as its next Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. After Listecki weighed in, and after the archdiocese’s judicial vicar Paul Hartmann wrote a letter criticizing her work, Marquette rescinded the offer to O’Brien.
Johnson had already laid groundwork for the story. As one of three journalists on a panel questioning Listecki when he spoke at the Milwaukee Press Club in early March, she pressed him on the subject of how much influence the diocese would or should have on local Catholic academic institutions.
Her question focused on the implications for academic freedom in Listecki’s assertion that the University of Notre Dame should have consulted local church leaders before inviting the pro-choice President Barack Obama to speak there. The archbishop’s blithe response: “I respect academic freedom in the classroom. But I also have freedom. If a teacher attacks the church, I will be there to defend it.”
While all three reporters on the panel offered their share of tough questions, Johnson was the most willing to push back and be necessarily assertive that day. (For his part, Listecki demonstrated a veteran pol’s ability to be slippery, change the subject and answer only the questions he wanted to, whether they were asked or not.)
Johnson rang up another scoop following the infamous case of Father Lawrence Murphy, accused of abusing as many as 200 boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf from 1950 to 1974. The New York Times first got a jump on the story’s newest angle in March, when it obtained documents from lawyers for the alleged victims suggesting that the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, played a role in preventing Murphy from being defrocked.
An Aug. 19, 1998, letter from then-Archbishop Rembert Weakland to Ratzinger stated that Weakland had told Father Thomas Brundage, the judge assigned to Murphy’s church trial, to end the trial and implement a lesser sanction, suspending Murphy’s priestly duties rather than defrocking him. (Murphy died two days later.)
In the wake of the Times‘ revelations and defending the church and Ratzinger, Brundage wrote an essay in the Anchorage Catholic newspaper in Alaska, where he’s now based. Brundage denied there had been any plans to drop the case.
Johnson covered Brundage’s assertions and got an interview with Brundage April 1, in which Brundage reiterated his claim. “I would have been furious that Weakland would want me to stop the case,” Johnson quoted Brundage as saying.
Commendably, Johnson didn’t just take his word for it. Digging further, she came back with a story the next day pointing out that Brundage himself appeared to have drafted the 1998 letter from Weakland. “I hope this is of help Archbishop, Rev. Thomas T. Brundage, Judicial Vicar, Archdiocese of Milwaukee,” Brundage put at the bottom of the unsigned draft.
In the wake of the follow-up, Brundage later admitted he had erred:
“In all honesty, I do not remember this memo, but I do admit to being wrong on this issue and I apologize for my mistake.”
As Pressroom Buzz noted in March, the JS‘s coverage of the Catholic Church’s child abuse scandals has been uneven. Religion reporter Marie Rohde was indefatigable in digging out the story at the predecessor Milwaukee Journal in the early 1990s under then-editor Sig Gissler and managing editor Steve Hannah. Mary Jo Meissner muted the paper’s coverage when she arrived as editor in 1993.
That pattern continued under Meissner’s stewardship of the new Journal Sentinel, when first Jo Sandin and then Tom Heinen took over the religion beat. Sandin was a skilled feature writer and wordsmith and Heinen a sober and thoughtful reporter, but while they covered breaking news on the abuse issue, neither plowed new ground on the subject. The JS‘s major investigative piece on the Murphy case in 2006 was written by Mary Zahn, a member of the paper’s Watchdog team.
Johnson appeared to set a new tone almost as soon as she took over religion coverage a year ago. When Weakland published his memoirs, Johnson wrote several stories and consistently took note of Weakland’s repeated unwillingness to be interviewed by the paper.
She isn’t all confrontation and criticism. Over the weekend she turned out a short, charming and enlightening feature on the Dalai Lama’s visit for the public opening of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.
But she’s also not afraid to ruffle some collars. Peter Isely of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests credits Johnson with “some really good reporting” in the last year — and with displaying a dogged even-handedness that takes nothing for granted, no matter the source.
“She’s not easy on me,” Isely says. “I know that every line is going to be gone over. She challenges every single document we obtain or release, every single statement we make. She does not hold back or fail to thoroughly challenge our position or conclusions.”
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