"Hallelujah," the pope "intoned reverently, in Latin"

In which tmatt is asked to flash back to the 20-year run of GetReligion.org

This is not another Pope Leo XIV post — I promise. But I confess that it’s new-pope adjacent.

Instead, this is another post dedicated to a subject I have vowed not to stress too often (other than in “Crossroads” podcasts) at Rational Sheep. I am talking about the brand of mainstream-press criticism that was the daily bread and butter of GetReligion.org, the religion-news blog that I led for 20 years (and it’s massive archive remains online for researchers and writers).

May I ask Rational Sheep readers to check out the GetReligion finale, since its opening case study will play a major role in what unfolds in this post?

OK, first let’s look at the flurry of activity on X in which I was summoned back into GetReligion territory. And then my friend Rod “Living in Wonder” Dreher jumped into the fray in the latest offering — “Cicero's Hallelujah (Mmmph!)” — at his must-read Substack diary.

There is a lot of material here to view and read. So let’s get started with a screen shot from X.

This is a reference to Pope Leo XIV chanting the ancient Marian hymn “Regina Caeli.” Here is that text:

V. Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia.
R. Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia.
V. Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia.
R. Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

V. Gaude et laetare, Virgo Maria, alleluia.
R. Quia surrexit Dominus vere, alleluia.

And then in English:

V. Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia.
R. For He whom you did merit to bear, alleluia.
V. Has risen, as he said, alleluia.
R. Pray for us to God, alleluia.

V. Rejoice and be glad, O Virgin Mary, alleluia.
R. For the Lord has truly risen, alleluia.

If you want to watch that moment unfold, here is live footage, care of the Rome Reports YouTube channel.

Here is a non-paywall copy of the Washington Post report — by way of MSN.com — referenced by Jonathan Liedi and lots of other folks.

Take it away, Rod Dreher:

The authors are the Washington Post’s Rome bureau chief and one of his reporters, an Italian. These are not among the Post’s religion reporters, to be clear. But good grief, if you are journalists covering Rome — especially if one of you is a native Italian — shouldn’t you know one of the most basic facts about the global religion whose headquarters is right there in your city?

(For our non-Christian, non-Jewish readers, “hallelujah,” or sometimes “alleluia,” is a Hebrew prayer of praise that occurs often in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible.)

To be merciful to these reporters, Leo said “hallelujah” at the end of a Latin prayer. If you have no knowledge of Christianity and the Bible, it’s easy to see how you would make that mistake. But then, what business do men whose knowledge of Christianity is so scanty have covering the Vatican? Nota bene — that’s Latin for “note well,” Post reporters in the audience — this mistake got through layers of copy editing back in Washington too! That is to say, not a single soul at that major American newspaper, whose critical eyes fell onto that copy before it went into print, realized that “hallelujah” is not a Latin word.

Not one.

Dreher notes that this is funny, but it’s also sobering for ordinary news consumers, since it “reveals so very much about the mindset of the people who report and curate the news.” The question is whether elite newsrooms contain anyone “culturally literate” enough to know what was actually happening on the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica.

It’s also possible that these Post journalists thought they needed to stress the Latin angle since, you know, that whole Latin Mass thing is so important to the right-wing Catholic extremists who back Donald Trump. Right?