'Disappointed in their journalism'

From the bulletin Sunday at St. John the Evangelist Church in Rochester...good thing I wasn't in the pews yesterday...

During these past days, Pope Benedict has given us many texts and we need to be careful not to read them as if we already know everything. It seems to me the Rochester Post-Bulletin offered very poor coverage of the Pope’s visit. If you relied on our local newspaper to give you a picture of this event, you did not receive anything significant or of substance. I was very disappointed in their journalism.

We did a story on the front page April 15, the day Pope Benedict arrived in the United States, with some local content. Without going to the binder of print copies, I see a total of 12 stories in our Web archives related to the pope's visit (one of which is a followup on the possible impact of Benedict's visit on seminary enrollment), plus two editorial page columns (one by O'Reilly, the other by Parker) on the pope's visit.

Some of those stories appeared in short form in our nation/world pages; at least one of them ran to quite full length. In any case, that seems like a decent amount of coverage in print. We could have run more on the pope's more purely spiritual message during his visit, on our Faith page.

I'll also note the front page story Thursday on this summer's St. John Block Party...