So Much For the "Authoritative" Position or "News-gathering" Skills of the Paper of Record

Not even news-gathering, just basic, widely available information, on a "news" item that they had, what? a year, year-and-a-half warning on?

And then, the NY Times runs the headline, "God Is in the Details," as if to mock their own carelessness!

No, Cardinal Dolan was not going to lead the "Call and Response" at Mass.

And it's not really a scoop that there was no Bible on the altar, and that instead there would be a specially printed "Missal" from Rome, because... there's never a Bible on the altar for a Catholic Mass, a Missal is what is always used, (although church ladies, d'un certain âge, still call it "the Sacramentary.")

Now, admittedly, none of that is information any non-Catholic should be expected to know.

But it is expected that Mizz Crabtree who writes the "Faith Matters" column for the Easter Gnawbone Weekly Gazette, if she were called upon to write about the Pope visiting Whereintarnation Co. in East Dakota, would hie her Methodist self over to her canasta buddy's, Miss O'Papist, and ask her to get her cousin Fr. Can'twaittoretiretonewmexico to check her work.

So a reporter for the august Times really should have been expected to have done so.

That's what I was thinking at first.

But then the thought occurred to me - maybe there were no Catholics to ask.