Get Religion ... Lookin' Out for Media Reporters Everywhere

And we're glad they do. If you care about bad reporting or a lack of reporting about religion, you should be reading Get Religion. We can be thankful that whether a large issue or a small story detail, nothing gets by the bloggers and their readers. For example, in a story about the Chicago cathedral burning ...

But there’s a whopper of a problem with one line in the story:

One of the church officials said the blessed sacrament or Eucharist, which symbolizes the body of Christ, was removed.

It is wonderful to see a reported detail on the sacrament but Catholics do not believe that the Eucharist symbolizes the body of Christ. They believe that the bread and wine become — are — the body and blood of Christ. This isn’t really an unknown teaching of the church, having been featured in popular culture, literature and general discourse for hundreds of years.

As the reader who sent it in noted:

Perhaps most readers wouldn’t have noticed this, but I think this is something that an editor, at the very least, should have picked up and changed.

Yes, it’s a rookie mistake in an otherwise solid story.