No--She SAYS She's Catholic

( N.B. Fonts are messed up today. My apologies.)

I don't know if anyone here knows anything about journalism, but if so, I could use some help. It involves how the media misidentifies Catholics, and in so doing misrepresents that Catholic faith. Case in point: a quotation from this article, which is headlined "Catholic Melinda Gates defies the Vatican over Birth Control Funds":

Melinda Gates, billionaire philanthropist and practising Catholic, yesterday laid down the gauntlet to the Vatican by vowing to dedicate her life to improving access to contraception for women in the developing world.

My question here is how the article simply assumes that Gates is Catholic. It seems to me in many other articles the reporters hedge. For instance, “A marksman stopped the van, driven by a man who says he is a member of the English DefenceLeague,” or “Thourot,who says he is a member of the National Rifle Association, continues his support of guns,” or “The Taliban said it seized a doctor, three nurses and their driver on March 27 in Kandahar province” (my italics in all cases).

            I will here give reporters the benefit a very serious doubt (since I don’t believe that all, or even most, reporters are consciously anti-Catholic, although some most certainly are) and assume that their constant identification of Melinda Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, etc. as Catholic is not designed to damage or scandalize the faith. In that case, why don’t they hedge about this? Do they take Gates’s (or Pelosi’s, or whoever’s) word for it? Do they call and check to see if they’re registered at a parish? Do they at least attempt to verify it?

            The point is that, intentional or not, every time one of these dissidents (probably heretics) is unequivocally described by a third and ostensibly unbiased party as Catholic, it does damage the Catholic Church. (For the definition of Catholic, I’ll refer you to an earlier post, but the short version is that you have to be baptized, and you have to accept both the Catholic Faith and the authority of the hierarchy.  As Ludwig Ott puts it in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, a reference work that should be on the shelf of every theologian and canonist, “Public heretics, even those who err in good faith (material heretics), do not belong to the body of the Church, that is to the legal commonwealth of the Church” (p. 311). Of course, this refers to membership in the Church, not the label Catholic, so there may be some wiggle room here.

            So if I’m correct and Melinda Gates isn’t Catholic, yet she’s described as a Catholic, who’s at fault? If not the reporters, the only other candidates are 1) Gates herself and 2) her pastors (i.e., her parish priest, or his bishop, or the pope), since they refuse to publicly correct the record in light of the proper, doctrinally-defined understanding of membership in the Church. Three highly suspect entities: the heretic herself, or the media that does have an anti-Catholic bias, or members of a Church hierarchy infected with modernism. Take your pick, but whoever is to blame, every time this happens the Church takes another body blow because the following truth is once again obscured: You cannot be Catholic and at the same time dissent from Catholic doctrine.