It used to be secular but in the past decade the church has exerted more control over the paper. There is still great journalism to be found in it but maybe not as much as in it's hey day.
I poked around a bit and it looks the church pulled back from more direct control, maybe. Sounds like the church put a non-journalist church member in charge in the early 2000s and later put professional journalist back in charge later in the decade. I'm not sure what the background of the current leadership is. I remember a bunch sky is falling pieces in the mainstream press when a church member took control back in the day but I can't find much good analysis of weather the quality of the paper has suffered from the changes. Sounds like the Monitor had as much trouble as any other paper adjusting to the new media landscape and that it might be hard to tell what changes are because of changes in the media landscape and which are from leadership changes.