Catholic Voice

 The Future Depends on Fidelity

 

“What future does the Catholic press have at the height of a digital revolution that is bankrupting many newspapers?” 

 

That is the question posed by the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop Claudio Celli, in his opening address at the Catholic Press Congress held in Rome in early October.  230 communicators from 85 countries participated in the four day gathering to discuss the both the challenges and the opportunities Catholic journalists must confront today.  The meeting ended with an audience with His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI.

 

The Archbishop proposed an answer that was short, clear and to the point:  “The future will depend on the capacity of Catholic journalism to be faithful to its mission.”  He went on to say that the mission of Catholic journalism is "to give rigorous and correct religious information, above all when that offered by a good part of the secular press is not very objective today and at times creates confusion."

 

 

Irish Media Bias Against Catholic Teaching

 

Consider, for example, the recent series of letters to the editor published from 7 - 22 Oct 2010 in The Irish Times under the heading “Nobel Prize for Infertility Work.”  Patty Agnew’s article (6 Oct) led to the letters.  Mr Agnew’s article was a straightforward report of the Pontifical Academy for Life’s statement of protest at the selection of Robert Edwards for the Nobel Prize for Medicine.  Prof Roberts was the inventor of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a practice clearly condemned by official Church teaching. 

 

All the letters chosen for publication were, except for two, in favour of IVF.  One letter submitted by a priest on 7 Oct clearly broke ranks with Church teaching.   Not only did he indicate his support for IVF, but he did so in a manner that was seriously disrespectful towards the Mother of God, St. Joseph, and ultimately Jesus Christ. 

 

After several failed attempts and some major editing, I managed to have a letter published 14 Oct specifically responding to the issues initiated by the 7 Oct letter.  Meanwhile it was hopeful seeing another letter by an Irish priest who spoke about Natural Procreation Technology (NaPro Technology) as a more effective alternative to IVF.  His letter, however, was much more subtle than mine which addressed the doctrinal issues head on.  It would have been wrong to just give the 7 Oct letter a pass.

 

In the days following my letter a number of other letters were published highly critical of both the content and tone of my letter.  All of them, disagreeing with Church teaching against IVF, defended their views by refuting things I never actually said or implied in my letter.  The Irish Times, however, never published my follow-up letters (submitted in two different versions) to clarify my position in support of Church teaching.  Oddly enough, I was even given a copy of another unpublished letter written by a female ObGyn in defence of Church teaching in response to another ObGyn who offered grossly exaggerated statistics and fallacious arguments supporting IVF.

 

It makes one wonder how many other letters defending Church teaching were left unpublished.  The point is that despite their incessant claims of objectivity, secular media are anything but unbiased.  Rather, they play no small role in shaping public opinion on important issues.  For example, Catholics who are not well-informed on the issues concerning IVF and who read the series of letters in The Irish Times would be at risk of moral confusion.  The sad thing is that some key information was deliberately withheld from them by the almighty media powers that be.

 

 

Facing the Challenges

 

Zenit reports Vatican Spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, as saying “that harsh anti-Catholic reactions in the press are understandable, since the Christian message ‘goes against the secularized world’ and since the Church is often ‘unarmed’ -- with few ways to defend itself.”  Commenting on the communications challenge, the director of L'Osservatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, said that more attention given both to good information and solid formation, both in the world and within Catholicism.   According to Zenit,  he “lamented new stereotypes that have arisen about the Holy See, such as that it is an enemy of science, or incapable of maintaining the rhythm of communications media.’

 

The president of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing (USA), Gregory Erlandson, said according to Zenit, "The lack of knowledge of the faith has led in turn to an inability to distinguish what is truly unique about the faith.  This also means that there is less of an impulse to seek out Catholic-identified books and publications."  

 

Several of the Congress’ participants pointed out the Church’s credibility problem arising from the sexual abuse scandals.  Zenit quotes Archbishop Celli as saying, "that although these revelations have been a shock for the Pope and for the Church, as Benedict XVI himself said to journalists accompanying him on the plane to Scotland, this grave and shameful sin does not in any way call into question the vocation and mission of the Church to be at the service of man with love."  He added, “that the communications crises and scandals that the Church has gone through in recent years emphasize even more the need to have means of communication with a Catholic vocation.”

 

According to Zenit, “The current context in which the Catholic press moves, said Archbishop Celli, is that of  ‘a dictatorship of relativism, where we witness the attempt to reduce the action of the Church and of religion to a private realm, without public importance, de-legitimizing it as if it were an enemy of man, of his liberty and dignity, in this age of sad passions.’”

 

 

Moving from Challenge to Opportunity

 

John Thavis, of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Catholic News Service, offered some strong observations to those gathered at the conference.  He asked, "How well do we really communicate with the modern world, the wider world, beyond our own ecclesial borders?”  For example, as the scandal erupted in Europe at the beginning of 2010 and many secular newspapers seemed to try to lay the blame at the feet of Benedict XVI, the Catholic press knew that the Pope had been ‘methodical and determined and patient’ in trying to deal with the problem since the 1990s.”

 

Thavis added, “What worries me is that Catholic communicators, with all their perspective, context and fairness on the sex abuse story, have not really had much impact beyond their own limited audience.  We feel frustration at times over how the mainstream media treats the Church, but this frustration is often translated into a kind of closed-circuit discussion among ourselves.  There's a risk of becoming too self-congratulatory," he cautioned.

 

It seems to me that too often Church initiatives attempt to engage the world by selling out to the secular.  What has become clear to me through the series of letters in The Irish Times was that people no longer speak with a Church vocabulary, nor do they understand it.  That means that Catholic journalists need to engage the world on her terms without letting go of “the pearl of great price” which is our Catholic faith.  This is what the Church is asking; this is our mission--hopefully many will choose to accept it.

This feature is categorised under Life Matters