The lasting potential of papal media coverage

Sporting his journalist’s pork pie hat with his press card prominent in the hatband, Father Raymond de Souza uses his National Post column today to admirably wrap up his coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Britain.

He argues convincingly, having followed the pontiff’s historic state visit step for step, that it forged triumph from predicted humiliation by confounding a hostile media and legions of fashionable pope-haters alike. More, Father de Souza points out that Benedict’s was the right kind of triumph precisely because of his steadfast refusal to water down the Gospel message to make the Church more “attractive” to the Times and the times. 

Such clear-eyed, knowing contrarianism—the gift to give issues a context few readers would have thought of by themselves—makes for truly fine journalism and a worthy read.

The one caveat comes when Father de Souza’s clerical collar shows a little too obviously around the neck under the journalist’s hat. He is a journalist-priest but he is a priest first, after all. It’s understandable that hostility toward the pope, toward the Church herself, would affect him more deeply, more personally, than it might others. The result is an unfortunate undercurrent that because of its hostility, the media is somehow blameworthy for the nightmare the Roman Catholic Church is going through because of the child sex abuse scandal in its ranks.

What’s lost is the opportunity to publicly use that hostility as a goad within the Church to begin truly cleansing it of the underlying causes of the abuse and of the scandal.

Was it predictable that the British media would give saturation coverage, during Benedict’s visit, to the issue of child sexual abuse by priests? Emphatically, yes. Was such saturation coverage justified? Even more emphatically: yes. At the institutional level, it’s difficult to imagine any single issue in Christianity being of greater urgency today than the abuse crisis engulfing the faith’s largest denomination. The capacity of the billion-member Roman church’s evangelical and moral mission depends on the purity of the charity—not just justice—it extends to the victims of priestly pedophiles.

That alone makes the abuse story infinitely newsworthy before even beginning to consider the narrative power of the human tragedies suffered by thousands of children.

So surely the last question to ask is this: if it was predictable, and if it was justifiable, is there any way the media coverage can be made beneficial to the church? Yes—if it produces a process to root out any perpetrators who remain hidden, and hastens the extermination of the very moral vision that allowed such crimes against humanity to continue for so long.

Despite Benedict XVI’s enormous outward dignity as pope, Joseph Ratzinger the man must writhe inside at the indignity of suffering repeated media scourging for the sins and crimes of fellow priests who lack the minimal Christian forbearance needed to keep their hands to themselves when children are in the room.

Wouldn’t it be something if the black-hearted British media expiated some of its own sins by provoking the pontiff to resurrect his erstwhile reputation as the Vatican’s pit bull?

Yes, yes, emphatically yes.

Why everyone should care about the silencing of the religious voice

Benedict’s warnings last week about the silencing of Christian voices in the public square provided a wonderful argument for why the Roman church’s current agonies matter far beyond its own pews. Yet the news-skewering effect of the abuse scandal pushed his warnings to the bottom paragraphs of most news reports.

More, an institution perceived as silencing the innocent during sexual crimes, then brow beating them to keep the secret afterward, hardly seems credible crying out against the stilling of the voices of the faithful.

Yet if the Roman Catholic Church is, ultimately, able to make just and charitable recompense for the offenses of its priests, if it is able to renew its evangelical and moral mission with the abuse scandal as part of its history, Benedict’s speech at Westminster Hall last week may contain the words to rally not just Catholics, not just Christians, not just believers, but even those who put their faith purely in secular liberal democracy.

http://thepapalvisit.org.uk/Replay-the-Visit/Speeches/Speeches-17-September/Pope-Benedict-s-address-to-Politicians-Diplomats-Academics-and-Business-Leaders

In his remarkable address, Benedict argued not just for faith as a man of faith, but for freedom as a child of dictatorship. Joseph Ratzinger witnessed first-hand as a young man the full evil of what might be called associational silencing, i.e. denying human beings full status as citizens simply because of the sources of what they say. As a result, he urged us to see that democracy, not dogma, suffers most from misunderstanding or abusing the separation of church and state. After all, the great monotheisms have survived for millennia under every political system that humans can connive. Humanity’s innate religious sense apparently pre-dates even language.

But we need only skip back in time the short distance to the current pope’s adolescence to be reminded of what can happen to tolerant, liberal democratic societies when faith is first pushed into private, and then the faithful themselves are deemed insufficiently human to merit entry to the public square. 

Is such an outcome a necessary consequence of every diminishment of religious freedom? No. But an abundance of caution, not to mention an enduring love of tolerance and liberality, should prompt all who care about democracy to speak out against what Benedict rightly identifies as the silencing of the religious voice.

Discrediting of faith

It’s always precarious to argue from personal experience, since it inevitably draws from a population sample of one. But if anyone doubts the reality of the silencing Benedict warned against, I would serve up as evidence the current hearings going on here in Quebec on the issue of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Now, my own beliefs on euthanasia are a matter of ample public record and I have no intention of rehashing them here. And as full disclosure: my wife is the director of an organization deeply involved in the effort to prevent medicalized killing being smuggled into the provincial health system.

What has been fascinating for me as an observer, admittedly one with a very definite perspective, is the way the religious faith of those opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide has been used as a pretext to attempt to block them from the debate even when they are arguing from purely secular grounds.

During hearings held in Montreal two weeks ago by a special committee of the provincial legislature, for example, Dr. John Zucchi testified on behalf of 54 tenured professors at McGill University who signed a manifesto opposing attempts to legalize euthanasia or assisted suicide. Dr. Zucchi is an eminent Canadian historian, and chairman of the history department at McGill. Testifying beside him was Dr. Gerald Batist, chairman of the department of oncology at McGill University and author of more than 100 scientific publications including one in 2006 on “improved anti-tumor response rate with decreased cardiotoxicity of non-pegylated liposomal doxorubicin compared with conventional doxorubicin in first-line treatment of metastatic breast cancer in patients who had received prior adjuvant doxorubicin: results of a retrospective analysis.“

As might be expected, neither of the witnesses went into raptures of religious declamation during their appearance before the legislative committee. In fact, neither mentioned a word about any aspect of religious faith in making his arguments.

Barely had they finished testifying, though, when one of their fellow citizens on the other side of the euthanasia argument was working the hallway outside the hearings, busily lobbying committee members to disregard Dr. Zucchi’s presentation because he is a well-known Catholic in Montreal. (He took the Quebec government to court for violating the constitutional rights of school children at Montreal’s Loyola High School.)

All right, so one busybody lobbyist got overly enthusiastic. Gotterdammerung it isn’t.

But the fascinating thing was that throughout the hearings witness after witness for the pro-euthanasia side of the debate launched into tirades about the religious beliefs of those opposed (my wife timed one tirade at a full two minutes of full-bore Catholic bashing) . . . and the committee members just folded their hands and let it go on.

The discrediting of faith now seems so accepted in Canadian society that elected members of a provincial legislature (which still has a crucifix on its walls) sat listening attentively to verbal abuse of believers simply for being believers.

These are the seeds of intolerance that will bear poison fruit indeed unless all who have faith in liberal democratic freedom come together to root them out.