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.
No comments:
Post a Comment