I'm a little late getting to this, but three cheers for Peter Steinfels' column in the Times the other day, criticizing lazy journalists for what he is certain will be their usual crap coverage of a papal visit to the US. Excerpt:
Is the pope Catholic? That used to be a sarcastic way of saying, could anything be more obvious? Is fire hot? Is water wet?Now, however, that nothing in the world is obvious, when Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States on April 15 there will surely be voices in the media apparently disconcerted to discover that, yes, the pope is Catholic.
Yes, he disagrees with Richard Dawkins that atheism is necessary for salvation. Yes, he believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God and the center of human history. Yes, he thinks that Catholic Christianity is truer than Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or even Protestant Christianity. Astounding. What next?
This will now be the eighth or ninth papal trip to the United States, depending on whether one counts John Paul II’s several hours of layover in Anchorage in 1981. What is surprising about every papal visit, at least after 1965, when Paul VI addressed the United Nations, is what so many people find surprising. Each time they are surprised, for example, that the pope hasn’t abandoned the notion that all human lives, even in their earliest, embryonic phases, deserve protection and that therefore abortion is wrong.
The problem is that most journalists just don't get religion. They don't understand how the religious mind works, and try to impose a political understanding on it, particularly in terms of conflict (besides, American journalism thrives on exploring conflicts, often to the exclusion of ideas). Nor do they get how the Catholic mind works, and seem to believe that Catholicism is just a smellsy-bellsy version of Protestantism, which more or less makes the individual believer the locus of religious authority (to be fair, any observer of the cafeteria that is American Catholicism could be forgiven this conclusion). And they tend to interpret the Catholicism that is in terms of the Catholicism they would like to see. As I have observed in a different context, it strikes them as normative that religion would be liberalizing in this day and age, and when it fails to do so, they sense that something is wrong.
One of the reasons National Catholic Reporter's Vatican correspondent John Allen is such a valuable journalist is that he actually works very hard at explaining the Vatican and its ways to his readers. He could easily pander to them -- he does, after all, work for a famously liberal Catholic paper -- but he's great because he understands the Catholic faith and the Catholic bureaucracy, and strives to interpret their workings in light of a worldview that doesn't always make sense to Americans, with our unquestioned assumptions (liberal and conservative) about how the world -- and the world of the Catholic religion -- works.
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Charles Cosimano: You say "JP2 was a tool of foreign policy, to be played like the stringed instrument that he was."
Could you explain yourself?
As I recall, JP-the-Great was the target of an assassin's bullet, part of the KGB's attempt to eliminate him as a factor in Poland's self-liberation. As an underground seminarian he risked death at the hands of the Nazis. As a priest and later an archbishop he outwitted the Communists who occupied his country and spied on his people. As Pope, he didn't hesitate to expend his media popularity to willingly be a "sign of contradiction" to the world. It's hard to see how someone so brave could be viewed the way you describe him.
Perhaps I have misunderstood your characterization. Help me out here :-)
I live in the Washington, D.C. area and was hoping to get a ticket to attend the Papal mass in April. But I decided to shelve that dream when I heard that there were upwards of 200,000 requests for 47,000 tickets.
Yeah, that massive outdoor Mass in Soviet controlled Poland was so servile of JPII. He didn't really understand the importance of his actions (or the dangers). What a tool. NOT.
For all those who missed this, the brilliant minds at the Creative Minority Report website put together a helpful media template for the mainstream media to use during the Pope's visit:
creativeminorityreport.com/2007/11/headline-prognostication.html
(Add the usual.)
The Creative Minority Report is always a great read!
It took me a while to understand this pope, and it really took a shift of my point of view to understand his (or I think I understand, anyway). I had to come to learn the Tradition of the Church, I had to get out of the round spaceship Catholic parishes to get to the old Catholic churches in the dumpy parts of town, I had to learn the Tridentine Rite of the Holy Mass-- in Latin, with the priest facing the Lord rather than the congregation closed in facing each other across the circle. I had to accept that this Pope has a vision for the Church that includes me, but that he would challenge the Church to do some things that no one was used to doing.
And he is subtle-- offering the Mass ad orientem, rolling out long-closeted vestments, issuing his motu proprio, removing the shackles on the indult Mass and elevating it to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass-- and it is truly Extraordinary!
Then, I began to understand this pope. He's not the charismatic pop star that his predecessor was, he's a quiet, contemplative academic. And I hope that, like St. Francis, he's slowing rebuilding the Church that appears to have fallen into ruin.
Viva il Papa!
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