Burnt Orange Report

Vatican Coverage Atrocious

By Andrew Dobbs

I've had a passing interest in the selection of the new pontiff over the last couple of weeks as it is an incredibly important process that I've never had the chance to witness in my lifetime. Unfortunately for me the quality of news coverage of the event has been truly awful.

The biggest problem seems to be that the media seem to regard the process as something akin to American politics, and their mindset is so skewed towards covering American political processes that they shortchange both the conclave and the expectations that people have. Want proof that they are completely clueless? How about this article from the Christian Science Monitor which has the title "Benedict XVI will test religion's 'red-blue' divide" and this quote:

Supporters welcome a global figure unwilling to water down his faith. Others see his election as widening the global religious "red-blue" divide between conservative moral absolutists and liberals of all faiths who say religion must be more inclusive.

I suppose that the idea is valid, but the rhetoric of a "red-blue" divide is so inane as to immediately cause severe nausea in conscientious readers. The fact that the colors chosen by network news broadcasts during the 2000 elections are now being applied to theological debates among the world's oldest Christian church is idiotic at best and downright blasphemous at worst.

And the media's conception of this divide is also completely wrong. The fact of the matter is that if you let Michael Moore and Gloria Steinem pick the most liberal cardinal in the entire conclave, the person would still be against abortion, gay marriage, female ordination, allowing priests to marry and contraception. In any system, including ours, there are things which are so bedrock that nobody within respectable discourse questions their value. Nobody in American politics wants to get rid of the Senate or elect the President for life or legalize child pornography. Those things are so basic as to be unquestionable. In the same way, Catholic teachings on the sanctity of human life, the sexual purity and patricarchal nature of the clergy (and I don't use that term in a derogatory way, simply descriptive) and traditional family strucuture are so basic as to have very little opposition in the mainstream of the Church's hierarchy. To call Benedict XVI or any of the cardinals "conservative" because they support the traditional values of the Church is like calling Ted Kennedy a "conservative" because he doesn't want to legalize heroin.

The American media are forcing American political debates and American political processes on a system that is almost 10 times as old as our Republic and operates on a completely different plane. To define Catholic "liberals" and "conservatives" by the issues of gay marriage, abortion and women's liberation is to ignore the truly salient discussions in the Church- local control versus centralization, liturgical reform, political economy, etc. We need some intelligent discussion on these topics, and God knows (I mean that in the most literal sense) that it won't come from CNN and the Christian Science Monitor.