The title of the artilce is, of course, sardonic if not sarcastic, since it reads very much like a John Allen recapitulation of 'Benedict XVI's greatest blunders'... For now, I will simply post the first part of the article in purple to signify that it is all questionable at the very least, and also because the specifics the writer cites have been recycled and reworked to death - and distorted with every new turn - but were mostly dealt with in the Rodari-Tornielli book and the couple of good revfews of the book recently posted on this thread.
Is Pope Benedict's media team
up to the challenge?
by Paul Donovan
Monday 30 August 2010
Pope John Paul II was seen as the great communicating pontiff, a man who went out from the Vatican to engage with the world. The message was clear and the symbolism spot on: remember him kneeling to kiss the ground when he came to the UK during the Falklands war in 1982?
The present pope, Benedict XVI, could not be more different. A scholarly man who made his way as the previous pope's enforcer in the Vatican, he is not a natural communicator.
Benedict XVI's regime has seen several PR disasters: the Regensburg address in 2006, which was widely interpreted as an attack on Muslims, then the suggestion that saving humanity from homosexuality was as important as saving the rainforest, and the decision to pardon Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying British bishop.
Those close to the inner sanctum of theCchurch say the problem is that too many people seem to be participating in communicating the message. Statements are disjointed, as if several contributors have been involved and then it has all been hacked together by the Vatican press officer, Father Federico Lombardi.
This is in marked contrast to the way the media operation worked under John Paul II, when the legendary press secretary Joaquín Navarro-Valls handled the operation. He was present at all meetings and had control of the message – a very modern spin doctor.
However, the mishaps experienced so far by the present Pope and his media team slide into insignificance when compared with the potential damage that mishandling of the international child abuse scandal could wreak. Earlier in the year, PR weaknesses were exposed as abuse cases were uncovered in America, Germany, Austria, Holland, Ireland and Belgium.
Abuse appeared endemic in the operation of the Church. The global media sensed blood as the crisis seemed to move closer to the Pope himself. The first response from the Vatican was to try to shoot the messenger, accusing the media of dishonest reporting. The stories were said to be part of an "obvious and shameful" campaign to "damage" Pope Benedict "at all costs".
As the crisis gathered momentum, there were unhelpful contributions from Father Rainero Cantalamessa, the preacher at the pontifical household, who compared attacks on the Pope to anti=semitism, and from Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the dean of the college of cardinals, referring to "petty gossip".
Finally, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, suggested a link between paedophilia and homosexuality. Against this background, the first visit of a Pope to Britain as a head of state was announced.
The trip, from 16-19 September, offers plenty of potential pitfalls, with the atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens claiming to be investigating the possibility of arresting the Pope over allegations that he was aware of child abuse in the Church and did nothing.
Then there is the human rights activist Peter Tatchell's "protest the pope" campaign, and the National Secular Society's constant questioning of the £19m cost of the visit.
The attitude of the British government may be one of welcome, but hostility does not lie far below the surface in Whitehall, as shown by the infamous "blue-sky thinking" Foreign Office memo in April that suggested a brand of condoms be named after the Pope and that he should visit an abortion clinic as part of the visit.
The handling of the facetious memo was one of the more astute pieces of public relations from the church, which in effect turned the other cheek in public while in private obtaining more concessions regarding the costs of the papal visit from a government keen to make amends.
The consistent strand that runs through 10 years of changes in official Catholic communications is a lack of people involved who have worked as journalists.
The approach of the Catholic Communications Network (CCN) has been, on the whole, professional but reactive. It never seeks to set the agenda. This allows some of the more mischievous in the media to portray the church as "sex-crazed", interested only in issues such as abortion, birth control and civil partnerships.
There has, however, been some improvement since Vincent Nichols took over from Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as the archbishop of Westminster last year. More comfortable with the media than his predecessor, Nichols has spoken out on issues as varied as the economic crisis and youth violence.
One commentator on all things Catholic is Cristina Odone, the former editor of the
Catholic Herald, who is a regular talking head, particularly on the BBC, despite having left the editor's chair more than a decade ago.
It has no doubt been in part to fill the vacuum that Odone and other chatterers have utilised that Austen Ivereigh, Murphy-O'Connor's former press secretary, and Jack Valero, the director of Opus Dei in the UK, have combined with the Catholic Union to create Catholic Voices.
Ivereigh says the model for Voices "is inspired by the experience of the Da Vinci Code Response Group in 2006, when the release of the Dan Brown film created a similar demand for Catholics to be ready to discuss its claims, however far-fetched".
The fact that the media may not want to hear from these people seems to have escaped the organisers' notice. It is good copy to get the most outrageous Catholic voices who can be found on issues such as abortion, civil partnerships and child abuse.
Many in the media are not interested in a rational voice from the Catholic church – it's not good box office. What is more, Catholic Voices has already hit choppy waters, being accused of ageism because of its upper age limit of 40, and a rival group called Catholic Voices for Reform has already been set up.
The question is: how will this all pan out? The worst-case scenario for the Catholic church here is that before the Pope's visit journalists discover recent abuse cases.
[Does anyone have any doubt they already have such 'bombshells' reaady to lob????]
This would shoot to pieces the strategy that has attempted to separate the Church in the UK from the rest of the world on child abuse, arguing it acted properly and put in place rigid guidelines.
CCN is certainly confident, issuing weekly communiques counting down the days until the Pope arrives. However, if abuse cases surface from the past 10 years and a Catholic Voices representative ends up pitched against Dawkins or a Catholic Voices for Reform sharpshooter, anything could happen.
In that situation, prayers may prove not to be enough. [And yet, NON PRAEVALEBUNT! In God we trust...]
And how about this alarmist nonsense which portrays the Pope as though he were a decrepit on the verge of requiring life support at any second!
Hospitals go on high alert
for the Pope's visit
by Deborah Anderson
August 30, 2010
Hospital staff across central Scotland will be placed on high alert next month for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.
Fears over the Pontiff’s health have led to every hospital on or near his route between Edinburgh and Glasgow being asked to make preparations.
The Vatican has been trying to play down fears for the 83-year-old.
But officials now say they are not prepared to have just one designated hospital – standard procedure on overseas visits.
Pope Benedict takes medication for a heart condition following a mild stroke in 1991.
A year later he suffered haemorrhaging after he cut his head in a fall, also believed to have been caused by a stroke.
Last December, traditional Christmas midnight Mass was held two hours earlier than scheduled because he was tired. The Pope also recently broke his wrist after slipping.
Concern has been raised that congestion on Glasgow’s Kingston Bridge could put his life at risk in an emergency.
[Have you ever read such a ridiculously tendentious account of Joseph Ratzinger's health history - which is remarkably scant for a man his age and who has always been constitutionally fragile!]
The visit to the UK, from September 16-19, will be the Pope’s fourth overseas trip this year. He will meet the Queen in Edinburgh before coming to Glasgow to say Mass at Bellahouston Park.
A survey of more than 1000 adults across Scotland has found that 2% of Scots strongly object to the Pope’s visit, 3% object and some 63% are neither for nor against it.
ZENIT has put together a summary of recent events that bode ill for the visit...But then, I don't think any sensible Catholic - least of all the Holy Father himself - has ever thought this trip would be a cakewalk, since each of his detractors is aflame with the ambition and zeal to be the one who will 'bring down' the Pope and the Church!
Pope to brave persecution in UK:
Hostility intensifies as visit approaches
By Father John Flynn, LC
ROME, AUG. 29, 2010 (Zenit.org).- As the date for Benedict XVI’s mid-September trip to Scotland and England draws closer, the anti-religious hostility is becoming more intense.
Peter Tatchell, a well-known critic of the Catholic Church, penned an opinion article published Aug. 13 in the
Independent newspaper. “Most Catholics oppose many of his teachings,” he claimed in regard to the Pope.
In his role as a spokesperson for the Protest the Pope Campaign, Tatchell then went on with a long laundry-list of Church teachings, which he described as harsh and extreme.
Tatchell has also been chosen by the television station Channel 4 to front a 60-minute program on the Pope, which will be broadcast around the time of the papal visit, the
Telegraph newspaper reported on June 4.
It won't be the only television special critical of the Catholic Church. The BBC is working on an hour-long documentary on the clerical abuse scandals, the
Guardian newspaper reported Aug. 3.
Along with the unsurprising opposition to the visit from the Orange Order of Ireland and Protestant preacher Ian Paisley, the British government also got caught up in an embarrassing instance of anti-Catholic prejudice.
The Foreign Office had to issue an official apology after a government paper on the visit became public, the Sunday Times reported on April 25. A document that was part of a briefing packet sent to government officials suggested that the Pope should sack “dodgy bishops," apologize for the Spanish Armada, and open an abortion clinic.
The attacks have not gone unanswered. Although not official representatives of the Church, a group of Catholic speakers was set up under the name of Catholic Voices. Under the leadership of Jack Valero, who is a director of Opus Dei in the United Kingdom, the team of speakers are offering themselves to defend the Church’s teachings.
Support is also coming from secular sources. Self-declared atheist Padraig Reidy criticized the extreme nature of the anti-Catholic rhetoric in an article published by the Observer newspaper on Aug. 22.
On July 28, Kevin Rooney, also an atheist, writing for the online site
Spiked, described the attacks on the Church as “illiberal, censorious and ignorant.”
Rooney, who grew up as a socialist republican in Belfast, said that not only do the critics oppose the teachings of the Church, but they also want to prevent it from speaking out at all. Moreover, he noted, any accusations made against the Church are immediately taken as being true, without any need for proof.
“As with the right to free speech, it seems the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty does not extend to the Catholic Church,” he observed.
The problems faced by the Church are far from being limited to verbal hostility. A raft of laws on so-called hate crimes and anti-discrimination create a continual series of legal challenges for Christians in the United Kingdom.
According to a booklet just published on this topic by Jon Gower Davies, there are more than 35 Acts of Parliament, 52 Statutory Instruments, 13 Codes of Practice, three Codes of Guidance, and 16 European Commission Directives that bear on discrimination.
In "A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today," (Civitas) he outlined a number of recent cases where Christians have suffered from these laws.
The latest example of this was the loss by Leeds-based Catholic Care in a High Court appeal on the issue of whether they could continue to deny placing adopted children with same-sex couples.
The origin of the case was a 2007 sexual orientation regulation, which outlawed adoption agencies from such "discrimination."
According to an article published Aug. 19 by the
Telegraph newspaper, Catholic Care is the last remaining Catholic adoption agency to resist the regulations. Since the law came into effect in January 2009, the other 11 Catholic adoption agencies have had to either shut down or sever their ties with the Church.
There have been numerous other cases in past months where Christians have faced legal battles.
-- A foster caregiver won her struggle to continue fostering children, after she had been banned by Gateshead Council. The ban was due to the fact that a girl aged 16 that she was caring for decided to convert from Islam to Christianity. The caregiver, who remained anonymous in order to protect the identity of the girl, had fostered more than 45 other children. Although the matter was righted in the end, the woman suffered considerable financial losses due to the ban. (The Christian Institute, July 11)
-- A Christian preacher was arrested for publicly saying that homosexuality is a sin. Dale McAlpine was locked up in a cell for seven hours and subsequently charged with "causing harassment, alarm or distress” (The Telegraph, May 2). After widespread protests the charges were dropped. (The Christian Post, May 18)
-- A Christian relationship counselor was denied the opportunity to go to the Court of Appeal regarding his dismissal by Relate Avon after he admitted he could not advise same-sex couples because of his beliefs. Gary McFarlane lost his claim of unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal and at a subsequent tribunal appeals hearing. (Christian Today, April 29)
-- Shirley Chaplin, a Christian nurse, lost a claim for discrimination after she was moved to desk duties following her refusal to remove a crucifix on a necklace. Even though John Hollow, the chairman of the employment tribunal panel, admitted that Chaplin had worn the crucifix for 30 years as a nurse, he said that wearing it was not a requirement of the Christian faith. The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, mentioned the case in his Easter sermon. He said there was a ''strange mixture of contempt and fear'' toward Christianity. (The Telegraph, April 6)
Earlier this year the situation reached the point where the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, together with six other Anglican bishops, wrote a letter to the
Sunday Telegraph complaining that Christians in Britain are being persecuted and treated with disrespect.
As an article on the letter in the March 28 edition of the Sunday
Telegraph explained, the bishops argued that, while believers of other religions are shown sensitive treatment, Christians are punished.
"There have been numerous dismissals of practicing Christians from employment for reasons that are unacceptable in a civilized country," the letter declaimed.
The notoriety of restrictions on Christians reached the point where the Pope publicly intervened. During his speech on Feb. 1 to the bishops of England and Wales, present in Rome for their five-yearly visit, he commented on the topic.
Benedict XVI observed that their country was noted for its equality of opportunity to all members of society. He then urged the bishops to stand up when legislation infringed on the freedom of religious communities.
"In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed. I urge you as Pastors to ensure that the Church’s moral teaching be always presented in its entirety and convincingly defended," the Pope said.
"Fidelity to the Gospel in no way restricts the freedom of others -- on the contrary, it serves their freedom by offering them the truth," he added.
Given the Pope's concern over this matter, and the continuing cases of Christian persecution, we may well expect him to speak out on it during his visit next month.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/08/2010 18:25]