BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

What the Pope was worth
in revenues from advertising
by Filippo Di Giacomo
Translated from

Nov. 11, 2010


The feast over, the accounting done, it now seems as though to have the Pope as a guest has turned out to be just dandy even for the 'priest-eating' Spanish media.

According to data from the Madrid-based Kantar Media institute, if the Spanish authorities had needed to plan a promotional campaign for the two regions visited by Benedict XVi during his two-day visit this weekend, they would have needed to spend at least 67 million euros.

Kantar's data base showed that the Pope's visit had generated 6,026 separate news reports. Which brought in 67 million euros in revenue to the 327 Spanish media outlets accredited to cover the events in Santiago and Barcelona.

The agency also reports that in both cities, the TV channels earned the most revenue from the visit (37.8 million), followed by the print media (17.2 million) and by radio (11.5 million.

TV also had the primacy of immediacy. The Spanish bishops conference estimated the total TV audience worldwide at more than 150,000 [based on the audiences reached by the TV channels who bought rights to the live broadcasts.]

The highlight of the visit was the dedication of Sagrada Familia - an event made memorable by the coverage itself of Television Espanola (TVE) with surprising tecnological sophistication (3D, 32 cameras, with a ceiling spidercam for unparalleled top views, and several placed at eye level in order to capture details better), and exemplary technical direction which was able to pick up and convey all the symbolic and esthetic significance of the event.

One of the recurrent media tempests during any papal visit abroad concerns the costs of moving around the entire papal party and the apparatus surrounding the Pope, at the expense, it is claimed, of the host country.

Like Madrid's Kantar, analysts in other nations know that whenever a Pope visits anywhere, he brings gains for everybody, including those who are in charge of watching pubic expenditures.

And that to understand the true 'content' of any papal visit, one must get away - before, during and after - from everything said by the so-called religion correspondents and commentators who are incapable of reporting anything that has to do with a papal visit without imposing a political perspective.

They are already starting to transform the coming World Youth Day in Madrid as a kind of redde rationem ['give an accounting', taken from the Gospel story about the rich man who has entrusted his affairs to an administator, and then later calls him to make an accounting of how he administered his assets] between the 'two Spains' - those who pray with the Pope and will fill the city squares, and those who are against him and have staked their claim on the virtual public squares of the media.

In fact, as an editorialist in El Pais wrote, the socialist government in Spain is well aware that to get into an all-out fight with the Church would mean a loss of at least two million votes in any general election.

Perhaps that is why Jose Montilla, secretary-general of the Catalan Socialist Party and president of the regional government (Generalitat), managed during the papal visit to almost simultaneously call a meeting regarding support for 'alternative families' while participating in all the papal events and presenting the Pope with a gift!

In a horizon where even the vice-president of the Catalan government and leader of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (and therefore, political heir of those who in 1931 went from church to church to seek out priests that they could then hang from the meathooks in the local slaughterhouse), praised the Pope after hearing him say Mass prayers in Catalan because, he said "in doing so, the Pope did more for the Catalan language than all the prime ministers of Spain put together", the Pope's visit brought out much that never finds room in media reporting.

Which is that, just as he had in Turkey, in the USA, in Australia, In Israel, In the United Kingdom, the Pope met a people of faith who are for the most part silent weavers of calm and peaceful relations. And that their pastors, like the Bishop of Compostela Julian Barrio and the Archbishop of Barcelona, Lluis Martinez Sistach, continue to express the true pastoral character of the Catholic tradition.

Thanks to the Pope's visit, the two bishops have shown themselves to be what many of our bishops have not managed to become: fecund witnesses of a Church that is capable in a Ratzingerian way of proposing the great themes of the Catholic faith without being tempted to pick a fight nor to dumb it down to the cultural level of contemporary society.

Perhaps, too, one of the paradoxes to which we are being habituated by the Pope's foreign trips is that in order not to feel that he is unheeded and 'isolated', all Pope Benedict XVI has to do is leave the Vatican!


The bad news from Spain is that apparently, the hardcore anti-Church media remained hardcore throughout... That is really troubling. Elsewhere, hardcore media critics had always relented in the actual presence of the Pope, even if they would revert to type soon enough.


The landscape after the visit
Translated from

11/11/2010


We Spanish Catholics have much to reflect upon and much to work on after the pilgrimage of Benedict XVI to Compostela and Barcelona.

The starting point can only be our gratitude to the Pope for his great sacrifice in coming to us to gift us with his personal testimony and preaching, which should determine our path as a Church in the immediate future.

This demands an examination in depth, a willingness to correct ourselves and to change, as well as an educative effort. With emotion but with much intelligence, we must also analyze the climate of cultural hostility that surrounded the visit, especially in the media-cultural complex. Unfortunately, Spain has proven to be different in thhis respect from the rest of Europe.

Let us start from the end. I do not recall any similar climate of aggression (which continues) during any previous papal visit to Spain. News, reportage, interviews opinion pieces, gossip - all fit into a pattern of repugnant sectarianism and hate-filled hostility.

Of course, the seeds had been sown for some time, but now we are starting to see their bitter fruits more clearly. We can say that the mission of much of the media was not to let up in their criticism at all, from the moment the Pope's plane left Rome!

And they found fault with everything: from his accurate description of the historical clash that had taken place in Spain between faith and secularism, to the fact that nuns cleaned up the altar at Sagrada FAmilia and prepared it for Mass [they thought it was demeaning to women that the most obvious 'role' they had in the Mass was to clean up!].

Oscillating beween vulgar manipulation of facts and ideological combat against the Church, all the reporting left hardly any space for what the Pope said, as if the millions who had been following the Pope's visit with such attention deserved no respect at all from these new engineers of public opinion.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to go into details. I shall concentrate on how the attack en masse got started, provoked, it seems, by the Pope's declaration on the need for a new season of dialog between faith adn European secularism.

Benedict XVI was talking about a continental problem that has left its mark in the last few centuries on European culture, and he was advocating that it is time to go beyond it. He referred to the tragic consequences of that clash in 1930s Spain {it is not as if he lied or was making wild claims), but he did not assign blame. Rather, he proposed - as he did in Westminster Hall, to the applause of the top representatives of British society - a new kind of encounter, a new dialog between Christianity and secular reason. And that was enough to trigger off the reaction, because there are secular sectors who are not interested in dialog at all but simply in extirpating Catholicism.

Both his historical discourses - at Plaza Obradoiro and at Sagrada Familia - were taken by his critics to mean that the Pope was attacking Zapatero's secularism and preaching against abortion, etc. Either one could well have occurred, but a review of both texts shows it was not so at all.

Zapatero was nowhere, not even in the substrates, in either speech, and as for abortion, all Benedict XVI did was to proclaim the value and dignity of every human life. He said three lines about this, and all of it positively.

His critics are not blind, but they prefer not to see. And the more open and cordial Benedict is in offering his embrace, the more it feeds their grudges and need for aggression.

For all that, there is no possible alternative to Benedict XVI's proposal for dialog - it's the only one that is worth supporting, and it is the method of his new evangelization.

But we must not ignore the 'reduction' of his visit by part of the Catholic world in a way that is almost a reflection of what is happening among the radical secularists.

For some of these militants, the Pope had come to un-bury the hatchet of war against Zapatero's policies and to stir up a combative dialectic with the enemies of Christianity. Others saw his homilies simply as denunciations of abortion and euthanasia [even if he never used those words], or simply as a defense of marriage and family values.

On the other hand, having read and reread his texts and having attentively followed every step he took in Santiago and Barcelona, I must say in all sincerity that the visit left me stunned with amazement.

Because I believe that never until this trip has any Pope appealed in such a way to the thirsty heart of a disoriented generation, showing them that man cannot give himself life, nor can he save and bring it to fulfillment by himself alone.

Benedict XVI has called on the Church to accompany contemporary man in his labored search for meaning and has reminded him that not all the good and beautiful things in the world will satisfy him, that his goal must be to find God, who is a friend to everyone.

As eloquent signs of God's friendship, he pointed to the imposing beauty of Sagrada Familia and the no less imposing example of Christian charity at the Centro Nen Deu.

The mission that the Pope urges on us is not to reinforce our armies for a reconquest of Europe. It consists in testimony to a human renewal that inspires faith, the kind of Christian witness that goes forth to meet the questions, doubts and rebellions of our contemporaries.

It is necessary to look in depth into what new evangelization means, in the light of Benedict XVI's discourses in Spain. It is for us to dialog (with everyone who is willing), to educate and to build. It is for us to pay the price of witness, which must be public and for which we must always be ready to give reason.

The Pope, as the Vaticanista Sandro Magister points out, is convinced that the Church - rather than giving orders or seeking institutional changes - needs re-education, to reconstruct its own culture. And that cannot be achieved rapidly, much less by order, but through continuous and methodical teaching. So let us not waste time....