About the lack of coverage
of the Paris events -
even by Catholic media
Having been avidly behind the Holy Father's Court of the Gentiles initiative since he proposed it in December 2009, I was most mortified, as I had occasion to note here more than once, at the lack of coverage and paucity of materials regarding the two days that launched it internationally in Paris on March 24-25.
In the past few days, two commentators - Sandro Magister in
www.chiesa and Armin Swibach in
Die Tagespost - have come out lamenting the same.
The deficiency in the Catholic media was almost criminal:
- Even
L'Osservatore Romano's only coverage of it was limited to publishing the text of the Pope's closing message.
- CNA did a middling perfunctory summary two days after the event.
- CNS to date has not had a single word about it.
- ZENIT, which can report actively from London if it wants to, did not bother to have anyone reporting from Paris, and was content with posting the Pope's message, and two days later, quoting from Fr. Lombardi's Octava Dies editorial about the event.
I had mentioned that
Avvenire has a special dossier on the COG in general, going back to when the Holy Father first proposed it in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia. But even they - although they did two good interviews with philosophers Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Marion, who took part in the dialogs, only reported on Day 1 of the Paris events - when the dialog was held at UNESCO headquarters, and nothing other than the Pope's text for Day 2 - which included discussions at the Sorbonne, the Institut Francais and the College des Bernardins, plus the youth assembly and Vespers at Notre-Dame.
Let us look at what Armin Swibach in Die Tagespost had to say (his translated text is in italics). After an opening paragraph saying what the COG is all about, and a second paragraph quoting from how teh Pope introduced the idea back in December 2009, he goes on to write:
The Pontifical Council for Culture spent much time and effort to prepare for the event that symbolically wanted this dialog between agnostic or atheistic culture and Catholic thought to be launched in Paris.
High-profile participants were invited, and impressive interventions were expected. Unfortunately, it was not possible to follow the events as they deserved to be.
That is not right, though. KTO, the French Catholic TV channel, broadcast all the events, and any reporter who could not be in Paris but who understands French could have followed most of the events sitting home. All the main Catholic media have French-speaking reporters but nobody bothered. I certainly would have done so if I had been a reporter assigned to follow the COG initiative, and I would have wanted to as it is, but I could not juggle my tasks for the day to watch KTO at the appointed times.
Its organizers had forgotten to set up a press office and to provide interested parties with detailed information. Nor did they think it necessary to provide the media with either the partial or full texts of the papers delivered.
A website that had been prepared for the event - www.parvisdesgentils.fr - only gave a sketchy overview of the event (locations and topics), and only in French.
I confess that I, too, had no reason to doubt that after the actually rather detailed preparatory information on that site, it would follow up during the events with running reports and eventually, the texts corresponding to all those mouth-watering mental delights that their published programs showed. Alas, they seem to have stopped functioning on the day of the event itself, apart from Twitter-like messages of which the last I saw was a repeated alert that "The Pope's message is about to come on live TV".
Even the text of the Pope's message was not published until the day after. [No! Actually, Vatican Radio's English service had the English translation almost right away - I should have checked the other services too, but apparently, the German service was not as efficient, since Swibach complains!]
And the Internet site of the Pontifical Council on Culture makes no reference to the initiative or to the event at all. [Actually, that web page has nothing useful except a brief history of the Council, but the week after Paris, I found out they had opened a website on the COG specifically, but most of it was still under construction and was not useful other than to get an idea of their visual look!... I have just checked now, and it is no longer online. Maybe someone made a mistake and put it online when it was so woefully incomplete, and now they've pulled it.]
Conclusion: An opportunity for a new dawn of dialog between faith and the secularized mainstream culture was missed. A failure to follow up on the Pope's initiative on December 21, 2009....
[That's a rather sweeping conclusion to make, considering that the Court will be on the road in a number of other cities this year.]
What Swibach fails to note is the glaring fact about
the total lack of media coverage for the Paris events in the secular media. I have mentioned twice how even AFP, the French news agency, never once acknowledged it in its France 24 bilingual online and TV service. Similar near-total blackout in the Italian media.
Their way of saying - "No thanks, we're not looking for God, nor for the truth - neither exists for us. Nor are we interested in what you Catholics have to say about anything whatsoever!"
It was so naive of me to think that the big names of the non-Catholic participants in the Paris forums would at least merit media attention in general!
Second glaring fact that no one points out:
Cardinal Ravasi is supposed to be one of the smartest guys on earth - the sharpest intellectual sword in the Catholic sheathe, by John Allen's account -
but why has he never thought it was worthwhile, or even necessary, to open an appropriate website for the Pontifical Council on Culture and its activities, and not the skimpy webpage on vatican.va which only allows the dicasteries to post documents and not to have a proper website with various subsites and sub-sections?
The same could be said for Mons. Fisichella at the new Council for Promoting New Evangelization. Both he and Ravasi are fairly young intellectuals with solid academic contacts: How difficult is it for them to tap some computer-whiz staff member or camp follower to come up with a functional website at little expense? The media love to go on about the Vatican's erratic, occasionally appalling, communications strategy or lack thereof. What excuse do Ravasi and Fisichella have, when they are supposed to be among the best brains in the Curia?
I remember that shortly after Benedict XVI brought up the Court of the Gentiles idea in his December 2009 address to the Roman Curia, Fr. Schall came out with his usual perception with an article saying
"The Internet can well be the present-day Court of the Gentiles".
I know the cardinal has bigger things to think of than having a proper website for this important project, but considering all the admirable foresight and work that he and his people put into preparing the Paris events, how could they have overlooked providing for timely and appropriate dissemination of supporting information and documents during and after the event?
Journalism works the same way science does - "If it is not reported (or documented in some way), it is as if it never happened" - like the tree falling in the forest that no one hears.
Sandro Magister makes the same points Swibach does,
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1347333?eng=y
but he did get hold of the text of one of the interventions at UNESCO - that by philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, a convert to Catholicism, which I hope I can translate soon.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/04/2011 19:26]