The Pope addresses atheist Europe
but Italian media only saw
a Berlusconi angle
Sept. 29, 2009
As has now become customary for him, even the thirteenth international trip of Benedict XVI - just concluded to the Czech Republic - was very intense.
In one of the world's most atheist nations, the Pope dealt with certain fundamental themes: freedom "which presupposes the search for truth", the dangers of 'inhuman and destructive cynicism' which would reject the greatnesss of such a search, the invitation to 'broaden the concept of reason" to open it to faith, because to exclude the transcendent perspective is to to "betray the grand formative tradition' which led to the birth of teh university in Europe.
Also, the lack of basis for those attempts "meant to marginalize the influence of Christianity in public life" when "the history of Christianity" is the "history of Europe itself".
"Radical secularization" which, in cutting itself off from truth, makes society "more fragile and less inclusive", finds it hard to "recognize what is true, noble and good".
The need for the Gospel - "which is not an ideology" but "transcends teh vicissitudes of this world and throws new light on the dignity of teh human being in every era" - in order to avoid "reason that is deaf to the divine", "incapable of entering that dialog among cultures of which our world has need".
What a pity that Italian media were rather obsessed with the Pope's encounter with Berlusconi [who saw off the Pontiff for Prague] and later, with a contrived [and flatly wrong] claim that the Pope had referred to politicians* in his homily at Stara Boleslaw yesterday.
[It started with the Italian news agencies claiming that the Pope had said "Today there is a need for politicians with credibility, who are ready to spread in every area of society the Christian principles and ideals by which their action is inspired" - when the Pope never once used the word politicians; the word he used in this sentence was 'believers'.
Yet the Italian media - mostly liberal and therefore anti-Berlusconi who is fairly conservative - chose to read the statement as an indirect reference to Berlusconi. Some of them corrected themselves after Fr. Lombardi immediately protested the misuse of the Pope's words, but some like Italian state TV's flagship channel RAI-1 have apparently persisted in the misquotation.
The blatant intellectual dishonesty of ideologues is just un believably stunning!]
Thus they lost sight of Papa Ratzinger urging an opening to faith to a nation that still ignored the painful signs brought on by materialistic constriction. Let the rest of Europe listen!
I am surprised Mr. Mastroianni is surprised the Italian media, by and large, chose to make Berlusconi and his standing at the Vatican as their news focus rather than Benedict XVI's trip itself.
The mostly liberal Italian media, discombobulated that Berlusconi had his few minutes of a cordial and informal tete-a-tete with the Pope, thus ruining their scenario of a serious rift post-Boffo, literally seized on a statement in the Pope's homily on Monday, and by simply and dishonestly changing one word - 'believers' to 'politicians' - made it appear that the Pope was sending an indirect message of chastisement against Berlusconi notwithstanding that airport interlude!
As usual, they were projecting their own secular and lay [as opposed to priestly] tendencies to a priest, the Pope himself, about whose holiness no one has a doubt. Not only are they making out a man of God to be as underhanded as they are and would be in a similar situation - they also insult the Pope by thinking he could be petty enough to use a homily in a foreign land, to Europe's most atheist nation, in order to castigate Berlusconi!
Besides, the Pope's discourses in the Czech Republic contained none of the buzzwords that get the media salivating - no reference whatsoever to hot-button social issues, only to the search for truth and the use of reason that is broad enough to accommodate the transcendent. Since when has the media considered 'truth' and 'reason' as newsworthy?
And how many of them saw the irony in the fact that the academics of Europe's most secular nation gathered in full medieval panoply and regalia in Bohemia's most venerable storied hall to listen to the head of the Catholic Church speak to them about truth and reason? When Rome's largest university, founded by a Pope, had allowed a tiny minority of dissident professors to successfully contest Benedict XVI's very presence on their campus last year?
