Cardinal Bagnasco tackles
media reporting on the Pope
From the site of the CEEE
Oct. 3, 2009
PARIS - Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, Archbishop of Genoa and president of the Italian bishops' conference (CEI), today addressed the current Plenary Assembly of the Council of Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE) under way in Paris Oct. 1-4, at the Maison de la Conférence des évêques de France, and spoke on the Pope and the media.
The session's main theme is "Church and State, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall".
With a view to identify various models and juridical solutions to be adopted by individual European States in order to attribute a legal status to the Catholic Church and regulate relations with Her and Her main pastoral, social and educational structures, CCEE has
promoted a Europe-wide research.
This is aimed at addressing various issues, such as:
- What is the Catholic Church’s juridical status in the European States?
- Which laws and concordats have been abolished so far?
- How are the Church’s charitable institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.) funded?
- What is the influence at local level of the various laws, treaties and agreements within the European institutions?
- And what are the communitarian aspects of religion?
The results of this European survey were to be presented to the Presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe in attendance.
The CEEE gathers the Presidents of the current 33 European Bishops’ Conferences of this Continent, and the Archbishops of Luxembourg and of the Principality of Monaco, as well as the Bishop of Chisinău (Moldavia).
CCEE officers with Pope Benedict XVI in April 2007.
Current President is Cardinal Péter Erdö, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Primate of Hungary; the Vice-Presidents are Cardinal Josip Bosanic, Archbishop of Zagreb, and Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, Archbishop of Bordeaux. The General Secretary of CCEE is Fr Duarte da Cunha. The headquarters of the Secretariat is in St Gallen (Switzerland).
Here is the English translation of Cardinal Bagnasco's text provided by the CCEE:
THE MEDIA AND THE POPE:
A DIFFICULT YEAR
by Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco
Arcbishop of Genova
President, Conferenza Episcopale Italiana
I would like to begin by greeting and thanking His Eminence the Cardinal President and all my confrères in the Episcopate for the invitation to talk about this significant theme: “The Media and the Pope: a difficult year”.
It is a complex and very relevant theme, considering the importance assumed by the means of social communication in today’s globalised society and the risks connected to the distorted use of them, above all today when, “communication seems increasingly to claim not simply to represent reality, but to determine it, owing to the power and force of suggestion that it possesses” (Benedict XVI, Message for the 42nd World Communications Day, 24 January 2008).
On the basis of analysis of the Italian experience, which in many aspects offers a privileged point of view, it can be said that in the early period the media representation of Benedict XVI’s pontificate was on the whole reasonable and largely positive.
The uncertainties of some commentators, tied to the most part to the projection onto the new Pontiff of not-wholly positive stereotypes linked to Cardinal Ratzinger or to his presumed lack of communication skills, were very soon overcome or at any rate reappraised by a more careful judgement about the content of the teaching, and recognition of the particular appeal exercised by the Pope over crowds despite his deliberately restrained style, focussed on the word more than his gestures.
This appeal was nurtured by some major events which stood out from a media point of view, such as for example the visit to the synagogue in Cologne, during his first trip to Germany, on 19 August 2005; or the visit to the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp, on the occasion of his trip to Poland, 28 May 2006; or again the visit to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, during the visit to Turkey, 30 November 2006; or, finally, the lectio magistralis at Regensburg University on 12 September 2006.
Besides these events which had a notable impact, media attention has been catalysed by Benedict XVI’s interventions on so-called “non-negotiable principles” or the Christian roots of Europe, which have caused a lively debate in public opinion in the major European nations.
Less attention, instead, has been devoted to some meetings rich in significance for the ordinary life of the Church, such as the visits to Rome parishes, speeches to groups and the Wednesday catecheses, which in reality often represent the opportunity for preaching and testimony on the part of the Pope which should merit much greater emphasis and examination.
One detects here the risk, which already emerged in the second year of the pontificate and gradually intensified, of a disparaging media representation, which tends to undervalue the Pope as witness and preacher of the Gospel and over-emphasise the intellectual and political Pope, to stress the interventions believed to be potentially confrontational, judged to be more useful for making news, and to ignore some basic themes which reveal the priorities of the Pontificate.
These well-known priorities can be quickly called to mind.
The first is represented by God himself, by the relationship with Him and by faith in Him through the Lord Jesus Christ who has revealed him to us.
In this perspective one call also speak of a “Christological” priority, shown in particular in the book Jesus of Nazareth, which drives Benedict XVI to reassert strongly that Jesus Christ is the way to God the Father, our unique Saviour, the true substance of Christian faith.
The Church must make God present in this world and offer people access to God. This mission is realised above all through personal and liturgical prayer, and demands that at heart is the unity of believers: these, prayer and the unity of believers, are further priorities of the current pontificate which involve everyone, each with their own responsibility.
A final priority which it seems appropriate to recall here concerns the clarification of an authentic concept of freedom, necessary for the life of people and the good of society.
To this end Benedict XVI, rejecting every ethic and idea concerning what has been defined as a “dictatorship of relativism”, emphasises that the freedom of the person is by its nature relational and cannot exclude responsibility towards the other person.
Freedom is such, one can say, only in relation to the inaccessible value of each life, of peace, justice, solidarity and all the fundamental human goods appreciation and respect of which needs, however, further education.
If one ignores or neglects this framework of priorities in which the Pontiff’s various interventions are situated, it is difficult to avoid partial or misleading representations, ideological and preconceived criticism, readings aimed at making the Pope say what in all evidence he does not say, even going so far as to nurture forms of ostracism foreign to democratic dialectic.
Some recent discussions fall into this type of media shift, as for example those following the famous Regensburg address, the Motu proprio allowing celebration of the pre-Conciliar liturgy, or the remission of the excommunication of four Lefebvrian bishops, or the clarifications about the nature of inter-religious dialogue, or considerations about limitations of the use of condoms which arose during the trip to Africa.
In all these cases, a correct representation would have enabled the misunderstandings to be overcome and allowed for the clarification of the effective importance of interventions which, far from justifying certain of the severe criticisms that were made, in fact coherently develop some of the key ideas of the pontificate and the priorities indicated above.
Instead, there was a preference for a partial and rather often frankly mistaken reading, which leads oneself to ask if in some elements of culture and the means of communication an anti-clericalism interested in hiding the true face of the Church and distorting the significance of her message is making headway, so that the message appears to be incoherent and anachronistic and the Church seems animated solely by the desire to “build walls and dig trenches”, especially in ethical matters.
This would be the Church that says “No”, enemy of humanity and indifferent to its needs, obscurantist and contrary to scientific reason.
In fact, pointing out the risks that the lack of absolute respect for the human person can signify for the dignity of the human person is certainly not a sign of hostility towards science nor of obtuse resistance towards modernity; it is the Church’s task to point out the risks, and doing this is rather an indication of concern and friendship: a friend cannot not point out a danger.
The most important thing about the Church can be summed up in the great “Yes” with which she responds to the love of the Lord pointing Him out to everyone.
For this reason she speaks mainly about God and eternal life, that is, a life destined not to end. She speaks of hope and happiness. Some “No’s”, which at a certain time the Church judges to have to say, are the precise consequence of an ethics of “Yes”, and again more fundamentally an ethics of love, in the name of which, in order to obtain an easy and fleeting consensus, one cannot exchange, to the detriment of anyone, evil for good.
Some environments would like a Church blindly aligned to the opinion which proclaims itself to be predominant or progressive, or a simply silent Church. The lines of clear demarcation, which impose sometimes painful and nearly always never easy choices on consciences, are certainly not in harmony with a world where the relativity (or relativism) of ethics and morality removes the choice from conscience to consign it to a limbo where everything is beyond good and evil.
However, the Church cannot fail in her own mission. To freely express one’s own faith, to participate in public debate in the name of the Gospel, to calmly make one’s own contribution in the formation of political-legislative guidelines always accepting the decisions taken by the majority cannot be mistaken as a threat to the laicity of the State.
The Church does not wish to impose on anyone her own “religious” morality: she has always expressed and cannot not express – along with typically religious principles – the fundamental values which define the person and guarantee his/her dignity, without stoking up disputes but always privileging the method of calm and constructive confrontation and the search for the common good.
An essential role for the awareness of the dissemination of such values, recalled with exemplary clarity by the teaching of Benedict XVI, rests today with the means of communication.
One can hope that in the exercise of such a delicate task the reasons and criteria of ethical responsibility might prevail, a responsibility which, if not excluding the possibility of founded and constructive criticism, nevertheless finds its own ultimate verification in the capacity to contribute to the knowledge of and search for the truth.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/10/2009 17:59]