Media's political reading
of the Church deforms its image
The Church is a reality to which secular measures don't apply
by Vittorio Messori
Translated from
February 26, 2013
Only after the helicopter flight across Rome - a truly cinematic event which will surely open all the TV newscasts around the world - only after that flight on February 28, with the skies over Rome approaching sunset, which will carry the soon-to-be emeritus Pope Benedict XVI to 'hiddenness' and silence, only then will we have an idea what the 115 cardinal electors have in mind. Beginning with the date for the Conclave, assuming the outgoing Pope will modify the rules.
[He did to allow them to advance or delay the start, as needed - a much needed change that will help facilitate and improve their preparations so that the Conclave itself will not end up being too extended..]
On the one hand, the cardinals who are heads of dioceses (therefore, not residents of Rome, nor in the service of the Curia) would like to have the Conclave over with so that they can return to their respective Sees to be with their flock for the Holy Week liturgies, the most important and demanding in the entire liturgical cycle.
It is often forgotten = given that Christmas has been transformed into a 'planetary feast of Father Winter' - that the major Christian feast, that from which all others derive - is by far the feast of Christ's Resurrection, not that of his birth. That is why it is important for any cardinal-metropolitan bishop to be at home for Holy Week.
On the other hand, many of the 115 electors barely know each other, mostly only in passing, and few of them would have met all of their fellow cardinals before. Therefore, it is only right to give them time to get to know each other, to exchange opinions, confidences, proposals.
And certainly, many will want to know what is really happening in a Curia that has been pictured to be afflicted with gaffes and errors, if not scandals. Any time cut off from the sede vacante could compromise such necessary preparation.
Only an electoral body that is compact and harmonious can think of reaching within a reasonable time that two-thirds of the votes to elect a Pope as decreed by Benedict XVI in a motu proprio modifying John Paul II's previous rule
[that theoretically could lead to days of repeated ballotings as voting blocs could tend to neutralize or block each other from gaining the necessary majority].
The cardinal electors - unique in the world and composed of men coming from all parts of the world - need time to orient themselves and to consider the choice they will have to make in the Sistine Chapel, next to the famous stove in which their ballots will be burned.
I confess that I had already written this article and was about to send it to the newspaper when the Secretariat of State issued its harsh statement on February 23 denouncing how the media seemed to have taken the place of the temporal powers-that-be in earlier times who sought to control, or at least, to condition how the Conclave would proceed-
Which also recalls that the media do not manifest at all any awareness of the spiritual nature of the Conclave, since they filter everything through a cage of interpretations that are all and exclusively profane.
It was a note that I was pleased with, of course, since it provides authoritative confirmation of what I am trying to say in this article and which therefore did not require me to 'soften' anything of what I had written.
And so I am proceeding with what I had already written without making any last-minute changes that, I am glad to see, are not necessary.
I was saying that commentators and self-proclaimed experts from all the world, since Benedict XVI announced his renunciation, have hastened, with the smugness of those who think they know everything and for a long time already, to speak of voting blocs in the next conclave, denouncing presumed agreements among groups of cardinals, advising strategies they think the electors might never otherwise think about.
The attitude of such articles and TV commentaries is winking and all-knowing. The writer or speaker seems to be winking to let the reader or viewer understand that one must be sly about these things, and that he, the opinionator, knows everything taking place behind ths scenes, and can reveal to you how things really are: namely, that everything is about power and money, nothing has to do with religion!
Most of these supposed analyses are laughable vainglorious talk by those who, following an inextirpable vice, apply inappropriate categories to interpret a reality different from that they usually deal with
{a reality they refuse even to acknowledge as a legitimate reality!]
This is the obsessive deformation - one would say maniacal - by those who insist on interpreting religious events with the usual political categories, boring and exhausted (and in this case, completely misleading), of right-left, conservative-progressivist, traditionalist-modernist, fundamentalist-openminded.
What results is a total incomprehension of ecclesial life - it is a deforming idiocy offered as acute and brilliant analysis.
"Every entity," admonishes Thomas Aquinas, re-echoing Aristotle, "must be understood and interpreted according to entities of the same nature".
What can these armchair experts possibly understand of the profound motivations of men of faith, those who are in the hierarchy of the Church of Christ, who know that they must appear before him to be judged.
What can they understand about these men, many of them of venerable age, often with heroic biographies, some who have been persecuted because of their faith - whom the analysts treat as if they were merely personages from some universal secular Senate or executive board members of some multinational firm?
[The problem is that most of the cardinals who have spoken to the media so far in the past few days have succumbed to the bait of media questioning by answering them in the terms defined by the media!]
If we use strong words against these artificers of disinformation who can be found, today as always, throughout the entire global media system, it is merely to live up to the cutting style that for once we heard from the gentle and always measured Benedict XVI who, in his last discourse to the clergy of Rome, left us an extraordinary text - and who, perhaps because he had neither the time nor the strength to write it out (as he told the priests), spoke completely off the cuff.
Of course, his topic was well and clearly defined: the second Vatican Council, where the young theologian, Prof. Joseph Ratzinger had distinguished himself as an expert consultant through all four sessions of Vatican II, to the point that Paul VI took him from his university milieu in 1977 to head the most important German diocese, Munich in Ratzinger's own Bavaria.
Speaking with evident nostalgia of his 'splendid' Council experience, Benedict XVI evoked the fervor, the hopes, the commitment, the loyalty, and the courage as well as the dutiful prudence of the largest Council ever called by the Catholic Church.
Everyone, in short, was aware that they had been called to renew the face of the Church of Christ, to re-launch evangelization in the world:
Non nova sed nove, not new things but things proposed in new ways, seemed to be everyone's motto. It was tremendous work, but also a joyful celebration in the light of faith. For that alone.
If "instead of an awaited springtime, what followed was an unforeseen and frigid winter" (in the words of a disheartened Paul VI amid the ruins of the 1970s), a great part of the responsibility lay with the fact that alongside the Council of the Church, there was the 'Council of the Media' which soon overshadowed the real Council. Such was Benedict XVI's denunciation.
He recalled that the authentic documents of Vatican II never got to the public, not even to Catholics, but only their tendentious interpretation from journalists, commentators, writers and factional specialists and media-savvy experts within the Church herself.
It is therefore unjust to indulge in victimism, as if the deformation of the Council had been effected by some external conspiracy. In fact, as Joseph Ratzinger has often said, a good part of the damage - the most pernicious of it - was the work of men of the Church.
To the whole world and to the People of God themselves, what 'reached home' was the dark, narrow and sectarian political reading of the Council - reflecting none of the religious zeal of the Council Fathers, the fervor of their apostolate, their focus on the Gospel as the guide for the Church, now as it always was.
Those complex, wise theological cathedrals in miniature that the zuthentic Council documents were and are. were forced into a straitjacket of a presumed no-holds-barred confrontation between progressivists and conservatives, between obscurantist reactionaries lying in ambush and the bright sun of the future invoked by leftists who were still in cassocks at the time but would soon be in jeans.
In his paternal and warm 'chat' with the priests of Rome, Papa Ratzinger did not hesitate to use words of strong condemnation ("it was a calamity, it created such misery') for the intrusion of media, led by those whose world view insists on dividing everyone into right or left, by those who would reduce everything to a question of lobbies confronting each other to defend or to acquire power.
Instead, Benedetto XVI began his 'memoir' by narrating for the first time in public a highly significant anecdote previously recalled in articles by others.
As a young theology professor, he had come to the Council as theological consultant to Cardinal Joseph Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, who was the president of the German bishops' conference, a man immensely loyal to Rome and also one of the most influential among the European bishops who truly wished for a renewal of the Church. Therefore, a man 'of the left', according to the ideologues' scheme.
Among other things, the first great turning point of the Council was because of him - namely the shelving of documents already prefabricated by the powers in the Roman Curia which the Council Fathers were supposed to approve by raising their hands, hopefully by unanimous vote, instead of discussing them first.
With the Council already under way and the 'uprising' successfully carried out against simply rubber-stamping what the Roman Curia proposed, Frings was asked to give a lecture on a Council that was now launched into the unknown, having discarded the route marked out by the Roman Curia.
[Maybe I'm wrong, but I had the impression the lecture was given in November 1961, before the Council opened. I must check it out. Benedict XVI himself does not mention the Genoa lecture in his chapter on Vatican II in Milestones.]
And where would the lecture be? In Genoa, of all places, the feudal stronghold of the great (whether you liked him or not) Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, acknowledged leader of what the ideological scheme calls 'the right'.
The cardinal from Cologne, who had eyesight problems that would eventually make him blind, asked his consultant Ratzinger to draft his lecture for the conference in Genoa. And so the presumed progressivist Frings went into the lions' den of the presumed reactionary Siri. He delivered his lecture, which so pleased the cardinal of Genoa that he passed on the text, with great praise, to his great friend John XXIII.
The Pope, of course, was among those that the 'German faction' under Frings' leadership had challenged, leading him to dump all the texts (schemata) preciously prepared by the Curia and which he had approved implicitly.
So when Frings, not long afterwards, received a summons from the Pope, he thought he was in for a reproach, or at least an admonition to be more respectful of the 'unanimity' line desired by Papa Roncalli who had envisioned a short Council, celebrated in enthusiasm without too much discussion.
Instead, Frings was received by a Pope who came towards him with the text in hand that had been written by Ratzinger, read by Frings and sent on to him by Siri. John XXIII embraced him and said, "Eminence, you said the things that I myself would have liked to say, for which I have not found the right words".
It was an exemplary anecdote, Benedict XVI said, because it makes clear the brotherhood and love for the Church, as well as concern for orthodoxy,shared by those who, by doctrinaire reading, would be members of opposite and irreconcilable factions, one fighting a reactionary resistance, the other fighting for 'progress'.
It is a manipulation that - take note! - was engaged in by those who, during the entire Council, and above all, in the interpretation given by the teaching Church, saw an alignment with odious capitalism, as well as by those who suspected in everything a Trojan horse introduced by the equally hated Communism for some or Masonry for others.
But we, instead, says the eyewitness and participant Joseph Ratzinger, "moved only within the faith - we sought to interpret the signs of God in our time. What interested us all was to deepen the relationship between reason and belief, between the Gospels and the world, but in continuity with the past of the Church".
Of course, the same 'analyses' that are as deceptive as they are presumptuous, are being repeated, first with respect to Benedict's renunciation, and now, before the Conclave. And we shall read and hear more of it after a new Pope is elected.
Actually, those who live in the Church - not because of sociological classification but because of the living and free gift of faith - are well aware of the poverty and impotence of schemes which would reduce the complex and rich experience of religion to trivially human perspectives.
The believer knows that the presumed alignments of the conclavists today which may exist are not to be explained - except marginally, in some cases - by the usual categories employed and valid for secular politics. Yes, the political is an important aspect of the human experience, and the Church and its people would be making an error if they failed to take it into account. The error is to try to use the same measure for a reality as 'different' from the usual human categories as the Church is.
Canon 351, Par. 1, of the Code of Canon law says: "Those to be promoted Cardinals are men freely selected by the Roman Pontiff, who are at least in the order of priesthood and are truly outstanding in doctrine, virtue, piety and prudence in practical matters".
The fact is that, thank God, for at least the past two centuries, it appears that the cardinals of the Church have met those criteria. These are men who obviously have their limitations and deficiencies but who have, in every case, given their whole life to the Church. Men who, everytime they drop a ballot into the urn in the Sistine Chapel, also solemnly invoke the Trinity aloud to swear that their vote has been given only on the basis of their conscience, after long prayer, and only for the good of the Church.
Most of them are old enough - 60s onwards - men conscious that sooner rather than later, the day of reckoning in the Great Beyond awaits them. Men who know very well the Gospel saying that "much will be asked of those to whom much is given". Especially if that 'much' is given to them to be instruments of a Church which is not theirs but Christ's, who will ask them to account for their life at his Second Coming.
Those who do not take part in and even scoff at this 'strangeness', dismissing it outright to 'prove' their objectivity - what can they possibly understand at all of this perspective?
A related item: When the following appeared on the Rorate caeli blogspot three days ago, and my attention was called to it by a dear friend, I read through it and thought, "OK, so what else is new?", because I felt that the conclusion affirmed in the headline has always been painfully obvious. Also because, on various occasions in the past eight years, I have brought up John Allen's utter dismissal of a Ratzinger candidacy up to two days before the 2005 Conclave as my favorite example that 1) Allen has been much too much over-rated as a supposed 'Vatican insider' or 'Vatican expert', even by those who ought to know better like Cardinal Dolan and so many other eminent Catholics; and 2) Allen has never liked - and is really hostile to - Joseph Ratzinger, despite a brief two-three year period when he seemed to have 'converted' (but I now realize it was probably just an expedient to justify the positive amendments he had to make in his 2000 'biography' of Ratzinger for a revised edition to sell after the latter became Pope)... Today, the blogspot is rejoicing appropriately because L'Osservatore Romano picked up its editorial and played it up in its March 4=5 issue... So here is the Rorate caeli editorial:
'Religious correspondents' and 'Vaticanistas'
really don't know much more
about the Conclave than the rest of us
by New Catholic
March 2, 2013
The 2005 Conclave is not exactly ancient history. In 2013, though, it has become a kind of non-debatable fact that Cardinal Ratzinger was obviously and the whole time the absolute favorite in the 2005 Conclave. Alas, maybe he always was among the electors, and we will never know how much his position in some outstanding events leading up to the Conclave (as writer of the 2005 Colosseum Via Crucis reflections, as Dean of the College of Cardinals and consequently main celebrant of the Funeral Mass of John Paul II and of the Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice immediately before the Conclave) led to a last-minute movement in his favor.
What we can say for sure was that
the media, the same media filled with strange "papabile" suggestions today, and especially the Italian media, had no space whatsoever for Ratzinger as a credible papabile up to the day of the conclave.
No wonder most of us, influenced by media reports, were (gladly) shocked when the Cardinal Protodeacon announced his name on April 19, 2005. It is true that, in hindsight, and considering the events above, historians can say, "there could have been no other outcome".
That was not exactly how things were reported at the time. We will not let their mistakes (true or made on purpose) be forgotten.
Whom did extreme-"progressive" Rome correspondent for radical weekly NCR John Allen Jr. mentioned as the top papabili as soon as news of John Paul II's death appeared? Remember: this was not a rookie taken by surprise; the state of Pope Wojtyla's health had been no surprise for several months, so newsmakers such as Allen, who lived full-time in Rome at the time, had their lists ready.
He included the following as his papabili: Ennio Antonelli, 68, Italy; Francis Arinze, 72, Nigeria; Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 68, Argentina; Dario Castrillón Hoyos, 75, Colombia; Godfried Danneels, 71, Belgium; Julius Darmaatmadja, 70, Indonesia; Ivan Dias, 69, India; Claudio Hummes, 70, Brazil; Lubomyr Husar, 72, Ukraine; Walter Kasper, 72, Germany; Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, 68, Dominican Republic; Wilfrid Fox Napier, 64, South Africa; Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, 68, Cuba; Marc Ouellet, 60, Canada; Giovanni Battista Re, 71, Italy; Norberto Rivera Carrera, 62, Mexico; Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, 62, Honduras; Christoph Schönborn, 60, Austria; Angelo Scola, 63, Italy; Dionigi Tettamanzi, 71, Italy.
This was the "official" NCR list in the 2005 Conclave, posted soon after the death of Pope John Paul II: do you see one name missing there?... As we have often made clear here,
Allen and "journalists" like him do not intend to report; their intention is always to try to influence events. Always. It is not for nothing Allen has remained faithful to NCR this whole time.
We can move a step higher in credibility and read another contemporary article by Sandro Magister. The 2005 Conclave was widely reported as an open conclave, and Magister also included a long list of plausible Popes; he did include Ratzinger, but hesitatingly:
"the indication of Ratzinger as the next Pope is perhaps more symbolic than real."
What is amazing is to see fellow Catholics falling once again before the same media hype about certain papabili in this 2013 Conclave. Could the "Vaticanistas" be right? Of course they could, especially when dozens of names are mentioned each time.
But what one must remember is that the secular media and the "progressive Catholic" media (the same secular and progressive media that crucified dear Pope Ratzinger again and again during his entire pontificate, and that now that he is gone pretend to "admire" him) are not to be trusted.
Trust in prayers and penance only: auxilium nostrum in nomine Domini. (Our help is the name of the Lord).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/03/2013 23:43]