How MSM - and even Vatican Radio -
continue to exalt Pope Francis
at the expense of Benedict XVI
Some in the Catholic media have trumpeted Pope Francis's statements this week about wealth and the global economy - in snippets from his morning homilies and in his address to the new ambassadors from four or five countries who presented their credentials to him yesterday (Thursday) morning. This blog entry by John Thavis is typical:
www.johnthavis.com/the-popes-financial-gospel-and-the-vatican-bank#.UZa...
Of course, in all the hoopla, not one bothered to mention that all this was the burden - in explicit detail - of Benedict XVI's third encyclical
Caritas in veritate, which, at the time it was published, got far more attention in the secular media than the Catholic media ever deigned to give it.
Nor, for that matter, does anyone mention Benedict's truly revolutionary decision to legislate financial transparency for all Vatican offices and opening the Vatican's finances to the scrutiny of an international enforcement organization. From what they write, one would think IOR was still as it was in the 1980s when it was involved in the Banco Ambrosiano collapse and all the sordid consequences thereof.
In the same general spirit these days of ignoring almost everything positive in Benedict XVI's Pontificate, to dredge up only the negatives that the MSM can summon, even Vatican Radio is into the act, trumpeting Pope Francis's meeting with new ecclesial communities on Sunday as the first such event since John Paul II. (Let me go back and research all the special audiences given by Benedict XVI for the new movements.) Nor does it mention that the Sunday meeting is an event of the Year of Faith that was programmed when Benedict XVI was still Pope, not something added on because there is now a new Pope.
I can understand other 'Catholic' media conforming to the MSM herd mentality about Pope Francis the perfect Pope, the instant saint, the world's all-time most popular celebrity, the miracle worker whose very election alone has already cleared the entire mess left behind by Benedict the incompetent bumbler who had not a single virtue to commend him! Because that's the way of the world, to take the path of least resistance and therefore the most 'popular', most-trod and most comfortable path within the exhilarating cocoon of demagoguery. And if you're not with them, you deserve to be an outcast.
But for a major Vatican communications outlet like Vatican Radio to toe that line is simply unconscionable - and stupid! At least, L'Osservatore Romano makes occasional positive mention of Benedict XVI - when it reports about a symposium or conference about his 'thought', for instance, or about a new book about his thought from the Vatican publishing house, as it did on May 15, when it dedicated almost a full page to publicizing the Italian edition (published by the Vatican publishing house) of Vol. XII in Joseph Ratzinger's
Collected Writings - the volume dedicated to his thoughts about the priesthood and priests.
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I will post translations of the articles ASAP.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/06/2014 07:55]