MEDIA MONITOR:
Three cases
The Pope's pastoral visit to Venice
I was wondering why no one in the Anglophone media was picking up the story in the Italian media yesterday morning about the Holy Father's pastoral visit to Venice and Aquileia in May next year (my first news post yesterday, posted on the preceding page of this thread). CNA finally woke up today and translated one of the stories but without acknowledging the news source.... CNS has not reported on it, and I don't see it in Catholic Herald, either.
www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-benedict-xvi-to-visit-venice-...
It was a strange oversight by the Anglophone Catholic media, because the announcement was made by Cardinal Scola himself (though it had been speculated on earlier by one Italian newspaper) and he gave specifics - and due to the fact that Venice is the destination, which no Pope had visited in 26 years and which had given the Church three of its Popes in the 20th century!.
The CNA and CNS writers in Rome are generally prompt to pick up what the OR says about, say, reproving Berlusconi for his questionable remarks in public, to cite their most recent pick-up. That particular story was not provided in the online selection of OR (and I can understand why not!), so CNA/CNS must have taken it from the paper edition. If it had been in the online edition, I would probably have cited it in my little summaries of what's in OR but not bothered to translate it on its own because it is merely peripheral.
There was a minor story that got some play in many news outlets earlier this week, judging by the online news summaries, but which I chose to sideline because it was based on a wrong premise, as a vigilant Catholic site points out today... And yet it was purveyed by AFP, which is one of the top three international news agencies serving media outlets around the world.
Iranian leader thanks Pope -
for something the Pope never said
October 07, 2010
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has thanked Pope Benedict XVI for denouncing an American fundamentalist pastor’s plan to burn the Qu’ran — although the Pope never made such a public statement.
In letter to the Pope, made public on his office web site, Ahmadinejad wrote: “I thank you for your stance in condemning the unwise act of a church in Florida, America, in insulting the word of God which hurt the hearts of millions of Muslims." The church in Florida actually backed away from its Qu’ran-burning plan.
The AFP story on the Iranian president’s message states that in September the Pope “denounced pastor Terry Jones's threat to burn the Muslim holy book.”
In fact the Pontiff’s statement — which AFP accurately quotes — was delivered at a public audience on September 15, several days after Jones had announced that his congregation would not burn the Qu’ran. The Pope’s words referred not to the controversy in the Florida church, but to a violent clash in Afghanistan.
It is true, however, that the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Affairs had condemned the Qu’ran-burning plan as “outrageous,” in a statement released before the event was cancelled.
My gut keeps me from rushing to post anything that makes me say, 'Come again???', especially if it's a minor or secondary story that won't really make a difference when one learns about it or never learned about it at all...
But my gut kept me likewise from running with a more significant 'story' about Mary McKillop that made headlines around the world and took on a life of its own in the blogosphere for several days, until someone who should know spoke up this week. But of course, the rebuttal hasn't made the news that the first one did, because the first story was tailored to fit the media narrative that runs thus: the Church has always been a den of child molesters and priest protectors to the point that more than a century ago, it excommunicated soon-to-be-saint Mary McKillop for 'blowing the whistle on a priest offender!
Someone at the Catherine of Siena Institute [a Colorado-based lay apostolate training program run by the Western Dominican province in the United States] has done a good summary of the news mishandling that saves me having to go back to reconstruct the sequence of the mishandling and correction.
Mary MacKillop:
The whistle that never blew
Written by Sherry
Thursday, 07 October 2010 07:15
A week ago, newspapers and the Internet were buzzing with the story that Bl. Mary MacKillop, who is being canonized in Rome this Sunday, was a "whistle-blower", a woman who had been excommunicated because she exposed the sexual abuse of a priest.
The story got considerable play over at dotcommonweal, the America blog, it was featured as a news story on New Advent, Andrew Sullivan's blog, Get Religion, Religion News, etc.
Mary was going to be the unofficial patron saint of whistle-blowers [on priests!]
The problem is that the whistle-blower scenario has turned out to be completely false. And that news hasn't made it around the internet yet.
At the time the story came out, I did some research because I happened to own a copy of the definite biography of MacKillop, written by the postulater of her cause, Fr. Paul Gardiner. (We have used Mary for years as an example of the charism of teaching in our Called & Gifted workshops.) As I wrote in the discussion over at Dotcommonweal:
The problem with the whistle-blower scenario is that Mary wasn’t anywhere near Adelaide in April, 1870 when her sisters there heard rumors about Fr. Keating, a local Franciscan. She was in Brisbane, 1,000 miles away, and didn’t return until nearly a year later. (A journey of 1000 miles in 1870 Australia took weeks.)
The sisters in Adelaide heard stories of abuse and told Fr. Woods, their founder. Fr. Woods told the Vicar General of the diocese and the Vicar General sent Keating away.
One of Keating’s confreres, Fr. Horan, set out to take his revenge on Fr. Woods by destroying the Josephite Sisters which he had founded. It was Horan who drafted a long list of accusations against the Sisters, calling them incompetent and disobedient, and it was Mary MacKillop who was trying to keep her footing and protect her sisters in the middle of what was essentially a dispute among priests.
And all of this occurred while the bishop, who was the only one who could have defused the situation, was away in Europe for over a year at the First Vatican Council!...
It would be most odd for Gardiner not to mention Mary’s role in this – if she was involved – since the whole point of the chapter was to understand the complex patterns of events that led to her excommunication and dissolution of the Josephites in the Diocese of Adelaide (Some of the communities outside Adelaide survived.) Of course, an error is always a possibility but his book is not the work of a careless or incompetent man.
. . . The imagined “whistle-blower” scenario of Mary personally walking into the bishop’s office to report an abusive priest never happened. The Josephite community in Adelaide were whistle-blowers but the ultimate whistle-blower was Fr. Woods and he was the one that Horan was attempting to punish for it.
But in the current climate with the first Australian canonization happening in three weeks, it was much easier – and more profitable – to fudge the facts. So the saintly, unjustly treated woman becomes the whistle-blower while the mentally ill male co-founder, who actually did the reporting is ignored.
History is sometimes stranger than fiction! The primary whistle-blower turned out to be a wildly eccentric, mentally ill male cleric, Fr. Woods, not our new woman saint. Since Fr. Woods was regarded as "the founder" of the Josephite sisters,
Fr. Horan sought to take vengeance by destroying the women's community that he had founded.
It turns out that the carelessness and incompetence lay elsewhere.
Now both Fr. Gardiner and the executive producer of the Australian Broadcasting Company's Compass show (the source of the original story) have vehemently denied ever asserting that Mary was a whistle-blower.
As Fr. Gardiner put it: "Early in 1870, the scandal occurred, and the Sisters of Saint Joseph reported it to Father Tenison Woods, but Mary was in Queensland and no one was worried about her," Father Gardiner told
The Australian.
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/priest-denies-making-claims-about-mackillops-excommunication/story-e6frg6nf-12259...
Father Gardiner, considered the nation's foremost authority on the MacKillop story, said his words had been twisted to suit the "ill will" of media outlets.
"There was a long chain of causation. Somehow or other, somebody typed it up as if to say I said Mary MacKillop was the one to report the sex abuse," Father Gardiner said.
"I never said it - it's just false - it's the ill will of people who are anxious to see something negative about the Catholic Church. There's already enough mud to throw, though."
So as we come to this weekend of celebration and joy, can all bloggers of good will make a concerted effort to get out the true story? Let's see if we can make the true story fly about the internet as quickly as the false one did.
By the way, the docu-drama that started all the fuss, which will be broadcast this Sunday, is
Blessed Mary: A Saint for All Australians, on the History Channel and getting strong reviews.
I know the above story has nothing to do with Benedict XVI directly, but he was obviously the target of the original canard. Mocking him, in a way, for presiding at the canonization of a nun who, in the eyes of the detractors, stood up to the problem of sexual abuse by priests more than a century ago and who was, they claim, consequently punished for that act by excommunication! It doesn't matter that they have their facts completely wrong - it's the narrative they have decided to push in order to further 'shame' the Pope and the Church. Of course, it's exploitation, plain and simple. Blessed Mary McKillop will know how to pray for them.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/10/2010 01:57]