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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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12/09/2012 03:21
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Andrea Tornielli shares with us the results of a recent study by an Italian firm called Reputation Manager that looked into what is being said on Italian Internet sites about Pope Benedict XVI compared to the Dalai Lama. In a way, I am not surprised that the Holy Father comes out far less favorably than the Dalai Lama, since more regular poll surveys in Germany, the Pope's own homeland, have also shown this. But the extent of negativity about the Pope in Italian cyperspace appals me, because it means that Italians who use the Internet pro-actively are buying into all the anti-Pope, anti-Church propaganda purveyed by Italian MSM. [And that pro-Benedict forums like ours are nothing but tiny, weak and unheeded voices in the cyber-wilderness.]

I would like to think that this Internet-proactive population is not exactly representative of Italians as a whole, certainly not of those who turn up in the hundreds of thousands whenever the Pope turns up anywhere in Italy.

As for the seemingly general impression that the Dalai Lama is everything a spiritual leader should be - compared to Benedict XVI - I doubt that a significant number of those who think this actually know much about him - no offense meant to the DL, whom I admire in many ways, just not on the order and magnitude of my devotion to the Popes, in general - except that he preaches peace, he is Buddhist, and he and his people are persecuted by the Chinese Communist regime Perhaps not even that much, but just because they read nothing in the media that is at all remotely negative about him!

How many of these secularized anti-Pope Internauts are even aware that observant Buddhists - who think that even swatting an ant is a crime against nature - oppose abortion and homosexual acts as much as Catholics do! Would they still hold the Dalai Lama in such uncritical favor if they knew this?


The negative prejudice against
Benedict XVI in Italian cyberspace

by ANDREA TORNIELLI
Translated from the Italian service of

Sept. 11, 2012
[
A study by Reputation Manager shows that almost half of the contents online about Papa Ratzinger has 'a negative tone' and ' an injurious impact' - in direct contrast to what the study shows about the Dalai Lama.

Benedict XVI's message is not getting through well, not on the Internet, even in Italy, according to study results published by Reputation Manager in the journal Expansione, which, thanks to special software, has dedicated an issue to analyze data taken from the Italian web universe, including the social media. In this case, the program analyzed the 'digital image' of Benedict XVI and of the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan Buddhists.

The conceptual model used three parameters applied to both figures: their personal image, their religious life, and their communications. 'Personal image' was subdivided into 'biography' and 'opinion', whereas 'communications' was rated according to "books, addresses, lectures and trips".

The results show that the Web including YouTube and the social networks, has a 'balanced' view of the Dalai Lama, whereas for the Pope, the overall impression is 'emotional" and 'not positive".

"The synthesis offered by the analysis of the emotional impact of messages on the Internet analyzed by Reputation Manager on these two important religious figures offer a very clear snapshot: Almost half of online content about Benedict XVI (48.74%) has a negative tone and injurious impact; only 7% is positive and generally lukewarm, not enthusiastic; the rest are neutral.

"On the other hand, the Dalai Lama is decisively more popular on the Web, both quantitatively (53% vs 47% as conversation topic) and qualitatively (26% of online content is positive and only 8% negative but not injurious - the emotive impact of the words used about the Dalai Lama in general 'balanced', whether they are positive or negative".

The comparison between the two personages played out mostly on video (22%), with 19% in the newspapers, and 13% on forums. [Off the top of my head, I can cite at least five exclusively pro-B16 Italian forums, including this and PRF - and for the study (or the software) to 'find' that none of the content about the Pope is enthusiastic makes me doubt the validity of the study. Also, I cannot believe that the information content about the Dalai Lama could possibly match that about the Pope, for the simple reason that the Tibetan leader does not have the regular year-round schedule of events that the Pope has, nor the dedicated corps of journalists covering the Pope as a regular daily beat. Perhaps the base number for the percentages cited should have been made clear. You can't compare 26% positive out of a total base of say, 500,000 items, about the Dalai Lama, when the base for the Pope may easily be at least four times that. The larger the base, the less homogeneous it is, and sharp disparities in attitudes are more likely to emerge.]

It is interesting to note that among the top 5 domains, after YouTube, comes UAAR (Unione Atei e Agnostici Razionalisti), ferraraforum.it, followed by the online sites of corriere.it and ilfattoquotidiano.it.

The most popular video site about Benedict XVI, with more than half a million visits and loads of commentary, is called “Papa Ratzinger... .in tutta la sua cattiveria!” (Papa Ratzinger - in all his nastiness!) - which is seen by more than five times those who watch the most visualized video on the Dalai Lama (less than 90,000 hits) which contains his aphorisms and wise sayings. [And that's the kind of numerical perspective that is relevant to these 'studies'.]

The video presence online of Benedict XVI is clearly unbalanced and characterized either as parody, revelations, and criticisms, which are mostly ferocious. [Since one cannot imagine any possible video of Benedict XVI being 'nasty', one can only conclude that a hate site like the one cited, uses available video and possibly selectively edited sound clips taken out of context, to peddle their own nastiness about the Pope!]

The situation is no better, the study shows, in the social networks. The Dalai Lama has 4,390,916 fans on 290 web pages run by 71 groups on Facebook, and even if only 1.7% of these fans are active (they have contributed at least one post or comment), it is clear that these groups and pages are 'decisively positive'.

The numbers are far lower for the Pope - 263.032 followers on 154 pages run by 62 group, but in this case, except for those named for the Pope in a neutral way (e.g., Benedetto XVI, Papa Benedetto XVI), the overwhelmingly majority is heavily tilted negativ ely, as one can see by simply reading their titles, which are mocking or downright offensive. But even among the Pope sites, only 1.8% of the listed 'fans' are active, a sign that the negative trend is not growing nor necessarily the backbone of these sites".

"The personal image of the Pope and his decisions and positions in the religious field are generally unpopular," says Andrea Barchiesi, administrative director of Reputation Manager. "Despite the Pope's greater socio-cultural closeness to Italians, or perhaps because of this, the prevailing opinion in the Italian Internet universe over what Benedict XVI says and does is negative, and thus, too, the strong emotive impact that this opinion has on the resulting commentaries online".

In short, the prevalent image of the Pope in Italian cyberspace is that of "a very rigid person', one thought to be anti-Muslim (after the Regensburg lecture), and to have been a Nazi in his youth (even if obviously false, the lie is reinforced online by a photograph of the newly-ordained priest Joseph Ratzinger with both hands raised in front of the faithful, in which he is labelled as a diehard Nazi bent on rendering a Hitlerian salute even during a liturgical celebration.)

Benedict XVI is also associated with the idea of the 'Inquisition' and he is blamed for the cover-ups on pedophile priests, as if he had not been personally responsible for proactively fighting this problem in the Church.

An accusation that was reiterated in a recent documentary called Mea Maxima about the serial child abuser Fr. Lawrence Murphy of Milwaukee. Between the 1950s and the early 1970s, Murphy was said to have abused hundreds of children in the deaf-mute institute where he worked. [Does the documentary mention that the diocese asked the Milwaukee police to investigate the charges, but whatever the reason, the police came back to say they found nothing actionable against him in all those dozens of charges made? Maybe Murphy got away with it, but in any case, the diocese forced him to retire in 1972.]

Referring to a supposed 'conspiracy of silence' in the Church - as one reads in a review of the documentary that was published in La Repubblica [of course!] - the documentary claims that such a conspiracy was sealed in 2001 on account of an order by Cardinal Ratzinger demanding that all charges of sex abuse by priests must be sent to his attention alone as a confidential document.

[I have not read about this documentary, but it obviously milks the deliberately erroneous reporting of Laurie Goodstein on the Murphy case in the New York Times in 2010, whose mis-statements on the case were belied by the very documents themselves that the Times posted online as their sourcing for the story. The editors rightly wagered that few readers would bother to look at the documents and simply take the story as is, as gospel truth. Fortunately, the priest heading the diocesan tribunal in Milwaukee at the time the diocese decided to resurrect Murphy's case 20 years after it had forced Murphy to retire - and during which ho one had come forward with any further accusations against him - reacted to the falsehoods and published an account to give the true story. Of course, a rebuttal of any falsehood printed originally on Page 1 with blazing headlines never gets the attention it deserves, starting from the culprit media purveyor itself. But at the time, Cardinal William Levada also wrote an open letter to the US media in response to the Goodstein article, citing the first-hand testimony of the priest who headed the diocesan tribunal, and giving the correct version of the Murphy story. This detailed account may be found on the Vatican site on the Church's response to the sex abuse issue
www.vatican.va/resources/resources_card-levada2010_en.html
and it is too bad it is available only in English.

None of that, of course, matters to unscrupulous journalists and 'documentarists' who rush to immortalize their lies before the public and a relentlessly secular MSM only too eager to peddle anything bad about the Church, the worse the better. Who can forget the untold damage done by a 2005 BBC documentary by an Irishman who claimed to have been a sex-abuse victim, in which the most blatant lies were peddled about Cardinal Ratzinger, to the point of citing a 1962 CDF letter to all the bishops of the world about how to deal with 'the most serious crimes' by priests at the diocesan level, as 'proof' that Joseph Ratzinger [who, in 1962, was a professor in Bonn] had promulgated that letter with specific instructions for bishops to keep all such reports or investigations of priestly crimes 'secret'. Regardless of who wrote the instructions (the CDF Prefect at the time], that allegation simply is not so.

MSM reporting in general about the sex-abuse issue since the 'scandal' erupted in Boston in 2001-2002 has been so distorted and wrong, as a consequence of the general mania in the media to depict the Church as the most depraved institution the world has known. To my knowledge, no one in the English Church mounted any meaningful protest against the fabrio of lies that underpinned that BBC documentary, and when a private Italian TV channel bought the rights for Italian TV in 2006, a few brave souls from the Vatican did come out on TV to seek to rebut it, including Mons. Rino Fisichella, and the Catholic media in Italy mounted a campaign to counteract the lies, but to little avail. The viewing public are generally suckers for anything labelled 'scandal', and who knows how many Italians who watched the documentary even paid attention to the attempted rebuttals but retain instead all the wrong ideas about what Cardinal Ratzinger did or did not do!]


The 'Mea Maxima' documentary's accusations against Joseph Ratzinger are a complete misrepresentation of facts; New directives about how to deal with cases against priests accused of sexual abuse of minors - which until then had been the primary responsibility of the diocesan bishop - were issued by John Paul II in 2001, with implementing instructions by Cardinal Ratzinger as CDF Prefect, to ensure that all such cases were reported to the Vatican, specifically, to the CDF. Which was, of course, the exact opposite of 'cover-up' of which the documentary accuses Cardinal Ratzinger.

It marked the beginning of a response from the Vatican that would become increasingly decisive and efficient to the point that, after Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope, he instituted more norms to deal with the issue, including a true and proper emergency law that would result in immediate intervention by Church officials to protect victims of these crimes.



The omnipresence and convenient access to the Internet is obviously very much a double-bladed sword. People will tend to look up only those sites that they know to be congenial to their own sensibilities and opinions. So it doesn't matter how much truth we post online, all such stories are like giant trees falling in the forest which are unperceived by anyone because no one is there to perceive it. And I certainly do not trawl the Net looking for negative stories and commentary about the Pope - I do not have the inclination nor the time to waste on an exercise that can only be an occasion of sin, for me!

By the same token, those who are conditioned or predisposed to hostility against the Church will eagerly patronize and contribute their own provocations to the hate sites that peddle the most outrageous falsehoods about the Church and her leader, and would never even think to look at any site that might remotely be pro-Church or pro-Pope.

The facts are there for those who want it, but the malicious lies and misrepresentations are also out there and appear to be more patronized, because that, alas, is human nature. So, maybe we can only find comfort from the words of Jesus in the Gospel, as cited by Antonio Socci but in the context of Cardinal Martini's 'popularity' in the world:

"If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you...If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you" (Jn 16,18-20); and

"Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven" (Lk 6, 20-23).

Because in this context, his detractors do nothing but heap heavenly blessings on Benedict XVI.

IDEA FOR A PROMPT VATICAN RESPONSE
TO ALL MIS- AND DIS-INFORMATION
ABOUT THE POPE AND THE CHURCH


And even if the best Vatican communications strategy, tactics and expert consultants could never hope to defeat human nature, the Vatican should, at least, not allow lies, mis-statements or misrepresentations of fact in news reports to go unanswered. (Lella on her blog has been militantly and consistently advocating this.)

While I understand it is unseemly for a Press Office to respond to opinion pieces, it is right and proper to do so when one questions the truth or objectivity of the facts on which the opinion is based. I do suggest that the Vatican frame a template with which it can promptly respond to any and all such disinformation and misinformation, no matter how far back in time it goes, e.g.:

"Regarding the statement made by ____ on ____ in _____ that _______, the facts on the record, appropriately documented, and verifiable by any journalist or fact-checker, are as follows: __________________________________.

In the interests of truth and fairness, the Holy See requests that the appropriate correction be made on these pages/program/broadcast as soon as possible."

And the first template of facts to be assembled ought to be a brief but incisive chronology of the sex-abuse issue and how the Vatican has dealt with it since 2001. Such statements do not require any subjective embellishments - "Just the facts, please", as an investigating policemen might say - so no one has to wrack his brains to come up with appropriately diplomatic as well as emotive expressions, an exercise that is often the most time-consuming.

Be efficient. Use a template, and fill in the blanks with the bare facts, then e-mail it ASAP to the editor or program producer or broadcast personality. They may not all pay attention to it, but some will, and the fact will be made known that the Vatican is no longer allowing itself to be used as a doormat and trash dump by the detractors of the Church.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/09/2012 04:05]
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