Media criticism of Pope has no link with atrocities visited on the Jews

By Terry Prone

Monday, April 05, 2010

QUOTE sluts, in the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, were the people outside of the administration who could be activated to come out in support of an emerging policy or make a statement helpful to the president.

Instead of someone from the inside making a positive statement and thereby eliciting the inevitable response of "well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?" someone with ostensibly little to gain would be prompted to raise an issue and thereby give it wider currency.

The Vatican doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to the quote sluts concept. Over the past couple of weeks, their support of Pope Benedict has come from within his own circle. This would have been ineffective but forgettable if his confessor hadn’t got in on the act with a stirring homily on Good Friday, which effectively shot the Pontiff in both slippered feet.

The confessor set out to fight for his man with a vengeance and a letter. The letter had come to him, he told the congregation, from a Jewish friend. The Jewish friend, he said, reading from the missive, likened recent coverage of the Pope to anti-semitism. Dreadful stuff, went the implication. Should be stopped. Immediately if not sooner.

The confessor’s sermon echoed a theme already established by "Vatican sources" which held that media, in covering the child abuse story, were "sowers of mistrust". Shock, horror. What the hell else have media ever been, other than sowers of mistrust? It comes with the territory. Nay, it defines the territory.

Media, according to all the old axioms, is in the business of publishing anything that somebody doesn’t want published, of turning over stones to survey the wrigglers beneath, of exposing venality and corruption where none had supposed it to exist. If the Vatican believed media was about building trust, they need their mitred heads examined.

While they’re having them examined, they might also have a look at the bit of their brains which supposes that ticking off international media for being sowers of mistrust will in some way stop journalists and broadcasters doing precisely that. It’s roughly the equivalent of suggesting Paul O’Connell, when he’s not advertising milk on TV, sometimes hunkers down – in public – with a cluster of muscular men and hangs onto their shorts while breathing heavily. Of course he does. That’s rugby for you. Same with media.

For the Vatican to reprove radio, TV and print journalists for doing what they’re paid to do argues more than profound ignorance of the function of modern journalism. It also argues a mistaken belief in the efficacy of generalised reproach from on high. Once upon a time, such Papally authorised reproof might have been effective. Not any more.

His Holiness’s confessor, however, went way beyond generalised reproach and complicated an already bad situation. His sermon put the tin hat on it. A tin hat with a Star of David emblazoned thereon, courtesy of the Jewish friend who sent the helpful letter and permitted its use in the pulpit.

One has to assume that the Jewish friend was being extraordinarily and illogically kind, or that for some reason he doesn’t grasp the scale, scope, history and unique characteristics of anti-semitism.

The first distinction between anti-semitism and criticism of the Pope is obvious. Criticism of the Pope was verbal, appearing in the spoken and the written word. Anti-semitism, on the other hand, has taken a multiplicity of forms, starting with the written and spoken word, wherein libels and unsupportable charges were laid against Jews, moving on to forcing them to wear distinctive dress, pay special taxes which amounted to a licence to practice their religion, and later involved social, civil, economic and residential restrictions, forced conversion, expulsion, violent attacks and mass murder.

A second pivotal distinction is that the negative coverage of the Papal performance in his previous role is based on what he did or did not do, not on his religious beliefs.

Early anti-semitism, in contrast, started with a rejection of the Jews because they would not accept Christ as the Messiah. Guilt by association held all Jews in some way responsible for deicide.

WITHIN media coverage of child sex abuse in Ireland, that guilt by association has sideswiped even a man like Bishop Eamon Walsh, who rigorously outed the facts of the Ferns scandal, making himself grievously unpopular with priests in that and other dioceses in the process. Walsh was furious, later, to find himself regarded as in some general way to blame for child sex abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese for no better reason than that he had been an auxiliary bishop there when it happened. But that wasn’t what media did to the Pope. He suffered no vague guilt by association. In sharp contrast, he was accused of specific, evidenced, personal failures.

Connecting coverage of those alleged failures to anti-semitism is a stretch. The Pope has not been persecuted or physically attacked because of his religion. That’s what distinguished anti-semitism in its first millennium, when Christians persecuted Jews because of their religion.

That changed in the 15th century with Queen Isabella of Castile, whose threat of expulsion led many Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity, although some of them continued to be secretly loyal to Judaism.

"As a result," Dinesh D’Sousa writes in his The End of Racism, "new laws were passed restricting and discriminating against Jews not on account of their faith but on account of their blood. The new Christians were called ‘marranos’ which meant pigs... for the first time, European Christians adopted an attitude which held that Jewish blood was a hereditary taint which could not be eradicated by baptism."

But here again we search in vain for a legitimate parallel. The Pope was never attacked on the basis of race. Literally nothing links criticism of him for his alleged failure to vindicate German victims of child sex abuse with anti-semitism, and the attempt to make such a link shamefully trivialises two millennia of atrocities visited on the Jews by comparing them with a couple of months of negative coverage of Pope Benedict to such an embedded international persecution. How could the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa compare allegations that the Pope had covered up for child abusers to "the more shameful aspects of anti-semitism" given that the "more shameful aspects of anti-semitism" range from murderous pogroms to the gassing of millions of human beings in concentration camps? How could any sane man compare the experience of "collective violence" against the Jews to a few weeks of media hostility to the Pope?

The Vatican, immediately after the homily achieved worldwide coverage, said the confessor wasn’t acting in an official capacity when he said what he said. That’s not the point. The point is that in the presence of the Pope, on a crucially sensitive day in the Christian calendar, he said it. And he evidently believed it.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, April 05, 2010