The Pertinacious Papist and patriarch of the Magnificent Blossers, Dr. Phil Blosser, has noted the kind of headlines that the pope is getting these days. He gives some examples:
- Pope urges protection of envirnoment (Nov. 10, 2002, Associated Press)
- Pope’s Christmas Message: End global violence (from 1998, CNN)
- Pope urges more human rights for Cubans (Dec. 3, 1999, Miami Herald)
- Pope praises continued efforts to eliminate land mines (Dec. 10, 2004, The Catholic News & Herald, Diocese of Charlotte, NC)
While all press is good press, are these really the kinds of headlines that we should be having about the pope, he wonders?
Why not headlines like these?
- Pope: Catholic fornicators playing Russian Roulette with Satan
- Pope to youth: live chastely or risk going to hell
- Pope’s Christmas message: repentance key to God’s mercy for even most wretched sinners
- Pope: Georgetown University no longer Catholic
READ THE WHOLE PERTINACIOUS POST.
To clarify for those that don’t follow the link, the author is not blaming the Pope for the headlines.
This issue is part of a larger problem of people framing other people’s comments according to your philosophy.
Regrettably there are few publications in the country that frame issues from the Catholic prospective. Here in Milwaukee, our diocesan newspaper is terrible. As counter-culture as it is, I would like to see bishops do some real imposition of belief on institutions that call themselves Catholic. Granted this violates people’s sense of freedom, but heresy never got anyone to heaven.
I don’t think it’s the media’s fault. Even from a Catholic perspective, the pope rarely makes such bold spiritual pronouncements, instead, he chooses to speak mostly about worldly topics, like helping poor countries.
But has the Pope actually said something such as “Georgetown is no longer Catholic”? Has the Pope expressed concern that Catholics in the US have to start new colleges and universities because Georgetown, Notre Dame, etc. aren’t much different than secular universities?
As far back as 1990 the Pope set out the groundrules for Catholic Universities in his Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
The implementation of the norms in Ex Corde Ecclesiae has been slow and patchy in places but the Pope has not remained silent on the matter. He discusses the matter in addresses to the bishops of Chicago, Indianapolis and Milwaukee and Bishops of Portland, Seattle and Anchorage.
Oddly enough, after reading this post I returned home to find the National Catholic Register in my mailbox. This issue extensively covers the Pope’s remarks, and, boy, what a night and day difference it was seeing this. The Pope has had a lot to say on many of these topics this past year, particularly evangelization. It just goes to show that the MSM (including many “Catholic” publications) choose only to follow that which they agree or can’t ignore.
The last interesting headlines I saw regarding something the pope had said was this:
Pope to Bush: Go into Iraq and you go without God.
Of course, if you read the article, that isn’t even what the Pope said. What the pope said was, “Man cannot march into war and assume God will be at his side.”
I keep hearing the pope paraphrased as having said something similar to the headline. Unfortunately, some people seem to read the headlines but not the stories.