THE
P RTAL
March 2016
Page 24
“It must be true,
I read it in the
newspaper!”
Do newspapers always tell the truth?
Geoffrey Kirk thinks not
The more
you know about an event the less you find you can trust the reporting of it in the newspapers.
This is especially true of the coverage given in the English language press to the Catholic Church. Take
two recent instances by way of example.
Pope Francis and Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow met for
the first time in an airport in Cuba. It was a significant
meeting accompanied by a lengthy common statement
which was worthy of careful attention, especially with
regard to abortion and same sex relations, which
it deplored. The press ignored those inconvenient
clauses and got the rest wrong.
“It will be the first meeting between the leaders of
Christianity’s two biggest churches since a 1054 schism
that helped to shape modern Europe and the Middle
East”, claimed The Guardian. But as every schoolboy
knows (and Google will tell them if they do not) such
is far from the truth.
The Seventeenth Ecumenical Council, convened
in Basel and concluded in Florence in 1445, dealt
importantly, but not decisively, with the reconciliation
of East and West. (Incidentally, the Patriarchate of
Moscow was not established until 1589, and so had no
part in these deliberations which were led by Joseph of
Constantinople.)
There have been numbers of contacts in
modern times between Bishops of Rome and
Ecumenical Patriarchs, notably those of Pope
Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964 and Pope
Francis with Patriarch Bartholemew as recently as
2014. Additionally Athenagoras visited Rome in
1969, St John Paul II visited the Patriarch in 1979,
Bartholemew attended John Paul’s funeral in 2005,
and met with Benedict XVI shortly afterwards in 2006.
Telegraph and the BBC in their reportage of the
publication of letters between John Paul II and Anna
Teresa Timenyeska. These were routinely described in
the press as “secret” – where the word “private” would
have been more truthful and appropriate - and they
were treated by Peter Stanford and Edward Stourton
as arguments for the abandonment of clerical celibacy.
Stanford, of course, is the author of a book about
“Pope Joan” which uses the legend as an argument
for women’s ordination (and so must be agreed to
have abandoned reason some time ago); Stourton
is a divorced and remarried “Catholic” who clearly
has axes to grind. That is about the measure of it: a
press (where the Church is concerned) too lazy to do
To have ignored these facts and to portray the its homework, and obsessed with pursuing a ‘liberal’
meeting in Cuba as an historic and ground-breaking agenda in defiance of all logic and common sense.
enterprise is shameful for a national newspaper (and
for the BBC, who took the same line).
Pope Francis, tragically, is presently the beneficiary
of all this – the darling of the bien-pensants. But how
Something of the same might be said of The Daily long will the popularity last?
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