The Media Fog

My fellow religious ed teacher Mrs. Irene recently told me about a man who was driving up & down her street in a car laden with signs exhorting, "No hope in the Pope!"

When you get right down to it, the dividing line between Catholic & Protestant or Orthodox Christans - & on a larger scale the Catholic Church & the world - is the question of authority. Who has the authority to solemnly declare & define truths & how those truths play out in the lives of men. Catholics hold that the pope in his office as Vicar of Christ on earth has this power. Everyone else says it's up to everyone else (It's particularly sad when people inside the Church seize on this line of reasoning, but especially priests. No one deserves to be slapped upside their nappy heads more than clerics who engage in anti-clericalism. Ah, but I digress...).

To borrow an idea from Chesterton, when Luther rejected the idea of an infallible Pope, he ordained every man an infallible pope.

And this idea is in such stark contrast to the world's ideas of authority & moral judgments, that the Church specifically or Christianity in general only make the news when they can be parodied & ridiculed or show to be false prophets & hypocrites according to the media's own version of "the way things should be."

So, I should be neither angry or upset that a horrible piece of reporting aired on NPR this morning. Perhaps no entities on earth are more contrary in their world views than NPR & the Church. A large collection of mostly separate issues were woven together in a tapestry designed to cloud & confuse those issues rather than bring enlightenment to them. Truly, and I mean it, truly one of the worst articles I've ever come across. It's not only bad, it's bad for you.

Is it about the lifting of the excommunications of the SSPX bishops? Is it about the recent re-emergence of a more Tradition- & traditional-minded Church? Antisemitism? Catholic-Jewish relations? Is it about debilitated theologians? The role of Pope in the Church? Is it about a shrinking, more faithful Church? Celibate clergy? Well, it's all mentioned or alluded to, but none of these topics are made any clearer after being mentioned. Rather, they turn into a formless fog.

And the color of that fog is essentially, "Hey, Catholics! Don't listen to that Pope guy. Don't let him tell you what to do & what to believe. Get with the times - this is a brave new world! That religion stuff is all garbage. What is truth? It's all subjective anyway, so just do what you want to do. Better yet, listen to us - we'll tell you what to believe."

One should not be surprised that Benedict is as concerned with unity within the Church as much relations with groups outside the Church. That's one of the primary roles of the papacy - to ensure the unity of the Church. The SSPX doesn't have the same size following in the U.S. as it does in Europe, but I'd say the pope is concerned far more about the souls of that particular flock of faithful than distressing over the negative reactions of the media or other religious groups.

Here's a news flash: the world & its spokesmen will never "get" the One True Church founded by Christ Jesus upon the rock of Peter, & upon which the gates of hell will never prevail.

Personally, I know of nothing else on earth in which I can assuredly place my hope.