Read here and there for starters. After that, check out Zadok here (and Father John Zuhlsdorf has the italian text here if you are up for it).
Now compare all that to the inaccurate Nightline report here.
Read here and there for starters. After that, check out Zadok here (and Father John Zuhlsdorf has the italian text here if you are up for it).
Now compare all that to the inaccurate Nightline report here.
Note that all these reports are datelined on March 10, the day after the Vatican interview. That means that the articles from the Catholic press were available (as were the people who wrote the articles) before the Nightline story aired. ABC didn’t bother to do elementary fact-checking or to check with experts in the field before running a second-hand rumor.
As in the recent Rowan Williams furore, journalists throughout the world simply picked up the headline from a Times Online story ([url=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3517050.ece]”Seven New Deadly Sins: Are You Guilty?”[/url])and assumed that it accurately depicted the underlying fact situation. In fact, the article currently online does give some correct information in later paragraphs, but the sensationalistic headline and lead paragraphs render that moot. There was apparently no effort to obtain comments from knowledgeable experts in the field of moral theology or even from secular ethicists. Surely such folks were available to a journalist working in Rome.
While relying on [i]The Times[/i] might have been safe when it was the world’s newspaper of record, Rupert Murdoch has owned it since 1981. The paper now has about the same reliability and freedom from bias as other News Corp. outlets like [i]The Sun[/i] or [i]The New York Post[/i]. There is simply no excuse for taking its stories as Gospel, much less in assuming that the headline fairly portrays the key point of the story.
The Times may even be as untrustworthy as The New York Times. But the reality is that few news sources are dependable as the “discipline” of reporting has sunk so low.
Thank you for posting this Kendall. The posting of the incorrect articles caused the usual anti-Catholic hysteria to commence. Unfortunately most of this was from fellow Christians. Some of whom should have known better.
I echo Paula’s thanks and comments. I saw the report last evening on BBC America which also had taken this out of proportion and context. I have clear differences with Catholics, but in the end they are fully Christian. We certainly should have discussions on points of theology, but need to work together to focus on countering the real “threats” that are aiming to “convert” others, namely revisionism, Mormonism, Islam and atheism.
#1-4,
I agree with all the comments above. Sadly, the Roman Catholic Church is often considered the biggest and strongest institutional obstacle to social “progress,” and so it’s often subject to incredibly negative and distorted treatment in the press, whether it’s by the print, broadcast, or online media.
Lately, I’ve been reading Philip Jenkin’s fine and very revealing book called, “The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.” He documents in depressing detail the very widespread prejudice against Catholicism among the opinion-shaping elites in the western world, especially in the media, but also in our most prestigious and influential universities (and many not so prestigious ones).
The sad and significant thing is indicated by Jenkin’s subtitle, “The Last Acceptable Prejudice.” George Weigle, Richard John Neuhaus, and other leading Catholic writers have often called attention to this same phenomenon. Alas, a rabid suspicion and mistrust of Roman Catholicism has a long and sordid history in this nation, which began in so strongly Protestant a fashion (with RCs only a miniscule minority, except in Maryland, during the whole colonial period). What’s new is that we now live in a society that regards “toleration” and “inclusiveness” as the greatest of virtues, and holds bigotry and prejudice to be the worst of vices. And yet, anti-Catholic prejudice of a vile and blatant sort is still excused and seen as justified; somehow the RC Church is fair game. All other forms of prejudice are out, but anti-Catholicism is still “in” among the liberal social elite in this country, to an astonishing and appalling degree.
But of course, there is also a similar, if less pronounced, prejudice that is virtually as socially acceptable in most social circles. And that is the extreme dislike of conservative evangelicalism in elite circles in the western world. Evangelicalism or orthodoxy is not only confused with “fundamentalism” and religious fanaticism, but is also subject to very similar distorted and biased reporting. It’s commonly assumed that all evangelicals are obscurantist “literalists,” or militant members of “the Religious Right” of the Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson sort etc. The ugly stereotypes abound, and they are almost always very, very negative.
This once again shows that we are living during a transitional era in western culture that’s of great importance. Our society is becoming not only more aggressively secularized and pluralistic than ever before, it’s becoming more openly pagan and downright anti-Christian than ever before too.
Now that is not necessarily a bad thing. The pre-Constantinian Church did quite well, despite fierce opposition. But it does call for the Christian Church, at least in its so-called “mainline” forms, to realize that the time for Christendom-style church life is over. We desperately need to make the harrowing adjustments that it will take to become a “High Commitment, Post-Christendom style Anglicanism” of a decidedly sectarian, Christ-against-culture sort. Now that will amount to a full-fledged New Reformation. I can’t wait to see it happen.
David Handy+
I’m not sure this silliness rises to the level of being anti-catholic. It’s ignorant and silly, but…
GetReligion.org has a good post up about it, ending with a decent report from Reuters (of all sources!):
[i]”(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,” he said.
[i]The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.[/i]
Important point: it’s not all stem cell research, just that which takes a human like to achieve it’s ends.[/i]
Did the Ten Commandments get lost in this article’s verbage??