We are
currently in, I suppose, one of those joyful intermissions – which the late
Christopher Hitchens once hoped would last forever – in which the world does
not have a pope. This, of course, is not quite true, but until that famous miasma
rises up over the Vatican, the planet we humbly call home feels like a place
with clearer views. I mean, of course, moral
views, the ones that really matter and can’t be charged to a credit card
whilst on holiday.
Amongst other things, the
resignation of Ratzinger has prompted me to think about the thoughtless regularity
with which the concepts of religion and morality are thrust together, as though
they are mutually dependent, symbiotic salvations in an increasingly godless age.
There is a strange obstinacy – a kind of sleight of hand, even – that goes on
in the Australian media, perpetually drawing together these two ideas which
sit, in actuality, more like chalk and cheese than two peas in a pod. Have they,
after all, forgotten the bishops who helped Nazi war criminals escape post-war Germany?
That the Spanish clergy murdered countless leftists and innocents during that
country’s holocaustic civil war? That I might be stabbed or shot if I uploaded
an illustration of the prophet Mohammed with this blog, that the Catholic
hierarchy in this country might arrange my safe transfer to a parish in New
Zealand if I told them I had been raping children for thirty years? Let these drops
in the ocean, plucked from the top of my head, suffice.
The ABC and the Australian are, at the best of times, uneasy bedfellows. Anti-Aunty
shtick appears in the Oz with monotonous
constancy these days. Media Watch frequently
and justifiably fires back, though with far less belligerence than the Australian’s notoriously prickly
editorials. The occasions on which these two oppositional juggernauts find
common ground are rare, and unseemly. That they have done so on the matter of
the resignation of the Pope should not surprise or disgust and yet it does.
On Wednesday the 13th of
February, the Australian ran
predictably obsequious pieces on Pope Benedict XVI. Tess Livingstone called him
‘a man of grace and wisdom’, whatever that means, whilst that edition’s
editorial preposterously lionised him as ‘an intellectual leader and student of
the sublime’ (whatever that means). Bizarrely, the same editorial singled out
the ABC for criticism, for its ‘shallow commentary... symptomatic of the
obsessions of an insider class that struggles with conservatism, faith and pluralism.’
Perhaps the Oz, like me, was unprepared for the attack dog antics of the editor
of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics unit, Scott Stephens. The mellifluent Stephens
is a religious apologist par excellence,
a pseudo-intellectual obscurantist devoted to civil discourse except, it seems,
when even uncontroversial claims about religious crimes are put to him. The
straight-talking Peter FitzSimons, when he had the temerity to suggest on a
recent episode of ABC’s The Drum that
the Catholic hierarchy’s response to the child sexual abuse crisis had been
inadequate, was thundered at by Stephens, who called his point of view
‘stupid.’ FitzSimons then challenged Stephens to refute claims made by Christopher Hitchens in 2010, and rerun by the Sydney
Morning Herald on the occasion of Pope Benedict’s resignation, that
Ratzinger was both individually and institutionally responsible for covering up
acts of child sexual abuse within the Church. All Stephens could muster in
reply was to say that Hitchens had been ‘wrong.’ Presumably the SMH’s editors didn’t think so because
they put it on the front page. One imagines that, had FitzSimons’ and Stephens’
positions been reversed, the Australian would
have sanctioned yet another frothy-mouthed editorial damning the ABC’s failure
to meet its own standards of impartiality. The newspaper was similarly mute on
Stephens’ improper tweet likening the PM to a ‘condescending primary school
teacher’, rightly assessed (amongst other similarly opinionated tweets) by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes to be a
breach of the national broadcaster’s guidelines. So much for ‘ABC groupthink.’
In reality, the Australian ought to have shown more gratitude to have an
ideological compatriot at work within the ABC, prosecuting a virtually
identical case for the Pope’s legacy. Perhaps, on the other hand, the irony
that Stephens was, for a change, genuinely contemptuous of the ABC’s
impartiality remit was not lost on the paper’s editors. Broadly speaking, the
Stephens/Oz take on the legacy of
Pope Benedict XVI was this: a highly intelligent and cultured theologian, the 85 year-old had the humility to resign because of ill-health.
He confronted the child abuse scandal head-on and, in all other ways,
reinvigorated the Catholic Church during difficult times.
The Hitchens article referred to
above would make as good a starting place as any from which to gauge the full blinkeredness
of these tributes, but there is no shortage of candidates. Geoffrey Robertson’s
The Case of the Pope is one such
contender, a typically thorough (and devastating) examination of Ratzinger’s
accountability for the Vatican’s ongoing abuse of human rights. Robertson views the Pope as, in a very
real sense, the head of a criminal conspiracy to protect paedophile priests.
The Australian’s assertion that
Benedict’s approach to this issue was ‘hard-headed and forensic’ is consummate
twaddle. That the child sex abuse crisis is deemed deserving of no more than a
single short paragraph in the same editorial is equally worthy of contempt. The
seemingly permanent scandal of the Vatican’s murderous opposition to the use of
condoms in HIV-stricken Africa doesn’t even rate a mention. What does? The
first papal Twitter message, presented as evidence that Benedict was ‘not deaf
to the demands of the modern world.’
It must be asked, as well, why no
mention was made, either by Stephens or the Australian,
of the internal ructions which have plagued the Vatican in recent times. Surely
the controversy surrounding the leaking of papal correspondence – said by the Guardian to depict the Vatican as ‘a
seething hotbed of intrigue and infighting’ – is pertinent to Ratzinger’s
legacy? No mention, either, of credible claims that a ‘gay network’ exists
inside the Holy See, seemingly at odds with papal doctrine which instructs that
homosexual sex is ‘intrinsically disordered.’ It has even been suggested – credibly, I believe – that Pope Benedict’s resignation was less to do with his ‘humility’ or
‘selflessness’ than his despair at the Vatican’s internal divisions (he is on
record as saying these divisions ‘marred the face of the church.’)
What is it that prohibits newspapers
like the Australian, and ABC
commentators like Scott Stephens, from offering clear- (as opposed to dewy-)
eyed assessments of Pope Benedict XVI? Perhaps, in Stephens, there is more than
a little self-justification at play. The Australian,
on the other hand, can scarcely report the national forecast these days without
poisonous ideological bias. It has politicised the pope in much the same way it
has climate change and refugees, seeking to use whoever occupies the position
as another warrior in its interminable ‘culture wars.’ It can see nothing in
Pope Benedict, or any other pontiff for that matter, that it cannot see in its
own reflection.
It
is truly nauseating that the same outlets which greeted Pope Benedict’s
departure with fulsome praise and sycophantic assessments of his time as
pontiff met last year’s establishment of a Royal Commission into church child
sex abuse with, at best, mealy-mouthed caution. This is sheer moral bankruptcy.
When will this country’s self-proclaimed ‘interrogators of power’ stop fawning
and start doing some actual journalism, and when will the national broadcaster
end the fantastical and unwarranted tribute to religion’s value in the public
debate about morality that its Religion and Ethics unit represents?
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