Last Monday a report by Reuters announced the news that “Pope marries couples who cohabited and had children” and it was given blanket coverage around the world, including Malta.

The Daily Telegraph gave a more sensational headline, saying that the Pope married couples “living in sin”. The fact that he married them to stop ‘living in sin’ featured nowhere in the report.

What, according to the media is the significance of this act? The Daily Mail considered this event to be “a latest demonstration of his [Pope Francis] more laissez-faire attitude to Catholic teaching”.

Reuters was more cautions, describing it as “the latest sign that the Argentine Pontiff wants the Catholic Church to be more open and inclusive”.

Several media outlets, including Reuters, added another ‘gem’ to their reports. They attributed to the Pope the statement that the “Church must end its obsession with teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality”.

A lot of the media coverage of the Catholic Church – like many other types of reportage – is tainted with bias and sensationalism. Many people are not discerning or informed enough and consequently they let the headlines (many just read the headlines and don’t bother with the full text of the report) influence their perceptions of the Catholic Church. Thus false impressions are created and unrealistic expectations are raised. The same things happens in politics, economics, international relations and all other subjects that people are not too well informed about.

It is not very common that popes officiate marriage rites. In 2000, St Pope John Paul II joined in marriage eight couples from different parts of the world as part of the Jubilee for Families. He also publicly presided over another joint marriage for several couples in 1994 as part of his celebration of the International Year of the Family. So what Pope Francis did is rare. Was the celebration conducted by Pope Francis a one-off occasion to highlight the Synod on the Family that will convene in the first week of October?

If this is the case, then this is similar to what St John Paul II did. Was the marriage celebration the establishment of a new trend, having the Pope officiate in more celebrations of the sacraments, and not just matrimony? If the latter is the case, then the event would be more newsworthy and pastorally more significant.

But there is nothing extraordinary in the joining in matrimony of couples already living together before marriage and even having children. It happens all the time and today it happens more frequently than before. Every Cana pre-marriage course I address has several such couples preparing for marriage. It is great that people accept the grace of God and try to regularise their relationship by celebrating the sacrament of marriage.

The fact that now even the Pope did what priests and bishops have been doing for a long time adds more significance to the welcoming and merciful dimension of the Catholic Church which is, after all, a Church of and for saints and sinners. Has it not been said a long time ago and by sources quite respectable that when the lost sheep return, celebrations should be afoot?

Reuters and the rest of the media commented on the event in itself without reporting anything of the homily given by Pope Francis, where he clearly stated that the family is based on the marriage of a man and a woman. But had the Reuters journalist reported the homily, he would have found it difficult to pit once more Pope Francis against Pope Emeritus Benedict. (This is no surprise as pitting one person or one issue against another is a very common media convention.)

“His approach (Pope Francis) contrasts with that of his predecessor, the German Pope Benedict, who said that threats to the traditional family undermined the future of humanity itself,” wrote the Reuters journalist, conveniently forgetting that Pope Francis defends all the time the traditional family and has described gay marriage as an anthropological regression. That is not a great compliment to non-traditional families, is it? Even Benedict could not have said it more forcefully.

The Reuters journalist then told us that “the Pope has said the Church must end its obsession with teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality”. These are nice words indeed. There is only one little snag – of no consequence, naturally – that the Pope never said those words! But why should one let the truth come in the way of a good headline?

Media reports started attributing these words to Pope Francis following his in-depth interview with La Civiltà Cattolica and 14 other Jesuit periodicals. During that interview, the Pope used the word ‘obsession’ only once. This is the sentence: “The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” (Even Pope Benedict has also said the same thing several times.)

What the Pope said in that interview is not the same as what Reuters and many other media outlets reported that the Pope said.

A lot of the media coverage of the Catholic Church – like many other types of reportage – is tainted with bias and sensationalism

It is not the first time that papal interviews are misinterpreted, albeit for different motivations. In 2010, German journalist Peter Seewald’s Light of the World was published, which is based on a wide-ranging interview with Pope Benedict. Seewald had already published two successful books interviewing Cardinal Ratzinger: Salt of the Earth (1996) and God and the World (2002). Benedict’s interview was hijacked by a controversy about Aids and condom use. Many read in this book a breakthrough in traditional teaching. There was no such breakthrough.

Similarly, there is no breakthrough with what Pope Francis says and any traditional Church doctrine. His theology is similar to that of Benedict although his pastoral strategy, preaching style and use of metaphors to communicate the Word of God are quite different.

I am not writing the above to support a commonly held clerical ‘dogma’ that there is a media conspiracy against the Catholic Church. I don’t think that this is the case. The media generally treat the Church as they treat other large institutions by using the journalistic conventions developed as a result of the commercialisation of journalism. The result is many times far from being good quality journalism, but this is the state of the beast at the moment.

We are on the eve of a very important Synod that will be discussing the family under the full glare of media reportage. This in itself is something good but audiences should be discerning and informed enough to be able to differentiate between the journalistic wheat and the sensational chaff. Media reports are not the fifth gospel!

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

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