Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Sede Vacante: The Sky is Not Falling on the Catholic Church


If the media focus on the Vatican were a floodlight and not a spotlight, it would be clear that the story of religion in free fall is cultural and not Catholic.

By Father Gordon J. MacRae

(These Stone Walls) Even in Lent, I am hard pressed to find many perks in my current state in life. As a prisoner with no online access at all, I really struggle to write. It’s not just my inability to access what’s going on in the world beyond these stone walls. The bigger problem with writing from prison is that almost everyone around me suffers from ADHD – Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. No, I take that back. Most of them don’t actually suffer from it at all. I do!

Today while trying to come up with a title for this post, no less than a dozen prisoners interrupted me with “Watcha doin’?” or “What’s up with all this Pope stuff?” Well, what I’m doing is trying to write about “all this Pope stuff,” and “What’s up with it?” depends on which cable news channel you’re watching.
Wondering whether I should add patience to my growing list of things to work on for Lent, I just asked the last guy who stopped by whether I’m an impatient person. “Of course you’re not,” he said. “If you were, you would just tell me to ‘Beat it!’ like everyone else does.”

So there you have it. I have a lot more patience with other prisoners than I do with the news media right now. As I write this post, CNN has been broadcasting all day long a news segment about an Italian press report of corruption, scandal and blackmail in the Vatican, and of course all of it is the “real story” behind the Holy Father’s recent decision-making process.

The story spinning at CNN is not at all like the one I wrote last week in “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.” CNN was so saturated with its far more sordid version of papal events that I needed another take on it. So I switched to FOX News for a couple of hours only to find not a single mention of the story. The Vatican Secretary of State was recently quoted about this story:... (continued)


Link:
Related:

No comments: