The New Pope and Journalism's Crisis of Faith

by Norman Solomon

The papacy of Benedict XVI confronts journalists with a key question: How much critical scrutiny is appropriate when a religious leader gains enormous power?

So far, most American media outlets seem to be walking on eggshells to avoid tough coverage of the new pope. Caution is in the air, and some of it is valid. Anti-Catholic bigotry has a long and ugly history in the United States. News organizations should stay away from disparaging the Catholic faith, which certainly deserves as much respect as any other religion.

At the same time, the Vatican is a massive global power. Though it has no army, it is more powerful than many governments. And in the present day, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church is the capital of political reaction garbed in religiosity. Many dividing lines between theology and ideology have virtually disappeared.

After more than two decades as a Vatican power broker, Joseph Ratzinger is now in charge as Pope Benedict XVI. He is extremely well-positioned to push a longstanding agenda that includes hostility toward AIDS prevention measures, women's rights, gay rights and movements for social justice. No one in the hierarchy was more committed to stances like vehement opposition to condoms while millions of people contracted cases of AIDS that could have been prevented. And he has been the commander of the Vatican's war on liberation theology.

During the 1980s, it was Ratzinger who led the charge from Rome against the wondrous spirit and vibrant activism that galvanized Catholics and others across Latin America. While many priests, nuns and laity bravely joined together to challenge U.S.-backed regimes inflicting economic exploitation, intimidation, torture and murder with impunity, Ratzinger used the Vatican's authority to undermine such community-based resistance. He silenced outspoken Church officials and installed orthodox clergy who would go along with the deadly status quo.

Hours after the smoke cleared over the Vatican and the world learned the name of the new pope, Mary Jo McConahay -- an insightful journalist who has long covered Latin America -- wrote for Pacific News Service about a question blowing in the wind. "What would have happened, Guatemalans and El Salvadorans ask to this day, if Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II had regarded the Latin American call for liberation from autocratic rulers with the same force with which the European churchmen supported the Polish Solidarity revolution?"

For right-wing religious activists, Ratzinger has been a Godsend. And now that he's running a church with 1.l billion members, the odds are excellent that he will proceed to gladden the hearts of misogynists, homophobes, and anti-left crusaders around the world. Contrary to the predictable media spin since Tuesday about the uncertainty of his papal course (reminiscent of the claims in early 2001 that George W. Bush might turn out to be some kind of moderate president), everything we know about Ratzinger's extensive record during the last quarter-century tells us that he is a reactionary zealot who is determined to shove much of the world's history of progressive social change into reverse. He is a true believer whose ideological theology accepts scant diversity and no dissent.

The new papacy is a huge gift to the minority of conservatives in the United States who are trying to impose their version of morality on the country and the world.

Soon after the 2000 election, an astute analyst of far-right religious movements, Frederick Clarkson, wrote that "both the evangelical and Catholic Right are developing and promoting a long-term, fundamental approach to the practice of faith that links political involvement with faith itself. In this case, the Catholic Church is building on its own history and also benefiting from the Christian Right's recent efforts to create wider space for public expressions of religiosity in civil discourse." Clarkson added that "a shift in the political culture suggests that personal and unedited expressions of religious belief for political purposes are no longer considered unseemly. Indeed, the suggestion is that they are beyond reproach."

And that's much of the problem. When a highly debatable position is "beyond reproach" -- when religiosity provides cover for all manner of manipulations and repression -- it's easier for demagogic power-mongers to get away with murder.

Journalists should not let any pious proclamations intimidate them. When the policies of a president or prime minister result in suppression of human rights or fuel public-health disasters, the news media should not hesitate to expose the consequences. And the policies of a pope should be no less scrutinized.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," will be published in early summer. His columns and other writings can be found at: www.normansolomon.com.

New Spong Book is Out

John Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop and prominent spokesperson for liberal Christianity, focuses this book on "terrible texts" which have been used to justify such "sins" as overbreeding, degradation of the environment, sexism, child abuse and anti-Semitism. These biblical texts, according to Spong, are not the incontrovertible Word of God, but flawed human responses to perceived threats. An incendiary example of this is Spong's assertion that Paul was a closeted gay man whose anti-gay statements were motivated by little more than his own self-loathing.

Spong does not stop there; in the course of the book he suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married; that none of the supernatural events described in the Bible took place--including the resurrection--and that theism itself is a misunderstanding of God. Interestingly, readers who do not endorse Spong's radical reinterpretation of Christianity will still find much in this book they can affirm. His explanation of the roots of Christian anti-Semitism is fascinating and much less challenging to orthodoxy than many of his other claims. Unfortunately, Spong leads with his weakest section, which features a variety of poorly constructed arguments claiming, but giving inadequate evidence for, a strong causal relationship between biblical injunctions and both overpopulation and environmental problems. Nonetheless, this absorbing book has much to offer readers of all persuasions.

Politics in Red Robes

Bush's attendance at the Pope's funeral merely masks White House exploitation of Catholic division

Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian

President Bush, a militant evangelical Protestant, has lowered the American flag to half-staff for the first time at the death of a pope. Also for the first time, a US president will attend a papal funeral. Bush's political rhetoric is deliberately inflected with Catholic theological phrases, in particular "the culture of life", words he used to justify his interference in the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman, the removal of whose feeding tube was upheld 19 times by state and federal courts.

In the 2004 election, Bush's campaign helped organise the attack on John Kerry's Catholic authenticity by conservative bishops who threatened to deny him communion. Inside the White House, policy and personnel are coordinated in line with rightwing Catholicism. Not only are issues like international population control, reproductive health and women's rights vetted, but so are appointments.

Since the accession of Pope John Paul II, the conservative mobilisation within the American church has been a microcosmic version of the ascendancy of the conservative movement in the country generally. As the authority of the Vatican was marshalled on behalf of the conservatives, the Republican right adopted its position as its own in order to capture Catholic votes. Now the social agendas of conservative Catholics and Republicans are indistinguishable.

John Paul II welcomed American democracy as a counter to communism, but he had no experience with democracy of any kind. He envisioned his mission as restoring the authority of the church. America appeared to him as a liberal inferno - its citizens, he lectured American bishops last year, were "hypnotised by materialism, teetering before a soulless vision of the world".

The Pope asserted his control over the American church in 1984 with his naming of conservatives Bernard Law and John O'Connor as archbishops of Boston and New York. They became his chief agents. At the same time, the Vatican refused to deal with the elected officers of the US conference of Catholic bishops, who were largely imbued with the spirit of Vatican II.

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago was acknowledged as the leader of the bishops and represented the broad progressive tradition of the American church. He articulated the concept of Catholicism as a "seamless garment" in which abortion was only one among many important issues. In 1994 he announced a common ground initiative, entitled Church in a Time of Peril, calling on the church to overcome its polarisation and suppression of discussion on the issues tearing it apart - from women's changing roles to the fact that many Catholics did not accept most church teachings on sexuality to the declining numbers of priests. Bernardin was a consensus builder and believed he had touched all bases with the Vatican before unveiling his project. But the same day, Cardinal Law, clearly acting with Vatican authority, denounced it: "The fundamental flaw in this document is its appeal for 'dialogue' as a path to 'common ground'."

Bernardin died months later and was replaced by a protege of Law's. In 2002, the Boston Globe ran the first of more than 250 stories on paedophilic molestation by parish priests. Law resisted investigating the sex scandal and faced potential criminal prosecution for his cover-ups. The Pope rescued him with a sinecure in the Vatican. In the aftermath of the sex scandal, conservatives under siege lashed out more ferociously. As they saw it, their failure to overturn the law on abortion demonstrated that they had not been hardline enough. Thus the sex scandal set the stage for the rightwing Catholic offensive on behalf of Bush in the 2004 campaign.

With the Pope's death, American Catholics yearn for openness. According to a poll by Gallup, 78% want the next pope to allow Catholics to use birth control; 63% say he should let priests marry; 59% believe he should have a less strict policy on stem cell research; 55% say he should allow women to be priests.

But the Republicans are moving aggressively on the conservative social agenda. This week, in Kansas, gay marriage was banned in a referendum. Four states have passed bills permitting pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. The governor of Illinois has issued an emergency order to ensure that pharmacists fill all prescriptions. California's legislature is debating a law to require druggists to do the same.

By consolidating power, the Pope believed that he was strengthening the church. Now the conservatives want a post-John Paul papacy to extend his stringency. Others want moderation, openness and discussion. Catholics in America do not now hold the same principle of hope. No one monitors the church's crisis more closely than the White House, and no one plots to exploit its division more ruthlessly. Religion is politics under red robes. So Bush travels to Rome.

Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars