The aim is to discredit

Testimonials of solidarity with Benedict XVI continue to multiply all over the world, in support of the Pope who has been the victim of a real campaign of defamation in recent weeks. The controversies triggered by the scandal of the child abuse perpetrated by some priests and religious have been used to mount a wider media offensive against him. After the words of greeting addressed to Benedict XVI at the beginning of the Easter Mass to express the solidarity of the whole Church with him, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, returned to the question in an interview with the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, on 7 April. SIR Europe has interviewed in turn Andrea Riccardi, founder of the St. Egidio Community and Professor of Contemporary History at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre.In the course of history the Pope and the Church have often been subjected to attacks: is there any telling “difference” between this one and those in the past? “Yes, the recent media criticism of the papacy is different from the attacks of the past. Each period is different. Thus the period of popularity of Pope John XXIII was followed by the long and bitter attack mounted against Paul VI which lasted virtually to the end of his pontificate. It was a very delicate period (characterized also by a deep division within the Church herself) which we need to remember if only to remind ourselves that today is no exception. People then wondered whether the oldest institution of the West would recover from this crisis. Pope John Paul II also suffered from sharp criticism in his first years (later forgotten and obscured by the subsequent idyll). So these were different periods, each characterized by criticism of various kinds, which should not be confused with each other. Undoubtedly, however, there was a common foundation: the Catholic Church, with her message, her tradition, her claim to change man, is antipathetic to the ‘liberal’ mentality, whether it be the revolutionary and anti-constitutional version of 1968, or the neoliberal and radical one of more recent times”.Why is there such bitter antagonism against this Pope?“This bitter antagonism against Benedict XVI predates his pontificate. Cardinal Ratzinger was considered and portrayed by the media as a hard-line inquisitor, throughout the period in which he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and collaborated closely with John Paul II. This image is really a caricature for anyone who personally knew him and has been repudiated by the five years of his pontificate. Yet this image prepared the terrain for the difficult reaction, by now almost invariably hostile, to this Pope. A critical attitude has been constantly expressed towards him, for years: what did Benedict XVI fail to say in his speech? -it’s the question that is almost always posed when the Pope speaks. We may cite the example of Benedict XVI’s journey to the Holy Land. The media or other institutions reacted to each of his interventions by stressing that the Pope had failed to mention this or that issue. ‘Exams never end…’, said Pirandello. In actual fact the corpus of Benedict XVI’s addresses in the Holy Land in 2009 is of a high level and comprehensive in range. On the other hand, the media find little political (which is what really interests them) in his religious and spiritual message, and so they incline to a negative attitude”. How should Catholics try to place in its true light, and thus to defeat, the campaign to separate them from the Pope, to isolate him and attack him even harder?“There is a logic that has been imposed on the media in giving information about the Pope, which cuts across the various outlooks. It’s a blanket hostility towards the Pope: something’s always lacking! Here comparison with John Paul II also comes into play: his greatness is emphasized (though it wasn’t always during his lifetime). But John Paul II too – I repeat – was criticized by those who praised Paul VI. It was said he was the prisoner of a Polish mentality. Yet Paul VI was far from popular during his pontificate; on the contrary he was bitterly criticized. He was considered inadequate to succeed John XXIII and harshly attacked: he was very unpopular in a period in which a certain self-regulation of the media reigned. Does not the better pope end up being the one that no longer exists? Catholics have the responsibility not to isolate the Pope: in this time, as always, the life of the Church is great and complex… The ‘catholic’ people are a great, universal and complex reality. Certain images do not only distort, they simplify the Church. And everything negative that happens in the Church is, in one way or another, led back to and blamed on the Pope. Nonetheless, by trying to discredit the Pope in this way, the aim is more widely to strike at and discredit a whole way of being, the Christian way of life and the role of the Church in the contemporary world. This should be clearly understood. Besides the Catholic Church is, by her very nature, and by the reality of her life, a globalization of self-sacrifice, in a world in which globalization is exclusively that of the market. Catholicism is characterized by diversity in relation to the reality of the globalized world as it is shaped today. This needs to be borne in mind. The message of the Church is not homogeneous with the different messages of the contemporary world, which change from day to day. Instead of diversity, we could use the biblical category of prophecy. Saying so is not acting the Catholic victim; it is not a form of entrenchment, but an observation that the historian and the observer of social phenomena can legitimately make. Catholicism seems, in various respects, different from the models of life of our time. The unity of Catholicism means a horizon – of which the Pope is protagonist – that transcends the local and national dimension. But, in this strange time of globalization, the generalized tendency is to reject all the wider dimensions and institutions, in order to restrict the world to the individual ego, to the local dimension. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, is a great institution-as-community that comes from afar (tradition) and that looks far into the distance (universality). She is not easily reducible”. To the insinuations against the Pope the Holy See promptly responds with documented denials: will not this media campaign have repercussions on the quality of information? “Globalization has also changed the function of the media. The major international press and wire services have a decisive role. In one way or another, the tendency is, in the way we present the news, or in our general approach to it, to end up by towing the line, by singing in chorus. It’s not easy to enter the choir or to change its song, but we must try to do so with freedom and in accordance with our own convictions. We also need to avoid panic in the Church, even if we share sorrow for this time of affliction. It’s true that some attacks do form people’s opinion. That’s very unfortunate. But that’s not all. There’s also a perception among people that is not dependent on the media. People know what the Church is, because they know her and have lived within her. So Christians need to be present, in person, in society and in life. They must express their Christian faith in an open, direct and winning way”.