The Stone Throwing Business

The media coverage of the Pope's Letter doesn't seem much interested in what it actually says

I turned on the radio to get a sense of the responses to the Pope’s Letter.

As far as I could hear, the interviewers mostly forced the discussions back into their own narrative framework, uninterested in the vision that animates the Pope’s Letter.

Some of those responding to the Letter were survivors of abuse, bearing witness to what they have endured, reminding us of the need to get to know what to watch out for and what to do, and to acquire the character to do it, if we see abuse.

So what is the Pope saying in the Letter we should do, then?

Most of the other commentators didn't go into that. They were too busy pushing their own agendas of how they want the Church to change its doctrines. They didn't bother to go into the actual content of the Letter.

The emotional atmosphere of the discussions seemed to me too hot and hostile for any real listening to the Letter.

I had the impression that the media pundits and most of the invited speakers and commentators are so far out of the Church’s way of approaching things, that anything, other than their own language and proposals, is dismissed by them as a cop out or they glaze over when confronted with it. It's in another language than theirs. They are simply unable to connect with what the Pope is talking about in any real way.

They haven’t a bog’s notion what he is talking about and they are not going to even try to go there.

I, on the other hand, am an incorrigible bog-Catholic, and it's not often we get a Letter addressed just to us by the Pope, (has there ever been one before?) so I would like to know what the Pope is saying to me, even if it means I have to read the thing for myself!

Time and again, the media interviewers bark out hostile questions that seek to box the answerer into a position where they ‘have’ to call for another bishop to resign or else be made to feel they are part of, or approve of, a cover-up of child sexual abuse.



The Stone Throwing Business

Listening to them, I couldn’t help thinking of the brilliant homily Archbishop Diarmuid Martin gave on ‘the woman taken in adultery’ in the Pro-Cathedral at Mass on 20th March 2010, when the Pope’s Letter was first presented in the Dublin Archdiocese.

The homily is about the mercy of Jesus. It is well worth reading the whole thing. You can read it and download it at: http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1838&Itemid=907

But here’s the bit that struck me as catching the media's hectoring style to a T:

‘They want to trap him and put him in contradiction with their interpretation of the Law of God. … And as often with those who bear fundamentalist tendencies, they love to trap and compromise anyone who has even the slightest difference from their view of things. … Jesus says very little. He waits, he writes in the sand. Wisely he does not allow himself to be trapped into answering their loaded question. After a long silence he challenges them: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” … all of us are in need of God’s mercy. Jesus alone is the one who is without sin; and thankfully for us all, he is not in the stone throwing business.’

I was door-stepped on my way out of Mass myself this morning (21st March 2010) and had the same experience. The questions were loaded so as to try to push me into saying the Letter ‘had not gone far enough’. Would I not have to agree that another bishop should resign? I felt the questions were phrased so as to trap me and put me into contradiction with their narrative of what should happen next.

Stone throwing was very much the order of the day.

But, to get back to the Letter. What’s in it? There’s the question.

It’s a terrible conclusion to have to come to, but I’m afraid there’s only one way for me to find out for sure, and that’s to read it!