David Quinn
The Church needs to stand up for itself more in the media, for the morale of beleaguered Catholics
At the recent ordination of nine seminarians to the diaconate in Maynooth, the Bishop of Cloyne, William Crean, had the following to say: “At this point, Ireland through its political and media establishments seem determined to eliminate the engagement of the Catholic Church in the public sphere.
“This will prove to be a huge challenge for which you need to be prepared. There are many in these systems who have developed a gratuitous cynicism towards the Catholic Church and desire its destruction, believing that it stands between the people and Ireland becoming a progressive society.”
This is the kind of thing that immediately raises journalistic hackles. The Irish media dislike criticism every bit as much as the Church did back in the days of its pomp. To attack the media, and especially to accuse it of ‘bias’ is an act of lèse majesté. The media cannot possibly be biased because it is the essence of a journalist to be objective and impartial. To accuse it of bias is to accuse it of a journalistic ‘mortal sin’.
Writing in The Sunday Times at the weekend, no less a person than Conor Brady, the former editor of The Irish Times, weighed in with a comment.
Deference
Conor Brady is not a polemicist and his column on Sunday was cool in tone rather than angry. He reminded us of a time when journalists were extremely deferential towards the Church. (He might have pointed out that the same deference exists today but has been transferred to politically correct individuals and organisations, for example, Amnesty International Ireland.)
He allowed that “some journalists and politicians are inimical to the Catholic Church”, but that there are also some journalists and politicians who are “inimical to the gardaí, the business community, the trade unions, the EU and so on”. In other words, there is no problem in general.
Pro-Public Spending
With due respect to Conor Brady (and I do respect him, these are not just words), there is a problem of bias in the Irish media in general, and this bias does not affect only the Catholic Church.
He mentions the EU, for example. The Irish media are almost uniformly pro-EU. Not alone is there no debate about whether or not we should be in the EU as there is in Britain, there isn’t even a debate about the kind of EU we ought to be in.
In the UK, the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express all favour quitting the EU. You can see this not alone in the comment sections, but also in the kind of stories they run on their front pages.
During the economic boom, our media acted as cheerleaders for the property bubble and also backed increased public spending.
This pro-public spending bias continues, but it is not allied to any particularly noticeable anti-business bias. Maybe one reason for this is that the newspaper industry is heavily reliant on advertising by the business sector.
On social issues, the bias is all-pervasive. Every single media outlet was in favour of same-sex marriage and campaigned strongly for it. This campaign began long before the actual four-week referendum.
Every media outlet favours the repeal of the pro-life amendment. Stories which strengthen the case are run and stories which would weaken the case are ignored or downplayed.
Thus, women who were told that their babies would not live long after birth and went on to have abortions will be sympathetically interviewed, but women who regret their abortions or who carried to term babies with life-limiting conditions will not be interviewed at all or if they are, will be interviewed in unsympathetic way.
Nor can it be said that any newspaper smiles benignly on Catholic schools or hospitals. Organisations that are critical of these will receive favourable coverage while those that support Catholic education and healthcare generally receive scant or unfavourable coverage.
We can even see this in the way different organisations are described in news stories. Organisations that are clearly left-wing will often be called ‘human rights’ organisations (the Irish Council for Civil Liberties springs to mind), while their opposite numbers will be called ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’ or ‘Catholic’ as a kind of warning to the reader not to entirely trust them.
As part of a feature on Bishop Crean’s remarks, The Sunday Times asked him for examples of an anti-Catholic bias in the media. No fewer than eight were furnished in response.
Among these were the defamation of Fr Kevin Reynolds, the findings of pro-choice bias made against the Ray D’Arcy Show (twice now), and the uproar that ensued when The Iona Institute – which I head – and John Waters forced RTÉ to apologise and make a pay-out following comments about homophobia (no such uproar has attended similar legal actions by much bigger figures against media outlets).
Bishop Crean might have added to his list the way in which the media cover certain Church teachings. Does any newspaper in Ireland support the celibacy rule, or the male-only priesthood, for example?
When Bishop Roddy Wright resigned from his diocese in Scotland some years ago because he was having an affair with a married woman, several British newspapers defended the rule of celibacy, no Irish paper did and lots of items were run on radio shows attacking the rule.
When Pope Benedict visited Britain in 2010 it took several days for the Irish media to admit that the trip had been a huge success. The admission only came because we could see on the BBC and Sky News that huge crowds were turning out for him and there was a general feel-good factor in the air that contrasted with the campaign against him that had been launched by militant secularists in the run-up to Benedict’s arrival.
Public Life
I haven’t even addressed here the question of how the Church is now treated as a less than normal player in Irish public life, which was the main thrust of Bishop Crean’s remark.
Whereas a trade union is permitted and expected to have a view about things that affect the common good, the Catholic Church is not, unless it squares with the opinion of secular liberalism.
So Bishop Crean was absolutely correct in what he said. It was even better that his remarks were backed up by examples when asked. We need more of this kind of leadership, not less.
The Church has to begin standing up for itself not just for the sake of the hierarchy, but for the sake of ordinary, Mass-going Catholics who badly need their morale lifted.