Breda O'BrienIs it only a matter of time before the media honeymoon which Pope Francis has enjoyed is over? Certainly, some of the media coverage of his recent trip to the Philippines might suggest that yes, the media has rediscovered that the Pope is a Catholic.
Pope Francis has an informal style of speaking that makes great copy for journalists, and he is open with them in a way no previous Pope has been.
As a result, the dominant narrative has been of a liberal, reforming Pope, whose only problem is the refusal of the Vatican and conservative Catholics to get with the programme.
It is, of course, a caricature. Pope Francis is a reformer, for sure, but in the style of his namesake, Francis, who felt he had a special call to re-build the Church.
It is not as if the Pope has not told us often enough, in different ways, that he is a ‘Son of the Church’. So when he reiterated Church teaching on the family in Manila, no-one was surprised but the media.
There were screaming headlines that the Pope had said that same-sex marriage disfigures God’s creation.
However, what he actually said was “the family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life” and “these realities are increasingly under attack from powerful forces, which threaten to disfigure God’s plan for creation”.
In short, reading that as simply opposition to same-sex marriage takes some doing.
Bond
It encompasses anyone who thinks that marriage is simply an emotional bond between two committed adults, those who think that there are no objective moral standards, those that think marriage should be part of a throwaway culture and those who are not open to having children.
It is a fairly comprehensive list, but some people in favour of the redefinition of marriage judged it wrong to say such things when there is a referendum coming up in Ireland in four months.
Really? Do you think the Pope was thinking about a referendum in Ireland as he braved typhoons to visit Tacloban, the area devastated by Typhoon Haiyan? The pilot was worried about weather conditions, but the Pope said that the whole reason he was in the Philippines was to be in solidarity with the victims, so the trip had to go ahead.
He made it, even though he had to cut his trip there short. There are vivid images of him in the same cheap yellow poncho as the pilgrims, soaking wet, but determined to be with his people.
This is a Pope of the poor, who wants us to get out and get our hands dirty in service. He is someone who is neither a liberal nor a conservative, but a Catholic.
As such, he will not fit neatly into any media narrative, and he will continue to surprise.
For example, his upcoming encyclical on the environment will no doubt ruffle feathers, as it will probably call for greater efforts to act on climate change now before it is too late. Some Catholics believe that it is impossible to speak about climate change without playing into the hands of those who see human beings as a blot on the face of Gaia.
Climate change
However, Francis will not have been the first Pope to speak about climate change. In fact, there was a brief attempt to cast Benedict as the ‘green Pope’ when solar panels were installed in the Vatican, and he attempted to make the Vatican carbon neutral.
The trouble with Benedict from a media point of view was that he was even harder to characterise than Francis, so they resorted to calling this quiet, introverted holy man the ‘Rottweiler Pope’, and other such charming titles.
There is a tendency in every human being to want to put others into a box.
Our brains work by recognising patterns, and automating responses to those patterns.
That’s fine if you want to learn to drive, but not so good if you want to really know other human beings.
Media narratives are more simplified again. There are goodies and baddies, people who are in and people who are out.
However, the interesting thing is that once a media narrative forms, it is very difficult to dislodge, even if the media begin to reject it themselves.
Francis is established internationally as a down to earth, credible human being with a passion for the Gospel and the poor.
More than that, he is loved. Not in spite of the fact that he is so forthright, but because he is.
However, we need to go a step further, beyond loving him, or even turning out to see him, as unprecedented millions did in the Philippines, to actually doing what he urges us to do.