Jumping on the Papal bandwagon March 14, 2013
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Uncategorized.trackback
FF continuing to sit on the fence over Abortion legislation….and now this
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin congratulated the new pontiff, and praised RTÉ’s coverage of the election, saying it reflected a deep interest among Irish people.
He asked if the Government would now consider providing funds to reopen the embassy to the Holy See, which was closed on grounds of cost.
you’d swear there weren’t many many more deserving issues.
On a related note, I thought the RTÉ coverage since Pope Benedict announced his resignation was completely overblown.
I met quite a few people who were deeply interested in the papal election. They were having bet on it. No-one unfortunately had the right man. It was the religious equivalent of yesterday at Cheltenham.
The media fawning over papal matters doesn’t, I think, have anything to do with religious feeling. It’s just like the way the same people got all Royalist when Kate Middleton’s wedding was on, the equivalent of hanging out with the most popular kid in the class. I love all those stories which are the equivalent of, ‘Church takes bold decision to bring in new era by choosing 76 year old.’
A 76 year with a questionable record and who has been pictured giving communion to an active right wing dictator up to his neck is mass human rights abuses.
On the RTE News last night there were FOUR different reporters in Rome. I presume meant four camera operators, four sound operators and other backup personnel. A shocking waste of resources. One reporter would have done the job as well. It’s not really a big story, looked at coolly, they were always going to pick a successor and does it really matter who it is? It’s not like anything substantive is going to change.
I’m sure they’ll be back in time to put the tough questions about money being wasted in the public service.
It’s of no small significance, and it’s also quite exciting in its way, particularly that period of an hour when they’d chosen a Pope but nobody knew who it was. So of course, cover it and do it in depth, but by the same token, if you’re doing it in depth and with several reporters, is there not room for one or two to ask difficult questions and maybe talk to people who aren’t just saying “how fantastic”?
By the way, did all the church bells go off where you are?
But the thing is that they didn’t cover it in any depth, just as they never cover anything in depth. Instead they covered it like they did the accession of Brian Cowen and MAry Coughlan, giving the impression that no matter who was chosen they were already prepared to be gobsmacked by his eminent suitability for the job. They sent multiple reporters because isn’t it a nice oul junket for people. For all the light they shed on it, they could have done a voiceover on agency footage.
It’s a bit like the way every time Manchester United win the league the sycophants always describe it as, ‘In many ways Alex Ferguson’s most important triumph yet.” The candidate who gets to be Pope, like the candidate who gets to be Taoiseach, is reported as being outstanding on the simple basis that he got the job.
His record during the Dirty War, like that of the hierarchy of the Argentinian church as a whole, is hardly glorious. There’s an Irish connection there too, a young priest Patrick Rice from Fermoy Cork was taken in and tortured brutally in 1976 because of his work with the poor in Buenos Aires. He later left the church, was a passionate defender of human rights and died in 2010. I wonder what he’d feel about the current appointment. Chances are if he was alive, RTE wouldn’t go next nor near him. Just as when Ratzinger, about the most controversial and divisive figure, got in his status as enforcer of rigid orthodoxy and hammer of Liberation Theology was glossed over amid much coverage of the ‘friends speak of him as a very nice man,’ variety.
All this ‘he’s a very humble man who likes the poor,’ stuff is grand but the fact is that Liberation Theology said that the Church should do more than simply pity the poor and feel sorry for them, it should be actively helping them in their pursuit of justice. That was the big battle in the church in the twentieth half of the last century, conservatism prevailed and a South American senior clergyman in particular must be judged on the side he took in that particular battle. I’d actually love to know if he’s ever spoken on Liberation Theology, Base Communities and associated movements but I’ll be waiting for RTE to tell me.
That’s the problem: everyone who was interviewed was saying, more or less, “how fantastic”! There was the obligatory nod towards the child abuse scandals but there was no sense whatsoever of the evident absurdity of the whole process and the pomp surrounding the lads’ get together. Not to mention that, well into the 21st century, there was mass uncritical coverage of an institution that still emphatically excludes women from any role whatsoever in deciding the new pope and which was an unbridled celebration of male supremacy dressed up as tradition. Any other institution up to the same carry on would be excoriated in the media. I was entirely unmoved by it, have to say.
The whole thing where every cleric we see talks about how he’s a good man and a great choice is a bit strange.
Firstly, how could they possibly know – he wasn’t a clear favourite, and few if any will have met him or even indirectly dealt with him.
Secondly, any observant priest knows that they owe the office unswerving loyalty and obedience, regardless of who is in power. Surely a more natural reaction would be to shrug and say that we’ll see how things play out over the next few years and that they’re largely indifferent to who holds the role?
I can see why priests might not want to do that, but why then should RTE put them on air. Not even RTE would allow such sycophancy on the election of a new political leader.
What’s more RTÉ were completely unprepared when the moment finally came. Silence after yer man came out and made the announcement. Seemingly no one in studio to translate for them let alone us. Then treated to fifteen minutes of an already breathless Dobson rhyming trivia off wikipeidia.
The world press were suffering collective mania watching chimneys in 2013 fair enough but RTÉ were difficult to swallow given the continued and numerous sins of omission before and during the crisis.
Jim Walsh was first out the traps with Embassy guff btw and echoed by other Senators when Ratzinger said he was off.
I did chuckle at Vincent Browne calling it Tridentine TV
It as in RTE
I thought it was a bit OTT myself, as a non-Catholic I had only a passing interest although of course it will have an impact on the laws of the land I live in. I had a look at some other channels just out of curiosity – TV3 seemed to be relaying an American news service (I could be mistaken) but returned to normal service before the revelation; BBC’s The One Show devoted all of 10 seconds to it before returning to a feature about quitting smoking (cigarettes, that is, not chimneys). Godless heathens!
Vincent Browne is playing the Lowry tape tonight apparently.
RTÉ have been in possession nearly three weeks at this stage according to Elaine Byrne and Marian Finucane ignored the frontpage the day it broke.
Can RTÉ really be that perplexed by reaction to the Rome jaunt in light of stuff like this.
All the stuff too about “He’s a Jesuit and thus he has this total commitment to social justice and the poor and the “people on the margins”. Belvedere College, Clongowes and all that… have I missed something here?
For whatever reason, the Jesuits in the Americas have had a tendency to be quite liberal. A far cry from the elitist shower that we have here.
Whether this in any way applies to the new pope, I cannot say.
I think the Jesuits are good at the PR spin – portraying them as being on the side of the poor. So plenty of stuff like getting their boys to collect for Simon at Christmas and yes, good stuff like what Fr Peter McVerry does.
But that’s good cover for the reality that they concentrate on providing state-subsidised elitist education for the children of the better off.
For the week that’s in it.
Yesterday, while waiting for a meeting at work to begin, we were idly chatting about the new RC pope’s choice of name. Most of us had heard the Australian priest who had been on Morning Ireland and who had pointed out that thtere was more than one St Francis.
One of those at my meeting offered the intresting observation that Franciscans had been founded as a response to dissatisfaction with the dominant monastic order at the time, the Benedictines.