Getting to the Point: media

Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Careful The Tale You Tell

Why is the Church so obsessed with abortion? Why does the Church talk incessantly about homosexuality? What is this creepy Catholic obsession with sex, sex, sex all the time? Why can’t the Church be concerned about real issues—poverty, for example—instead of always being all about the pelvic issues? Why, huh, why?

This is more and more the typical attitude of many towards the Church, or towards organized religion in general. And we are solemnly informed that it is for this reason primarily that the millennials are being alienated from organized religion and from Catholicism in particular. It is the fault of the Church and its laser-focussed obsession with sexual purity.

Except… that’s not true. Not remotely. Not at all. This article over at National Review does a great job showing this definitively. The Church, including all the various Christian denominations, gives billions of dollars every year to the alleviation of poverty throughout the world; the budgets for groups combatting the various ‘culture war’ issues is miniscule in comparison.

Meanwhile, I would echo the author of the article’s experience. I have been a Catholic my entire life, and I honestly think I could count on one hand the homilies I’ve heard that have even mentioned abortion, homosexuality, or any other point of sexual morality. I would add that the single source where we can see exactly what ‘the Vatican’ is saying is the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which reports pretty much every speech, every document, every word that comes out of Rome. While I haven’t done a scientific study of the matter, I would have to say that issues of sexual morality wouldn’t crack the top ten, or even the top twenty subjects the Church talks about all the time. My impression is that world peace and world economic justice are actually the two most urgent social issues Rome talks about, and has talked about for decades now.

All of this, while interesting in itself highlights something I have been aware of for some time. And that is the danger ‘the narrative’ poses to ‘the truth’. ‘Everyone knows’ that such and such is the case. But it turns out that it’s not the case. And yet even upon that being pointed out, everyone goes on knowing it, somehow. The Narrative trumps the facts, every time somehow.

We see this all over the place—the question of the Church’s obsession with sex is just one example which happens to matter quite a bit to me. (I do find it fairly odd and—what’s the word—oh yeah, ironic, that a culture saturated in erotic imagery and awash in x-rated material has the effrontery to accuse anyone else of being obsessed with sex).

But the question of narratives is an important one, one which we all need to be vigilant about. For Christians, we have to resist the narrative that the secular culture and those who are of that culture are utterly depraved and vile—the tendency to demonize the ‘other’.

The Sondheim musical Into the Woods, recently made into a so-so movie, has a lyric that goes “Careful the tale you tell; that is the spell.” Stories have a capacity to shape reality for us, a magical ability to both reveal and conceal. Stories, in fact, yield prejudice, and prejudice has a great power to render us blind and deaf to whatever contradicts it. ‘Liberals and stupid and evil… conservatives are stupid and evil… Muslims are all terrorists… Christians are all judgmental hypocrites… atheists are all arrogant jerks… black people are such and such, Mexicans are this and that, Jews are all xyz, Asians are all blah blah blah, white people are all that way’ and so on and so forth. Careful the tale you tell—all of reality shapes itself around that tale.

Meanwhile, life and the world and humanity are so much richer, so much more varied and complex, at once better and worse than the narratives allow for. Simplistic stories with heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators are all well and good for Hollywood or beach fiction, but serve us poorly in actually navigating the world as it is.

Personally, I try to limit the tale I tell to the One Story that I believe is absolutely true, because it is told by God and not men. And that of course is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Paschal Mystery in which everything God is embraces everything man is, in which God so utterly enters the human reality that He dies and goes to Hell, and in which the human reality is so penetrated by Divine life and love that the man Jesus rises from the dead and raises up all men and women who are joined to Him in faith. God becomes everything we are so that we can become, in Him, everything He is.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Everything else is just fairy tales told by an idiot, to be taken with large grains of salt at all times. The saying today is ‘check your privilege’, but I would like to start a new saying: ‘check your narrative’, and be vigilant always, welcome continually the facts that contradict the stories you tell yourself and others. Stories are for children (in light of the Gospel this is no problem, as we are all God’s children). We are adults and should live our life as adults, narrative-free if at all possible.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Rabbit, Punched

So did you hear that Pope Francis punched a rabbit in the Philippines? Like, dude, it was like the Thrilla in Manila all over again!

And I heard it was a cartoon rabbit or something, and had made fun of the Profit (sp?) of Islam... and so the Pope, like, totally punched it. Whoa! But it's OK, because the Pope said that all rabbits go to heaven when they die, reversing centuries of infallible dogma. Whaddaguy.

OK, so maybe I got parts of that story wrong. Or... the whole story wrong. Great - now I'm qualified to work for the New York Times! Big Apple, here I come.

So the Pope made a statement on freedom of religion, non-violence, and freedom of expression. There was a little more to it than 'Don't punch my mother, or the rabbit gets it,' or whatever the media said he said. And he made a statement about responsible parenthood and the Church's teachings on family planning. There was a little more to it than 'Michelle Duggar is a rabbit and your father smells of elderberries,' or whatever the media said he said.

Folks, I know I've said it before, but when you read something in the media that Pope Francis said something cuckoobananapants crazy, there are two possibilities. First, that Pope Francis is cuckoobananapants crazy. Second, that the media... well, to put it charitably, the media aren't quite reporting the story totally accurately.

After the 'who am I to judge?' debacle, the 'all dogs go to heaven' farce, the 'Ima puncha you face' inanity, and now the 'don't be a rabbit, dawg!' idiocy... my money is on the media just a bit, kind of, having got the story wrong.

And when you read some foolishness about the Pope, you have two possible courses of action, it seems to me. You could go read what the man actually said (the two links above took me exactly 20 seconds to find, by the way - it's not like it's hard to track down the straight story). And think about it. And put it in the context of, oh I don't know, EVERYTHING ELSE THE MAN HAS EVER SAID IN HIS LONG LIFE. All of which has been totally and utterly Catholic. That's one thing you can do.

But if time is short and you just don't feel like doing that you can always... well, ignore it. There is an unseemly fixation on popes in our modern church, I would gently suggest. Every word that comes out of their mouths (this did not start with Pope Francis), every time they so much as hiccup or cough, we are supposed to anxiously parse it out for every possible shred and shade of meaning.

Nonsense. The Pope is not the center of the Catholic faith. Jesus Christ is the center of the Catholic faith. The Pope has a vital and necessary role to play, and we owe him our filial loyalty and respect, our prayers, our attention when he speaks magisterially, and our religious submission to the exercise of his ordinary teaching office. And... that's about it, really! He's not supposed to be the focus of our faith life. Really.

So the next time the media 'punches the rabbit', so to speak (as opposed to jumping the shark), keep cool, either find out the real story for yourself or quietly go on with the duties of your state of life and your own discipleship of Jesus Christ. That's what matters, not anything else. Really.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

The Papal Examen

Among the ways of ‘missing the point’ that the post-modern world specializes in, is the shortened attention span that makes it hard for us to focus on any one thing for any great length of time. Driven by the constant inflow of stimulus (I won’t call it information) that the Internet delivers up to us, it is all too easy to let the latest stream of words and images wash over us and then just keep gushing down-stream. If we stop and think and talk about that one thing that just happened, we will miss the next twenty things that come along, and wouldn’t that be a tragedy?

This is very bad for us. We lack depth in our own personal reflections in this; furthermore, we essentially ‘out-source’ the analysis of the events of the day to those people—the media—who have no specialized knowledge or expertise and certainly no wisdom to speak of, but who have the ability to churn out vast quantities of words in short periods of time (a friend of MH who is a very successful Canadian journalist told us that this is, in fact, the salient qualification needed to work in the newspaper business).

For example, does anyone remember that thing that happened a whole whopping two weeks ago, when Pope Francis gave a talking to the members of the Curia? Remember how he was furious with them and lashed at them about their sins, and how they were cold and unfriendly to him in return, and how this is clearly a sign of… well, something or other happening in the Vatican, and…?

Remember that? I know it happened a whole two weeks ago, but isn’t it amazing how everyone has basically forgotten in any real way what was (we were assured at the time) such an earth-shaking event. A whopping two weeks ago it got everyone’s tongue flapping, either bringing out the Francis cheer-leaders to say “Yeah! Go, Papa! Sock it to them, those lousy no-good curial jerks! Woo hoo!” or on the other hand the Francis nay-sayers wringing their hands: “Oh, those poor curia people. They work so hard! Why is Francis always so mean? That’s not a good way to talk to your subordinates!”

Well of course part of it was that once those who were interested read the whole text and watched the video, nothing of what I wrote above was particularly borne out as, you know, having happened. The Pope was offering, in good Ignatian style, an examination of conscience (appropriate for Advent!); he was careful, as all good pastors are, to use the pronoun ‘we’ throughout, and the points of the examen were hemmed on both sides by warm expressions of gratitude and affection.

The curial officials meanwhile, certainly looked serious during the talk. It was a serious talk. Perhaps they were… I don’t know, examining their consciences! It's been known to happen. And afterwards they were all of them smiling and chatting with the Pope with complete cordiality. As usual, the people whose only skill is generating large volumes of words in short periods of time (hey! I could get a job in the media!) force-fed us a narrative with only the most tenuous connection to reality, and that is all the vague recollection most have of that earth-shattering event from two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, we have all moved on, and it’s a shame. Why is it a shame? Because it is a darned good examination of conscience, and not just for the curia, either. And so on this blog I am going to say ‘heck, no!’ to the ADD quality of our modern culture. I am NOT going to move on. In fact, I am going to take the next fifteen Wednesdays, and blog about each of the fifteen ‘diseases’ the Pope wrote about and reflect on how these might apply to our lives.

It is easy to point fingers at the curia, or at Cardinal X or Archbishop Y or Fr. Q. And yes, those in high ecclesial offices do have a higher burden of responsibility and accountability… to God and to their lawful superiors, that is. But it is useless—worse than useless, it is deeply harmful to gleefully or angrily or sorrowfully account for the sins of other people, in high office or otherwise. We are never, no matter what, no matter who, to examine the conscience of another person, only our own.

And so Wednesdays on the blog will be dedicated the next little while to “The Papal Examen” – Lent really is just around the corner, and this will be a good warm-up exercise for that season. See you tomorrow with the first disease!