Reporting on the Church

I WAS happy to learn recently that a university in Rome is organizing a week-long seminar in September aimed at educating media men on how to cover the Church.

“The Church Up Close: Covering Catholicism in the Age of Benedict XVI” is being offered by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross on September 8-14 to aid English-speaking journalists about how to report Church issues.

I think that it is a widely held desire that this seminar be spread, echoed if not replicated wall-to-wall, since in spite of our long Christian tradition, we are still amateurish, bumbling and clumsy when it comes to covering Church life and events.

“Most journalists covering the Catholic Church have difficulty grasping the full scope of the institution they’re talking about,” said Fr. John Wauck, one of its organizers.

“They tend to write from a more narrow national or ideological perspective, and the real nature of the Church slips through their fingers.”

He said that since the Church is universal, it goes beyond merely ideological and political categories in monitoring its developments. He further said:

“Frequently, journalists covering the Catholic Church lack historical perspective. Nowadays, many are used to working within a time-frame that is limited to a few days, sometimes even a few hours.”

Thus, one often sees shallow and Pavlovian views and comments about Church issues in the press.

Actually, the Church is much more than just universal and historical. It is a society that is both human and divine, that covers both material and spiritual aspects of life, temporal and eternal, local and global, natural and supernatural.

It has to be treated not only with the tools of our human sciences, but also and most importantly with the vigor of our faith. Some philosophical and theological grounding is needed for journalists to write about the Church sensibly.

Unless this point is well understood and internalized, we cannot expect a fair and balanced reporting of Church matters. We’d be stuck with the negative things, and the ephemeral items like announcements of fiestas and the like.

This, I think, should be very much in the minds of Church reporters. They obviously can write about actual events and other transient items about the Church, but the Church’s true nature and purpose should not be lost.

In fact, they have to feel the responsibility, if they have to be consistent to their faith, not only to project the Church properly in the world of public opinion but also to help in carrying out the Church’s evangelizing mission.

To be sure, this attitude is not meant to weaken their objectivity and impartiality. On the contrary, faith drives them to the limits of truth and justice. It’s when faith is feeble or, worse, absent when their pursuit for truth and other Christian ideals is greatly compromised and prone to subjective forces.

What usually happens is that Church reporters seem to crackle to life only when there are scandals. In these instances, they go into a frenzy. Nothing wrong there, as long as they do not forget to respect and uphold the Church’s nature and dignity.

This anomaly is clearly seen when much of the Church items in the media are about negative things. There’s hardly anything done to deepen people’s understanding of a doctrine of our faith, their appreciation of a Church policy, for example.

In fact, while the other sections of the media are glutting with materials to the point of nausea, one can hardly see any serious article on theology and spirituality. At best, only some knee-jerk reactions to Church issues are played out.

One gets the impression that man is all about food, sports, fashion, entertainment, business, politics, etc., and he is hardly a creature of faith, a child of God meant to attain a supernatural, not just natural, life.

Even the legitimate debate about a certain Church issue, be it on doctrine or discipline, is often avoided. There seems to be in the media a generalized attitude of indifference if not of condescension toward Church affairs.

Hopefully, the seminar organized in Rome, and similar activities that should be held all over, can help in correcting this deficiency in our media today. This concern has been flying under the radar for quite some time already.